“I know it’s difficult to forgive right now,” I think in response. “Our parents were binge drinkers of old tech. They put their microchips in everything and used us as guinea pigs. And yes they sobered up, became the worst kind of teetotalers imaginable, and nearly destroyed America. But China lost, we won, and our generation is leading the way. Do your best to be compassionate, our parents are processing their defeat,” I think, feeling like a hypocrite. I have over a hundred unanswered thoughts from my parents in my memory. “For now, take a long hard look at yourself and find a way to open your heart again.”

I think Read and my inner voice repeats my sentences inside my head. Everything sounds fine until I hear Take the long cart look at your elf. I bring up thought-to-text and fix it manually. If you don’t catch autocorrect you end up with a whole lot of WTFs and no accepted advice. I make my answer available on the thinkstream and within the hour I’ve gotten fifty-seven purchases. It’s not bad, though my ideas have been dwindling since “Healing the Rift” spawned a thousand copycat thinkers.

What I should’ve done was gotten licensed as a Tower technician. For a short, gold-rush moment, there were massive digging projects, Tower-construction jobs, and swaths of terrestrial data-blasting on US soil again. Half a million new jobs in the Midwest alone. Then tech speculators laid claims before any of us knew our minds were something to privatize. They purchased the beachfront property of our inner thoughts, installed frontal-lobe games, inner-ear jingles, stream-of-consciousness feeds, and mined the unexplored caves of our unconscious mind, making millions from our uncopyrighted fantasies. Meanwhile, I’m not dreaming up any mind games or ways to stream better sex, I’m just hoping to have enough good advice to be able to pay rent.

It’s two a.m. when I finally rise from my couch and crawl into bed. I lie there counting the repetitions of the humming, my body pulsing with the electronic heartbeat that sounds from across the dead plains. Arum, rum, rum; arum, rum, rum; arum, rum, rum. I think of a car alarm, so far away all you can hear is its muted echo. It ebbs and flows, then recedes for a minute, leaving me with a couple glorious seconds of quiet. My eyes grow heavy, and for a moment I dream. I see shapes, neon octagons, black pyramids; a fox darts across my vision. Arum, rum, rum; arum, rum, rum; arum, rum, rum. The fox raises its head, the shapes tremble and fade, I open my eyes. It’s just me: awake.