Summer of Love 2.0

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

“I mean, what I’m saying is,” he said, “is that going skinny dipping never killed anyone.”

Her eyes trembled back for a second and her look softened to a vacancy that let him know that she was accessing.

“Brandy and Jorge Garcia were killed in 1956 by their own village for skinny-dipping.” She replied. “It was seen an indecent behaviour for an unmarried couple. There are twenty such incidents on file and 48 more hits unexplored on the subject.”

She took the fun out of everything.

Every open-ended argument about what the capital of Zaire was, or what actor starred in that action film ten years ago, or how the words to that song were sung was suddenly a five-second conversation that ended correctly and abruptly.

His friends teased him about going out with a girl with implants. They said that she was obviously slumming it by going out with a kid too poor to afford brainwork. He told them all politely to get fucked. He was in love with her.

The implants were trying his patience, though. He realized that the inadequacies of his own memory and lack of connection to the network were basically the reasons that he had conversations at all.

The only things that she wanted to speak about were the unknowable answers to age-old questions like “what is life?” and “which religion is best?” and even then she had volumes of theories to draw upon.

They had a lot of sex together which was pretty mind-blowing considering all the tantric volumes that she studied and downloaded but afterwards, he got the feeling that while she knew, well, everything, she really didn’t have a personal opinion on anything.

When he asked her how she felt about something, she’d get a confused look on her face and he could see the effort it took her to frame an answer. In a way, she was even more naïve and simple than he was.

That’s why he loved her and that was the reason why she loved him, he thought. He could challenge her in ways that her implant-ridden, philosophy-obsessed pals uptown could not.

He was wrong, of course, but it was a fantastic summer for both of them.