Brief Aftermaths
Zipped it up in a bag and dumped it in the trash — a daykid. Just testing being a parent. He wasn’t good. He took a swig of SorrowDump and wondered why they couldn’t make it chocolate flavoured instead of sad lemon. The smile crept back onto his face, but it felt artificial.
The fleshpress in the bedroom was also in meltdown after last night. He couldn’t afford a reconsitute protocol so all these throwaways would litter his days in brief aftermaths. Nothing had any real permanence in his life.
He had a meet today. Not a drop, just a feel-it-out meeting. He’d set up a friend-or-foe handshake with a pretty far-reaching proximity alert.
Who was he today? He knew he’d set up a mask protocol but he wouldn’t know until he looked in the mirror. You had to put some of that outside your own control so that you didn’t start falling into patterns. Patterns were observable and they were the kind of thing that could get you in trouble.
Random moments in the life of this place. Hack-dogs roaming around pissing up open nodes and meat translating through the Crowspace Jacks. Tech made things easy, slack, half-arsed attempts at something that didn’t even have perfection on their radar. He was travelling around constantly on the alert, everything recording into parsing temp files that sifted for useful data, ready to ping set lists of people based on filters — it was security and it was opportunity.
He saw what he thought was his meet. The guy was sat there with a Harajuku Casual, so he figured she must be a rent-head for camouflage and not a sodding date, because that would have been a dumb move.
‘Sorry about him, he’s a puppet. He’ll slack-sack in about an hour and there won’t even be a stain to clean up.’
‘I thought you were …’
‘What? The cover? I know, hard not to hit the ground heavy with that chauvinistic programming, no matter how hard you try to be a modern man, right?’
‘Yes. I suppose so,’ he said, cold responding to that assertion.’I heard that you had extra-temporal brain patterns that you are boosting. Something choice.’
‘Depends, I suppose on whether you’re a jazz head, or a hip hop fan, or maybe into the Beats.’
‘You don’t have Burroughs do you?’
‘I sure do, and I have some Nova Mob plug ins too, and a couple of heavy doses of cut-up.’
‘Can I use it with Gysin Dream Machine?’
‘Sure you can, but beware going full word-salad.’
‘I live in that space.’
‘You’re welcome to it. You have the spondoolicks?’
‘If we can press palms they’re yours.’
‘Sure,’ she said, and they pressed their palms together.
‘That was peasy.’
‘Sure was. Here’s a Schroedinger bag. Here’s my shift-tag so you can reach out to me again. I won’t take yours because I don’t like to be data heavy.’
And he was on his way. The meet had been straight into something, and he hadn’t necessarily expected that, but it was all good.
Back home he started speaking to the Ambience Manipulator and the apartment began to set itselkf up for the immersive experience he was about to go on.
Tomorrow he might wake with a brief sense that he was the great writer whose thoughts he was channelling, but it would wear off before lunchtime, which was good, because he had to be somewhere.