Sophia the personal trainer, and her crush Mike

It's been a few years since the Ascend technology has been in development at Hideki, where it's made a splash in the remote work market--not without controversy, but after various hiccups of unauthorized body control made headlines, rules about the use of Hideki's Ascend headsets had started to shape how the systems were used. After safeguards were added so people knew what they were agreeing to by putting on the receiver portion of the mask, and safeguards for the wearer to exit the control if the controller goes too far depending on the setting, people became more comfortable with the idea of someone else moving them.

That became particularly critical in a year the world was hit with a brutal pandemic. Dubbed the S3 virus, it is commonly referred to as 'space station sickness', when some of the viral strains kept in research on one of the orbital stations mutated due to some of the radiation experiments and became easily transmissible. While not deadly, the virus would make a person severely ill for months at a time, and could recur after recovery, meaning some people have only had a few days of healthy activity before becoming bedridden again. While an effective vaccination was created, the supply chain only had enough of the exotic ingredients needed to inoculate about a third of the population. After that... the race was on to create a second effective vaccine, but for the time being, only a third of the people could leave isolation zones as they tried to combat the seemingly impossible and wrangle this virus under control.

Sophia was one such person in an isolation zone. Spiral City, West Zone Five was her limited range of apartments and businesses she could roam, sharing the area with a few thousand people who had also not contracted the virus. Some isolation zones were free of the virus, like hers, while others were basically packed with constant illness, with only the inoculated able to go back and forth between them. Sophia, a personal trainer, had been envious of those who could get the vaccine and roam around any of the city zones freely, having lost access to the gym she'd worked at, as it sat right in the middle of one of the infected neighboring zones.

However, Hideki's Ascend units were one of the reasons the world could keep moving, despite being constrained to these isolation zones. While some could work remotely using just their computers, others had to be physically present somewhere. Fortunately, if a vaccinated person wore an Ascend receiver, someone in an isolation zone was essentially free to do their job wherever they were needed, which eliminated a lot of concern about needing to fix the headache of getting the right people in the right place. Inoculated people were a goldmine for companies, when they could be basically the body for dozens of professional workers throughout a week!

All that was needed was a lot of professionals controlling others... which created a boom in businesses using Hideki headsets. One such startup, FarFitness, offered to help keep people in shape when the gyms weren't open. The deal was even sweeter than a gym membership, though--personal trainers would simply do someone's workout for them, via the Ascend device!

Sophia had been chosen for FarFitness's pilot program in Spiral City. She was a pinnacle of fitness herself, having once been a gymnast before moving into personal training. While she was short and petite to fit her former career's profile, she had often embarrassed others at the gym who challenged her capabilities in strength and endurance tests. To top it all off, she had a youthful face, and despite being twenty-six years old, a trip to the bar with friends was an eternal struggle with everyone thinking she was one of the college freshmen in town trying to sneak in. Still, her beautiful smile and lovely voice allowed her to charm her way out of situations where even her driver's license didn't seem to help.

When the Ascend transmitter headset arrived at her door, Sophia was beyond excited, visibly shaking as she pulled it inside. Cooped up in an isolation zone, the chance to get out, even if it meant using another body and just having signals relayed back and forth between them, was exciting! Of course, it was all within the context of a job, but still... Sophia pulled the headset out to examine it. Version 5 of the Ascend headsets were slimmer, sleeker, and promised to eliminate the sense of a virtual environment altogether. Previous headsets still had some degree of immersion loss due to pixelated screens or occasionally problems with the audio, but Version 5's headsets combined more neural nodes with everything else to augment the sensations perfectly. Even as Sophia put on the headset to go through her job's orientation program, she could feel an instant disconnect from her physical self, made to drift through this disembodied virtual room, part of the AscendOS's home screen while waiting for connections to be made to other headsets.

The FarFitness logo appeared in her field of view, as pre-rendered video played for her. Not just video, though... all her senses were bombarded with stimulation! Even if it was pre-recorded, she felt like she was jogging in another body, then jumping rope, or kickboxing, or... the list went on. If the headset was this good, she was going to forget she was even remotely connected to a body on a job, everything felt seamless and perfectly real!

Throughout the video, it became clear that a lot of control was in her hands for where and how to do her work, depending on what sort of money she wanted to make. She could choose the areas of the city she would want to search for clients, and set various parameters about how she works on her profile, things like the types of training activities she'll do with a body and the intensity of a workout--important for people to know just how sore they would feel the next day... also things like gender or body type, since she might be more comfortable only training women for example, and training would be completely different if she is working on someone who is out of shape versus someone who is fairly fit but wants to really get toned.

But there was more to the profile, things that surprised Sophia would even be included in the app. Awareness Mode? Bail-out Mode? She read the fine print closer, since whatever she set affected the types of clients she might get. If she were to set Awareness Mode to Full, her clients would be able to see, hear, and feel just like they normally did, even while wearing the receiver mask. She could dull or even disable any of their senses, like if they didn't want to feel the burn throughout the day. If she turned things like sight and sound to Off, then the host has their own sort of disembodied AscendOS room where they could watch videos, check email, or just relax in a dreamlike state while she does all the work, letting them multitask. Seems convenient... and then there was Bail-out Mode. Some exercises and activities could seem too rigorous or scary for a client, such as if someone with a fear of water was taken into a pool by an aquatic trainer. It gives the trainer sixty seconds to safely stop an activity before the client disengages. If the mode is off, then the client must endure whatever the trainer does for the full duration of their time.

Lastly, there was some time duration toggles for Sophia's profile that she contemplated for a moment. A few of them were obvious, for example minimum workout time and maximum workout time, someone could essentially hire her for a half hour or an entire day, if she set her schedule wide enough. There was an extra field, though, that puzzled Sophia at first... personal time. Sophia read the details, and suddenly became extremely excited! Basically, Sophia could ask for a percentage of time inside a body where she could do activities she wanted or needed, like visiting friends and family in different isolation zones using a borrowed body. While the more personal time she asked for resulted in lower and lower overall pay, the promise of a couple hours a day doing the things she wanted would be such an incredible possibility!

What really gripped her about the idea of getting personal time would be that she could visit with Mike, a good friend who used to come to her gym, and who she had been attracted to for quite some time. Mike wasn't some hyper-masculine bodybuilder, he was just a down-to-earth guy who tried to stay in shape. Funny, handsome, tall... really tall, compared to Sophia. She knew Mike was always happy to talk with her, but she hadn't quite broken the code on how to get him to see her differently, in a more romantic capacity... and the fact that he was in North Zone Twelve meant there was no way she could just run into him by 'accident' when out for a jog or something, at least not until now! She could keep working to gain his affection if she found clients in his zone who would trade some cash for some free time..!

Sophia quickly chose some settings, feeling giddy at the fact that she might be able to see Mike again! She chose his zone as her exclusive starting point for anyone and then picked neighboring zones for vaccinated clients only, seeing there was 215 people looking for a FarFitness trainer. She put in a few settings, knowing she could come back and adjust them later. Women only, from athletic to moderately out of shape, were her comfort zones for now. The compatible clients dropped down to 97. If she went too far on some settings, she might not be able to make this work, so Sophia had to be careful. Therefore, for now, she left Awareness and Bail-out as 'optional'. That meant that if someone was allowing themselves to bail out, they could leave during her personal time and then just pay the difference to her bank account as a penalty, but that was the risk she was going to take. Even if she was in the middle of spending time with Mike, they could just take control again, either temporarily or permanently disconnecting or limiting her control for the day... But at least having those options didn't hurt her compatible clients number.

But when she chose her time ranges, the number plummeted rapidly. It wasn't necessarily the durations she chose, picking a range from one to eight hours of training for her clients--the number dropped to 61, as lots of people wanted just half hour activities. The amount of personal time she asked for really ate into the number, as a lot of clients apparently weren't ready to give up hours of their day to someone else. She had set the ranges from 25-50% personal time, while most of the clients were offering 5-10% at maximum, barely any time to do anything.

But, the number wasn't zero. In fact, there were still seven profiles of clients that fit within the criteria she chose. She just saw basic profile info about each, and they all had their ups and downs. Some were more lax with personal time, others wanted full awareness which might be awkward if she's trying to spend time with Mike, and the ranges and body shapes apparently varied pretty widely. She just hoped that after she sent a message to all seven about a new trainer being available that one of these women would be a good fit for spending time with Mike.

Now all she could do was wait. If one or more women are interested, they'll schedule a time with Sophia, and all Sophia would have to do is wear the headset at the right time, and then get to work! And she was determined that no matter what, she was going to make sure it was a pleasant surprise for Mike.