A Stunt, and All the Kinds of Glass
Speculating in fiction
At this point it’s hack for me to start my semi-annual posts with a prologue about how long it’s been and why, so I won’t.
Before I jump into this one, though, I have a favor to ask:
For the past two years I’ve been working on a startup building immersive, roomscale arcade games. Think VR without the goggles. It’s called Third Wave Arcade. We have a huge opportunity to build our first arcade with a great partner, but we need to raise some capital for a round of software development. If you or anyone you know are investing in this space, drop me a line for more info.
OK back to it — to recap, (“last time, on Augmented Realist”), the last post in this series laid out a structure meant to be the second in the chain of a system that allows anyone to attach any digital thing to any real thing - if you didn’t read it, check it out here:
The Say and the Choos: a Distributed Labeling System
If you're seeing this post without reading the last, you'll probably want to go back and get the overview of the system we're discussing and why it's designed the way it is.
At the end of that post, I promised to circle back to the first link in the chain: segmentation and hashing. I think more than ever it’s apparent that a nearly universal segmentation system is possible, potentially enabled via multimodal LLMs trained on synthetic data.
This represents a more opaque intertwining of language and bias into scene understanding than even a more direct segmentation-specific system trained on hand-labeled data from a single part of the world. For many LLMs, we don’t know what they’re trained on, nor really how they arrive at conclusions. That opacity is a bad thing.
This piece of the puzzle is a moving target. It’s by far the most implementation-dependent, and thus mercurial, of the proposed system. The nitty-gritty specifics of a chosen implementation will have second- and third-order consequences in domains like privacy, interoperability, encoded bias, and modularity.
Trying to speculate about this piece while the state of the arts flew away like buckshot, I began to think again about building a demonstration of this system, to ground the exercise in something closer to home for those paying attention and, perhaps most importantly, for those who couldn’t care less.
I came up with a stunt - a very useful, very compelling, very dangerous stunt.
Imagine you could, for starters, attach anything digital to anyone’s face.
Put another way, imagine a system that made everyone’s face into a kind of QR code that pointed to a kind of link soup - a list to which anyone could add anything hosted online.
This is doable with today’s tech, but it’s an inversion of the way we think about our online identities.
Today, your identity is an anchor onto which platforms build a public ledger about you. Your dossier lives inside their walled gardens, subject to their rules.
But in this new model, identity itself becomes a kind of writable surface. Anyone, not just corporations or the person themselves, can affix meaning to your face—links, claims, media—without needing permission from a gatekeeper. It’s not just that people are posting about you. They’re posting on you. Or at least on the open index that your physical presence now anchors.
Importantly, the identity, and the content, live outside any platform.
As a corollary, we’d want the owner of the face to have the first say - the ‘choos’, for those of you who read the last post. We should be able to ask not only ‘what has been written about this person’ but ‘what does this person have to say about themself?’
Primitively, you could think of this as someone’s homepage, or their vCard, but creative users and years of culture will lead to sophisticated executables and augments that turn people themselves into experiences, applications, and operating systems. This was the idea behind the title image of the Say and the Choos post above - it depicts a street hawker selling handbags via her choos - only a few of the handbags are real, the rest are her virtual storefront. (Reposted here):
I genuinely considered - and still consider - building this, to prove a point. To open Pandora’s box. It would foment a wildly disruptive shift in our society, first in some very obvious ways, and later in knock-on effects hard to predict from where we sit today.
If we were to extend the system to all people, places, and things, what would actually happen? I realized that I should probably work some of that out, so my advocacy is better grounded, and the language more lived in, even if it’s impossible to know all that could come of it.
I’ve been arguing that some version - a worse version - of this is inevitable, and that we’d be best off with a free and open system. But what would that look like? Predicting online commerce in 1988 didn’t take a ton of imagination, but who had their money on scambaiting, mukbang, liveblogging terminal illnesses, fictosexual communities, on speedrunning Wikipedia bans?
To that end, back in Jan of 2023, I wrote a little speculative fiction. I’m copying the first chunk of it here. I don’t write fiction so, you know, YMMV, no express warranty, etc., but what I’m hoping to accomplish most of all is to imagine a world where secrets are rare, where expertise is diffuse, and where everything is an infinite palimpsest, and it’s been that way for a while.
Send me an email, leave me a comment, tell me what you think.
All the Kinds of Glass: Draft: Excerpt
First everything came to us in a trickle. Then our ids everted, shouting outside so loud we couldn’t manage a private thought, couldn’t touch anything without its opposite, the act of thinking a matter of a special effort, drowning in anything you could want to see or know.
The whole thing ran on making others want things, or want to do things, and the scale of it and the stakes - the money to be made - was so huge, before we realized it we'd built up corps that straddled new nations with everything riding on making it easier and easier to change others' minds, or to slip ideas in without them noticing.
It got so we didn’t believe it - any of it - each other, or ourselves, and we knew we had made a mess of the chance, that we’d blew it, broken something, and that the broken thing we made was so big we didn’t have room to make another alongside it, like we were in a house together and it was full, to the walls and up to the ceiling, so stuffed with untrustworthy trash we'd brought home we couldn’t dream of bringing anything else in, no matter how much we wanted it, or thought we knew better now.
This is to say nothing of proliferation of shit the AIs dumped out — factory farms of inanity and horror and ersatz help and polemic jamming every signal on every side until there was no way and nowhere to look anymore for voices of real people you might believe about something, were you even inclined to believe anything anymore.
All that was left for it, it seemed to some, was to wall in the people we wanted, to form clubs and cliques and cults where there were rules, where things made sense, and where we didn’t need to confront abhorrent ideas, or at least there was something to be done about them. A dominion for every sect, and despite what some said, they weren't all populated by ordinaries with more in common than they'd think with those across the wall.
No. Sorted like that, it was easier for a gripe to become a chant, and from there a war cry and a fact and the basis for the next campaign, the Overton window flying faster and further ahead like a late-day shadow, in all directions away from the origin, until for everyone the world seemed impossibly, irredeemably crazy.
But then there was gear, a joke at first too. They called them ‘poongoogles’. Middle fingers pointed them out everywhere, pocket protector for the face. But money talks, and influence at any price is cheap when you've spent billions already and staked your kingdom, and so minds opened, slowly at first, then faster as the right people were paid to say the right things or share the right pictures.
At first it was an expensive way to use the flatnet, as the Web became known, to use it bigger and more of it at once, for the rich in their homes and offices, or ostentatiously in coffee shops and on airplanes, and gear still had nothing to do with the stuff around it, and the flatnet was as balkanized and carved-up as ever.
Wearing, with the old rectangles wheat-pasted dumbly between us and the world, was briefly even more introverting than how we used to pour our focus into rectangles that others could see, and that we could look away from. But not for long.
The second flier hit Fan Deng mid-chest with a wet chuff and a cloud of pink mist. He puckered in the middle, folded, ass out, and went face first onto the engineered floorboards, with a dull, soft sound like a duffel of pumpkins dropped from waist height.
Ren's hands went reflexively to his temples. He felt an immediate flush of anxiety and guilt, as he did every time they had to hurt somebody. "Tell me he didn't fall on his gear,” he blurted. Fear throbbed behind his eyes.
He crouched by the corpse, tilting his head sideways, cheek to the bamboo, peering into the space between Fan's face and the floor. He pried by the shoulder, rolling the dead man onto his back. The gear looked intact, and Ren shot Krit a look of incrimination and relief.
Krit, looking on placidly, spread his hands as if to say, "I just shoot em", as a third and fourth and fifth drone buzzed in to land in the nylon fanny pack on his hip. “This wasn’t my idea, bro,” he offered quietly, just audible over the ringing in Ren’s ears.
Down on one knee, Ren slid a slick black lozenge - a witness - in front of Fan's unseeing eye. It rested directly on the eyeball, below the curving stick of gear extending from his temple. The witness read like a giant pupil, and with his slack face made Fan look to Ren like a cartoon boy that had been bonked on the head.
Fan - a body now, in boxer-briefs and a bloodstained polo shirt, lay perfectly still, somehow also quickly sagging. Ren gazed up slightly, focusing on the PIP relayed to his own gear. He saw the ceiling and a modal that said
FALL DETECTION
It looks like you've taken a hard fall.
Contact emergency services?
"We gotta do this quick," Ren said, nodding at the blood pooling behind Fan's back, "Help me sit him up."
Krit hiked the knees of his trousers and squatted down behind the corpse, prising his thick hands behind the body to lever it up to a straight-leg sit, staying there with his hands on its shoulders. Below his cuffs poked a clutter of faded flash — a Mary, a Puerto Rican flag, names in blackletter type. The witness stayed put over Deng's eye.
"Doll is in my pocket," Krit said, tilting his head left.
Ren began to reach for his pants. "Jacket," Krit said, his loafers creaking as he shifted his weight.
Ren removed the totem gingerly, but it was solid wood and felt heavier than it seemed. He looked it in the face. It was crudely made, with jute hair and a simple features carved into its dark, smooth surface. Something inside him lurched a little.
Inhaling deeply, he grasped it from the back and held it at arm's length in front of Fan's face, showing it to the dead man's gear. Through the witness, Fan's head gave him his answer.
"Oh," he said, too quiet for Krit to hear.
"I got into that car say," Krit announced, around a mouthful of musubi.
"I thought you weren't boosting," Ren said, "Mister would shit." He was half listening, half thinking about the recording on the witness in his pocket.
"Nah nah not boosting," Krit said, "just cool is all. Get title, history, public stuff from the muni say, but mixed in they’s exploits, prices, scrap, and rate on boosts from everybody in the covey."
"That sounds like a lot — how do you wear that with all your other shit? There's cars everywhere." Ren said to the sky above him. He was drinking an iced coffee and reclining, legs straight out, on a park bench. His gear was opaque black in the sun.
Ren wore a light grey tropical wool suit, crisp white shirt unbuttoned down to mid-chest, and brown leather derbies with no socks. It was humid, high eighties, with a languid breeze that made it feel hotter, but he made a point to get full sun on his skin every day, especially in winter, and sometimes the only chance was lunch.
His skin was uniformly dark year-round but he'd often take his bare feet out of his loafers to even a tan line only he could see. Today though, the image he got off the totem, through Deng's gear, had him unsettled, and being barefoot in public had always made him feel unprepared. He kept his shoes on.
At the edge of his vision, a faint lime-green field, shapeless, languidly shifting across a lowering sky, foretold rain on the way, peeking from behind midtown buildings to the West. Behind the blocky green he could make out the darkening ledge of a shelf cloud, looming.
Krit was walking back from the bodega. He gestured at the row of cars parked along the street beside him, in case Ren was taking his feed. As partners, they left a line open during business hours, but Ren usually only peeked Krit if they were separated and Krit got into some shit, or he had something important that couldn't wait.
"I'm not rinsing it all the time," Krit said, "I have my head bump me if I go by something good though - G rides or really hard hacks. Just cuz I still like this shit.
"I used to have it comp so it was, like, window stickers on the car windows? Like at the dealership? I thought that was cute but after a while I realized it was kinda conspicuous. The way I had to like, lean at the cars to read it? So now I just use the whatever OS bob and it's above the car most of the time. The say stuff is jus text so you can do whatever with it anyway.
"I don't search off it but I looked around when I first got in? There's a bo-nanza bro!" Krit laughed a big guy belly laugh, wet and half cough. "You gotta pay for a lot of the shit but the say links out to other covey hits and you can do a whole boost and fence without touching shit on some of the older rides. It's wild bro!" He laughed again, raucously, hacking a little, "fuckin things sell themselves ... I still love it man."
Here he sidestepped to dap beefy fists with another heavyset guy leaning by the dock of a commercial building, pointing a finger at his temple to explain he was on a call.
"You want in? Need 3 from the covey to vouch."
Ren shaded his face from the sun with one hand and let the other dangle at the end of his slack arm, eyeing the looming rainclouds.
"No thanks," he squinted, "don't need another firehose. Sick of fucking with the says I got. I've been dropping some, trying to dry up a little. Can't see where I'm going half the time and I don't have the energy to be tightening up my head every time I add a new whatever." He looked around the park with his brow knitted.
"Aiight," Krit said, "You get what you needed from the doll?"
"I got something," Ren said, into his fist, "might need Mister to tell us what."
Jackie scanned the marsh and woods where they hemmed the perennial meadow around her. In her gear, invasive grasses, shrubs, vines, and trees lit up in shades of blooming additive fuchsia and hot lavender, burning in the comp with real greens and browns.
"Blech," she said to the trees, brushing the palm of her hand over the catkins on the hip-high grass at her side.
She glanced back at the herd of goats grazing behind her, then subvocalized, "Head - let me see just the Bovidae tox again. Invasives." Most of the pink dropped away, leaving a handful of shrubs and ground cover. She spat.
“Is this including state extension say?” she asked silently, her throat barely moving with the minute movements of her tongue and jaw.
“Yeah,” her gear told her.
She squinted, thumbing a rivet at the front of her coverall and eyeballing the meadow border. She looked down at her muddy boots. A row of dense clumps of thin, long-bladed sedge led to a much larger stand of the same. At the base of the clumps, standing water poked through a silty clay soil.
"Isn't this appalachica?" she said aloud, crouching to pull a perigynium closer. "Head?"
"Yeah," her gear said again, and a broad mat of the plant burned in pink, seeming to follow the lowest, wettest area of the marshy plain between her and the woods. She looked up to the tree line and back to the sedge.
"Gimme ephemera for September 21," she asked, and just as she suspected, the arc traced through the sky was dotted with fully-visible sun-sized circles nearly sunrise to sunset.
She looked back to the grasses, and spat again, nudging a clump with the toe of her boot.
"Fuck are you doing here?" she asked the grass.
Staples sat alone at the small bar in what used to be a kind of speakeasy. The tiny space was warmly lit, with all its tight tables, and the 6 stools at the bar, occupied by patrons making quiet conversation. No customers stood. No one was allowed to enter without somewhere to sit.
Midway through the short row of two and four-tops, tucked against the glass curtain wall, two guitarists plucked out an almost inaudible bossa in the tight nook where a table had been removed for them. The warm air in the bar smelled like rosemary smoke and simple syrup.
Two Japanese bartenders demonstratively stirred crystal mixing glasses held at eye level, gazing closely at hand-cut ice cubes as they twirled their bar spoons in a way that made as little sound as possible.
Outside, pedestrians hustled around a triangular square, their steps prodded on by the obvious rainclouds. At the plaza center, a large cube sculpture perched improbably on its corner.
Staples contemplated the menu bob, which appeared to glow through the distressed mirror of the antique backbar. The place still had paper menus available, an affectation more than anything, but the server hadn't been by yet to offer him one. The server role itself was a similar kind of holdover — almost everywhere you could order from the menu directly, through your gear.
Like the other, slower methods at work behind the bar, the paper menu and the gentility of ordering with a human contributed to a feeling of intentionality that differentiated the place with a decorum Staples appreciated when he needed a break.
Unbidden, gently, a field of fine blue lines converged to a point off to his left, slightly behind him, at a table near the corner. His gear had picked out the face of someone in the room. The style of the field said it was a person of interest, and the color said it was someone he'd labeled 'work' or 'business' in his personal, private say.
He'd come to the bar to think alone, but if he'd faced whomever this was, they'd probably faced him too.
Since gear had become ubiquitous, new and more elaborate faux pas arose like warts where gentility's premises lagged new powers. He fought instinct for a second and rubbed his eyes.
Decades before, wearing had begun in fits and starts. Early, multi-billion-dollar commercial efforts had focused on resolving the formidable technical issues in making the hardware practical.
The largest companies in the world each pursued a vision of monopoly control in what was generally agreed to be the largest single market of any kind ever created. They assumed gear, like smartphones before it, would find an audience of early adopters first, and that a raison d'etre, or a killer app, would naturally follow, to be succeeded by more or less the entire economy, marching straight into their new storefront.
It sort of worked out that way. The timing of the first serious entrées to the consumer market coincided with a growing ambivalence towards tech's influence on life in general. They launched to little fanfare among waves of studies showing the ill effects of screen time and internet use among the youngest cohorts to have grown up with social media.
Industrial, commercial, and military uses were the first to find revenue. But for decades, despite the hardware shrinking, from face masks to goggles to smaller goggles to enormous glasses to less-enormous glasses and so forth, a conspiracy of social stigma, cost, impracticality, and the lack of a compelling use case left consumer gear largely in the hands of gamers, gear-heads, artists, and pornographers.
In the end, it was a group of hackers, or artists, or activists - to this day nobody knows who exactly - that ripped off a number of band-aids at once and slipped society a kind of transhuman roofie.
Intended as a grey-hat demonstration of the danger of facial recognition surveillance, myLittlePwndy showed the world the power - and inevitability - of using the meat world itself as an anchor to the digital.
As a demonstration, the system was simple and self-contained; anyone could upload any image or video and get back a list containing one 'Person' per face that appeared in their submission. That Person - just an ID number, really, was, for the most part, unique, and, importantly, deterministic.
At first, the system didn't have any information beyond that. No names, no concordant data at all shipped with the system as it was. It was simply a map from face to number.
But the thing that made myLittlePwndy subversive - made it world-changing - was that anyone could submit anything for any face.
Want to tag a celebrity? Label yourself? A friend? Add a bio? A link?
Leave an anonymous love note on your crush. Spread a rumor on your boss's face. Doxx an enemy with their home address and phone number. Scribe conspiracies on the likeness of ex-presidents. Nail revenge porn to your ex. People got creative, fast, and the tech press went wild over it.
It was like, all of a sudden, everyone in the world had an uncensorable, unmoderated, public comments section attached directly to their very person, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Until Congress got involved.
Where Europe had spent the last 50 years doing their best to regulate new technology before the worst problems arrived, the US had generally continued the laissez faire post-hoc strategy they'd employed since the first days of the internet. There were noises made about anti-trust action, about forcing popular foreign-owned services to onshore their data and shed their entanglements, and the grand tradition of dragging tech CEOs in Congress continued unabated, but the federal government had remained effectively hands off tech straight through the first two AI booms.
myLittlePwndy was too much to ignore. Social media and the big free services had been privacy-obliterating but at least they were opt-in. This was something else entirely, utterly inescapable, and something about how it involved people's actual faces, rather than some abstract idea of their online identity, brought the drumbeat to a fever pitch nearly overnight.
This being America, though, appetite for an out-and-out ban on this complex behavior was expressed by only the most insecure members of Congress, with most Senators advocating a more measured approach emphasizing preservation of the rights of all involved, albeit for different reasons. There was the right to free speech, the freedom of the press, the people's interest in receiving information, the freedom of corporations to make gobs of money, and plenty of precedent to suggest that the courts' interpretation of this activity would protect the general idea as speech about a person, albeit not without reservation.
These explicit rights would supersede any implied right to privacy when it came down to it, but by this time, individual online identities had become so culturally and financially important, so ramified and woven into life, that this first real link from the digital to the meat, ineluctable as a fingerprint and suddenly more important than a social security number, forced the issue to the top of the national agenda.
We must, it was argued, 'own' something - some real estate - at the front door of the connection from our physical form to the digital. It would take a constitutional amendment to prevent what was widely agreed to be a kind of speech from taking place. The usual laws around libel, slander, truth in advertising, hate speech, etc., would continue to apply, perforated as they were by what was left of Section 230, but the chain of concepts underpinning 'writing' 'on' someone's 'face' were, when it came down to it, too much of an exquisite corpse of innocuous and previously-protected behaviors to prevent, even if the amalgam felt altogether new and scary.
But, the thinking went, we could mandate that a person have the first word, if they wanted it, about themselves. It didn't neatly fit into any existing protections but straddled just enough Americans held sacred that a relatively unambiguous and truly novel bill passed with bipartisan support in a bitterly divided Congress. The law said that any service providing digital information to the public based on a user's identity had to allow that user to dictate a canonical response of their choosing, for free. A kind of a first or last word.
This personal payload became known as a 'choos' - pronounced 'choose' - and its codification in law and the furore that accompanied its birth were the instigating event for what became A Space, a transition that in retrospect was in some ways more important to society and to the human experience than the birth of the internet that preceded it. It was almost as though the internet, up until that point, inestimable as its impact had been, was simply a caterpillar inching along, waiting to wrap itself up, liquefy to an undifferentiated goo, and subsequently eat its way out of its cocoon, unfold new wings, and absolutely fuck shit up.
For it was myLittlePwndy (later to be supplanted by its most popular choos-complaint imitator, FaceDoxx), the Choos law, and the Cambrian Explosion of services, infrastructure, techniques, businesses, and culture that followed, that finally brought the internet into the physical world, and along with it, the realization that the whole of computing's history to date had taken place in a flat world of words, trapped inside tiny rectangles. And with that, the genie left the bottle.
Staples poked his thumb quickly and furtively toward the center of the blue field, hand down by his leg where no one would see, in a gesture that was more of a tic than anything.
His gear showed a simple bob with the face and name of someone he didn't recognize, along with a note he had taken. Apparently they'd met at an urban planning conference. They'd talked about light rail and waterfront zoning. He'd made a note that she was married, which reminded him that he'd been single at the time, before he'd been subsequently married and divorced himself. Still furtively, he cut the air with his fingertips, and the bob and the field disappeared.
He pointed at the disappearing bob with a thumb tip covered by his index finger, a gesture most users mapped to choos. His gear went looking for a response, in parallel sending an embedding of the color, scale, shape, texture, and location of the woman's face to FaceDoxx and two other lookups. He already had her name in his personal say, so his gear sent that along as well, to narrow it down.
Her canonical record - her 'choos' - came back on FD and one other - it was the same on both. She had linked out to a personal blog and a card that identified her as a distance runner, a mom, and recruitment officer for a consultancy in Maryland. It included a professional headshot where she looked nervous and constipated, like a hostage.
Staples briefly wondered if his note about her married status meant he’d been attracted to her at the time they met. Based on the headshot, if that were true, his tastes had changed significantly in the years since. Not for the first time, he wondered how well he remembered the person he’d been before he married. He winced and wiped a line through the condensation on his water glass with a fingertip.
Satisfied he didn't need to say hello and that she likely wouldn't do so either, he pinched his thumb and forefinger together and twisted in a counterclockwise motion, like turning down a knob. Everything his gear was showing faded out, leaving the room completely dry. He noticed the bartender had brought his drink and placed it before him - a cloudy, foamy, pale yellow thing in a Nick and Nora glass, smelling faintly of lavender and Chartreuse, garnished with a torched orange rind.
Back in the room, in the now, he stared at the foam. His hand twisted at a kink in the hair over his ear. Staples had a problem, or at least the feeling he had a problem, but it wasn't yet clear what kind of problem he had.
Jackie let the car drive her home in silence. She had left the dairy without checking in with the manager and hadn't changed her muddy boots before getting into the sedan. She was lost in thought and wanted to stay that way for as long as possible.
Something felt off about this job and something told her that if she looked for it too hard it would vanish in front of her eyes. She’d confirmed the operations folks had looked for the usual suspects - rumen acidosis, heat stress, crowding, silage, hardware disease.
She wasn't an expert on diary production or cows or animals, or, based on how her love life had been proceeding for the last lonely and frustrating decade, people. But she did know plants.
Things in the natural world changed faster with each passing year. The Northeast had fared better than almost any other part of the country through the repeated shocks brought on by climate change.
Extreme heat melted everything in the sun belt. Never-ending droughts and wildfires spooked off the private insurance market in California, and the state's inability to prop up the industry finally brought the idea across that tens of billions of dollars in homes sat on land unfit for human habitation. The rich got out and only the poorest stayed behind, left to fight with the surrounding states for a dwindling water supply, and for federal money to prop up collapsing utilities.
Repeated bailouts of inundated southern cities cratered Congress' will to continue propping up the National Flood Insurance Program. Hurricanes of increasing strength and frequency slashed their way deeper and deeper into the Southeast until only those with the strongest stomachs and the deepest pockets would rebuild with bomb-proof elevated houses in the parched, flat wastes between mosquito-infested marshes, leveled city blocks, and abandoned tract neighborhoods.
Similar stories of chain collapse made much of the country uncomfortable for those without the considerable means needed to buy comfort; an increasingly tiny segment of the population with each passing year.
The Northeast wasn't unaffected - more hurricanes than ever made landfall above the Mason-Dixon, bigger and wetter and more often. Deep-freezes, bomb cyclones, atmospheric rivers, tornadoes, droughts, heat waves, flash floods, and wildfires near and far made everything feel more precarious and more hostile than before. But on balance, compared to the blasted hellscapes in other corners of the country, the Midwest and New England looked appealing enough that their populations grew in the high single digit percentage points some years from internal migration alone.
Jackie was an observant person, and preternaturally pragmatic, even as a child. She saw this coming - something like this, anyway, two decades before, as a teenager also realizing the fear and loss and rage she felt watching the natural world spinning off into chaos was crippling her as a person, emotionally and physically. Her guts were in knots. She ground her teeth in her sleep. She sighed involuntarily and yawned from stress in quiet moments.
She couldn't escape a feeling of directionless resentment or the unannounced spikes of panic that stabbed through her from nowhere. She turned inward for years, thinking dark thoughts about the world that awaited her, and, even more disturbingly, about the people she loved, who seemed so oblivious.
Some of that pain never went away. What was left she channeled into a more constructive inclination to immerse herself in the natural world - to sink into it while it lasted. She took longer and longer trips, venturing further and further into what passed for wilderness, as far as she could get in borrowed cars, hitchhiking, and on buses and trains. She kayaked, hiked, canoed, climbed, and, and in her early twenties, studied, flying through online degree programs in botany, geology, and hydrology in the solitude of tents and hammocks.
Despite the freedom and exhilaration and the escape, the inconstancy of backpacking and nomadism wore thin eventually, and she returned to the calculations she re-ran several times a year, playing out the slow-motion trends that were plain to see if you were honest with yourself. The map in her head eroded on its edges and scorched and pocked with rust-colored holes as she played time forward.
Opportunity was no longer concentrated in the cities. Two and a half pandemics and an ever-strengthening remote work culture made urban rent hard to justify, whether for offices or shoebox apartments. To judge by the market positioning of the retail and restaurants in the big-city downtowns, the only people left in the tall buildings at city centers were the super wealthy and their superintendents.
Further out, rural communities struggled to maintain even a meager subsistence, battered by a climate that went from fickle to inconstant to downright violent in a surprisingly short period of time, faster than farmers could adapt, anyway.
Jackie put her savings down in the high hills of central New Jersey, a rangy farm country in direct sight of the New York skyline 40 miles away. She put a used trailer on a 5-acre plot of recovering farmland, a sloped parcel with a small stream, a pair of huge pin oaks supporting a rotting deer blind, a scattering of struggling apples, a stand of dead Walnuts killed by a succession of invasive moths, a carpet of invasive grasses, and a marsh full of invasive reeds.
Her neighbors were a mix of blue-collar workers, wealthy Republicans, destitute recluses, and gentleman farmers. She tacked up fliers at the Tractor Supply, the Grain & Feed, the 4-H, and the post office, advertising her services as a plant detective. She waded into hard issues on the state extension site and in-person, bartering for a beat-up chest freezer, an old shotgun, an Ikea bookshelf, and a few bushels of dried persimmons, all in the first year.
She diagnosed fungal blight on ornamental dogwoods, bolstered mycorrhizal diversity in herbicide-scorched meadows downhill from a golf course, and got paid actual money to assist the transitioning of a university’s sports complex green roof from a monoculture centipede grass to a native wildflower mix.
She built a small but active following for her public say, ranking high on native plant ID, diseases of local natives, and some kinds of moss.
Her trailer was sparse, physically furnished with a threadbare recliner and a folding table and a single bed and a very old halogen torchiere floor lamp that did nothing to improve the appearance of the smoke-stained popcorn ceiling. At first, in a fit of aspirational asceticism, she'd convinced herself she didn't care about the appearance of her home, then shortly thereafter realized she did. Or at least that the way it was now could, at the end of a bad day, touch off her latent depression for a night or more.
She didn't have money to do anything meat, but she'd given the place a lot of love in A Space, opting for a rich Chinoiserie wall-covering and a sheeting water feature and some tasteful Deco sconces and loads of potted plants. She put some effort into choosing a selection of A houseplants that would have thrived in the meat conditions, knowing her botanist lizard-brain would have rebelled at the impossible appearance, however virtual, of full-sun orchids and birds of paradise blossoming in the taupe murk of her trailer.
It felt silly to her. She'd grown up with computers and promptly, if not enthusiastically, worn gear when it became common to do so. She used A Space in her work, to check assumptions and find things she'd missed. She wore for entertainment and for navigation and almost one hundred percent of the time she was in a city, as did almost everyone. She diligently curated her say, reviewing tags regularly like she was grooming a zen garden.
But she also thought of herself as being rooted in the meat, a naturalist given to inhabiting the present, disinclined to self-delusion.
Today, Jackie knew that much of what she thought about herself was a story she'd written as a teenager, a legend, and that even if some of it had been true then, most of it didn't hold up to inspection now. Once you realize you’ve been thinking in fiction, it doesn’t just go away on its own unless you make something up to replace it.
Unless she was reading or researching or gaming, she didn't wear much at home, but on days like today, when she returned to the trailer with a cloud in the back of her head, she'd learned to leave the gear on and spend the evening in a nicer setting.
As Ren sat up, a vector outline of a police car flared into view the next block over, its light cutting through the intervening buildings like a neon sign in a blooming teal. Across the way, solid blue dots indicated the location of nearby police outside the immediate area. The car outline faded and became dotted as it left the view of the user that had seen it, no one Ren knew but a lookout in his wider crew nonetheless.
When this Cop Spot system was first adopted by Belarusians running a kind of import/export hustle out of Bay Ridge, they’d called it Systema. They had repurposed an app originally made to help schoolteachers keep track of a flock of kids, but the underlying technique generalized perfectly to many eyes wanting to watch many others.
Users with the magnet link received a peer-to-peer heartbeat of last-seen locations of law enforcement. The data came from 'narcs' - users running an extension to their head that reported police vehicles and hit a private say on every face, looking for known cops, whether in uniform or not. Most people rinsing the feed were narcing too, in the spirit of a healthy ecosystem.
As adoption grew, the payload grew, and even though the bundle was light, with objects carrying only location, an optional name, ID type, the report embedding, and direction of travel, it became impractical to rinse the whole set as users in India, China, Brazil, Russia, and the Philippines enthusiastically piled in. It was just too many narcs watching too many cops - too much firehose, a common problem in A.
This necessitated the adoption of a regionalized sharding system - updated endpoints for reporting sightings began bucketing data into Voronoi-bounded geographical zones dynamically subdivided in a way that kept the heartbeat reasonable for any one region.
Unless he was looking for a clue to something big going down, Ren kept Cop Spot on a roughly 500-foot need-to-know boundary. At the moment, he had that spread out to 5 blocks, not just because he had just been involved in a shooting that morning, but because he was distracted, and he felt like outsourcing some vigilance so he could think.
Mister had to have known he would at least be curious about what he saw in Deng's gear. She might have even suspected he'd be more than curious. As it happened, he wasn't sure what he was feeling, but at this point he wasn't ready to rule out that the tight feeling in his stomach and ball sack was fear.
It was hard to tell that feeling from the one he got when his body felt a big opportunity might be nearby, like when it seemed like he might get laid.
His body knew he was going to have to bring the witness, and the doll, to Mister sooner or later, and if he didn't, he'd better be ready to run. His mind was slowly figuring that out, too.
… that’s it for the excerpt. Thanks for reading! Tell me what you think in the comments, or send me an email, and if you liked it, tell a friend about Augmented Realist, won’t you?