You ask the app and it tells you to skip breakfast. It does tell you — sometimes it gives instructions unprompted — to scroll through a “relationship advice” forum that makes your skin crawl.
It’s the point, you remind yourself. Surveillance can’t be avoided and modeling can’t be outlawed: you are still living among the regulatory rubble of the fallout of the last attempt. We can only resort to becoming unpredictable in a way no human can be.
Gym today? No. A mid-morning pub in a couple of hours. You’ve never done that. The app tells you where.
You ask if you will call your girlfriend. That’s a no, tenth time in a row. You met on a forum for the Entropic Resistance – she’ll almost certainly forgive you. Unless the app tells her not to. You can’t ask the app if you should feel resentment or regret.
Sometimes knowing that something is predictable doesn’t mean you can avoid doing it.
You’ve never really known how to feel about that.
The doorbell rings. A purchase by the app, unannounced and unexplained. The plain box has a pill inside. You take it and wait.