Author: Majoki

Around the collar and down his spine a welcome iciness spread as he jogged in the midday heat. His shirt, alerted him with a tri-chime that he should rehydrate and automatically pinged his fitchip which opened a GPS widget in his visor dashboard next to his environmentals: ambient temperature, wind speed, particulate composition and UV penetration. He noted the closest public park and sprinted directly there. He let the water faucet run over his wristbands as they took potability readings and swamp cooled him with nano-heat exchangers. The water was within safe parameters, and so he nipped at the bubbling source until weight sensors in his shoes let him know he had replenished the fluids he had lost since beginning his workout.

He stretched for a few moments, letting his sportsaware gear recalibrate and also gently stimulate his muscles to keep him loose. He sometimes imagined he could hear the hum of the triboelectric accumulators and capacitors that helped run his run. Energy abounded at the nano-level and his clothing harnessed it. A moving mass of sensors, on par with a cockroach or bloodhound, he moved through the city, active and engaged. Information did not pass him by, he sucked it up, made it run to his rhythm, an embedded personal noosphere.

His gear calculated his endorphinals, a clear-code algorithm tied to flex, flow, blood, heart, muscle and EKG. This was how he knew he was on top of his game. Powerful and data driven to become even more dominant, he sussed the heady information of personal energy and awareness. In every fiber of his gear and being, he sensed it and embraced it. He was a true datazen.
In an adrenalin rush, his heels kicking higher and higher, he lit up Main Street.

Grabbing a handful of crusty Cheezy-Os, he monitored the runner’s progress. One of a thousand packets of information being fed by the millisecond to HQC for review. Every sensor had a doppelganger censor. It was a necessity. With so much data being collected, with so many datazens feeling empowered, it was imperative to have checks and balances.

He saw that the runner had stopped for water. With precision waves and taps of his orange stained fingers, he overrode the runner’s fitchip potability data. To the runner it now read in the safe zone. A citizen on a daily run trying to stay fit and healthy didn’t need to know about contaminants from the new triboelectric factory leaching into the city’s water supply. That kind of information was upsetting. Embarrassing. As were recent air quality and UV levels. Appalling, even dangerous, but necessary for progress. Triboelectric synthetics didn’t grow on trees. Ordinary datazens didn’t realize that, but the privileged at HQC did.

Noting that the runner had moved on, the tech smiled as the runner’s biometrics fed the HQC system. All that data willingly, freely generated for the HQC. The eyes, ears and thoughts of the city centralized, aggregated, disaggregated, broken and batched to keep the flow. It was all about flow: data in, data out. And HQC touched it all. Easy to smooth out the turbulence, keep the flow even and uncomplicated. The tech knew that if you tortured data, it would confess, but HQC’s way was much simpler. Provide data that fit the ideal. Let there be information bliss. Create a self-fulfilling prophecy and get out of the consumer’s way, let the datazens feast within the frenzy of being, of doing, of sharing.

HQC made that happen—one beautiful illusion at a time. As he watched the runner accelerate down Main Street, providing a kick of biometric juice to the system, the tech smacked at his fingers, licking at the last residue of cheese powder, making him feel strong, in the know, in the right.
His embedded HQC biochip told him so as it lit up the Mainframe.