The End

Project Soli.

Cool tech, right? I mean, holy shit — gestures without interfaces? Radar tracking for precision? So awesome! It’s like a Theremin for your computer, a next gen Leap motion!

But think of the implication of them giving it out. They’ve developed something that constantly tracks your precise movement across an arbitrary distance.

This can be both awesome or terrifying. Here’s a scenario of each:

Awesome

It’s a new era. Everyone has at least some smart wearable, whether it be smart pants or a smartwatch, everything will have Soli embedded — even walls and digital poster ads. Touching a device to use it? So passé! What are we, neanderthals? Google’s central server, Gatsby, is responsible for processing and directing most of the world’s data. It’s everywhere.

It’s a crowded day at Central Station. Shoulder to shoulder, you almost can’t feel the winter cold. Everyone in coats, everyone brushing up against each other. Everyone is nervous and itching to get to their destination, but everyone is in each other’s way.

This is the third consecutive week Angela has had to endure this chaos. A cashier in Walmart, she’s on the verge of losing her job to a self-operating cash register that’s more efficient and far cheaper in the long run. She tries to petition and complain, but the internet keeps telling her she should have evolved, trained to become skilled in another area rather than allowing obsolescence.

To take a pay cut and keep her job, she sold her car for a pittance and opted for public transport.

“Central Station. Central fucking Station. Hell.”

She’s lonely, and blames herself as much as she blames everyone else around her. She feels unwanted, unimportant — with no family to speak of and her friends all emigrating to more economically stable countries than the now volatile USA, she endures day after day of prodding and pushing on the subway. Of being groped by homeless people, poked by defunct ticketbots, shouted at by teenagers.

“Fat cow! Gee tee eff oh, el oh el!” they say, and she isn’t even fat. Underfed, if anything.

For weeks, feelings of rage had been bottling up inside her. She had tried to ignore it all for so long, but life has been an uphill battle and there’s no descent in sight. She figured she’d had enough. Putting her crucifix on, she took her father’s old gun. You know, the type that didn’t have biometric locks or Gatsby verification installed. She set foot towards Central Station and decided to take some of them with her. The pests. The tumors. The whistlers, gropers, old people who are too slow, young people who are too fast. She’ll end their hell too, they won’t know it then, but they’ll thank her. In Heaven, they will.

Standing there in the center of the big compass drawn on the marble floor of Central Station, surrounded tightly by at least a hundred people wandering aimlessly, pushing each other out of the way, she reached for the gun tucked in behind her back. A sharp pain.

When she woke up, she was in a hospital bed, handcuffed to the railing. The detective would be there soon, now that she was awake…

In this story, like Batman or Nathan, Google’s Gatsby monitors all the world’s movement at all times. The multitude of radar sensors constantly transmitting data through “Google Movement Services” on everyone’s Central Smartlife Unit — a tiny computer core commandeering all of a user’s gadgets — provides a never ending stream of people’s gestures, poses, body language. Often, people have it built into various trinkets that never leave their side — like necklaces or bracelets.

When Angela entered central station, Gatsby had already known she had a firearm behind her back, but given the USA’s open-arms policy (the law that any citizen at any time may carry any kind of weapon, concealed or otherwise, as long as they identify as Christian by means of sworn statement and a symbol visible at all times) it didn’t act on it. A yellow alert was issued to the Central Station guard, however, to be on standby, because Gatsby knew Angela had been frustrated and on existential edge for a while.

The guard was close to her at all times, and once Gatsby confirmed her intent to grab the pistol via her posture and movement, a red alert flared up on his lens and he took her out. It took a fraction of a second for Angela to trigger Gatsby’s alarm because the entire technologically advanced portion of the world is now being monitored for movements and gestures 24/7 — even those that don’t wear Soli devices: they’re measured by everyone else’s and those randomly scattered around the world. Their minuscule size makes them unnoticeable.

Terrifying

Everyone has at least some smart wearable, whether it be smart pants or a smartwatch, everything will have Soli embedded — even walls and digital poster ads.

Jessica and her posse decided they had had enough of it. Homosexuality had no place in the world, and needed to be rooted out. For years they had been meeting in an abandoned church near her house, renovating it as they could, spreading the good word, accepting new souls into their flock. True Christians they called themselves, and they stood for the real word of God, not that commercialized fakery they sell in stores and give out in hotels.

Jessica, a Hebrew specialist, translated the original Bible text into English. Some parts needed to be removed, of course (“Like, no one ever does slavery any more, duh”), but most of the word of God was true. “Those fucking faggots — the pest of the planet, ruining everything for everyone, always”.

Jess would often get asked about her group’s stances. When asked why she supports incestuous marriage (her cousin had, in fact, married her sister — and then divorced her to marry her twin years later) she said that two adults being in love should be able to get married no matter what. When asked the same about gay people, she would reply that gay people weren’t mature adults and shouldn’t be allowed to make such decisions for themselves. Besides, there’s lots of incest in the Bible and it’s perfectly fine, but homosexuality — never. “Even God said so! Look!”, she would say, pointing to passages in her translated version.

It was a Tuesday when the Trues (a nickname they gave themselves) decided it was time to end this plague — and what better way to do it than during Pride week’s parade. Not only would they cleanse the world, but also show everyone they’re doing it. It would be perfect. It took months of planning, funding, premeditation.

Hacking the Soliloquy (Soli’s frequency range for transmitting movement data even without internet connection) with the help of an underground hacktivist group, they were able to determine the highest human density of the crowd in the parade along with the lowest presence of the police force. Cross referencing these points with the city’s map of fire hydrants, it was just a matter of being there and doing the deed.

Sunday, July 27th 2018, was hell. When the molotov cocktails flew, no one realized what was going on until the smell of burnt flesh reached them. Then, panic. Frenzy. The intrinsic selfishness of the human being brought to light, friends stepping on friends, fires crackling in one direction, skulls cracking in the other. Platforms caught fire and the costume styrofoam mixed with alcohol and juice burned like napalm. Odor so foul people collapsed and burned to death due to excessive gagging.

When the chaos subsided, the total death toll was 239. A perfect execution. The absence of fire hydrants in the immediate vicinity prevented even those fire trucks that arrived through the denseness of the parade from being effective, and the relative absence of a police force allowed Trues to continue throwing flame bombs long after the calamity began. As she was being dragged into a SWAT vehicle, Jess shouted “See? We’re doing good! If God didn’t want us to do this, we wouldn’t have succeeded!”

Nearby, a Soli-powered digital poster changed screen to say “Sensodyne — for painless brushing of those pearly whites”. Officer Sheperd had been having some teeth sensitivity issues.

Okay. Both stories are a bit far fetched. But are the implications of a world that’s voluntarily carrying radar-powered motion trackers everywhere really something we can ignore? And that’s when humans use Soli to its extent. But what when it all goes beyond humans?