The Watch in the Sand: Part 11

7:18 am, October 3, 2055

Jack stared down at her limp form. Part of his brain was working furiously trying to think of what had happened, what was going on. The rest of his brain was calm and detached.

He had met Connie on the train five years ago. She had been reading an old paperback book. He knew the author, and loved the old paperbacks himself, so he worked up the courage to introduce himself. They got into a discussion about favorite authors, and ended up talking about dinner recipes. It wasn’t until their second date that they talked about Nanocules, and whether things were better now or not.

Lifespans were longer, for one thing. The average human could live to 120 years of age, barring accidents. And even accidents were rarer and less dangerous. Nanocules could monitor balance and mental state. If you were distracted, or started to trip, they took over, and stimulated your mind with a jolt, waking you up, or re-balancing your limbs. You could opt out, of course. You could always opt out, though Jack had never met anyone who had. Who would want bruised elbows and skinned knees?

Violent crime was down. That was a positive he hadn’t expected. Jack had paid attention as Nanocules and the Boards became more and more status quo. As humanity became connected by only their thoughts, violent crime started to vanish. Some bleeding heart Sociologists claimed that it was common humanity working its way into old prejudices like tree roots, cracking stone and corroding walls. It was basic reward and punishment. Kindness and fellowship was rewarded with Pluses — callousness and cruelty was punished with Negs.

Or perhaps, the more cynical scientists thought, it was fear. When you could record everything with your eyes and ears, when everyone was a walking camera and microphone, there was nowhere for crime to thrive. There was no privacy; a populous police state.

That wasn’t entirely true. It would be closer to say there were no secrets. There was the privacy of static. With a billion lives mashed together in a web of billions of Boards, who cared about one individual? It had been a painful realization for some: that they were not, in fact, special. Rather, every post was immediately followed by a hundred comments from complete strangers. For every response that called the post inspired, there was another comment linking to a post saying the exact same thing from a few minutes ago. Even the most contrary Negs were quickly parroted and linked. It was almost impossible to be an individual on the Boards.

So everyone found friends — hundreds of them — and within twenty years of the first GUI that connected the human brain to the Boards, society worked, ticking along smoothly and calmly, like a precision mechanism floating in the star filled skies.

But not for Jack.

Jack’s first foray into the Boards had been frustrating. When he went to the boards, he expected to find something new, or exciting. Instead, he found not the infinite diversity and creativity of the human race he expected, but rather a formless mass of evolving homogeneity. He never bothered posting, or reading others’ Boards. He was sure there were others like him out there, but the sad irony was that he would never be able to find them. They would never post either.

What had sealed it for Jack was the Profiler. The realization that his whole life, every moment of every day, could be reduced to probabilities. A computer could match your brain and Board to everyone else’s in the world, and accurately predict exactly how you’d start and end any day of your life was terrifying to him. The Algorithm could see how you began, and then it could tell you where you would end.

Connie was gone. Had the Algorithm foreseen this?

Slowly, the images began to seep into Jack’s brain: the victims falling to the concrete without a sound. Knees buckling and heads tipped forward to the ground. Faces and arms scraping against the brick and steel walls as limp bodies crumbled. Most of the cars and taxis continued to drive along their programed route, while the few being driven manually veered wildly to the sides of the road, coming to a screeching halt when the on-board computer detected irregular driving.

Jack rubbed his forehead as he looked out over the street. They had been together constantly — always talking and laughing together. He was so happy to finally have someone he could really talk to without the Boards getting in the way. She didn’t like them either, and several dinners had been spent venting about pet peeves and rude behaviors that were popping up like weeds in their lives. They shared books, talked about vintage movies, and built a relationship together.

The pain wasn’t there. The ache was there, the numbing tingling ache that clutched his chest, but where was the sharp knife blade pain in his gut? His Nanocules had probably detected his impending anguish and the Bank had given him an anti-depressant. He wanted to feel vexed — he should feel the pain.

Her body was still there. Jack looked down at the still form of his lover, twisted and limp. Her eyes were open, and her face relaxed. Jack felt uncomfortably reminded of the wax museum she had taken him to one weekend. Was it shock?

Jack wanted to be furious. He should have been able to scream, and destroy, and tear the blood from his veins and watch it flow out of him like a river into the gutter where it belonged. He couldn’t even feel hot tears of frustration and helplessness well behind his eyes, threatening to land on the wax doll he stood over. He looked out over the mass of slain humanity, lying in heaps like discarded puppets.

Nothing.

Gradually, the part of his brain that was not writhing in his emotional purgatory became aware that he was running to the northbound train, and that it had begun to rain.