A Short Something

I squeeze my eyes until they hurt,

release, ride the phosphene kaleidoscope back to oblivion, rinse, repeat. Anythings better than the phantasms waiting beyond the blackness of my lids. When my eyes open, the refresh rate is so quick you don't even see a seam between the Privacy Filter of the back of the eyelid and the beginning of the augmented ads creeping into view. I can't even afford an apartment, how am I supposed to pay for Premium Sleep Mode? It doesn't matter if your sleeping on a body conforming temperature regulating king size next to your Queenly wife, or in a tent hidden in a copse of trees beside the Missouri river. Everyone deserves darkness in the privacy of their room. Don't they? I guess someone disagreed.

So I squeeze my eyes shut, where it's still illegal to show ads. For now. The new law will pass, no one doubts it. Everyone hates it.

I remember a book I read as a kid, Top 10 Games You Can Play Alone in Your Head. Prescient. I replay my favorite scenario. My joy at 'winning' this round is instantly replaced by a stone in my gut. The next time I open my eyes I will see ads for a dozen simulacra of these games made by a gibbering idiot of code. Cursed, bizarro, fun-house mirror mockeries of real efforts made by real people, scraped without their permission. Sickly chimeras crafted by a faithless invisible hand.

My eyes squeezed tight, I try to focus on the fresh air wafting through the tent on this rain-cover-less night. Decaying leaves. Someones campfire a bit further up river. The smell of plastic wafting off the river. I can feel the chemicals slowly collect in my nostrils through the night. Tomorrow morning I will sneeze out a perfect plastic molding of each nostril, complete with atrophied nose hairs stuck in the mold. It is particularly bad tonight and I hack, sure tomorrow will be the day I hack up a mold of my lung, possibly containing the lung too. I zip the hood of the sleeping bag for a mostly mental protection against the fumes. My fists ball, hands shaking, bitten brittle nails ready to puncture the thin skin growing thick too soon, I slip into a fitful excuse for sleep, until they take that too.