Jane Actually

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    “T he latest offer is from Miramax, the Weinsteins,” Melody informed Jane. They were sitting in Melody’s apartment, she in her old lady BarcaLounger that was out of place in Tamara’s chic decor, and Jane sitting on the couch, just barely in range of the terminal on the coffee table.
    Tamara was already in bed after a vexing day at work. Jane had tried to console Tamara about the inequities of women in the workplace, but the topic was so out of her ken that she feared she offered little practical advice. And yet Jane admired and even envied a little Tamara’s life as a professional woman.
    Jane and Melody, however, had also spent a busy day at the avatar agency, with Jane and Mary perfecting their skills and Melody pretending to be an interviewer. Melody thought Jane and Mary had improved tremendously. Mary no longer looked as if she were hearing a Who and managed to simply look thoughtful while waiting for Jane to tell her what to say. Mary also had gained enough confidence to start talking before Jane completely finished her reply, although that predictably resulted in a few missteps.
    Jane’s performance was still uncertain and this puzzled Melody, until Mary suggested that perhaps Jane could start employing texting shorthand.
    “Every one of her responses is grammatical and well thought out, with the proper punctuation, but it takes a while,” Mary said, which for her was close to complaining. Actually, Melody thought Mary’s skill considerable and her attitude exemplary. She never complained at the demands placed on her, which Melody attributed to her theatrical training. She felt chagrin at having objected to Mary.
    Jane, however, was getting crankier and crankier. Jane had assumed she could assemble her thoughts quickly and coherently, not unlike her ability in various chat rooms and instant messaging. She prided herself on forming complete, complex sentences that Elizabeth would be proud to utter, or pithy epigrams—“My good opinion once lost, is lost forever”—that Darcy would toss.
    “You’re trying too hard,” Melody said later, after Mary left. “Stop trying to write dialogue and just talk like you normally do and let Mary make it sound clever.”
    “What?”
    “She’s pretty good at the accent and we’re Americans. We’re programmed to think anyone with a British accent is smarter than us.”
    “Do I have an accent? I really don’t know what my digitized voice sounds like.”
    Melody laughed, which Jane saw but of course could not hear. “Yes you do, because I downloaded and installed a new voice for my terminal. It’s called ‘Elizabeth’ appropriately enough, and it does kinda sorta have a British accent.”
    Melody looked a little embarrassed at this revelation.
    “You can change my voice, whenever you like?” Jane asked.
    “Yes, although I’ve only changed it the once. The default voice and the other voices that come with the terminal … well none of them sounded right.” The admission made Melody recall the shock the first time she heard Jane’s digitized voice come through her terminal. She’d emailed and chatted with Jane and become friends and then took her on as a client without ever hearing her voice. She’d accepted Jane’s claim that she was the real Jane Austen almost from the first. She had to admit she’d made her decision on purely subjective and emotional reasons that were happily later substantiated by fact. But the first time she heard the flat digitized voice, she suddenly doubted her support of Jane.
    Which led to the search for a better-digitized voice and specifically one with a British accent. “Elizabeth” was a rather posh, frosty voice and was correspondingly expensive, but the first time Melody heard it, she knew she’d found the perfect voice for Jane, and her misgivings vanished.
    “What voice does Mary’s terminal use?”
    “Gosh, I don’t know,” Melody replied. “We should ask. It makes a big difference.”
    Jane was silent for a space, thinking ruefully of her recent attempt at programming the terminal and Mary’s reaction. She returned to their previous topic: “Sorry, I was just looking at the transcript. You said we had another movie offer for
Sanditon
from Miramax. That is another production company?”
    “Well, it’s essentially Walt Disney nowadays, unless they sell it off, like all the rumours say will happen. They make a lot of the ‘quality’ movies—including several of yours.”
    “Oh, which