Eve In Utopia

Chapter Six

Eve found Joy in 'The Orca', her fellow waitresses' favourite bar that adjoined one of the casinos at the resort. It was crowded and noisy and Joy was sitting at a small, round table with three other women about Joy's own age which made Eve feel just a little out of place. Joy, however, made her welcome , introduced her to the other three women at the table as Wren, Patti and Kate and scoffed a chair for Eve from a nearby table when no one was looking.

"I'm glad you changed your mind and decided to come have some fun for a change," said Joy. "Spending all that time alone in your room isn't good for you."

"Are you sure she is alone in there," teased Wren who was an interesting racial blend with blonde hair and facial features normally found on Asians.

With the thin walls between our rooms," replied Joy with a roll of her eyes. "If Eve sneezes, I hear her."

"I wish I only heard sneezes from my next door neighbor," put in Patti, a tall redhaired woman. "She really needs to lay off the chilli."

"I would rather have that than my neighbor," said Kate. "She has a bf that she misses, but she makes loud and liberal use of a substitute if you know what I mean."

"Oh, have you seen it?" asked Joy with a mischievous smile. "How big is it?"

"Hey, I'm not some super perv with x-ray vision," protested Kate, "I only get audio."

Joy seemed about to press Kate for more details, but a harried looking waitress arrived at that point with drinks for the others and after she deposited them on the table in front of their owners, she looked at Eve. "What can I get you honey?"

"Um, I'll have a beer please," replied Eve who really didn't care for alcohol which seemed to have little or no effect on her, but she thought it best to fit in and the others at the table were all drinking. Eve's employers had apparently believed that some knowledge about recreational drugs, especially alcohol had been something she should know about, and so had provided both theoretical knowledge and samples as part of her training. Eve remembered a character in a television show she had watched describe the beer he was drinking as tasting like horse piss and Eve had wondered how one acquired such knowledge without doing the exact tasting comparison it seemed to require. Personally, she had never been tempted to perform the experiment and she had to make an effort to not grimace when she took a sip of the beer when the waitress brought it to her.

"I was asking these others about Annie since they all knew her," said Joy, "but she seems to be avoiding them as well."

"What about any others acting strange like Annie?" asked Eve as casually as she could.

"What?" exclaimed Patti. "Do you think there's some new strain of covid going around or something?"

"I heard the Chinese have developed mind controlling nanites," put in Kate.

"Hey don't look at me," laughed Wren, "I'm only about a quarter Chinese. I was just lucky the HR pig who hired me thought I looked exotic. I thought that was something that only described birds and plants."

"He probably got confused and meant erotic," snickered Kate.

"You know, I did run into a couple of people who were acting a little weird," said Patti after everyone had a little chuckle. I work in housekeeping like Annie. She is one floor below me and Wanda is one floor up. If one of us had more rooms to clean than we could handle, the others would help out if they could. I saw the room list and that Wanda had a lot of rooms today, so I went to see if she wanted any help and she just brushed me off, almost as if she had no memory of us helping each other."

"I don't know if this is the same thing," said Kate thoughtfully, "but I work on the flower gardens. Zeke is one of the guys cutting grass and he always makes a point to stop and chat when he sees me in the garden weeding. Today, he saw me and didn't stop. He's kind of cute and I thought he was working up the nerve to ask me out on a date, but maybe he just found someone else."