Bewilderment now obnoxiously pranced amongst her anxiety-drenched sentiments; an unfamiliar sensation she found to be disorienting. Blinding. “Why?” was a question she seldom found herself asking; perhaps occasionally when speaking with her parents about their past — during the era of mass distraction — but never when referring to the Intelligence. The Intelligence, the operating system native to the graft, helped to streamline her life. Refreshing at regular and rapid intervals, it learned everything. It provided individually tailored and accurate responses, so she would never be left in a situation with too few or too many choices. Time spent on decision-making was time wasted.

Concept Design by Matt Bell © DXLab

She had been one of the early adopters of the graft, which promised a seamless interface between her digital world and the analog one; the breakthrough that would once again afford her the freedom to look up at towering glass edifices instead of looking down at a tiny glass screen. She had been an architect in a prior life. As the practice morphed into more of a science nested in efficiency and away from artful expression, she saw her role gradually evolve. Working for the Holistic Environment Response Division (HERD) as a Storyteller, she preferred this to the alternative — as a Quality Assurance analyst, overseeing the builder bots, making sure that the parametric algorithms didn’t falter. She believed that the latter was a mindless vocation. Her role challenged her to find ways to connect our fundamental human desires to the science of built environment; abstracting a Cartesian sensibility through narrative.

She found the cadence of her job satisfying. It allowed her to interact with a diverse range of people; to amplify the weaker data signals that indicated not just what one needed out of a new build, but what they wanted and might not explicitly be aware of. She interfaced with individuals she wouldn’t typically meet beyond the bounds of her post because perhaps their compatibility quotients would be too disparate to allow for intersection. Just last week she met a 67 year old male of Honduran and Japanese heritage looking to invest in a new 50 capsule high-rise build along the periphery of the crawling city limits. Pressing her index finger and thumb together as if pinching at the nothing-ness in front her, she gently pulled down to reveal the projection of his Outline. His graft Outline — the abridged data shadow of his physical being— indicated a pretty typical health and well-being profile for his demographic. However, she could see a slim glimmer of a memory with a very high nostalgia factor. She blinked her eyelids twice in rapid succession to focus in on the moving image in her line of sight. As a young man, he had spent 30 days in the mountains in India. In voluntary, conscious pursuit of silence and solace. Vipassana it was called. She couldn’t understand the desire to be solitary, let alone imagine what would push someone to crave such an experience. She had found this unnerving at the time. Regardless, given the other indicators in his Outline, and the attributes of available capsules, she had learned exactly how to craft together a simulation of his future in this new build to appeal to his ideal well-being threshold.

Concept Design by Matt Bell © DXLab

The graft, while technically sound, had had a slight chemical reaction to her epidermal matter. The reaction had left her with a permanent mark on her wrist, just at the base of her left palm. It resembled the silhouette of a country or the figure of an animal of some sort, one that was seldom ever seen. “You’re like the girl with the dragon tattoo!” a female friend had exclaimed one evening; a dim reference to an obscure work. Her dark brown eyes had instinctively rolled at the remark but she forced a chuckle, and secretly hoped that the reflex had been veiled under her long black lashes — she had heard this before, and it was beginning to lose its luster. The first time it happened, she had thought — Good. Now if anyone ever has to identify my body, they’ll know it’s me because of the mark. Immediately following this, she realized what a morbid thought that was and shook it from her psyche. They wouldn’t call on another person. How inefficient when they can simply identify us through our graft data and notify kin via social media portals?

Concept Design by Matt Bell © DXLab

They had been in a stingy little cocktail bar that night. Dark and din-less, her favorite kind. And to be more accurate, they were “acquaintances” rather than friends. Their personal preferences, comprehension levels, and social network links weren’t yet strong enough to be officially classified as “friends.” This outing was the final intersection planned to lock-in social compatibility. Post-eyeroll that evening, she remembered having quickly scanned her Outline rating. It hadn’t depreciated into the blue and green tones, and her heart-rate was still steady so no obvious indicator of discomfort. The acquaintance hadn’t registered the mildly ill-mannered gesture, good.

She recalled relying heavily on the acquaintance's Outline metrics to drive conversation as the night progressed. Her satisfaction rating had taken a dive following that intersection. It made sense that The Intelligence never planted another in-person on their calendars. It had sensed low compatibility quotients. Time spent on low satisfaction thresholds was time wasted.

Now propped up in bed with her back slumped against a plush wall of pillows, she squinted her eyes to re-focus on the notifications which had sprung up during her period of unrestful slumber. Scrolling through the virtual simulation in her line of sight, she blinked once more to zoom in to the succession of uniformly-sized tiny icons which served as an emblem of acknowledgement from her social circle. 96, 97, 103…She was only interested in discovering one individual’s avatar in that list…and it was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she had scrolled too quickly, skipped over him in her eagerness, her eyes still adjusting to her wakeful state. Again, from the top, and slower this time…Nothing.

Maybe our algorithms aren’t syncing up. The phrase spun, over and over in her mind. A slight sense of distress masked as intrigue.

Concept Design by Matt Bell © DXLab

She found this perplexing. How could this be? Even for her, of ample technical competency. She had opted for deep learning networks, which had come at a premium. She could afford it. After all, she lived and worked along the Silicon Coast — the strip of land stretching from Vancouver in Canada down through Seattle and Portland, into Baja California. The Wall hadn’t made it that far, thank goodness. At the time, it’s fair to say that she was heavily under the influence of unblemished infatuation.

Set the parameters according to what?

Sure, she barely knew him but her path had intersected at least twice with his at this point. And it knows us, she assured herself. The graft Intelligence, the decades-worth of her data woven through neural networks that had decoded her preferences and interactions down to a literal science. The self-learning systems. It knew her menstrual cycle, sending her notifications before she even had the time to pause and count the days. It knew who she was meeting with and where…what her work-day looked like, mapping how she would travel to conduct site visits (whether it was via VR or in Analog), how hot she liked her showers, how strong she liked her coffee in the morning, what needed to be re-stocked in her kitchen, and her favorite genre of bar for a nightcap after dinner with good friends — veiled and well-worn. Surely, the same was true for him?

Concept Design by Matt Bell © DXLab

She felt…tethered, suddenly. That was the only way she could describe the sensation as her mind meandered back to a conversation she had had with her grandmother a few months earlier. A recollection of a time when people literally were tethered by the devices that connected them to one another. A time when phones resembled bricks, and were mounted on walls or set on kitchen counter-tops and living room end-tables. A time when teenage girls would wait by the phone hoping for their high school crush to call, hoping that no one else would need to make a call when this finally did happen, or that the dial-up Internet connection didn’t kick them off the line. Her grandmother had had to explain what “dial-up internet” was. A term that was just as elusive as the “CD-ROM” or “MP3 player.” Her grandmother’s childhood experiences had felt so far away, so intangible.

Perhaps she too was tethered, albeit by an unseen network…

That’s ridiculous, she thought to herself. We’re a far more progressed society by now. She repeated this out loud for her own benefit, thinking that maybe if she heard it with her own ears she’d be more inclined to believe it.

Concept Design by Matt Bell © DXLab

She traced the mark on her wrist with her index and middle fingers, as if in a ceremonial trance. The permanent abstraction. Her state of mind always determined what she thought it resembled at that moment. It would always be there. She would always be connected. To everything. To everyone. A few days ago this would have been a comforting sentiment. But now, in this early morning meditation, she felt slightly uneasy…tethered, and yet simultaneously disconnected perhaps?

WHY?