That evening, Anita’s secretary Marge came over and witnessed their signatures, then entered their names in a large ledger she carried and stamped them with the State Seal. The ceremony was short and wordless; once Marge was done, she put her ledger and notary Seal in her briefcase and left. The whole process had taken less than five minutes. Howard wasn’t particularly happy about granting Anita a power-of-attorney and was even less pleased when he saw that the lawyer had made it a full power-of-attorney rather than a limited one. It bothered him to assign all his assets to Anita, but the danger of being pauperized by prosecution for polluting was too real to be ignored. Given his deteriorating condition, he had to agree that her ideas were sound. Besides, Anita wasn’t going to use his power-of-attorney unless there was an emergency. Howard had every confidence that he would remain the sole director and arbiter of their fates. A ship could only have one captain, and he intended to remain firmly at the helm to chart their course.
The next morning, Anita suggested they go to a Saturday morning matinee at the movies. The local Centrex 24 had recently replaced their ancient and much revamped Dobie ® surround sound system with the latest Sensorium ® audio/sensory system. The video was pretty much the same as it had been before; a high definition video signal displayed on multi-sync, multiple, flat-panel plasma displays that spanned six meters in one dimension and four in the other. By multiplexing the signal and decoding each part of the picture for each high resolution flat plasma display panel that was part of the total display, the effective limitations of both thirty-five millimeter film and normal television were bypassed with a depth of detail and color that was unmatched by any other technique. It was difficult for the average viewer to be able to perceive the difference between what was real and what was a simulation.