Break apart pt1.
2022-11-14
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//story short of a text

*in a cafe of the future?

She sat a few feet away. Surely she must have realized I was 
scanning her. It did not matter. She stood up and sat opposite
of me. Who was I to object the intrusion?

"Your book is outdated, you know that, right?" She said as she
seated herself.

Smart girl. She scanned me too. She was right, the e-book I
was reading was an original text file from 1998 pulled from the
archives. Even though its author revisited the file to update it 
to relevancy in 2003, I was too stubborn to buy into revisionism.

I was still getting used to the fact that the title of the file 
I had opened on my smart-visor was readable by the 'world'. Not
that most people cared. Somehow it turned out to be the norm.
Sure, when it all started, we had stories to tell about the smartly
dressed guy on the train browsing the latest 'privately leaked nude 
teen pics,' but we got used to it very quickly. The ocassional
unabomber-manifesto.txt reader shook us none. Somehow the augmented
reality visors became an everyday commodity.

Not everyone had the augmentation at first, mind you. At first
many were reluctant to drive a needle through their right eyeball,
and the ability to look at anyone around and see what they were 
looking at was reserved to the brave few technomancers, who cared
little about the health risks of the newly provisioned upgrades,
but when Coca-Cola aired their now historical promotion of 'one sting
with a hint of code,' the uncertainty vanished, as millions flocked
to stores to get their free cyber-upgrade with a can of Coke.

Tt has been decades now and I still get the ocassional scare, when
I open one of [REDACTED]'s texts and recive a random emoji-react 
as I'm riding the subway to work. Yeah, that's a thing now. Look at
the guy sitting six rows away from you, see he's reading 'Hildi and
Her Journey Through The Meta-Verse' and be able to leave a 'react'
on said fact. But most people quickly decided it was a weirdly 
intrusive function and even though it is a freely available option, 
the whole vintage social-networking reactioning didn't breach into 
the brave new world of real-life 'see-what-I'm-doing and leave 
a reaction.' And before you ask, the ability to block anyone below 
16 to react to your visor-feed has been a thing for the last 27 
years. But I digress.

There she was, sitting opposite of me. Smiling with the expression 
of a victorious general. We don't do this... this random meet n'
greet. We haven't for decades. One would think the visor-scanning
was used to find people with common interests, but the reality couldn't
be farther. It wasn't common knowledge, but our advertisal overlords
used the information of who we were looking at (and what they were
looking at) to generate algorythmic pathways to present to our 
personal profiles' dreams as we slept.

Not to get technical; as is a rarity nowadays, there she was,
intruding my private space. (My visor alerted me with 
red-bordered messages of 'UNKNOWN PERSON IN YOUR PRIVATE SPACE')

"You're a fan of [REDACTED]?" She continued as if we've had known 
each other for years. "I know he's a bit of a black swan in the
popular circles. Funny though, there are still few who manage
to sift through the digi-trash to find the actual unaltered texts."
I felt uneasy. She seemed too confident speaking to me.

The round glasses sat on her sharp nose. She was just a girl
with a 'The Economical Downfall of the Balkan States' over
her face. [REDACTED] wasn't exactly blacklisted. Not like Hitler's
Mein Kampf, or Marx's Capital. His fortune was the seeming obscurity
of his person. Obscure enough for the powers that were to not care.
In my surface thought I finally came to a response:

"His personal site is still online, you know. As long as you know
his name, you can easily find it." I would've added a smirk, but 
she was quick to retort.

"Ha! You're one of the digital-degenarates? Looking for swank 
nobody cares about just to look ecro in the visors of your 
onlookers? No, no, that's not it. You seem too... regular,
you're just a regular degenerate. Right?"

You think I would've taken offense, but the word has long shifted
its meaning to anyone with superfluous knowledge of things beyond
the 'accepted' narrative. "Right, I'm something of an archivist."
I lied.

"Bullshit. You're a wannabe hacker. Many such cases. Longing for
digital freedoms of the 2000's." The girl was right, she continued
"I can see it on your face, another unhappy closeted soul. Gotta 
run, you know how it be." She winked and stood up as quickly as 
she sat down, but not before placing a handwritten note onto the
table.

I had a feeling I was just about to get into things I shouldn't,
but I couldn't but welcome it. After I shifted my eyes away from
her short-skirted exit to the note, I wasn't too surprised to
see that all it read was 'RTC' and a street address, not far from
here.


TBC...