The Real Housewives Of Hades

Vanadium Lightyear’s lurid nightmare turned out to be an actual premonition. In the early 21st Century, disincarnate It Women started to haunt the airwaves. Nobody could pinpoint the exact moment it began, but it would have been on a significant New Moon or planetary alignment. Like their uni-dimensional counterparts, these ladies loved their astrologers and psychic advice. Nor was it clear how they got through.

At first, it was all rumor and anecdote: a beauty therapist from Onyxville claimed she heard cackling coming from her dishwasher. Then that dissolved into what sounded like a raucous, drunken conversation among females.  A neighbor reported that their smart speakers transmitted similar sound effects, specifically a drawn-out, cynical-sounding “nooooooooo” whenever her then-boyfriend entered the bedroom.

But it wasn’t only a local phenom. In Kairos, several counties over, a retired astronaut said there were female faces on his television screen, women with concept eyeshadow and blow-dried hair, disco mist swirling around them. His theory was that they were trying to transmit a message to him. Shortly afterward, however, he was hospitalized due to a mental illness contracted while in space. Doctors said that the televisual hallucinations could have been an undocumented side-effect of this mysterious mind virus.

Concept Eyeshadow & Televisual Hallucinations

But the reports of disembodied female laughter, conversation, and visual phenomena became more frequent. Several of the communications suggested that the entities were making a direct commentary on someone’s style or sex choices, alarming people who feared that the appliance manufacturer was spying on them or that it was a marketing ploy. Within the year, these manifestations had become mainstream. Fact checkers for the Internet Of Things were forced to say (a) that they did not exist and (b) not to follow their advice.

Yet soon everyone was talking about the Real Housewives of Hades; they either had the haunting or knew someone who was affected. Some were scared. They risked injury – mostly to their fingernails –  by opening up appliances and trying to remove smart-chips or Zigbee transmitters. Others eschewed wireless internet altogether, inflating a massive and unexpected bubble in dumb appliances.

But others felt drawn to the ‘ghosts’ and formed odd relationships with them. Referring to the voices and/or images as their “wives,” they revered their guidance. Any household appliance or device that was networked could potentially be an Oracle. They idealized it as the ultimate decentralized spirituality: A coven at your fingertips, touch control channels – any dimension.

“Female Spirits Can’t Just Float In On Moonbeams”

Finally, the authorities stepped in to investigate. Or rather, reassure the public and advertisers.  “Literally trillions of dollars have been spent on these technologies,” said the government’s Telemetry Minister, speaking to an audience of millions. “It’s highly sophisticated. Female spirits or whatever they are can’t just float in on moonbeams and hijack our frequencies. It’s probably an artificial intelligence anomaly.” He went on to suggest that anyone removing themselves from the network could face criminal charges. It was important that they continued to receive authorized information and advertiser’s purchasing guidance. However, people persisting in “religious type rituals” around The Wives would be tested for the mind virus.

Of course, this move by the government enraged everyone. Those who feared The Wives now assumed they were a government conspiracy. Right To Repair advocates resented the dictate that they were not to touch things they owned. The people who loved The Wives were furious and feared a high-tech witch-hunt. But this predictable (to everyone but the pompous Minister for Telemetry) outrage was not the only outcome.

Previously confined to domestic surroundings, the Wives accessed the entire network, breaching firewalls and privacy settings in a massive attack. With barely any outward sign aside from a strange scent,* they were suddenly within every wifi sensor, streetlight, and public address network. Couples who were driving with the assistance of the satellite navigation vocals described a transmission interrupted by an acid-tongued, rat-a-tat commentary: “He’s rolling his eyes again; still find it hot?” “The right direction? The only right direction here is separate ways, honey…”

Some Blamed Space Weather, Others The Road Tunnel Beneath Stonehenge

It occurred exactly 11 days, 11 hours, and 11 minutes after the widely televised announcement, affirming the irrational belief that this was a supernatural phenom. It was also an evening of bizarre space weather and high magnetic flux, both of which were blamed by the government. Astrological adepts pointed to Uranus newly into Gemini, and geomancers cited the road tunnel recently built beneath Stonehenge.

The manifestations leaped from rumor and conjecture to being all-pervasive.  For example, anyone waiting for a train was regaled with a surreal stream of consciousness. Conveyed in confidential, confessional tones, like high-end gossip, it jumped all over the place – sometimes poignant, often lewd, and with input from multiple voices.

“…Colloidal silver for your Moon chakra….A-Lister Lawsuit against a cult nobody’s heard of yet…It’s related to Evening Primrose, no – not Morning Primrose – it helps you lubricate from within…her agent fired her over it; Space Dust and social media don’t mix…The Soviet sex-hypnosis program that makes them incredible in bed…

“…He only married him for the sandalwood plantation…Lasers count as Fire element in Feng Shui…One of the most expensive pieces of real estate on the planet poisoned by the groundwater – it’s cursed....Avalon… are you talking about the club or the dimension hun?…Florentine diamond…”

They were suddenly on every frequency and everyone was tuned in.

While the military had far superior signal jammers, even they reported intermittent occurrences. In one well-documented case,  the radio operator on a destroyer was alarmed to hear a sound described as like “the internet connecting in the Nineties” and then the words “when is the cute one back on duty?” He summoned his commander: “Ma’am, I think they can see us.”

At that point, Deflecting Karma Drama was still considered a niche show, and barely anyone had read the renegade astro-physicists. Why, you may ask, did it begin in Onyxville? Well, as any of the housewives would concur, Onyxville is one of the most geomagnetically erratic suburbs on the planet.

It was, of course, Vanadium’s birthplace and she sometimes wondered if all the fluctuations and frequency incursions had affected her. After all, Neptunian Life Coaching had sensed something unique about her and she’d picked up on The Real Housewives of Hades well before others – literally in her dreams.

Naturally her mother had zero time for the ‘Onyxville as wyrd portal theory’: “Nonsense,” she snapped. “You should be delerious with gratitude for the sacrifices I had to make to get us into such an exclusive suburb….And, I’m sorry – What?…you’re saying you live-streamed the housewives into your brain because of the tectonics here?….I knew I should have made them extend your gestation to avoid you being born with Mercury square…”

Her mother paused, seeming temporarily elated. “Did I tell you that the gynaecologist who induced you said that I had the most structurally perfect cervix he had ever seen? No Yonic Rejuvie, none of that nonsense – I think it’s actually because of my I.Q. levels…”

To Be Continued.

*The scent has never been identified but is most commonly described as smelling like ‘roses and phosphorous.’