Chapter One – Your Daily Allowance of Unsaid Things

Chapter One – Your Daily Allowance of Unsaid Things

“The idea of thought-crime is foolhardy. One cannot regulate a person’s thoughts, it is simply impossible. You can, by curating a target’s media and cultural influences, direct and predispose them to certain outcomes, but a person’s thoughts remain their own.

Their words, however, are not so easily hidden, and while it is true that a person’s actions weigh more than their words, that isn’t to say that there is no value in what someone says.”

–Advanced Marketing 101, Sixth edition, 2039

***

“Okay, so this is going to be an immense pain in the ass,” I said.

I was on the couch, feet up on the coffee table and one of Lucy’s tablets on my lap. The Kittens were being brats, but they were being brats elsewhere after I threatened to hold them by their ankles out of the nearest window until they learned the art of being quiet.

It was an empty threat, but it still worked.

Anyway, the tablet was one of Lucy’s school tablet things. I was pretty sure it didn’t technically belong to her. She’d still gotten it jailbroken before ever bringing it home, and now I was using it.

Sure, it was oldschool, but there was just something about having a touch-screen in hand that felt oddly nostalgic.

Like, old-movie nostalgic, I meant. I’d gotten my first augs when I was a kid. I’d never had to handle a smart phone or a tablet like this. Still, I figured it was a bit like smoking or something. Most people nowadays vaped, or sucked on an e-cig, but there was still some cultural nostalgia for smoking those old paper-wrapped cigarettes.

I was enjoying the tablet for the moment. It kept everything I saw stuck to one, convenient, somewhat-ignorable space.

I had the news pulled up and was trying to temper my pessimism.

If I was going to pop over to Quebec in a day or two–and I hadn’t yet decided that I would, there was a very real chance that I’d just tell Deus Ex to suck eggs–then I’d want to have a good idea of how things were going in the city.

So far, the news was… weird?

I was expecting grim, horrible, awful news. That’s what sold. Sensationalized grimness made for good headlines and sold subscriptions faster than anything else. News companies weren’t above making shit up for that.

But usually they did report some degree of truth, and there was usually a decent way of seeing between the lines. Not that I was a big news watcher.

What I saw online was confusingly… bland?

There was some stuff about a carnival, some celebrity gossip. The funeral of a samurai was being held later in the week, but there wasn’t much about how they died except to say that it was ‘while saving others.’

There were a few pictures taken over a wall, of a landscape covered in craters, but I was expecting lots of aliens, not a fat load of nothing.

Things didn’t look that bad.

That had me worried.

“This is all bullshit, right?” I asked. Fortunately, I was mostly alone in the room, so I didn’t look insane talking to myself.

It’s certainly biased. Though not necessarily untruthful.

“Yeah, feels like the news is saying a lot without saying anything.” I reached over and scratched at my knee. I was wearing some of those old-school dolphin shorts, not because I particularly liked them, but because Lucy did. Left my legs cold. I was mentally debating spending points on a warm blanket or calling over one of the Kittens to go fetch me one from somewhere. Ah, well, whatever. “So, if Deus wants me to poke my nose in there, that means that shit’s worse than New Montreal. But this all looks… fine? Some financial crime, some corps selling things, a few minor political scandals, lots of celebrity drama. There’s nothing here that’s ringing any alarm bells.”

Which means?

Myalis didn’t just ask things like that. I bet she knew everything already. So that question was more of a leading question type of thing. “It means that either the news doesn’t know how bad things are, or they’re not reporting it?”

I looked over the different news companies. A few of them were bigger, national companies, and some were like, big names, the sort that covered news across the continent and internationally, but most of the stories were from smaller agencies and blogs and the like.

I rubbed at my chin, then backed out of the news and went to a social media aggregator instead. There were some that were divided by subject and there was almost always a ‘city’ subject for every big city. It wasn’t hard to find the one for Quebec.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

And it was all more of the same.