This supernaturally attractive crowd was visible to Amon by way of the ImmaNet, a global communication network that matched up the world seen by the naked eye with a veneer of graphics and information infoseen by the eyescreen integrated into every Free Citizen’s retina. Using a kind of software called digimake, it was easy to design a personalized overlay and attach it to your body, as though sketching a portrait on tracing paper, modifying it, and pasting it atop the model. When the people around Amon moved, the ImmaNet ensured their digimade appearance moved with them, the digital world inextricably bound to its naked counterpart. There were no bad hair days, no bulging veins, no sunspots or hairy moles, no red eye, yellow teeth, dangling nose-hairs or crooked smiles, no crumpled shirts, mismatched ties or poorly-fitted suits. Average faces were coded with distinction, strange faces averaged into charm, the power of digimake cleansing the metropolis of ugliness like the alchemical light of some esthetic deity.
Yet the ImmaNet was limited to only two senses—sight and hearing—and Amon’s sense of touch belied the spectacle. Nowhere could he see even a dab of fat; every office lady either voluptuous or slender, every salaryman brawny or slim. But he could feel flab and untoned muscle pressing in all around him: a squishy love handle on his side, a soft bicep on his belly, a sagging breast on the small of his back.
The air was filled with the scent of perfume, spray-on deodorant, and mild halitosis. Jets of A/C continuously blasted the top of his head, still sweaty from his walk through humid streets to the train station a few minutes earlier. This injected an almost nauseating chill into his blood, yet soothed the heat seeping from his cocoon of clammy fabric-covered flesh.
Amon had his arms upraised in front of him, his hands gripping the cold metal rail overhead. He allowed his torso to lean with the train’s juddering momentum but kept his feet firmly planted on the floor, never stepping from his spot, while he focused on his diaphragm in keeping with the breath reduction method he had mastered. To make up for his failure at blink reduction back in his apartment, it was imperative that he utilize these spare minutes in transit effectively and limit inessential actions. Amon believed in living in the now.
Breath reduction was very much like blink reduction, in that it was all about finding the golden mean. First, he made each breath long, but not so long that GATA would register it as deep breathing, a relatively expensive action. A breath was marked as “deep” after a precise amount of time (specified by the definition of the action-property) had elapsed since it was initiated. Through repeated practice, Amon had drilled this duration into his nerves until he developed a visceral intuition of exactly when to stop, so that respiration would be maximally drawn out without ever quite being deep.
At the same time, he regulated the pauses between the beginning and end of each inhalation and exhalation. Once again, the trick was balance: the pauses had to be lengthened, but never so long as to be registered as holding breath, another expensive action. Successful pausing also required subtle awareness of air hunger. Like the sensation of dryness in the eyes, the sensation of air hunger was a sign of impending reflexes that would jack up average breath frequency and safeguard homeostasis. According to the guru, the timing of the onset of air hunger varied from individual to individual and, after months of training, Amon had finally discovered his personal ideal. He could halt his lungs right up until the moment just before the action was labeled as holding breath, but by about the third or fourth consecutive breath cycle, he always detected a premonition of air hunger and knew that for the next few breaths he had to stop slightly earlier. Ever striving to calibrate his respiration into a more cost-effective pattern, he manipulated the muscles around his solar plexus, gently guiding their expansion and contraction, stoppering the faintest whispers of physiological imbalance before they could amplify into profligate nervous system echoes.
All over the train car interior—on the walls, windows, and handrails; the seats, bag-rack and floor; in every space visible between, above and below the tight horde of bodies—a kaleidoscope of advertainment squirmed. In an effort to ignore it, Amon stared at the back of a woman standing a few paces in front of him. She was wearing a navy blue blazer, her light brown hair falling loose to just below her shoulders. He kept his eyes fixed on a point a few centimeters beneath the tips of her hair, pretending the light and color dancing in his peripheral wasn’t there. Yet even still, he caught fleeting glimpses out of the corner of his eye. An apple with an eardrum pulsated to a silent beat; a group of women sat at a sleek white bar before dark green smoothies laughing uproariously; a penguin waddled alone through a department store with a Koku brand cigar sticking from its mouth. These myriad fragments of story and image were rendered in dynamic 3D, indistinguishable from the vistas of naked perception. They appeared within frames of different shapes and sizes that covered every inch of the surfaces, like shards of a broken mirror that had cobbled themselves together, a shuffling mosaic of jagged portals to alternate realms.
Lone tableaux and snippets of scenes leapt from their display fragments into the edges of Amon’s visual field in quick succession, like lightning flashes only half seen. Two male hands shaking firmly against a tropical ocean backdrop; a tortoise on wooden floorboards watching a form hidden beneath white sheets pump up and down; the truncated, triangular squiggles of the Kavipal logo. One after the other, they tried to grab his attention, but the attempt was in vain. Never for a moment did Amon look away from the navy blue fabric, for that would have meant wasting his money. The ImmaNet was constantly detecting the focal point of his eyes and charging him for the image rights of whatever he looked at. This would have included the woman, except she had waived the licensing fees for her back unlike the advertising agencies that managed chunks of the train, as people were generally sociable and wanted to encourage friendly attention, whereas companies were confident that their content could enthrall viewers into paying their rates and using their actions.
Such confidence was misplaced in Amon’s case, however, because he had configured his privacy settings to hide all his personal information. This allowed him to elude the powerful marketing algorithms that controlled how the InfoFlux presented itself from one instant to the next. Usually these programs displayed a different selection of content to each individual depending on their preferences, goals, vital signs, mood, age, job, gender. They then recorded the frequency and length of time each item was viewed, calculated viewing tendencies, and used the result to provide a new bundle of content the following second. This attention analysis loop ensured that material displayed to any one person was the best possible match for their desires at that moment. But since Amon kept marketers in the dark about who he was, their algorithms could only work with anonymous factors like location, date, and time of day. As a result, the majority of what he saw on that rush hour train was geared towards the “working professional,” not specifically to him. He realized that in configuring his settings this way, he was sacrificing his chance to inhabit a personally meaningful world; a world always funny to him, exciting to him, moving to him, full of wit and art and drama, and miraculous goods he never knew he wanted. But a meaningful world was a distracting world, and distractions were inimical to frugality. By increasing the chances that things in his vicinity were boring, Amon ensured that they were much easier to ignore. Admittedly, flicking his eyes away from the woman’s back to watch something—anything—would have been more interesting than the dull fabric of her blazer, but that was where willpower came in. After every exhalation, Amon checked the alignment of his eye-line in relation to her shoulders, correcting the slightest drift in any direction by bringing it back to center.