Status Updates and How to Demonize People with Differing Ideas in the 22nd Century

“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.

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.

Benchwarmer

It started on a whim. 

Okay, maybe a whim is not the best word for how everything started. To be clear, Ryan's actions have never been very whimsical. It started with a shrug, in an empty park, in a not so far away stopover town, on a plain looking bench, when fourteen months, twelve days, and eight hours ago Ryan took a stand…by taking a seat.

It was March when Ryan gave up. It wasn’t that the bench was particularly appealing, it was simply where he sat. The hours and minutes inched away until day one turned into two, then three gave way to four, five, and six.

It was after the first week that his friends began to talk. Echoing the typical feigned responses you might expect from acquaintances trying to fill the gaps of time before the inebriation took hold: 

“He has been there a week.”

“Apparently, he shrugged and sat down....”

                                                 “I bet it’s over a girl.”

                                                                     “He will be back here tomorrow.”

                                   “Have you heard he stopped eating?” 

The last one was true, it was almost two weeks until he even noticed he hadn’t eaten anything.

That continued until spring came, when he found he had been alone for a month; his friends and acquaintances dispersing among the more densely populated watering holes, where they might have greater opportunity to have their plumage talked about. By the time summer began, Ryan's benching had become a cautionary tale about those who could no longer hack the scene. Oddly, it was when the summer ended that his name found his way into back into the local vernacular. Coincidentally, this was around the same time much of the tourism started drying up and his neighborhood ran out of things to talk about.

By Halloween, groupchats saw a nearly four-hundred percent increase in the “shrugging guy” emoji. This can be directly attributed to the locals deciding that Ryan was a symbol for taking a stand, and the emoji served as a perfect textual abbreviation. By November, it was not uncommon to hear the phrase “idleing” or “benchwarming” being used in sidewalk banter, out-front some of the more frequented establishments, where an angry thirty-something with a mustache and mullet, or a near frozen girl in a white Hanes undershirt, short cut-off jeans, and pair of ankle boots, are not ready to leave said establishment, and are therefore, protesting like that park guy, Ray.

Ryan’s voluntary inactivity became a thing of legend when he made it through winter. Signaling this, newspaper articles with headlines that read "Nativity Scene" and "New Year Resolute" filled local coffee shops and fusion brunch bars. Those interested being part of the story, which was most the town at this point, shared digital updates under the hashtag "#APbenchwarmer". 

Finally, Easter weekend, someone actually thought to ask, "Ryan, why are you doing this?" It stirred something in him…

***

Ryan sipped from a crinkled water bottle, while to his left, a twenty-year-old girl with wide-eyes and the start of an indiscriminate floral pattern sleeve tattoo, enthusiastically, scribbled his responses into moleskin notebook. Truthfully, a part of him wanted to impress her, but like with everyone he has met since reaching legendary status, that feeling was overcome by a much stronger feeling of disappointment.  Disappointment that she didn't laugh in his face, that she didn't cut him down and pull the curtain away from his entire protest. Disappointment that she was not disgusted by the theatrics of this entire novelty.

Hearing the slowing of her pencil, Ryan spoke up, "You know, I see 'em, I hear what they say. It's dumb. They're dumb. Really dumb." Ryan's body lurched forward, like he was adjusting the weight of his unworn baseball cap that was resting on his head. He continued, "For Christ sake, if everything is art, then isn't nothing art?" Shouldering the pivot and holding his head, his elbows dropped, landing firmly above his knees and pressed deep into his thighs, grinding the unused muscle, and softened sinew.

The scratching of paper sped up and it was making Ryan sick. It dried his throat, tickling the knot resting near his Adam's apple. He was tired of fighting. It is why he shrugged and sat down in the first place. Only now his protest is no longer his.

When he rode the wave, it pushed him to shore, when he fought the current, it pummeled him... 

...the difference is that the air tastes so much sweeter when you fight for it.

On a bench, in a recently crowded park, in not so far away stopover town, at the end of a fourteen-month hiatus, a former benchwarmer, Ryan, had an epiphany...if we protest everything maybe living our lives to the fullest is the greatest protest we can mount?

It was time Ryan mounted one.

Ryan shook of the rust, leaned back, held up his head, and threw himself forward. There was no net for this feat and the only thing there to catch him was his own sheer will. Stomping directly onto the pins and needles that he had been collecting in his legs over the last several months, Ryan got up.