It wasn't a voice but more like something you just knew, all of a sudden, like a new sense.
Your urine flow is down 4 percent year over year. This is a common early sympton of enlarged prostate and prostate cancer. Your estimated time to further symptons is 3.2 years.
He sighed, angry at himself, like someone twenty years before might have sighed at an unpaid parking ticket come back for collections. Not that long ago it felt like 3.5, even 4 years. Anyway it wasn't hurting yet, though he supposed it probably would soon; these feelings were rarely wrong, if you gave them enough information. Anyway he didn't have enough spare cash at the moment to upgrade his medical plan to an interactive one. He fucking should though, he told himself, he was almost 30 and should be more responsible by now. Or was that just another one of those other feels, maybe a sponsored one? He thought a moment. No, this was nonspecific, a real feeling.
He finished pissing, washed and dried his hands.
He had friends who could afford full interactive (even immersive!) medical experiences. Flats, even, in expensive regenerative buildings. There was hardly any inside to them at all, just sun and windows and trees, bioreactors. And it's not like he was bad off, really. He'd go out to dinner with them at the fashionable spots and always paid his own tab. Just always hand to mouth somehow.
Funny thing about parking tickets. His dad had told him about them, driving him around when he was young. His dad was old fashioned and still drove his own car, though it parked itself. A red car, and styled old, where all the seats faced forward permanently and there were lots of controls. By then uniform metering had been implemented even in their city and there were no more parking tickets. "If it weren't for traffic cops, you might have come a few years sooner," said dad, and winked at his wife who just raised an eyebrow. He still made the same bad jokes.
It must have been strange to live then, to have to spend so much of your life worrying about such things. He checked his streams which were generating the usual amount of credentity, though he'd slipped another few hundredths of a percentile. He'd have to do someting and re-up to adjust for inflation soon.
got the new intuition but had to return it, just kept giving me this horrible feeling i might die soon & need to stop drinking #nonsense #in
His fingers stopped. He was out of characters already and didn't feel like editing, though he knew the post would benefit from brevity and rewording. He deleted the last hashtag and posted, and the streams brightened a few tenthousandths. He fielded some snarky responses and got about 11 new followers before he let the conversation expire. The metrics of engagement appeared: they were right down the middle, gender and diversity-wise (adjusted for the makeup of his peer group), and positive, skewing slightly younger than him. Not bad.
The new intuition (he had just bought the latest model) was still in beta for posts, and they came out pretty impressionistic, but he liked reading them that way anyway. You could feel your feed in your right brain and still have room on the left for other streams. This time he just turned on a music stream, some crossfader from New Zealand, with an ultraviolet avatar. (He felt that it was only 3 in the afternoon there, who crossfades at 3 in the afternoon?)
A conversation about the minx and its tail, and some intensely interesting and little known fact about its tail, a picture;
A conversation between some stand-up investors, joking (or was it a joke?) about buying intuition, you could never tell if they were joking
A question about restaurants in San Antonio, Texas, and many responses with organic user generated content and good feels
A consecutive tirade by someone about something
A rhyming couplet from a woman dressed in red, a watch
An animation, a memory, someone lost, cracks in the pavement—
He shook his head a little and blinked. He must have fallen asleep. That was the trouble with intuiting, it didn't fully engage the left brain. The crossfader had grown querolous and he turned it off and called an über.
She arrived in about 6 minutes.
She was on the wrong side of the street, like always. He cursed a little, under his breath. It's like they don't want to read the map. He stared, waiting for the call, though he could have called her right then, and he could see her from his window, not even pretending to look for the address.
The call came. "Yeah, it's number 5. On the east side of the street. Yeah. OK. See you soon."
He unbolted the door and a few seconds later she was there, in a red leather coat that went below her knees. She was taller than he felt she would be (he was still getting used to intuitive visualization), slender and dark. Lebanese, her card said.
"Jane?"
She smiled, and said his handle back to him. He nodded.
"Is that where the pin was, on the map?" He tried to hit the right balance of displeasure and professionalism. "I thought I put it right here."
She didn't answer, just kept smiling. "Where would you like to go?"
Fuck. He should have put it into the app, it saves a lot of time and confusion. He nodded again, toward the couch, and she walked to it, untying her belt and stepping out of her heels. "No, don't take those off," he said, following her.
He got there in 11 minutes, which is what his intuition had estimated before. "Have a good night," she said. "Yeah, you too!" he yelped back, all vowels, as the door closed. He watched her step into a tiny silver two-doored car, round and classic, which sped off as she checked her streams. He rated the ride 5 stars. No, 4.
He slept on his couch, that night, and woke with the sun.
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