down its contents—the passengers—on the little Cubist residents far below. In death, the bird looks just like the WarBird I shot down over the Sahara. The men in suits spill out of its body cavity so lightly and evenly, just like in Golconde Rene Magritte painting, c. 1953 . On the ground, the residents waste no time flinging off their pretenses of charitable love to pick up baseball bats with which to knock the falling men back up into the air.
As the bird touched down on the runway I realized I had been daydreaming. The other passengers were already standing from their seats, getting ready to disembark. I grabbed my bag, left the bird, went through luggage screening, and spilled out with the rest of the bird droppings into a burgundy-colored airport lobby.
The moment that I stepped off the PassengerBird, the augmentedreality in my contacts kicked in. Just about everything in my field of vision had AR metadata associated with it. I glanced at the entrance to a café and saw the menu hanging in midair with a meter next to it telling me how many seats were empty and next to that some stars indicating favorable reviews.
Everything in our world had a user review attached to it.
Even people had little social assessment stars stuck on them.
Café de Paris in the airport lounge: four stars.
Tuan Kirie: four stars.
Cian Reikado: three.
“Tuan! Tuantuantuan!”
A little girl’s voice shouting my name.
Since I didn’t know any little girls, I was pretty sure it had to be Cian Reikado. She was one of the only people who knew I was coming back. I went to pick up my Helix agent code at the baggage counter, then turned to Cian, who was yelping and jumping with excitement. If she’d had a tail, she’d have been wagging it for sure. Some public metadata was attached to her body—the name of the admedistration she belonged to and the SA score she’d been assigned by her admedistration’s moral consortium.
“How’d you find me in that crowd?” I asked.
“What are you talking about, Tuan? You stand out in any crowd!”
“Oh?”
“You should really watch that—you probably attract enough attention as it is with your job and all. Wow, you’re really, uh, rough-looking too. No offense.”
“Comes with the territory. I can’t help it if battlefields always tend to be the deserts and the highlands and the swamps. It’s tough on the skin.”
To tell the truth, my skin condition probably had more to do with my various indulgences than any battlefield conditions. The only thing keeping my WatchMe from alerting the nearest admedistration-contracted counselor was the DummyMe I’d installed to send phony data about my body to the server, but the DummyMe fell short when it came to fooling the human eye. I must’ve stuck out like a sore thumb.
Having bad skin meant you weren’t living up to at least one of the basic requirements of lifeist society. A sure sign you were a wrench in harmony’s cogs. Lifeist society meant everyone, man or woman, had to conform to certain standards. Nonconformity made itself physically obvious.
Bad skin? A sure sign of poor self-control.
Shadows under your eyes? A lack of proper publicly correct resource awareness.
All of this was reflected in your SA score. The vast majority of admedistrations required all adults to make their histories, including their medical records, public knowledge. This was, in part, to make the process of assigning a social assessment score as transparent as possible. No doubt, if politicians these days were as fat as the leaders of old had been,
As the bird touched down on the runway I realized I had been daydreaming. The other passengers were already standing from their seats, getting ready to disembark. I grabbed my bag, left the bird, went through luggage screening, and spilled out with the rest of the bird droppings into a burgundy-colored airport lobby.
The moment that I stepped off the PassengerBird, the augmentedreality in my contacts kicked in. Just about everything in my field of vision had AR metadata associated with it. I glanced at the entrance to a café and saw the menu hanging in midair with a meter next to it telling me how many seats were empty and next to that some stars indicating favorable reviews.
Everything in our world had a user review attached to it.
Even people had little social assessment stars stuck on them.
Café de Paris in the airport lounge: four stars.
Tuan Kirie: four stars.
Cian Reikado: three.
“Tuan! Tuantuantuan!”
A little girl’s voice shouting my name.
Since I didn’t know any little girls, I was pretty sure it had to be Cian Reikado. She was one of the only people who knew I was coming back. I went to pick up my Helix agent code at the baggage counter, then turned to Cian, who was yelping and jumping with excitement. If she’d had a tail, she’d have been wagging it for sure. Some public metadata was attached to her body—the name of the admedistration she belonged to and the
“How’d you find me in that crowd?” I asked.
“What are you talking about, Tuan? You stand out in any crowd!”
“Oh?”
“You should really watch that—you probably attract enough attention as it is with your job and all. Wow, you’re really, uh, rough-looking too. No offense.”
“Comes with the territory. I can’t help it if battlefields always tend to be the deserts and the highlands and the swamps. It’s tough on the skin.”
To tell the truth, my skin condition probably had more to do with my various indulgences than any battlefield conditions. The only thing keeping my WatchMe from alerting the nearest admedistration-contracted counselor was the DummyMe I’d installed to send phony data about my body to the server, but the DummyMe fell short when it came to fooling the human eye. I must’ve stuck out like a sore thumb.
Having bad skin meant you weren’t living up to at least one of the basic requirements of lifeist society. A sure sign you were a wrench in harmony’s cogs. Lifeist society meant everyone, man or woman, had to conform to certain standards. Nonconformity made itself physically obvious.
Bad skin? A sure sign of poor self-control.
Shadows under your eyes? A lack of proper publicly correct resource awareness.
All of this was reflected in your SA score. The vast majority of admedistrations required all adults to make their histories, including their medical records, public knowledge. This was, in part, to make the process of assigning a social assessment score as transparent as possible. No doubt, if politicians these days were as fat as the leaders of old had been,
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