Page 55 of Poster Girl

“Would you?”

Sonya doesn’t know how to answer. She doesn’t know what he’s trying to do, what he’s getting at, what he wants.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It used to speak to me. Now it’s just there.”

“And you liked it,” he supplies. “When it spoke to you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Heat rushes into her cheeks as she searches for the words. “Because, it... it made the world feel—richer. Everything I looked at had history and complexity that was in my grasp. Everything I did had meaning.”

“No,” he says, softly. “Everything you did wasquantified.There’s a difference.”

“They felt the same to me,” she says.

“You were a child,” he says. “You’re no longer a child, but you’re still using a child’s logic. If itfeelsa certain way, it mustbethat way.”

His voice is gentle. She feels like he’s only seeing the girl on the poster, and there’s nothing she can say to convince him there’s anything more to her. She’s just a black-and-white filter and a Delegation slogan to him.

“Why don’t you help me with my logic, then?” she says. “I saw one of those CAD pamphlets the other day, about the Elicit being a slippery slope back to the Insight. It is, I assume, just the next in a long line of technologies you want to carve out of existence.”

Myth’s Veil ripples imperceptibly. It’s just a random fluctuation in the iridescence, but for a moment it seems almost expressive.

“The Insight wasn’t some aberration or anomaly,” he says. “It is thesymptom of a disease that still infects our population—the desire to make everythingeasy,to sacrifice autonomy and privacy for convenience. That’s what technology is, Ms. Kantor. A concession to laziness and the devaluing of human effort.”

“Forgive me, but...” She leans a little closer. “This room is a shrine to technology.”

“Not all technology is the same. I encourage you not to get tripped up by semantics,” he says. “A device that you carry with you everywhere you go, a device that monitors and watches you, is not the same as one that sits in your house and plays music or dries your hair.”

“So where does your organization think we should have stopped?” she says. “Or are you just going to hack away at everything that makes life easier until it feels right?”

“We would never be so imprudent,” he replies. “We have indeed pinpointed the historical origin of our present woes: the cloud.”

“The cloud,” she says.

“It almost sounds as if you haven’t readanyof the Citizens Against Digital Takeover literature,” he says.

“Forgive me,” she says. “I don’t have access to a lot of it in my birdcage.”

He pauses, for a moment, his hands clenching around his knee.

“Yes,” he says, “the cloud: the invisible web that surrounds us all, saturating our very air with data that we cannot see or touch or even access, for the most part. Most people are not even aware of the term anymore; it has been lost to time. But before the cloud, if you had a piece of information—a document, perhaps, or a picture, you would store it on a device to which only you had access. The problem with this was that that device was a physical thing; it was subject to all the vagaries of a tangible object, it could be broken, or harmed, or stolen, or lost. It deteriorated with time, like a body. It was, in other words, finite.”

He leans forward, and she catches a glimpse, through the Veil, of a single honey-brown eye.

“The cloud made everything infinite,” Myth says. “And it facilitated the acquisition of massive amounts of data. And just who was the fontof data, the endless source from which to draw, to profit, to distract, to control?” He taps his chest with his index finger. “We were. We were, and still are, an endlessly renewable resource of information. The more we know about each other, the more power is within our grasp to maneuver each other. Because the cloud is not, strictly speaking, real. Every byte of data that exists must still be stored in a physical location, even if it is not one you have access to independently. We have simply ceded those locations to others for our own convenience. At first, we gave them to companies, and that was bad enough. But then we made a catastrophic mistake. Can you guess what it was?”

Sonya stays quiet, and still.

“We gave it,” he says, “to our government.”

He sits back, uncrossing his legs and stretching his arms wide, to take up the whole width of the couch. His body is like a bundle of wire. If he stood, they might be the same height, but there is something grand about him, and something unsteady, the rabbit heart of a fanatic tapping away in his chest.

She thinks of the rows and rows of files in the library, a mausoleum for the Delegation. She’s always thought of the records that were purged during the uprising as comparable to that library—some things were lost, perhaps, but for the most part, everything the Delegation knew was there in those file folders. It strikes her as foolish now. The Insight logged everything she ever looked at, everyone she ever spoke to, everything she ever did. The library could not contain all of that even for one person, let alone everyone in the entire megalopolis.

And all of that data now lives somewhere in this building.

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