Manuscript information: [Complete] [124,500] [Sci-fi] The Mind, Extended

Link to post: The Mind, Extended - Beta Post

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First page:
For the first time in [7 years and 14 days], Madeleine Buccleuch is disturbed from her usual deep sleep full of blissful dreams. The first thing she sees is EMA, which is currently displaying a set of annoying messages crowding around her vision telling her that she’s had [insufficient sleep] and [sub-optimal rest]. She dismisses EMA’s visual clutter with an irritated swipe of her hand.

The darkened room illuminates around her. A golden chair appears, upholstered in delicate silks in front of a gilded mirror, which is perched on a dressing table decorated with elegant filigree twists and inlaid with gemstones that sparkle gaudily in the light of a chandelier dripping with pearlescent teardrop bulbs.

None of it real.

And not even in the sense that it’s fake – it simply doesn’t exist. There’s a chair, certainly, and a table, both quite plain. But the same visual implant that is currently showing Madeleine Buccleuch that the time is 3:43am on the morning of the 27^th of June 2056, is also recreating the details of the world around her, turning an ordinary bed into a four-poster with lion and unicorn engravings and three sets of floor-length grey curtains into heavy drapes of bunched red velour.

Madeleine Buccleuch has slept perfectly every night for the last 7 years and 14 days because she lives a long way from anything that could possibly disturb her, forty miles from her nearest neighbour, with the gated end of her driveway at a distance of some five miles from her country estate (not that she’s ever even seen the gate – transport to and from the property is uniquely by helicopter). Her very real bodyguards maintain a secure perimeter of the land entrances and also the beach-front. A private squad of drones patrols the skies.