Hourglass: Chapter 1 - The Elevator

The 33 trillion cells of his body and his 20,000 genes screamed at him to say something to her, yet her mere presence paralyzed him.

This was the third time she had looked at him in a confined commute together of only four floors.
Xavier Oren was nervous. It had been a while since he had been alone and physically this close to a woman actually wearing a skirt, especially a woman like this. She had strikingly exotic features: long jet-black hair, piercingly full green eyes, sensual red lips, aristocratic high cheekbones, clear creamy Mediterranean skin the color of coffee with a lot of milk added, and her hips had an alluring width to them. She was dressed stylishly, with an expensive-looking white leather purse. Her curvaceous form beckoned from the delicate fabric of her daring black top, and the green-striped skirt did more than hint at her shapely legs. In the four mirrored walls of the elevator, her reflection receded infinitely away from his.
On top of the anxiety, he was irritated that he couldn’t access the Internet via his embedded ocular cyber-optic uplink lens (“Link” for short) to escape her gaze, his own reflection, and this awkward moment.

Dear Reader, you may think me some species of coward for not suavely striking up a conversation with such a desirable fellow vertical traveler, but would you transform into Casanova in such a moment, pushing 200 heartbeats per minute? Doubt it! What would I even say to her? Something like, “Hello, nice weather today…” No, that’s a boring conversation topic! Should I ask her if she works in the building? She certainly doesn’t look like she does. Besides, it’s creepy to ask a stranger in an elevator where they work…

Her eyes almost met his again as he looked at the elevator buttons, and he nervously glanced toward the corner of the elevator to avoid eye contact. Only a few more floors to go to the Support offices, he thought silently to himself.
She looked like she was in a hurry, tapping her foot on the floor as they finally arrived at Xavier’s floor, the Support offices. She walked out of the elevator first, seemingly intentionally passing closely by Xavier, and he caught her rare scent. He felt something profound change deep within his body. Close up; he could see just how vibrant her skin was and how the curvature of her dainty naked shoulders flowed perfectly into the voluptuous contours of her ample breasts. His head spun for a moment.

Intoxicating! But maybe she’s a hooker? How anachronistic of her! Or could she be an OnlyFanz “model?” I haven’t seen a real one of those in a long while…

Just slightly, his body retreated further into the corner of the mirrored elevator. Confronted with his reflection, again alone, he caught his breath and emerged. She had a confident stride as she walked towards the lobby opposite Support. Xavier couldn’t help but notice that her hips had this awesome rhythm as her heels click-clacked on the floor. The skirt was so tight that he could clearly make out both perky buttocks. Xavier’s mouth fell open as his hand went to his collar.

At this moment, a larger woman wearing black trousers and a grey-collared shirt with simple lettering reading “Moderator” emerged from Support, catching Xavier in the middle of gawking at the mesmerizing skirt. For a moment, her face contorted in disgust at him.
The Moderator isn’t happy about me “violating her privacy!” Xavier swallowed nervously as he entered Support for his court-ordered weekly review.

He walked into a meeting room in the government office devoid of personality, where about a dozen other dreadfully bored ‘Post Opps’ sat on grey plastic chairs. A few of them were reading old-fashioned printed books or magazines, but most stared blankly around the room. None of them were socializing.

I should explain the etymology of that phrase to you, Post Opp, which applies more or less to myself. It’s politically incorrect slang for a hybrid male-bodied human. Once upon a time, a rude comedian had compared men who chose infinite novelty and digital godhood to transsexuals. And the mean nickname, Post Opp, stuck like glue. Depending upon which statistical source is referenced, 50% - 60% of the male population are Post Opps.

The young man beside Xavier was wearing a cheap cloth face mask, as were several others.

Why are they doing that, you may ask - is there a dangerous virus circulating? No, they were pandemic generation babies; their parents put face masks on them to go out in public during COVID in the early 2020s and the bird flu in the late 2020s, and they never took them off.

A moderator entered the meeting room, the same one who had caught Xavier entranced by the dangerous curves of the mysterious woman. Shit! She took her place behind the desk that commanded the meeting room, behind her a large poster with a blank white puzzle piece, standing out in a grey puzzle grid read…

SUPPORT: HELPING YOU HELP YOURSELF: Taking care of yourself is easier when you have support. We’re here to guide you somewhere new.

She wasn’t very overweight, more than anything she was squarish; she sat with her legs together and her shoulders squared up, her hair was short and spiked straight up, and even her shoes were squarish. She gestured to the Post Opp sitting to the left of Xavier, who had thin forearms and looked Indian or maybe Middle Eastern.
“Amar, how did we do this week?” She asked with a tone hinting at her boredom and apathy about her duty.
His posture worsened as he leaned forward, and his shoulders rose slightly.
“Uhm, not very good…” he mumbled through his mask with a hint of an accent.
“Yeah…?” The Moderator pressed him.
“I kind of fucked up,” He started rubbing one of his twig-like forearms nervously, “I got the new Sim game Core Seven as soon as it came out, and I guess I forgot to ask the vendor to set playtime limiters on my game license. So I’ve just been gaming and getting mined…”

“Getting mined” refers to renting your cognitive powers by the hour to the highest bidder. Basically, you go unconscious while a company uses your grey matter’s quantum computing power to make money. It could be an asteroid mining operation searching for precious metals, a healthcare data analytics agency mapping the individual genomes of insurance customers, a hedge fund doing warp-frequency trades, or an investment firm mining a blockchain.
That’s how most of these pitiful Post Opps afford their rent, Link bandwidth, soylent diet, Sim games, and Support payments. It’s below me! A great way to become an insensate zombie who can’t even enjoy a good sim-sexing anymore.

“Amar, what benchmarks did we set for you last month?” The Moderator continued.
“Three hours of hiking, three hours of professional skill development, two hours of job searching, and…” he seemed to search for words, “two hours with my biological family unit.”
“The benchmark we set was ten hours weekly unLinked.”
“Well, I gamed with my brother in Hyderabad for a while!”
“Amar, this is the 5th week this quarter that we’ve failed to meet the benchmarks you chose when we started,” she said sternly, “You know what that means…”
“No! I can do better!” He protested at the highest energy level Xavier had seen out of him in the past few months they had been in Support together.
“I’m having your Link deactivated.” She cut him off. “You’ve shown zero progress towards becoming a productive, socially-integrated hybrid citizen. We have no other choice.”
He let out a final protest: “How am I supposed to develop toward integration without my Link!”
“That’s something that your post-expulsion counselor can discuss with you.”
There was no more fight left in him. His shoulders came further together as his slump continued, his head dropped, he shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, and stared with dead eyes at the linoleum floor.

Some of these Post Opps are real fucking losers! These are the types of barely males who used to hand over half their paychecks to be called “PayPigs” by women they would NEVER EVEN MEET via the digital sex work platforms for a pretty pixel show.
Then, those platforms figured out they could replace all their human “models” with AI avatars. The ensuing profit bonanza was the corporate scandal du jour in 2029, but the platforms paid extra into the Universal Basic Income fund, so the girls went on welfare and SSRIs and got fat. The customers couldn’t tell the difference and apparently didn’t mind paying for an AI-girlfriend experience. Sad bunch of suckers!

You might be curious: is cognitive-quantum mining an equal-opportunity employment option? Absolutely not…

Due to something called precognitive aptitude, certain Post Opps can make drastically more money than others being mined. In 2011, a researcher conducted a bizarre experiment: he attached 26 human subjects to biofeedback monitoring, placed them in front of computer screens in sensory-deprived environments, and showed them at random various images. Some eliciting a strong emotional response, but most not: a house, a car, a frog, a naked man being beaten in prison, a politician giving a speech, a kitten, a trail in the woods, the New York skyline, an anthill, a dead baby, etc… You get the idea.
The experiment got really interesting when they observed that the body would start showing minor physiological reactions before being shown the most emotionally shocking images, as much as 33 seconds prior to being shown the image. The eerie part about this was that the images were generated entirely at random.
Then the researcher got perverse and started showing pornographic images at random to the human subjects of the experiment - a red sports car, a buxom blond giving a blow job, a running back catching a pass, a disembodied victim of Ted Bundy, etc. This caused the ‘presentiment’ accuracy of the biological predictions to jump even higher above random chance. The mind’s sexual arousal mechanism, stimulated by the porn, statistically was demonstrated as the most prophetic human ability.
After replicating the experiment and showing hundreds of subjects many thousands of images, the data couldn’t lie. The deviation from random chance was too high; the mind knew what was coming before the computer knew.
The research made headlines worldwide for confirming what we’ve known for thousands of years and what science has denied for hundreds of years; human beings have an uncanny ability to predict the future.
Further research repeated the experiments but used a pre-ordered sequence of evocative images and found that humans were even better at predicting the future when it was already set in stone - or bytes, as the case was.
The most precognitive minds could predict any given event occurring or not occurring within 33 seconds, with accuracy up to 50% better than completely random chance. A fascinating discovery with shockingly little utility to anyone. Except for hedge fund managers who made or lost millions of dollars daily in high-frequency trading based upon minuscule movements in the value of stocks, currencies, and other exotic species of the areoform financial realm. Since images of porn and violence were the best predictive vehicles, and financial instruments only move in two directions (up or down in value), the imagery could be tied to future outcomes of the movement of the market.
This is how warp-frequency trading was born; based upon tale-tale biological signs like blood pressure increasing by a few degrees, hedge funds would enter or exit positions with tens of millions of dollars and profit by a few fractions of a percentage point in 33 seconds or less. Thus, a new generation of precognitive millionaires was minted.

It was Xavier’s turn to be questioned…
“I work out daily. I walk my dog daily. Other than that just a lot of hands of SuperSimPoker.”
“So you are staying physically active, that’s good. However, we have a growing concern about your online poker addiction, Xavier.”
Online poker addiction! I pay your rent bitch! Support payments were not a flat fee but a percentage of one’s income. Xavier was a statistical savant and had developed extraordinary intuition over decades of playing poker. While the average Post Opp’s monthly Support payment could buy a meal at a fancy restaurant, his was equivalent to a government administrative employee’s monthly salary, plus a 12% “privilege” surcharge because he was a straight, white male - doesn’t seem like much of a privilege! It would be even more, but he managed to hide a lot of his income through his little side business staking lesser poker players and consulting on hands held by those not as talented as him with the digitized cards.
“Well, I’m a professional poker player. That’s how I make my living,” he explained as he had before to the inquisition of the Moderators.
She pressed him, “We’d really like to see you focusing on a skill set that makes you more organizationally valuable.”
“Yes, I know, that’s why I spent 37 hours in the past three months attending public speaking classes. Last week, my mentor praised my grandiloquence in a speech I delivered to the class on the philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli.”
“Grand-what? What does that mean?”
“Grandiloquence: it means extravagantly colorful or bombastic.”
“So you gave a speech about colorful bombs and philosophy?”
“No! It just means…” I have to dumb this down, “I can talk good.”
“Well, you can talk good, Xavier! Have you done any public speaking work to demonstrate proof of social integration?”
“No. It’s honestly a very competitive market for public speakers.” Bitch please, they couldn’t afford me!
She continued, “Your sentence requires you to spend time weekly doing Ethics Reconditioning…”
“I watched a 4-hour documentary series about a 20th-century advertising tycoon, Edward Bernays, who is regarded as the father of post-modern consumer culture. Does that count?”
“I’m not sure if that would be on the Ethics Reconditioning curriculum, but for this week, yes.”
She continued to probe Xavier for details about his progress towards becoming a socially integrated Post Opp, punctuated with pithy pieces of trite advice to which he nodded with fake acquiescence. Xavier glanced at the clock; only a tedious 30 minutes had elapsed. In three hours, Xavier could reactivate his Link and escape back into a digitized opium trip. Whatever it takes to get my Link reactivated.

The rest of the Support session passed uneventfully. Amar’s outburst and expulsion was the most progress, negative or positive, that any of the Post Opps had made since last week. As he stood up, Xavier’s legs ached as the blood rushed back into them after hours of sitting in the uncomfortable, 3D-printed chairs.
As they shuffled out the door, he heard his name: “Xavier!” Uttered in a sharp tone from the squarish Moderator. She gestured for him to return to one of the plastic thrones of poor circulation. Why is she giving me trouble? I’m practically the star student here! His throat dropped into his stomach as he settled uncomfortably into the seat next to the Moderator.
She lowered her voice just slightly, “I didn’t want to confront you in front of the whole group but you need to be careful about not violating the privacy of citizens around you. If what I observed today in the lobby is something you do frequently, it will lead to citations, which can lead to expulsion from your Support program. You know what that means…” Her voice trailed off ominously. “I’m going to set your Link to temporarily monitor your sexual arousal bio-signs and cross-reference for public and private hashtags posted in your 10-meter geo area indicating that you might be violating the privacy of citizens around you.”
Xavier smirked at “sexual arousal,” the skirt in the elevator was the last time in a long time that he’d been even remotely aroused by anything not comprised of bits and pixels. No problem, lady! He nodded in acknowledgment, which she didn’t even notice as her attention was now completely redirected to the glowing screen of the tablet on her lap.

A few moments later, Xavier was in a state of extreme time dilation, leaning against a linoleum counter in Support, intently staring at the tiny flashing verification light on a blockchain transaction. The slowest 15 seconds of every week was the time it took to verify his electronic funds’ transfer to Support to clear so his Link could be reactivated after the weekly review meeting.
Serotonin flooded his mind as the green “Verified” payment icon popped up on the screen: YOUR PAYMENT OF 998 CBUSD HAS BEEN APPROVED BY THE CENTRAL BANK - NEXT PAYMENT DUE IN 7 DAYS. Aftershocks of feel-good neurotransmitters followed as notifications began loading from his Link and popping up in his peripheral vision: new instant messages from his gaming buddies, 3-D Prontograms, emails, micro episodes of his favorite Utube shows, and the next installment of his favorite interactive adult program, Sutra Samurai SwordXxx, had been published…

After a day of living in black and white, with a singular now-forbidden moment of iridescence, life was now back in color.

If you enjoyed this sample chapter and found it provocative, prepare to have your mind blown by the rest of the book!

Here's a plot summary...

Xavier is a Biohacker, Lifehacker, professional poker player, statistical savant, gamer, addict, and cyber-criminal currently being prosecuted for masterminding a nine-million-dollar heist of "pre-cognitive capital." Pushed out of his comfort zone one night at a cigar bar, he approaches a strikingly beautiful Colombian woman, Astrid. An old Russian man gives him a mysterious confidence drug along with some advice that gives him a shot at charming a woman unlike any other he has ever known. But Astrid has an identical twin sister who seems to have succumbed to the same corrupting modern influences as Xavier. As he battles his addictions, the twins draw him into a web of intrigue and moral quandaries. In a world where corporations enslave the human mind to predict the future and profit, he'll excel because of the Biohacking tools he yields and his innate talents but falter because of his fundamentally flawed character.

I'm author-banned on Amazon, so you’ll be able to get it as a digital book + audio book package via the Limitless Mindset Store, here

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