Nick gets off the metro at Hidalgo to switch to the university line and as usual can’t get a god damn dat signal to fb his position to all his amigos. City this size got no excuse. Shit, world got no excuse. You think we living in the fucking last year.

Some bum flashes his tin-cup app at Nick, but Nick flattens his thumb, scrolls his fuck-off app into view and keeps walking. Still no dat. At this rate, he’s gonna be the last hombre into the GPS pool and all the girls be laughing.

He’s about to take the stairs up to the U platform when this old guy with a fucking antique iphone3 bumps into Nick. Old guy probably running OS-IronHorse7 or some damn dung. Those kernels make you spill shit like zoo monkeys or a yokel that fall from the dat cloud into a dead-end IP addy.

Nick starts to flash his sarco app when the old guy puts his hand on Nick’s shoulder. Fuck, indecent animation. And to make it worse, the guy opens his real mouth and says something actually verbal, some god damn dictionary words.  404 losers, get a life. Nick pushes by.

On the U line, Nick eases up. The dat is back and although he’s about 7000 updates behind, he’s got some twenty flesh-clock mins before the train sleeks into the south end of the city to catch up. Not for nothing he majors in predictive s&r.

Done and getting thirsty, he pongs his beer app and takes a quaff. He shouldn’t drink before a test, but what the hell. Nobody gonna know. He’ll grab a breath mint app at the terminal.

Whoa, he makes it in time. Only two other amigos in the time share tunnel. And besides, the prof always shows up late. Prof man is old school.

As usual, the dat shield is up. Prof man thinks we ought to swallow our dat with rocks. More old school shit and Nick figures it’s all part of the test. But oh, so easy, easy! Nick can cross three or four app boundaries with one hand while keeping his gf virtually blissy.

Prof man calls time and all the flesh clocks play a quick hard-rock drum fill. Chips on the static mats and step away from the message apps, prof tweets. Then prof man launches his boring lecture app.

Christ, another dose of bullshit history. Nick heard it all before. Yappity yap: nobody used to see which side of the bed you was sleeping on and govmint anal-probe an intrusion. Oh, ten big thumbs down! You couldn’t sync up to your amigo’s dat in those days! You couldn’t even stream your lunch menu! People sat around with no sw!

Fucking unsupported personality drivers. Nick knows from his psyc app how people always looking back at the good old days. Not him! He healthy, adjusted, not the least bit prone to dl a murderous rampage.

And all his amigos agree. When we meet in the dat tavern, icon face to face, we all perfectly robust. Never no error screen come between us.