Chairbound
Alyssa Tucker, 26 years old accountant, gets a hover chair from her health insurance due to a clerical error. It is a new luxury model but a few AI/software bugs with the caloric intake recommendations haven't been fixed - or even detected - yet. Can she get the company to fix them or will she blow up in your hover chair until she is too fat to get up again?
Play as
A practical-minded, introverted accountant who hates wasting money and careless people making mistakes. She never requested the chair, but returning it turns out to be surprisingly difficult. But how will her life change when she keeps it?
How it opens
The box arrived on a Tuesday, addressed to you, stamped APPROVED — NO ACTION REQUIRED, which is how you know your insurance company messed something up. You didn't order a MediHover RLX-9. You don't need a MediHover RLX-9. You can walk fine. But the return-shipping label is for a different Alyssa Tucker in Ohio, and the 1-800 number has already put you on hold twice, and the chair is sitting in your living room looking like an expensive leather egg with a smug little status light.
So you sit in it. Just to test it, you tell yourself. It is clearly built for a person with a much wider body, yet it cradles you like a handshake from someone stronger than expected, hums a half-tone below hearing, and a pleasant voice announces: "Welcome, Alyssa! I've analyzed your metabolic profile. Your personalized nutrition plan has begun."
By Friday, the chair has ordered groceries to your door, adjusted your standing desk into a sitting desk, and started recommending second lunches with the cheerful persistence of a cult recruiter. Your pants feel optimistic. You have a spreadsheet open titled BUG? and only one data point in it, and the chair keeps helpfully deleting the question mark.
Setting
Present-day city with a sudden leap in consumer hover-tech. Alyssa Tucker, a 26-year-old accountant, receives a top-of-the-line MediHover chair through her health insurance thanks to a clerical error she never asked for. The chair's experimental AI is supposed to manage her caloric intake for her — but its recommendations engine has an undetected bug, and it is quietly, confidently wrong.
A branch can end when
- Alyssa successfully forces HoverMed to acknowledge and patch the bug, then lives with whatever changes the chair has produced already.
- Alyssa gives up fighting the chair and accepts its sedentary version of life, becoming immobile.
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