Bubbles

What happens when economic incentives coax people to choose a single digital ecosystem?

I'm trying something experimental this issue: a microfiction, short Sci Fi story (under 1,000 words) to illustrate something about how our lives might evolve within digital transformation.

Please take a look and let me know what you think. (FYI: the "bubbles" of the title are both the obvious kind and also "filter bubbles.")

I'll put a few miscellaneous goodies and things worth your attention at the end.

Bubbles

Monday: Dex never wore smartgoggles when he swam, even though they were cheaper than the plain plastic kind he had to go off-Amazon to find. His near-daily swims were the only time he just existed without filters or Augmented Reality reminders of a person's name, his next meeting, or the item suited to his taste that Amazon had waiting for him at home without his having to order it. Other swimmers had podcasts crooning or gamified their swims with virtual challenges and progress bars. But for Dex, doing laps in the Olympic-sized outdoor pool at Stratford gym, it was just him, sunlight (if the day was fine), and the other bodies splashing.

His lack of filters was why Dex noticed the woman knifing through the water one lane over. Dex considered himself a strong swimmer, but her speed and grace... wow! When his half hour ended and he looked to her lane, she was already gone.

Thursday: There was a loosely enforced "no specs" norm in the Stratford hot tub. No smartglasses. No smartgoggles. Dex loved the free-flowing conversations that emerged.

Soaking post swim, half-listening to Matt and Roger talk through who would win that night's football game on Prime, Dex's pulse skipped when she sat down across from him. They had again been in adjacent lanes, Dex pushing himself to pull harder because he was abashed by his comparative slowness.

She wore the navy blue one piece of a serious swimmer, designed to suppress friction in the water. Her arms rippled with muscle. He couldn't tell her hair color under the white swim cap, but her eyebrows were dark.

He caught her eye. "You're supersonic in there," he said.

That earned him a quiet smile. Brown eyes sparkled. They had orange flecks. "I used to be an athlete," she had a slight accent... Irish?

"Looks to me like you still are," Dex said.

"I don't compete anymore."

"I'm Dex."

"Lyla."

Another Thursday: Dex hadn't seen Lyla again since learning her first name, and he couldn't learn much more. She didn't pop on the Stratford registry of members open to communication, but that didn't mean much: the registry defaulted to not sharing. Everybody was in the Amazon community directory anyway.

He asked Bowtie, his digital assistant, to find every woman named Lyla in the Portland-area Amazon directory, using variant spellings, adding her eye color and the likelihood, given the accent, that she wasn't born in the U.S. Nada.

Remembering she had been a competitive athlete, Dex had Bowtie expand the search to college swimmers named Lyla. Bingo. He found an old press release about Lyla Hammond, born in Limerick, moved to the U.S. to attend Cal on a swimming scholarship, Silvered in the 200 meter freestyle back in the '28 Olympics.

So why wasn't she in his Amazon directory?

Tuesday: "You inspire me," Dex said to Lyla, again across the hot tub. At the other end, Brenda and Janice compared notes about travel in Italy.

"How?"

"I'm faster now because I keep finding myself swimming next to you."

Another smile and sparkle.

Friday: Alone together for once in the hot tub, Lyla told Dex she was an environmental scientist, working to rebalance river flows in Oregon to preserve wildlife while not hurting the human communities that had sprouted near dams. There was a political aspect to her work on top of the science. Dex's job marketing low carbon footprint, organic yogurt across the Amazon grocery ecosystem felt trivial by comparison, but at least it was relatively green for dairy.

She got out first, pulling off the white swim cap and shaking loose long brown hair. Dex located his nerve. "Hey Lyla, coffee sometime?"

"I don't drink coffee."

"Do you live life beverage-free, or can I tempt you with an alternative?"

"Tea."

"Tea sometime?"

"I'd like that."

"I'll catch you after the shower to get your numbers," Dex said.

When he got to the Stratford lobby, specs on, ready to trade contact info, Lyla was gone.

Another Tuesday: In his office at Portland Amazon Partners Plaza, focus eluded Dex. Why couldn't he find Lyla? He spent lunch sifting through the depths of the Amazon databases his job let him access, feeling a bit guilty, but to no effect.

It occurred to him: could Lyla be a Walmart customer? It was almost inconceivable. Stratford Gym was a Tier 2 Amazon partner. The Walmartians had their own gyms.

Dex had a black sheep cousin, Tom, who was Walmart. It had been weeks since Dex used his smartphone's actual line rather than Amazon Messenger. He called Tom to ask if he saw Lyla Hammond on the Walmart directory. Nothing.

Lyla must be Indie, one of the few million oddballs who dodged the two omnipresent digital ecosystems: Amazon/Google/Apple and Walmart/Microsoft/Meta, which everybody referred to by their retail names: Amazon and Walmart.

Indies were nearly Amish in mid-twenty-first century life. They shopped locally, avoided ecommerce (when possible), used old-fashioned VISA and MasterCard credit rather than Amazon Pay or Walmart Pay. Dex hadn't known that Stratford Gym even had a VISA/MasterCard membership option.

Dex liked Lyla, but where would they have tea? Meet for lunch? Go to a movie? A few years back, it hadn't been like this: businesses were open to anybody with the money to pay for goods.

Then, Amazon and Walmart began subsidizing partners to choose, only accepting AmazonPay or WalmartPay. Not both. Many partners wouldn't even accept cash or debit/credit cards.

The two ecosystems had slowly nudged separate, side-by-side societies into existence.

Another Friday: Back in the Stratford hot tub, Lyla explained that as an environmental scientist she couldn't justify the infinite cardboard boxes that came with either ecosystem, hence her Indie status. Dex said he understood.

"How about that tea?" Lyla asked. "I'll leave my phone number at the front desk."

"Sure," Dex replied. But he was lying.

It just wasn't worth the trouble.

---

Miscellaneous Goodies and Things Worth Your Attention

• The First Sip of Coffee in the morning, lately, causes me to remember Madeline Kahn singing, "Sweet mystery of life at last I've found you" in Young Frankenstein. You can relive this magical movie moment here.

• R.I.P. Matthew Perry of Friends, who died young at 54. The New York Times had a nice career retrospective, but they gave short shrift to my favorite Perry performance as Matt Albie in the remarkable, single-season, Aaron Sorkin series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip from 2006. That was the same year that 30 Rock premiered, and I've often wondered if Studio 60 would have thrived if there hadn't been another SNL-based show on NBC that fall.

• The world of transportation is changing, but nobody knows how just yet. Cruise, the GM robotaxi subsidiary, is pulling all cars off the road after an accident. Meanwhile, Toyota has dramatically scaled back its plans for a Woven Planet transportation operating system. We saw this way ahead of time in our 2017 Future of Transportation project: American attitudes toward car ownership, transportation, and self-driving cars are in flux.

• Adobe's Firefly Image-Generation AI beta is amazing. It created the image that you saw at the top of this issue. I tried to put the entirety of the short story into the prompt generator but could only do the first couple of sentences. Still, an appropriate image that came in seconds.

• I'm now all caught up on Gen V on Amazon Prime, having just watched Episode 7. It's fascinating, but very gross.

• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse comes to Netflix on Tuesday. I was tired when I saw it in a Florida theater with La Profesora and The Boy back in June, so I'm excited to watch it again!

• By the way, "Bubbles" is not my first adventure writing science fiction.

Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.