The technician hummed a chirpy song as she finished the last of her diagnostics on the pod. Re-sealing the unit with a click she turned to the anxious homeowner, who stood wringing his hands behind her, near the door leading out of the basement.
"I have no idea where she was getting all that power," the technician shook her head as she spoke. "But I've upgraded the cable gauge and raised the limiter so she'll be safe to use till we can swap her out next week." She turned back to the pod and continued. "I'm not going to lie, though. This is a pretty extreme case. If I were you I'd make as much hay while the sun is still shining."
"Of course." He puffed from behind his mustache. "It's clearly working very hard."
The technician shook her head.
"No, no. 'Working hard' is an output of 4.0 at 160 bpm. 'Working hard' is an uptime of 16 hours a day." She gathered the last of her tools together and put them into the heavy bag. "What you have here isn't hard work, it's nothing short of a medical miracle. This focus produces on average 5.6+ output, and clocks in 18.5 hours a day. I've seen focuses put in this level of effort for a few days, maybe a week. But she's almost seven months into her contract and still pulling these figures. This could be a new company record. I guess that's why the lab wants it back."
Again the homeowner was unsure what to do with this information. All he had done was sign up when the salesman had come to his house eight or nine months earlier. They'd offered a power solution that would give him total energy independence, and even a tidy little kickback if he could keep his energy consumption down and keep his focus on track with the occasional prodding surge.
All of this talk about output hours didn't mean a lot to him, but it was a different story for the engineer. She'd made a long set of complicated notes after her diagnostics. The unit's controlling program had developed some unusual characteristics. Somehow there were protocols and processes that she'd never seen before, maybe even true originals. It was like the machine had been conducting tests while it pulled o-power out of the focus encased inside.
It was true though, that the pod was programmed to try and figure out which combinations of stim, rods and pheromones worked best on different focuses. But the ingenuity of this particular pod was well above the standard parameters. Of course the technician could never admit that to a customer though; the company had put so much money into marketing the machines as non-experimental and predictably safe.
The technician finalized her notes and cleared the machine for transport. Holding out her clipboard she asked the homeowner for a signature and reassured him that he would be compensated for any lost output from a new unit. Just before she left, she leaned down and peeked through the viewing portal. Nothing unusual, another young woman who looked to be sleeping deeply lay naked in the pod. The curves of the pod's bed fit her perfectly, but the small window hid from view all of the machinery of the pod.
Although she appeared to be sleeping, the screen reported that the focus was still outputting almost 1.6 in o-power. The technician shook her head again; her boyfriend loved to wake her up by gently teasing her when she was sleeping and the second he hit somewhere sensitive she was awake in a bolt. There was no way she would be able to sleep though so much stimulation. This focus was really something new.
The pod was collected later that week and swapped out with an early contract replacement. This new focus was a solid performer with decent levels, and had been chosen to keep the homeowner from grumbling too much. It took a team of three laborers to maneuver the pod onto the racking and up into the van for transport.
"Is she plugged in yet?" asked the lead courier, a large, blunt company kind of man.
"Just getting it now... there we go." One of the assistants called back.
"We aren't supposed to travel with her plugged into the truck, are we?" The third man asked.