Feed (2 page)

So much for studying. 

Ramone said something, running his hands over his thighs repeatedly like he was sweating; Blythe responded, and her cheeks colored a little. Normally Blythe’s complexion was pale and smooth like white marble.

Marci yelped at seeing Blythe blush.
Finally!
she thought, hoping the ball would get rolling at last, though also wishing in some way that the climax of this story would stretch out, adding to the tension. Tension always paid off. Crescendos were more pleasing with a good build up. She’d learned that much from being a student of the feeds.

Marci fumbled to attach her ear-buds, again glancing around the alcove and stacks beside it. Beneath the smell of book must, there was the acrid odor of wood polish hanging over the cavernous library like a cloud. She scanned the room, feeling the eyes of the setting cameras on her. Not her specifically, necessarily, just everyone. And she was part of that, as she was in the room. No one was watching her, were they? At least, no humans? No, they were all immersed in their studies, not even registering her inappropriate vocalization, hiding in the lit alcoves along the nave of the library on the edges of the stacks of shelves. Libraries just weren’t catching on that no one cared for books anymore, she thought with a disapproving click of her tongue. At least they’d updated their desks. Not that Marci was using hers to study at the moment. 

Glancing back at her slate, Marci got herself plugged in just in time to hear Blythe tell Ramone his project was gorgeous. The electricity between them could have fried Marci’s fingertips where she touched the slate. 

A cloud of butterflies exploded in her stomach. Her fingers tingled. She felt like she was floating. The camera panned back to show the old guy’s face, his eyes, his hand as it brushed through his graying hair—he really was too old for the lawyer chick. “Thank you,” he muttered.

“Thank you?” Marci said aloud, not even realizing she’d spoken. “Kiss her, you jerk!” She pulled the slate close to her face, trying to get through to him.

“Shhhh!” a voice said beside her. Marci glanced up, stomach lurching in surprise. It was the young librarian—probably a student—on his way back to the main floor from the deep end of the stacks. He shook his head and gave her a disapproving stare. At least he didn’t kick her out, she thought, cowering in her seat. He pushed on and Marci turned back to her slate.

Nothing happened. Blythe tore her eyes from Ramone’s gaze and went on, discussing the particulars of whatever boring patent they were working on. Marci continued to watch, listening to each word for double meaning, innuendo, or anything that would betray their real feelings. She knew it would go somewhere, otherwise the Editors at Epic Romances and Steamy Affairs wouldn’t have picked it for the on-the-fly editing, the filters, and montage music they’d thrown on top of it. They had faith something would happen here. And Marci did too. It was inevitable. It was the formula. Throw the right chemistry between two people into the perfect setting and there was no way you’d not get the Epic Affair. Or Romance. Blythe was married, and so was Ramone, unfortunately, but that just gave the romance angle more heat. It was the way the world worked.

*****

“You dirty bastard,” Ghosteye said with a smile, the sound of his voice disappearing quickly into the angled, blue walls and the dark brown baffles of the studio. It was soundproof, cold (for all the machinery), and carefully constructed with angles that funneled sound quickly in directions that prevented echoes. Ghosteye squinted at the large screens in front of him. Even with the muted track lighting, his vision tired after so many hours.

Ramone, the subject of his current gig, thought he was getting away with something, that much was evident to Ghosteye as his fingers flashed across the controls of his editing board. Of course, it had been evident for years that Ramone was trouble. He’d never settled into a comfortable pattern of acceptance like the rest of the population—Ghosteye had done his homework after being assigned to the man. Originally he’d thought it was just for the potential affair, which made the old man a bastard, but after doing his homework, he realized that whatever Ramone was hiding was yet another reason for assigning him the rather crass term of endearment.  

What next?
Ghosteye wondered.
Perhaps a kiss?
He laughed, no, not yet. No chance.

His hands moved in a blur as he adjusted hues and tones, applied filters to accentuate beauty or delete blemishes. Sometimes Ghosteye felt like a machine, working so efficiently. Not only that, his training in micro-expressions gave him insight into the subjects’ minds—really, he’d sensed this whole thing coming with Ramone from the minute the bastard entered the lawyer’s office.

When Ghosteye got the assignment, it had come down with a letter of explanation, which, in summary, told him the following: Ramone was a Goliath. To topple him would benefit the Organization in two ways. One: it would neutralize him as a threat, and that would, Two: undermine the strange integrity to which he clung. That integrity turned him into a threat. It was based on old values. Values that were only helpful so far as they created the allure for the forbidden—those sacred things that begged for violation and thus enhanced the intrigue, the temptation of the stories. 

Honestly, the only thing better were the feeds where a priest succumbed to his forbidden lust. Ghosteye sighed, recalling the appeal of
those
feeds. They were growing rarer as the old religions died. What mattered now was science, the intellect, and self-worship. The new gods were the body reconstructed, fame, money, and the next conquest that landed a person in a viral feed and gave them the next level of fame and stardom. What wouldn’t anyone do for the flash of the screen, that window into a feed, someone else’s life, someone else’s adventure, that beauty and all it’s lovely promises?

That was what the masses wanted now. People like Ramone were the anomaly. Everyone else hungered for the feeds.

And Ghosteye was the human machine by which it came. The filter. The artist with a golden touch.

Ghosteye grinned and ran his fingers through his hair—greasy; he hadn’t showered in two days, there was too much going on! What he did was art, really. It was! The art of manipulation. He watched his subject leave the lawyer’s office and laid a blue-tint over the image, inserting a melancholy song even as he moved the feed from camera to camera, finding the perfect angles to relay the story Ghosteye felt building—where? Ah, there! A setting camera, switch the feed to that one, yes, it was
beautiful
. Made Ramone look tiny next to the skyscraper, accentuating so much anguish and desire. It spoke volumes of what Ramone must be feeling. Volumes!

Ghosteye picked a song quickly, having selected beforehand the proper music for any contingency with Ramone and the lawyer. There was a five minute lag to the feed that also allowed Ghosteye time to decide just what might happen and how he’d put this particular narrative together.

Without warning, a rumble broke through the smooth curtain of the song—and really, the song was perfect. Made Ghosteye want to curl up on the couch at the back of his studio and snuggle with a, a blanket or something. Maybe a pillow. Some hot chocolate. Or coffee. Something. The grumble came again, echoing through his body. He leaned forward and turned a knob—the volume fell in response. There it was again.
Ah,
he thought,
my stomach
. He glanced at the clock in the corner of his screen and sighed. He’d missed dinner. Rubbing his eyes, he stood and stretched. Tapping a button, an autopilot program took over and Ghosteye left the cold, dim studio.

At least Ramone had left the building. The bot could run things now. Well, it could do a passable job. Certainly nothing up to Ghosteye’s expertise. He was an artist, after all. An artiste. With an
e
on the end. High class. 

In the kitchen he heated up a bowl of noodles and leaned against the counter as he ate. He considered the thing Ramone was trying to conceal and laughed aloud at the futility of keeping something secret from him. Them. The Organization. Even though Ghosteye didn’t know what it was exactly, Ramone was too well-known to have escaped constant scrutiny. He’d been watched long enough to have amassed a file on his behaviors: his likes, his dislikes, and his habits to the point that the upper echelons of the Organization—the
Decemviri,
he thought the name with a shiver—were aware of Ramone’s potential for damage.

Ghosteye finished his small dinner, set the bowl next to the overflowing sink, and washed his hands, trying his best to ignore the rotting odor of days’ old food and caked on grime. The hot water soothed his tired fingers. As he dried his hands, stretching each bony digit between the rough folds of the towel and kneading the pads of his palms, his eyes fell on the cork-board he kept near the fridge. He looked away quickly, avoiding the note from Beth—elegant script, words that still punched a hole through him. “Come find me. You know where I’ll be. I can’t hide from your eyes, but can you see what’s in my heart?”

Throwing the towel on the counter in disgust, he retreated back to the studio. He imagined he could hear the sound of the invisible nanocameras—the bastards. It was their fault, really, well, somehow it was—following him as he strode down the hall and then, as he opened the heavy door separating the studio from the rest of his condo, he imagined the sound of the cameras turning away, following a computer-generated concoction of himself—a front. His very own olive oil importing business.

Chapter 2

Gray September skies dampened Ramone’s mood as he left Blythe’s office. The breeze brushing across his cheeks was braided with a slight autumn chill. The season made him dread winter. Would he make it through another? Soon the snow would come and pile up on his driveway, ice would freeze over the sidewalks, and he’d surely slip and fall like he did every winter. Maybe this time he’d break a hip.
Old men did that,
he thought with a morose grin.

Around Ramone, dark, uninviting skyscrapers jutted toward the gloomy sky like monolithic idols, dwarfing him. They were beautiful in an unfriendly, austere way. Three of the surrounding towers had shot up in the past five years, a product of the new technology and entertainment boom. Their shapes and the reflective surface of glass and polished granite told him nothing of what went on behind their walls. So much could be happening. Could he find it on the feeds somewhere? 

He went down cement stairs and through a square shared by three skyscrapers, heading toward a central parking garage just east of a crowded lawn. Passing benches and food vendors on his way, the odor of warm food hit him. He stopped at a hotdog stand, ordered a Chicago style, and ate it as he strolled to his car.

He finished the quick lunch before reaching his red Corolla. By then he had time to consider what had just happened with Blythe.
Something? No. Nothing. Nothing?
With a shrug, he was suddenly aware of being watched by hundreds of eyes.
The feeds. They’re watching because of the thing with Blythe,
he thought, paranoia welling up in him. There was something. Wasn’t there? It worried him. Not merely for the moral angle—which he knew was old-fashioned in today’s world anyway—but also for the work he was doing with her. He’d gone to so much trouble to keep his creation a secret, it would be devastating to lose everything because he couldn’t keep a poker face around a beautiful woman.

Thirty minutes later, the feeling of being watched remained as he sat in his office, unable to concentrate on his project. His “office” was a perimeter cubicle located on the sixth floor of another brooding skyscraper, ten city blocks from Blythe’s building.
Why do I feel singled out?
he wondered, rearranging the few items he kept in his cubicle: a picture of Sue at Niagara Falls and one with his two grown children at the beach, surfing, before they moved overseas for college. Both pictures were set in steel frames that matched the sterile decor of the office. Ramone experimented with different arrangements as he considered, focused inward: cameras were everywhere and everyone was watched all the time. In addition to those that followed each living, breathing human, there were ocular cavities—cameras set into buildings, traffic signals, freeway lights, subway stations. Any permanent structure in public could hold them. The feeling Ramone contended with was the feeling of being watched in addition to that ever-present sensation he’d grown used to.

There were no easy answers.

He plugged his ear-buds in, leaned back in his chair, and listened to a selection of arias that made his eyes drift shut. When the piece finished, he opened his eyes and gazed out the window—a luxury he’d been rewarded with two years ago. Dark rain slanted across the sky, running in torrents over the street and sidewalks below, into the storm drains. It would stop soon. Rays of light were breaking through the clouds to the west. Idly, he moved his desk-touch-screen to a comfortable slant, woke it, and sent a message to Blythe.
This is embarrassing, really,
he thought with a sigh, unable to avoid thoughts of her. He could almost admit he was stretching to relate the messages to their work on the patent. If what he was doing was being picked up by anyone other than the Editors, he hoped they’d attribute his attention to Blythe to desire and not to the patent. He could fool even himself that his attention was merely a red herring.

I should be working. There are deadlines.

The problem was that it wasn’t a red-herring. He longed for her. And it could ruin what he was doing. Ramone flexed his fingers, making fists and tapping the tops of his knees. The work. Not the work he should be doing for the company.
His
work. He needed to focus, impossible as it seemed. It was more important than the compulsion he felt to get lost in the fiction of Blythe.

He sighed and scrubbed his hands through his hair. His fingers itched to search the feeds for himself and find out if something had been picked up for sure. Instead he went to the break-room the engineers shared with the marketing department at the center of the floor.

“Ramone! Yo, yo, yo! Ramone,” a male coworker said, raising his hand for a high five. Ramone gave him a half-hearted smile, feeling himself blush at the attention. Dave. That was his name. Ramone could never remember for sure. Tall, blond, and bulky, Ramone recalled hearing somewhere that the man played football in college, hoping for the pros, but, well, he was here. It didn’t happen. Dave worked on the marketing side. The guy certainly didn’t fit in with the engineers on Ramone’s side of the floor. “So, my man, did you catch the hu-u-u-ge game on Saturday?” 

Ramone dodged the high-five, artlessly ducking toward the soda machine. Dave held a diet drink in one hand and pulled a chair out from a nearby table, plopping down among a group of his colleagues as he watched Ramone.

“Sorry, no,” Ramone said, glancing over his shoulder quickly then back at the drink selection.

“It was huge. Pre-season, last season’s bowl winners, man. What were you doing instead? Playing chess?” he chuckled to himself. Ramone cringed, staring at the selections. Dave’s friends joined in the laughter.

“Not really into football, Dave. Nor am I into chess, if you must know,” Ramone muttered, hoping Dave found nothing to tease him about in that statement.

“Not into football? Seriously?” Dave whistled. Glancing over his shoulder, Ramone caught Dave smiling broadly at his friends, some of them hiding grins and snickers behind their hands. Other marketing gurus. Ramone hated marketing and usually those who worked in it. They were all the same. Suave. Handsome, usually. Clever. Witty. Or at least they thought they were witty, thought they possessed deep insight into the human psyche. “Not even into chess, eh? Well, what do you do in your spare time, then?” he asked, giving his friends a look that said
this should be good.

Ramone selected a diet drink, retrieved it, and turned to leave, facing Dave head on. Ramone couldn’t keep the irritation out of his voice. “Actually, Dave, I don’t think simple enough terms exist that would allow me to explain it to you in a way you could understand. But, well, let’s just say that in my spare time, I make small, almost invisible robots come to life.”

Dave and his cohorts laughed.
What are they laughing at?
Ramone wondered as he pushed the glass door open, their laughter dying as the door fell closed behind him. Ramone sighed, glancing at the drink in his hand before hurrying back to his cubicle.

At his desk, Ramone pushed the exchange with Dave out of his mind, sipped the drink thoughtfully, watched a flock of pigeons wheeling on the breeze outside, their white and light gray bodies perforating the still storm-cloud dark sky, and sent another message to Blythe. This one was a link to an article about the quarterly earnings of the social media conglomerates. Even after the video feed explosion—all those violent shows like
Gladiators vs. Bears and Lions,
Extreme Fear Factor XXX,
Survive Death Island,
and then, of course, all those that involved sex and its many iterations—Ramone had intentionally avoided getting sucked into any of the feeds, only hearing about them from coworkers. He kept his attention limited to the non-realtime feeds that mostly consisted of political news and technology reviews.

He wanted to ask Blythe what she thought of the article, but settled for just the link and an insightful remark about it. Anyway, he knew when it came to Blythe he was only dreaming. He knew it would go nowhere. His heart belonged to Sue.

As he left his cubicle that evening just after seven, he glanced about nervously, wishing he could see the tiny, silent, ever-present nanocameras that followed him. Rubbing the back of his neck, he shrugged and hurried across the sidewalk beneath tall black lamps that were just flickering to life. Ramone usually waited until later to leave so that he could avoid interaction with his coworkers. Small talk was the bane of his life. Where he could endure it with other engineers who shared a similar thought style, trying to chat with the business, marketing, or administrative types that shared his building was pure misery. Luckily, tonight Ramone only had to smile politely at the CEO of the company, who climbed the steps behind Ramone, leading to the level with his reserved parking spot. 

“Alright then, Ramone?” the CEO said, nodding at Ramone, but not smiling. The man was dour and British, not that the two went together. Aside from his ruddy complexion, he possessed the most non-descript face Ramone had seen—brown eyes, bland smile with slightly crooked teeth, and a dull nose. The oddest thing about him, aside from the fact that he was hired off the street and hadn’t been an internal hire, was the slight lisp that accompanied his deep voice. 

“Fine, thank you,” Ramone answered, awkwardly stepping aside to let the CEO pass before heading to his own car.

“In a hurry tonight?” the CEO asked as he paused at the door to his vehicle, stopping Ramone in his tracks.

Turning, Ramone smiled hesitantly. “No, just want to get home to my wife.”

The CEO removed his key fob from the pocket of his slacks. “Ah, the old ball and chain. Huh, I’ve never met her, I guess. Why is that? You never bring her to company parties.”

This was precisely the sort of talk Ramone wished to avoid. “I’m not much for socializing.”

“Bring her to the next party. I’d like to meet her.” He pursed his lips, then smiled and opened his car door. A Bentley. “Goodnight, then.”

It wasn’t an invitation. It was an order.

Ramone nodded and found his own car, a sick feeling creeping into his throat. Why the sudden interest in his wife? Had something shown up in the feeds? Were his superiors watching him on the feeds?

Why wouldn’t they?  

Suddenly it seemed everyone knew he held a secret and they were looking for ways to leverage it out of him. That must be why the CEO was asking about his wife.

Not for the first time, Ramone cursed the feeds. In his car, he clenched the steering wheel tightly, getting a grip on his frustration before starting the Corolla and heading for the freeway.

Streetlights flickered to life around him. To the west, the orange sunset gleamed through a crack in the storm clouds, throwing a final, dying flare into the dark sky before vanishing beneath the mountains. Businesses lining the downtown thoroughfare leading to the freeway flipped on their lights and open signs. Fast food restaurants, vintage bookstores, nightclubs, a few convenience stores. Every aspect of human existence, terabyte after terabyte, recorded and filed away somewhere. Ramone recalled some of these same businesses seven years ago. Back then steel bars lined their windows and glass doors. No more bars. Who would dare rob a store when the entire act would be caught on camera? An arrest would happen imminently.
So, we are safe, but at what cost?
Ramone had been one of the people who’d protested giving up that last token of privacy when the cameras had first been used to monitor people. 

He’d been in the minority.

First there was a string of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Major city after major city clawed its way out of rubble and debris created by suicide bombers. Initially, the consensus was that freedom was worth the danger. But then eight bombs went off at eight different high schools and middle schools in five different cities.
How could this happen?
was the shocked outcry. The final straw. At the time, the nanocameras were being used by people with neural damage to their eyes. Soon, the cameras were modified into something more powerful. Tiny engines roared to life in them, floating, gliding on invisible currents, intelligently steering their way around terror suspects.

Soon questions of privacy arose. The cameras could be used as more than just monitors of suspected criminals! It started with those who guided the cameras to their subjects. They put the cameras on themselves and set up instant feeds straight to the Internet, giving the feeds titles like, “A day in the life of…” Boring titles, but who could resist the urge to watch someone else’s entire day? It had a strange pull.

People like Ramone were outraged. But after hundreds of veritable children were murdered en masse, how could someone suggest something so monstrous as turning
off
the nanocameras?
Lives could be saved!
Their protests were smothered and ridiculed. And then, eventually, the strongest proponents in favor of these voyeuristic uses of the nanocameras were the social media aggregates, and not surprisingly, it was they who owned and controlled the news networks. The world was ready, it seemed, to be seen at all times. And the courts, well, money talks.

That’s what Ramone believed, anyway.

He knew the machines were there, quietly, silently hovering around him. There were Editors watching him, perhaps twenty-four seven, filtering his life, splicing it, adding effects and music if they wanted, and turning anything even remotely entertaining into something they could sell on the feeds. It was sickening.