All good fun. She’s had a nice time. Reassured herself she’s now earning more than either Molly or Parveen, good. Katy’s still married but having an affair with her office intern so there’s trouble in paradise there, good. Otherwise the rest of the girls are all single like her, good. So yes, a nice evening. But she’s still desperate to get down into the London Underground where she can finally get back online.
Amy unlocks her smartphone even before the escalator has reached the station’s lower level. She feels out of the loop. God, it’s been two whole hours, what has she missed! She hates this whole wi-si thing they have in public places over a certain size now, limiting internet access. Stupid law. You’d think the Government might have better things to do than try to force people to talk to each other.
Her auto pops up, as familiar as looking in the mirror.
Amy Pearce
Gender: Female
Age range: 26-30
Orientation: Straight
Relationship status:
Single/Available
Current location: Liverpool
Street Underground Station
[Central, Circle, Hammersmith
& City and Metropolitan
Lines],
Bishopsgate, London EC2M
7PY
Status update: Catching up with
the old gang!
Hi Amy, hope you had fun with
your friends tonight! Here’s the
selected feed since 6:17pm:
27 direct messages
4 personal videos
35 referred videos
52 status updates
44 tweets
20 veets
5 bleets
31 notifications
22 sexnet messages
4 sexnet recommends
12 app requests
6 podcasts
15 newsfeed stories
18 ads
Amy doesn’t smile to see so much activity waiting for her. It’s roughly what she’s expecting. She could add a zero on the end of all those numbers, if it wasn’t for her auto, selecting what it considers the most relevant. It’s the usual mixture of sources: all the people in her Circle, others she’s subscribed to, and those that have demographically targeted her. So this is about normal. Amy isn’t a geek or anything.
A Circle Line train pulls in and she finds a seat. She doesn’t look at any of the other passengers, but gets busy reviewing all the things her auto has suggested need her personal attention. Ignore. Like. Ignore. Reply. Watch. Like. Like. Share. Approve. Reply. Watch. Forward. Like. Dislike. Dislike. Delete. Reply. Reply. Reply.
Oh, and here we go… updates from the autos of the friends she’s just met. Like hers, their autos are posting their exact current location on various Tubes, trains, buses and taxis. Similar updates flicker down her feed:
Molly Jacobs has had a great time
catching up with Katy O’Connor,
Amy Pearce, Parveen Smith and Sally
Adams at Raising The Bar,
Shoreditch, London E2 1WR! Lovely
to see you all again!
Amy brings her smartphone closer and tells her auto to post a similar update. The Tube carriage is alive with murmurings and mumblings, as half the passengers are doing the same thing, but her auto recognises her voice above the background noise. Immediately it composes an update using the words she tends to use, phrased the way she always phrases things, and posts it without waiting for approval. Amy doesn’t even check.
The train announces it’s coming into Victoria Station, where she needs to change lines for Vauxhall. She glances up at the video adverts blazing along the inside of the carriage. For the past few weeks, everywhere she goes the ads are all offering the same thing. Find love. Find a man. Find love. Find a man. Distracting images of smooth muscled models, always blonde with blue eyes, just like most of her past sexnet partners. The ads know what she likes. They know she’s single. They know that today is Monday 14th February. After tomorrow they’ll be replaced by the usual ads for clothes, holidays, corporate training courses. Until then it’s the same thing. Love. Love. Love.
It pisses her off. She hates Valentine’s Day.
Amy’s about to drop her phone back into her handbag when she notices the ad directly opposite her seat.
Romantic getaways for two on Tahiti
Beach in St. Tropez...
A simulation of her: strolling barefoot though the sand, long blonde hair tossed by the ocean breeze, wearing the same sari she wore in her holiday photos from Australia three years ago. She’s laughing – the ad is playing a sample of her laugh – as is the man whose hand she’s holding. Some dark-haired foreign type.
Amy almost waves her smartphone at the ad to pull more details from it, before realising what’s wrong with this picture. The ad is assuming she already has a partner to go on a romantic getaway with. Why would it think that?
She calls up her auto, checks her profile and feels her heart boom.
Relationship status:
Couple/Monogamous.
Amy Pearce is in a relationship with
Juan-Miguel Fernández Mendoza.
“What the hell is this!” she barks.
Beside her, a lady reading her KindleBlaze turns, tuts, scowls. Amy knows she’s broken the Londoner rules by talking out loud, but then sticks to them by not making eye contact. Her glare is focused on her smartphone.
The Tube pulls out of Victoria Station. She’s missed her stop, but doesn’t care, because the impossible has just happened. Her relationship status has just changed, all by itself! It should say Single/Available, as it has for most of her life. Except on those few occasions when she had a boyfriend, and briefly changed it to Couple/Available. But never, ever, ever, Couple/Monogamous! Amy never agrees to be exclusive with anyone. Always best to keep a guy on his toes, and worried that he might lose her if he doesn’t try hard enough. If he gets unhappy about that, then it’s over. No big deal. She lives in London. It’s not like there’s a bloke famine.
So this sudden insistence of monogamy irritates the hell out of her. And with who? Some random Spanish guy she’s never even heard of!
Amy guesses this has only happened in the last minute or so, as congratulatory messages start flooding in. The autos of all the people in her Circle are automatically responding, with smileys, winks, thumbs, tweets, songs, video clips. Amy’s whole body tenses as she realises they are all saying roughly the same thing.
Well done Amy Pearce! Woo-hoo!
About time too!
About bloody time Amy Pearce!
And he’s hottttttt!
Oh yay, Amy Pearce is finally in
love!!! Just in time for Valentine’s Day
too!!! Hugs to you both! XXXX
They’ve all been waiting for this, she thinks. It’s what they all want for me.
From the ad, Amy’s stolen laughter rolls down the Tube carriage.
Scowling, Amy moves fast. Any second now this is going to be noticed by her mother’s auto, and she can’t face that. A few terse words into her phone and her auto is updating her profile.
Relationship status:
Single/Available.
Instantly, all her mates’ autos retract messages, downdate statuses and redact invitations from her calendar. Amy watches with satisfaction as the mistake is corrected, unravelling across her Circle as if it never happened.
Which it didn’t! What went wrong there? Surely her auto hasn’t been hacked into? She can’t remember the last time she heard of that happening. Some sort of glitch? Weird!
But not so weird she wants to find out the reason. Amy isn’t a geek or anything.
By the time she doubles-back on the Tube and gets to her flat in Vauxhall, irritation has burned away the feelgood buzz she left the bar with. The front door unlocks two seconds before she reaches it, then relocks when she slams it shut behind her.
Amy stomps straight into her small kitchen, heats up soup, cuts bread
, opens a jar of olives. She thinks about the evening she’s had with her friends. There was one point when things almost turned into a big argument again… why does that always happen? She can’t remember a night out that hasn’t turned into a slanging match. What is it with people always wanting to argue? Parveen is always making little digs at her, suggesting that Amy isn’t doing any work to organise that big holiday they’ve been talking about for months, like she promised. Amy eventually had to shout her down: “YES I AM!” It’s the only way to shut her up, she knows - go for volume. She tuts to herself now as she makes dinner, wishing she’d told Parveen to do the holiday planning herself. That would have got Amy off the hook. She’s just so busy, God knows when she’ll have time to think about things like holidays.
Things had been awkward amongst the girls for a while, until Molly showed up. Oh, and she only brought her bloody baby along to the pub, didn’t she! Amy chose that moment to buy her round of drinks. Gah, kids, yuck! Who goes for a drink with a sodding baby!
She’d hoped to avoid having to hold the thing, but all the other girls were passing it round like the latest toy at an Ann Summers party (at least that would have been useful, she remembers thinking) and so inevitably it ended up with Amy. She had forced a smile and made all the cooing noises women are expected to make, looking down at the newborn boy. Bit surprised to find his eyes open, looking back.
Funny though. She’d got used to the weight in her arms quite quickly. And the faint fresh-dough smell. She always thought babies smelled of puke and piss, not this almost edible aroma. Amy had tuned out the rest of the pub, becoming fascinated with how tiny his fingernails were, they were microscopic… wow. Molly had to ask for him back, and handing him over felt strange. For a second it felt like someone had stolen her bag, or burgled her house. She’d had to go buy herself another glass of wine.
Amy carries her meal on a small tray into the living room. Both mainscreen and sidescreen light up as she walks in. The bigger monitor starts playing yesterday’s episode of EastEnders, picking up from the very moment her eyes closed when she dozed off in front of the screen last night. She sits down and gestures at the screen, circling her index finger round and round in the air to scroll through channels. When she gets to BBC0, the subscription channel, she prods forward to select it, then flicks her fingers sideways to drag the EastEnders programme onto it. She’s had enough of ads tonight.
As she eats and watches the rest of the episode without interruptions, the sidescreen is a constant flow of images, text and links. Her auto is there, doing its job. It highlights 16 TV shows coming up that it knows she may be interested in. It reminds her of 78 pre-recorded programmes she hasn’t watched yet. It lets her know that it’s currently having 24 conversations with other autos in her Circle, and that three of them may be worth listening to. It flags up news items and blog updates and tweets and urgent admin tasks that it considers high priority.
Amy watches TV and her auto at the same time, like everyone does. Every now and then she tells it to do something, while still following the unfolding drama of the terrorist attack on Walford.
She says “Renew gym membership, six month contract.”
She says “Reveet Aunty Agnes’s mash-up.”
She says “Confirm Frank and John’s party, order two bottles of rum, redact anything in the calendar for the day after.”
She says “Decline Cally’s birthday drinks, buy her a present from her gift list, forty pound limit, deliver for Friday.”
She says “Confirm Flag gig, transfer ticket cost to Jessica.”
She says “Enter EastEnders competition. Current episode. Go for… twenty casualties.”
She says “STOP!”
Her auto freezes its feed. With her left hand, Amy mimes drawing two fingers together, lowering the TV volume until the sound of explosions fades to silence. She gapes at the familiar updates on the sidescreen.
Oh yay, Amy Pearce is finally in
love!!! Just in time for Valentine’s Day
too!!! Hugs to you both! XXXX
Well done Amy Pearce! Woo-hoo!
About time too!
About bloody time Amy Pearce!
And he’s hottttttt!
The same status updates from her friends. Plus the one she was hoping to avoid, from her mother’s auto:
Well it’s about time my daughter Amy
Pearce found someone, I’ve been
telling her for years to settle down,
not that she ever listens. Make sure
you don’t make a mess of it this time.
When were you thinking of telling me
this then? When were you thinking of
introducing us then?
Which means...
Amy pushes her meal aside and drags her auto from sidescreen to mainscreen, swapping with EastEnders. Snaps her fingers, the command to go to profile home.
And there it is again.
Relationship status:
Couple/Monogamous.
Amy Pearce is in a relationship with
Juan-Miguel Fernández Mendoza.
“Auto interface,” Amy half-shouts. Her profile drops to the lower half of the mainscreen to be replaced by something more functional. Settings. Two dozen categories of them. Then emerging out of the list to fill the top half of the screen comes something simple, outlined in electric blue. Something she hasn’t used for years.
Amy Pearce auto interface ready.
Amy summons the airboard and her fingers start typing in the empty space above her lap, causing letters to spring across the screen, but then she catches herself and dismisses it with a wave. She did that on instinct. That’s how long it’s been since she used the interface to talk directly to her auto... back in the days of physical keyboards.
“Why has my relationship status changed?” she asks. Almost instantly, a response blinks onto the mainscreen.
Amy Pearce relationship status
changed to Couple/Monogamous at
9:56pm Monday 14 February 2022.
“Not when! Why!”
Relationship status change authorised
by user.
“Oh yeah? Who did that, then, cause it wasn’t – ”
I did.
Amy’s pulse jumps. She catches her breath.
Is that... is that normal?
She shakes her head. It’s been so long since she had to interact directly like this... she can’t remember her auto ever referring to itself in this way. But maybe this is how it works now.
She sits up straight and says “Rollback relationship status.”
The interface sits there, glowing blue. Amy’s fingers perform a short ballet to bring up her profile on the sidescreen, which is still telling the world she’s now part of a couple. On her profile wall, messages and tweets from everyone in her Circle come pouring down like a waterfall of words.
“Revert my relationship status,” she snaps, trying to remember the right trigger words you had to use back in the old days. “Change my profile. Single/Available. Activate! Do it!”
The interface glows.
“Why have you done this?” Amy is more unnerved by the quavering of her own voice than anything.
Whole sentences blink down the mainscreen, one by one.
I like Juan-Miguel Fernández
Mendoza.
I want to be with Juan-Miguel
Fernández Mendoza.
Juan-Miguel Fernández Mendoza is
right for Amy Pearce.
Amy feels her half-finished dinner roll around inside her belly like a live animal.
She takes a deep breath. And another. It suddenly feels like she’s in the wrong flat. A stranger’s home. What’s going on, what the hell’s happened to my auto, what... okay, okay, think!
Amy knows her auto is, like everyone else’s, programmed with every piece of data about her. Bank details, medical history, the lot. It manages her entire social universe, understands the connections between her and the thous
and-plus people she’s friends with in her online Circle.
But more than that – it learns from her. It knows what she likes, what she dislikes, what she needs, what she avoids. What turns her on. It browses the social networks looking for people it thinks she might like to know. It keeps an eye on the sexnets and recommends available men she might like to flirt with, or sim with, or go on a date with, or invite round for some non-exclusive fun. That’s how people meet: their autos make digital overtures, compare stats, and have conversations. If there’s enough compatibility, her auto reports that it’s found someone she might like to meet for real. By the time Amy goes for a drink with a guy, they both feel like they’ve already met. Takes all the awkwardness out of it. She won’t even look at a man unless her auto has approved him, even if he comes up and says hello to her face. That’s not how it’s done.
So does her auto know something she doesn’t? Has it really found her perfect man? Maybe this isn’t a glitch at all.
“Okay. Show me...” She struggles to pronounce unfamiliar syllables. It looks like she’s sneering. “...Juan-Miguel Fernández Mendoza.”
The interface slips onto the sidescreen to make way for his profile. Amy leans forward, studying the stranger. Most of it is in Spanish, so she hasn’t got a clue what all his status updates are saying, or what his preferences are. But she works out that this is a 33 year old man from somewhere called Basque Country, which doesn’t even sound like a real place. From the look of all the exclamation marks on his posts (are they meant to be upside down like that at the start of each sentence, or is that another glitch?), he’s the excitable type. Which means the childish type, in Amy’s book.
She browses through his photo galleries with rapid finger-swipes. Juan-Miguel’s face fills her screen: messy black hair, stubble, deep eyes, and a white smile that almost looks too big for his face. He’s broad-shouldered, hairy-chested and olive-skinned. Exactly the opposite of the slim, smooth, vampire-pale men she likes.
Auto Page 4