
The Ultimate Quest
In a far‑future world where humanity has mastered mind‑editing and interplanetary travel, Art Fillmore navigates a society that treats relationships like contracts and consciousness like a commodity. He prepares for a wedding to a woman engineered to be the perfect domestic companion—her mind periodically wiped to keep her temperament stable—while debating the logistics of a honeymoon that could span the solar system and beyond. The conversation with his bald supervisor hints at a culture obsessed with maximizing distance between spouses to eliminate divorce, revealing a bizarre blend of bureaucracy and romance.
The opening sets the stage for a quirky, satirical adventure that explores how far technology will go in shaping love, identity, and the human drive for connection. As Fillmore juggles his own age‑defying existence, the prospect of a partner named “Cynthia” (actually Xylosh) and the absurdities of a government‑sponsored separation, listeners are invited into a world where the ultimate quest may be nothing more than a quest for perfect happiness—if it can survive the pressures of a highly engineered future.
Language
en
Duration
~31 minutes (30K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
Apr 13, 2021
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
Subjects
A little-known voice from the golden age of science fiction, Hal Annas blended wry humor, strange inventions, galactic adventure, and twisty mysteries. His stories offer a lively glimpse into the imaginative pulp fiction of the early 1950s.
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