A Bright New World 4

The live stream wasn’t live at all it had been prerecorded about 8 hours prior in GMT.  He had already heard chatter about the winner of the spicy eating competition, it didn’t really matter every episode was more or less the same.  They chatted and introduced the two influencers who would be facing off introduced the sponsor of the stream, they would eat, stop to build tension and eat more.  The loser would have a dramatic cap out moment, preferably with a sob story or a visible show of tears.  The host would speak to winner and loser separately making sure the more popular of the two got about 30% more time to speak whether they won or lost. 

He had dealt with this exact situation before on the marketing end.  They had to make this change because the more popular one always seemed to lose.  They also made sure the loser always had the second interview, to maximize viewer retention.  It was important to appeal to the bigger audience weather in glorious victory on in a humbling defeat.   It really didn’t matter, nor did he car about either of the influences he just wanted something to hold his attention while he ate his own very un-spicy chicken.  

He reached into his pocket to grab a napkin he had taken from the café earlier that day and pulled out a few folded paper napkins, only for something to plop out on the table.  Whatever it was he was glad it had narrowly missing falling on top of his chicken.  He wiped some grease from his lip and glanced at the object hoping it was a long forgotten $20 bill.  Alas, it was the tiny book from the media shop. 

He wiped his fingers clean and picked up the little thing.  He was disappointed it wasn’t money, that would have been a bit more useful but this little book was such a curiosity he couldn’t bear to throw it away.  He wanted to know who made this strange little thing.  Where were vol. 1 & 2? Was it really all written and drawn by hand or printed in such a manner it just looked handmade?  There was no name to be seen and no email address or QR code to scan on the back. He opened the book to the last page. All he was given was a hint: “mail us your ideas” with a partial address “P.O. box 881.” Who the hell included an address so shortened?  What was the city state and zip code?  Must have been some kids who never sent one letter in their lives.  He tried to remember the last time he had sent a letter to someone other than returning a from to a bank or the government and nothing came to mind.  He had sent post cards home, years ago.

It wasn’t worth worrying about tonight, he tucked the booklet into his wallet to keep it safe and hidden.  Mailing a few postcards to variations of that address could be a fun little distraction over the weekend.  He had nothing better to do.  With that realization he cleaned up the table and kitchenette and went to bed.

A Bright New World 3

Paul lugs the air fryer to his apartment.  While there he whips together and eats a simple sandwich for lunch chasing it down with a beer.  Why not? He thought to himself, he didn’t have to be back at work.  After half an hour standing in his apartment trying to skip the stream of ads his TV was feeding him, he grabs his jacket and wonders onto the streets. 

He walks up one street and down another with no destination in mind. He continues aimlessly for another half an hour making his way to a hilltop park.  He sees a commotion as he gets closer several cars and people and yellow tape spanning the gap between two trees.  He sees many of the people hanging around this crime scene are police. 

“Get off the sidewalk. Everybody GET BACK!” shouts one of the cops waving a hand in the air.  “Everybody get out of the park! Get off the grass get off the sidewalk or your all going to get arrested.”

He was still well away from the scene and the other onlookers so he paused and watched for a moment. The police bushed back a few bystanders with a few quickly scampering off.  The police pushed the remaining few onlooker back across the street and continued to yell and wave their hands about.  He decided this was not the place to be and headed down the street back towards the center of the city and its shopping streets.

He didn’t walk for long before a shabby looking store front caught his eye.  The sun bleached sigh read ‘Bragin Media’  There were signs hung in the window advertising ‘buy 3 books get the 4^th free’ and ‘15% off all videos Wed.’  It wasn’t too impressive looking of a store but these shops selling old books, records, CDs and DVDs were a true rarity now days. He was especially amused at how antiquated the forms were.  Records… did anyone even own a record player in this day and age?  After standing in the cold a moment he stepped into the store, finding the interior crammed full of shelves and bins.  The owner, an older man quickly smothered a cigarette in an ash tray.

 “We got a sale going on.” 

He paused to listen. The man said nothing. “What sale is that,” he asked?” 

“You wanna buy it, I’ll sell it.”  The old man chuckled. 

“You hear that thing in the news about the rapist in a robot get up?  The world is not the same way it was when I was coming up.”

He didn’t know how to respond to that comment.

“If you like robots, and by Like mean want to shoot’em, you should get a DVD of the Terminator.  We got a couple floating around… somewhere.”

 

He smiled and nodded his head.  He searched the CDs and DVDs to see if he can find something from his childhood. He is amazed that many of the CDs and DVD’s are older than he is and he has heard of few of them.  Somewhat dejected by the fact he cannot find an old movie he remembered watching as a child he wonders into the back of the shop where books dominate the room.  A small box catches his eye labeled “trade a trinket.” He remembers the tiny plastic duck from this morning and plucks it from his pocket and drips it into the box.  His curiosity gets the better of him and he peeks inside only to see the duck, a dragon sticker and a small packet of paper.  He pulls out the paper to discover it is in fact a small stack of papers stapled at the corner like a multi-page brochure, but rather than being filled with ad copy, glossy product photos and a development road map he sees a few drawings and chaotic handwritten text.  Curious he pockets it hoping to study it later.  He leaves the store, deciding to get a caffeine fix at a café he knows nearby.

He entered the café, he had been coming here about 2 or 3 times a month since he discovered it about 5 years ago.  The place was pretty average as far as food and drink went so were the prices.  The atmosphere was what brought him back. The walls were lined with leather couches, the lights were the old-style incandescent bulbs with a warm glow.  The walls were lined with every imaginable kind of decorative flourish, old photos, framed illustrations pulled from the pages of old reference books and a few shadow boxes containing collections of small toys, old writing pens, lose keys, small hand tools and more. 

His Favorite was a small glass fish tank with a single blue fish and a plants roots dipped into the water, several tendrils of vines cascaded onto the counter. He watched the fish slowly swim around the roots as light glistened off the tank.  He leaned back in the chair yes, that little tank was definitely his favorite thing in the whole place.  someday he wanted to have a plant tank like that in his apartment.  They never played music here and there was only one TV screen in the back that was generally muted.  He liked to sit and look around, his eyes often wondered the store from fixture to picture frame to a customer sitting across the room.

It was always intruding to see a stranger sitting across the room sipping on a latte.  He always knew they had a few things in common, coffee for one, a love for the novel for a second.  Even if he didn’t know their names and never saw them again, he suspected they would have had a few things to talk about.  Yet conversations rarely arose naturally.

As he sat at the table waiting for his drink he started to reflexively reach for his phone to check for a message or look at the price of the mini urban fishing set he had been eyeing for a few weeks now.  As he reached into his pocket his finger brushed against some feathery item.  He pulled it out and looked face to face with a mouse.  It was the small booklet he had taken from the media store earlier. He stared back at the image of a mouse that seemed to be hand drawn on to the cover along with the words “New Lean Zine Vol. 3.” He opened it to the first page. “There is no more flight we need to stand and fight.” Along side another drawing of the mouse standing on two legs looking up at an airplane. He flipped to the second page read “Convert consumers to citizens, let them know they have rights.”  Next to another drawing of the mouse standing next to a shopping bag.  He looked around the café no one was looking at him or all that close to him.  He felt a bit self-conscious reading this strange thing.  “Sleep all day but stay awake at nights” The waitress came and he stuffed the booklet into his pocket somewhat embarrassed to be reading a thing that was most likely made by some high school kid who thought is was some edgy piece of art.  He slipped it into a pocket and headed home.

A Bright New World 2

He sipped on the oversized Pryamsn energy drink as he looked over the latest revised copy of an ad read for a V-tuber marketing campaign.  Even before reading it he had known the process of reviewing and editing was futile.  His agency had worked with this same heterochronic-anime-cat-girl-ghost on a few previous campaigns.  She always strayed from script and went on some strange diatribe about a trip the grocery store where someone said something that confused her in a marginally comical manor. 

The turnover numbers of this V-tubers views to site visits were low and the number of affiliate based sales were even lower.  This was not uncommon for any online platform.  Despite the facts the client seemed to like working with her.  She had her fans and they seemed dedicated.  His biggest concern had not been the meandering nature of her 4 hour long streams but the fact she said a lot of sexually suggestive things.  In the review footage he had been sent and that was generally a 10-20 min snippet of one 4 hour long stream.  It probably helped with engagement and really won over the male 22-34 audience but it didn’t seem like a great look for potential advertisers.

The more he read over the script and tried to guess what product was being sold, the more sympathy he felt for the girl.  He couldn’t blame this cat girl, for taking a decent check and stumbling through the ad read. The scripts that made final approval and were sent to her were always a last-minute ordeal this one included. And the icing on the cake was they were just plain bad.

You can always tell its AI writing.  The AI loves to restate the same points over and over and it always has a very hollow feeling.  It could point out facts, or in this case touch on all the ‘marketing bibles’ bullet points but it never had the ability to hammer home a point.  That just didn’t work in marketing.  It lacked any real world experience.  It had a complete absence of love or hate.  There just wasn’t anything a consumer could relate to, so they never seemed to grab onto the ads.  It was just words explaining things, like a college kid new to the job… familiar with all the ad copy fed into them and brimming with trending buzz words from the latest East Coast sales and marketing seminar but lacking the down-to-earth knowledge of how the product is used on the front lines.  A salesman may have been the perfect analogy for AI, not just because they were using it as a sales pitch middle-man for the actual sales-girl.  God knows it still wasn’t good enough to actually close a sale to the average human.   Because no matter how you used it, the AI was always suspiciously good at offering solutions that entailed buying a new product or signing up for a new long term subscription service.  Surely that was just a happy coincidence of our consumer society and not a deeper ploy to sell more products to increasingly desperate people short on answers and desperate for a change they couldn’t quite quantify. Words on the tip of their tongues but drowned out by a howling wind that calmed but never subsided. 

Maybe it was easy for him to spot because he had been writing for a while.  Maybe is was easy to spot because he knew the marketing strategies.  Maybe it was easy to spot because he had read a pile of old paperback novels that dated to the days when people actually read.  Maybe it was easy to spot because the people who used AI to write just didn’t care about the quality of what they wrote.   Then again he had read Neuromancer and all the Harry Potter books and didn’t think either were very good. Ursula K. Le Guin, now there was a woman who could write.  Too bad most people were unaware of her works.

He looked back at the dead fish of a script.  [Shipped as swiftly as a schooner sailing the sea.]  Was this some ancient reference the East India Tea Trade in the 1700’s?  He wasn’t sure what the client sold but a sailing ship allegory was not going to work on a bunch of chronically online men in the 22-34-year-old age range.  He deleted that line and started to type “Shipped to your door, swift and silent.” It was a lame line but ninjas were big again because of that movie based on an old video game.  One of the characters said something like that in the trailer that had ben playing everywhere.  The line should resonate a lot more but it wouldn’t age well.  None of these efforts aged well. He stared at the screen that read [Shipped to your door swift, and silent] an Oxford coma.  The AI powered writing assistants loved to… no.  Lived solely for the purpose of inserting the old Oxford coma.  “I’m no 18^th century English boarding schoolboy” he muttered to himself as he tried to delete the redundant coma.  The auto correct flashed as soon as he entered his correction. [Shipped by clipper swiftly in austere silence.]  Damm tea trade.

The AI had problems to say the least. Then it made more problems.  This never seemed to worry the managers and tech guys, on the contrary they loved it.  Problems could be sold off to people who could then attempt to solve them.  Those efforts would be counted as new projects and expansions in leadership roles.  It was potential in its most raw and unrefined form.  More important it was something they could type out in a list and email off to an upper manager and cite as work, without doing any of the actual work. 

This process was as productive as making shoes for a man who had no legs.  No one bothered to mention he had no feet so how were the cobblers to know the man with no legs also lacked feet?  Could he not place the shoes on his hands and use his hands as feet and his arms a legs?  There really was little difference so long as he could move.  Then why would anyone complain that a new pair of shoes had indeed been made and delivered to the foot less man by a delivery man who was himself was in great need of a new pair of shoes.  Too bad for him he was an independent contractor.  Bad for him but good for our bottom line.  That was in essence how these productions played out, creating solutions for problems that did not exist.

His AI assistant blared again, he reached for it to turn off whatever alert it was an fumbled the phone on to the floor.  The thing kept blaring, louder by the second.  He furiously snatched it off the floor.  He slammed his fist on the desk, the energy drink tipped over and spilled onto his desk and notebook “GODDANM PIECE OF SHIT” he proclaimed loudly jumping to his feet.  Quickly he grabbed a nearby napkin and tossed It on the greenish puddle.  It did little good.  The green juice had covered a third of his desk and its sticky sloppiness had surely ruined his notebook.  He tilted the can up right to keep the last ounce from running out just as the puddle overflowed from the edge of his desk and started dripping on to the floor. 

He hears a gasp.  He looked around to find all 12 of his co-workers staring at him in an awkward still silence.  Sandra was looking at him, She wasn’t the boss but was the office manager.  Since Chase was off for the week she took it upon herself the run the place. She shuffled over quickly and silently. “Paul… Can I have a word with you over in the break room?”  she shuffled off even faster than she had approached.

Paul grabbed a hand full of paper napkins and sopped up some of the frink and threw the wad of goopy paper into the trash can. He shuffled to the break room. Sandra was standing there with her arms crossed trying to emit a sense of power and control.  “That outburst was VERY inappropriate AND you disturbed the entire office.”

“Yes your right and I’m sorry.  I just…”  He struggled to think of an excuse and he feared he was not at convincing with his half-assed apology.

Sandra Sighed. “I know whings have been stressful with the high employee turnover and the downsizing last year, but that doesn’t mean we can just go around making a scene over spilt milk.”

He shook his head trying to act apologetic.

“Listen you have a lot of sick leave and haven’t used you vacation days from last year.  Why don’t you take today ana tomorrow off.  Those days will be deducted from you vacation leave but it will expire in a few moths anyway.”

He was somewhat surprised at how generous she was being, with his schedule.  But some time off was probably a good thing for him.  “Yeah, some time off will probably do me some good.”

“Sandra smiled a bit, alright I’ll put in the time off forms and Kenny can cover for you, god knows he needs something to do.”  She stepped out silently still with her arms crossed, which seemed oddly insecure in comparison to her appearance just moments before.  As he sat at the break room table he saw the air fryer hidden by the plastic plant.  That air fryer was worth a few bucks, money he might soon be desperate for that money.  He swiftly grabbed it and slipped out the door.

A Bright New World 1

 Since I could not sell this blog, I thought i might as well post some of my writing. Here is a cyber punk story I have been working on.

Part 1

The alarm blared again, this time the AI assistant had cranked the volume to the highest level the phone could output.  Paul grabbed the phone and fumbled with the alarm slider.  There was no time for food he drank a glass of water and put on his pants and shirt.  It was still cold outside so he grabbed the jacket by the door and his bag full of supplies.  In a rush to get to work on time he checked the mailbox only to find a small plastic duck one of the neighborhood kids hid in his box. He pockets it and runs off before he is late to work. 

He made his way down the now busy street.  Every time he passed an alley with an open kitchen door or turned a corner where a restaurant sat he wished he had time for breakfast.  As he neared work he paused at a kiosk selling coffee and bagels.  He looked at the menu, his phone blared again.  The AI assistant was warning him he was almost late for work.  He silenced the phone.  He sighed and shuffled on to work.

Paul arrived at work just in time to not be late but right in the middle of Sandra rummaging through the breakroom complaining about the accumulation of junk and unwanted expired food products. This had become a weekly occurrence but this week she has a new grievance, the air fryer Jackson brought in after Christmas. “Its blocking the cabinet where all the coffee pods are stored.  I can’t believe he we freelance and didn’t bother to clean out his desk or take any of the stuff he brought in.”  She opens the refrigerator door “See! He left a whole case of those Pryamsn energy drinks in there! Took the time to write his name on every side of the cardboard box but wouldn’t carry it home or to his next job.”  She set it in the corner under a plastic plant. “yeah some people…” he replied reflexively, as he looked at the box of energy drinks.  Its triangular logo with angry eyes was very reminiscent of an Egyptian pyramid.  Why would they call the drinks Pryamsn and use a triangle for the logo surely a pyramid or some reference to Egypt or the   pharos or the river Nile would have been easier to pronounce and would have been vastly better marketing based on the identifiable nature of the civilization.  Some middle management know it all probably said “pyra-MID why not just tell them to drink their own piss.  Who is going to pay $6 a can when you are calling it mid on the label!?”  Yeah, that was most likely the answer.

How was it even pounced Pry-am-sn?  That seemed to close to ‘prions’ the thing that caused mad cow disease. Pushing that thought to the back of his head he took note of the air fryer and the box of drinks figuring they each had around $20 of value it would be worth it to try and sell them online.  

Sandra had shifted to complaining about the trash not being taken out.  Even though as office manager that was part of her job.  He reached into the fridge and grabbed one of the energy drinks to give him a boost through the morning. 

He couldn’t help but laugh to himself a bit remembering Jackson with his white pants and his jelled sculpted hair.  Jackson was a dick. He wouldn’t be missed but he couldn’t blame him for leaving for greener pastures.

“Don’t worry I’ll take them to the thrift store after work today that should clear up some space.” 

Sandra paused and looked over at him for the first time during her rant, she gave a muted sigh.  “No, we need to wait until next Monday.  Just in case he comes back for this junk. We have had that issue before.  At least he didn’t steal the chair and power strip at his desk like that one fat guy a couple of years back.”  

He tipped the Pryamsn can to her and took a sip, then moved to exit And seated himself at his desk.