Infinite Detail

Most of them have probably done it themselves, she thinks.
PTSD on a civilization-wide scale.

But she’s intrigued by this weird fucking brown Englishman that’s hiding out in a shipping container full of servers surrounded by hillbilly white supremacists. She hands them to him.

Hints of the grime and jungle she used to dance to, but somehow different, weirder time signatures and polyrhythms. Flexible tempos, the groove holding while the BPM noticeably shifts. Somewhere, amid the percussive cacophony, what sounds like rain. Wind passing by a high window. The distant sound of voices through urban spaces.

For some reason his mind fills with Buckminster Fuller, that book he read about him, the way he was heralded by designers and architects as a neglected hero, the one that would have built us a utopia if he’d been given half a chance.
And how someone had told him that was all bullshit, and people thought of him so well only because his plans never got built.

“I can’t, Mel. I gotta stay. I got people I need to look after.” Grids mouths the words, perfectly in time with the hidden memories, words that have echoed around his head every day for ten years, full of regret and self-doubt.
She’d come to him, a few days before that final show. Told him that things were going to get bad, that she was going to have to fake her death to keep the cops from coming after her again, that she was going to have to get out of the city. That he should too.

Who was turning him and his postcode’s dramas and daily struggles into prime-time entertainment. Trending topics on the timelines. Algorithmically curated. The filler between the ad breaks.

Most of them have only been on the network for a few hours max, but already they’re broadcasting their own insignificance, filling their profiles with the trivial facets of their lives, transmitting their half-formed thoughts and feelings, insisting on becoming their own self-important nodes in the network.

And for a few long minutes it’s like she wasn’t gone, like she was there, standing behind him, like she’s got his back, and he feels one mile tall.

You want it to not fuck up? Then don’t let it. Take some ownership of it. Shape things. Talk to people. Organize.

once told him that after the spices and the weed it’s the most important thing the Croft produces. A sense of community, a sense of purpose, a statement to the rest of the city. Well, at least it was, right up until today. He thinks of the spex on his face. Maybe that’s all about to change.