“Ready to elevate your productivity? Time to show your team your full potential? Prozipichol is a once-a-day skill germinator that will bring out your best…,” an ad played through Laura’s optic nerve, seemingly graffitiing her kitchen counter and ivory backsplash.
“This is perfect,” Laura remarked, disregarding the ad and waving her outstretched hand at arm’s length, letting the artificial light of her kitchen’s digital output screen pour between her fingers. She was admiring the shade of pink that she had burnt into her fingernails earlier in the week, and how the color perfectly matched the Rose’ she has just poured into a large stemmed glass.
While advertisements danced in her periphery, the status bar at the top of her projected personal feed blinked red with unviewed alerts. This is a common side-effect of the lock-screen period that occurs during advertisement play. In those slipping moments, Laura’s badge rate plummeted, no-doubt, a result of an article she posted as she stepped out of office compound “73-2.” The article in question, “FIVE Enhancements to Eliminate Desk Mate Competition this Fall Work Season!” had a word count that pushed content limits, but she took the risk to meet the personal feed quota and to unlock scroll pace restrictions for the next several hours.
“UGH ID-IOT’S…It’s LIT-ERALLY pictures and words. Stop acting like BABIES,” Laura yelped, directing her frustration toward the irritated and deliberately blinking inbox, and the realization that there was very little she could do to immediately alleviate the damage she had caused. Unable to quell the inflamed appendage, Laura instead focused on slowly rebuilding her bruised digital reputation, vigorously scrolling through highlighted topics, whimsical musings, and informative jabs.
Laura had a knack for media mining. In fact, it is what led to her upgrade from the evening to the morning shift, in the first place.
When she made the change, she was admittedly apprehensive. She knew several workers from the early morning teams, and they had a reputation for being short-spoken, pointed, and homely. Today, however, Laura has grown accustomed to the A.M. shift. Beyond the more suitable hours, and the notoriety within the neighboring residential blocks of holding place in a sought-after time block, Laura found the job easier. Simply put, there are more people home between the hours of 12:00 and 6:00 A.M., offering greater opportunities for completing account tasks.
“-Livernegy is recommended for anyone struggling with Holographic Exposure Disorder, or H.E.D.-,” ads continued to glide through her direct line of sight, rattling around in the empty spaces in her head, creeping into the hallways of her mind, and gently coming to rest in the soft folds of sinew and brain tissue.
“-Livernegy is recommended for anyone struggling with Holographic Exposure Disorder, or H.E.D.-,” ads continued to glide through her direct line of sight, rattling around in the empty spaces in her head, creeping into the hallways of her mind, and gently coming to rest in the soft folds of sinew and brain tissue.
Laura’s satisfactory completion rate often allowed her to escape the confines of the billing offices ten…fifteen…even twenty minutes early. On this particular morning, she was making fists with her toes and gliding toward her living room with a glass of wine by 6:26 A.M; between leaving work and making the commute home, this represented a full four minutes earlier than the Resource Board calculated when they first offered her a five-year contract for morning block. Laura loved when she outsmarted the suits on the Resource Board.
For the uptick in her daily routine and close rate, Laura credited the optometric surgeon she visited for enhancement. Enhancements were common for workers in this shift, at least, more common than those in the evening schedule, who had not yet accumulated the necessary hours to qualify for a shift lottery. And for those who had accumulated the necessary hours, they often did not have the collateral for a work loan.
When Laura applied for the surgery, it was calculated she would likely need to clock equivalent to three more full contracts to repay the time leveraged in the loan. This was a calculation that Laura scoffed at…
...Laura loved when she outsmarted the suits on the Resource Board.
Laura’s eyes battled through another ad:
“Relanthrepa…a doctor prescribed insomnia inhibitor that soothes away the daily side effects of media implants…”
The words echoed around in the back of her skull while a dimmed image projected on the backs of her eyes. It was 6:29, and the advertisement pace had increased as the mid-hour feed update crawled closer. Laura was prepared. She took a sip of her wine, badged a check-in from her friend - it was important to make sure she kept up with the dialogue of the day - and plopped herself in front of a large digital screen in her living room.
While she busied herself at the screen, scrolling feverishly through headlines, a middle-aged man projected from her implant into the space between her and the screen. He spoke…
“When my doctor told me I might not be able to walk again…I was scared. What would my boss think?
…And what about my family?”
A montage of the man playing catch, running, and dancing flashed before her, meanwhile, a gentle-sounding narrator juxtaposed the images with a series of spoken side effects. Laura’s finger continued to slide vertically, bottom to top, tossing information upward, into orbit, at an exponentially dizzying rate.
“- is common in the first year with only one in five cases being reported after 15 months…Cellucocus, skin de-densification, and implant irritation have all been experienced within the first month’s cycle…if this occurs consu –“
“HA! Such garbage…little shhHITS,” her volume climbing over the fine print of the ad. The target of her ire appeared at about 80 or 90 articles deep into her personal feed, where she isolated a dialogue from a fellow worker, Ann. The post, which Ann made from her work desk, offered reported evidence of the benefits of increasing personal productivity to elevate oneself from morning to afternoon block.
Laura met Ann during her initial training period, when she filled-in on the afternoon rotation and learned the procedures for account receivables directly from Ann. She never liked her. Ann’s propensity for using colored paper, and ink, irked her. For Laura, it felt dangerous for anyone to identify with behavior so “stupid,” or as she once read in an article, “off-grid.”
When these concerns began to simmer, she voiced them to her desk mate. When the worries boiled over, she expressed her observations to the credit changer stationed at the lunch room collection desk. And when this did not satiate her need for a proper resolution, she reported the results of her investigation to a table of morning workers she had met from complex “73-1.”
“There is something creepy about anyone who would intentionally avoid implants. This shit is dangerous,” she remarked to the workers, and anyone within ear-shot.
Laura knew she would never see eye-to-eye with Ann, or noon-shifters in general. "Ask anyone...," they have a reputation for being wordy, self-centered, and radical. An assumption that was validated with Ann’s clearly biased dialogue feed.
“Disgusting bitch,” Laura gulped from her hand-heated Rose’, contemplating the proper course for isolating the vile misrepresentation which she was subjected to. The only option is to separate herself from the feed, but not before she alerted anyone within 6-degrees.
Laura took a deep breath, mouthed a large sip of Rose’, and began to craft the perfect response. She wrote, “Okay, Ann. So I read your…interesting…articl –“
“Bleeding and spotting may occur beyond the first month’s cycle...,” an ad warned of a series of necessary side effects while Laura built her scathing retort, only stopping to blink-refresh her status bar, waiting for someone, anyone, and the trickle of badges that would hopefully follow.
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