I am deeply and utterly bored of my life. This is another one. Near future fiction, where all the gadgets are either for sale or prototypes

Fernando woke up in his clothes again this morning. Don’t know exactly where I am. Padded down his pockets for the essentials. His phone was paired to his bracelet, so that was hard to lose, without his hand shaking off. If only he could program something to vibrate when his dignity got more than 5 meters away. Had a thorough sniff around to see if he’d puked anywhere or sat in anything, nope. Good to go. The bad thing about sleeping in the sun is that it wakes you up, but the good thing is that you wake up with a bit of a charge. Not mental, of course, but fuck it as long as the iPod worked. He snaked the earphones out of his blazer and got walking.

‘It’s, uh, where am I?’ he thought. Where he was, he was at some house party, with, someone, what, er. He pulled out his phone and got the thing to walk him through his meanderings. He was… in the park. That’s bad. Before that he was… at the roti shop. Yes, yes, a cursory dental analysis revealed as much. Before that, the after-party. And, presumably, before that the show. This was supposed to end up in the hotel or something. Fuck it. Now all manner of things were vibrating. He had to go. Um, where? He got two taps on his right shoulder and headed off that way, getting an occasional nudge when he veered off course.

Fernando had done something once, he couldn’t remember when or what. That fed him into the conference circuit and he never quite got out. One thing led to another and his qualifications were now a daisy chain of appearances at other conferences. He’d been caught in this myopic, self-referential loop of buffet lunches and airplane reservations for a few years now. Weren’t so bad. Sandwich? First he let the nanobots out of his hollow wisdom tooth to clean up the roti. He grinned stupidly at the girl in the corner like he had something in his mouth. Which he did. And then he’s like ‘oh, shit, where’s my netbook‘. It gone. Whatever, Trevor. Beep bop boop.

The Chinese Dalai Lama continued coming to these panels, as did his predecessor. Fernando being the drunken, rumpled product of the home of Theravada Buddhism was here to generally keep an eye on things, make sure the greater vehicle was on the rails, bring some money home for the research centers in the Kandyan hills. Despite the utter illegitimacy of this Manchurian incarnation, the People’s Republic still put some money where their mouthpiece was. ‘What to do what to do’, Fernando thought, looking around for some bite.

Posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 in Future, fiction.