People wearing bright blue overalls and matching footwear march by. All of them are wearing government-issued, augmented-reality glasses. Some nod at each other, but no one stops to say hello. They’re all too rushed or unsure or scared to stop and chat.
She watches them stop and read a brightly lit sign or one of the digital bulletin boards that rise at intervals along the side of the tile road. A young woman passes her, listening to a tune through her wireless earplugs and humming along. A middle-aged man talks on his invisible phone. The phone, the glasses, and the invisible earplugs all use the same system—a microchip implant attached to the cerebral cortex. Back at the Chip-Center people called the system “CS,” the Chip-System.
A young girl walks by, about five or six years old. The woman whose hand she’s holding looks beefy and stern. The girl’s eyes lock on the rip in Kaarina’s shoe before going wide with wonder.
“Nursie Laitinen, look! Her shoes. They have holes in them!”
Rooting her little blue sneakers to the ground, the girl pulls on the older woman’s hand and tries to make her stop. Pink lips form a letter O. Round blue eyes blink fast, still staring at the mysterious footwear. She’s never seen anything so weathered and misshapen in her entire life.
The girl’s hand reaches for her AR-glasses to pull them away from her eyes. She wants to steal a quick peek outside the augmented reality, just to better investigate this miraculous gaffe in the system. But Nurse Laitinen tugs her forward.
“Don’t stare, Alina, it’s not polite.”
Rather than defying her nurse’s authority, the girl pouts and stomps her sneaker once on the blue tile. Then she continues her journey toward the blue brick building in front of them. As Alina is pulled inside the revolving doors, she looks over her shoulder. Little hand waving cheerfully, she smiles happily at the stranger with such questionable footwear. Kaarina lifts her hand to wave back, but Alina has already disappeared into the softly glowing Children’s-Center.
Three short steps take her closer to the tile road, but not too close. She doesn’t want to draw any more attention from the pedestrians passing by. None of the billboards or street signs are useful to her: they’re all empty of text, symbols, or instructions. Of course, they’re not really empty. It’s just that she can’t see the text they display, unlike like those with AR-glasses. The Chipped live in an augmented reality filled with clear directions, inspiring quotes and adverts, vibrant colors, perfect weather, and stunning outfits.
Or so Kaarina has been told.
For the blue-suited people, the leafless maple tree she leans on is rich with vibrant, healthy leaves. In reality—Kaarina’s reality—the only vibrant color to be seen is blue. It glows against the gray buildings, the poles and billboards, and the plants around. It burns her eyes while she walks on the colorless pavement beside the neon-blue tiles.
Stepping on the tiles is not a good idea. If she did, the bright-blue blur would attack her like a lightning strike. Then a raging headache would kick in. She’d soon feel nauseated and unbalanced. She doesn’t know what it is that makes her sick if she tries to walk on the tiles–whether it’s the flawed microchip in her brain, or simply the lack of AR-glasses. There’s no one around to ask, no one to compare notes with.
She steps over the small cracks in the pavement like a child, heading toward the east side of the city. This is where she can still find small stores and apartment complexes. Where things still look a bit like they did before the city was redesigned around augmented reality. This is not too far from where Kaarina’s mother used to live.
The Pedalers—people who pedal electric bikes to earn their keep—live on the east side. Not in poor conditions but not wealthy, either.
Only a few people work at the stores and pharmacies. Food, clothing, and medicine are all provided to the Chipped by the government. Nobody knows for sure why these stores are still open, but some say it’s only because some people refused to leave their old jobs. The Chipped use their chip-credits, or CCs, for other things: AR-clothing and accessories, virtual pets, fashionable digital haircuts, and bronze-but-natural-looking tans. The better they look in other people’s eyes, the better they must feel about themselves.
The CS lets them rank other people from one to five stars after every interaction. Social rank is stored in the database, along with name, address, age, family history, medical records, and possible issues in the chipping process or in adjusting to the augmented reality.
Kaarina is in the system just like everyone else. She’s categorized as Unchipped, location unknown.
There was a time, right after her unsuccessful chip installation, when she worried that they’d come after her, drag her back into the Chip-Center for testing and probing and slicing. She was afraid the utility poles would be turned off: a sign of war between the Chipped and Unchipped.
But they never came for her.
Finding her wouldn’t have cost them too much effort. Unwilling to relocate too far from her apartment, she had chosen a hiding place near enough to walk into the city, but far enough from the suburbs where the rest of the Unchipped lived. She wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to live in the Chip-Center as the city’s newest science project.
Most of the old apartments and houses were unsafe to live in, either because of the risk of collapse or the restlessness of the neighborhood’s new inhabitants. The Unchipped who ran the black market were unpredictable and murderous, though they mostly focused on hunting down the animals that roamed in the woods. As a fierce animal lover, Kaarina refused to join them. She hid in the barn where she used to work, mucking
