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A silver, metal plaque displayed against a bright red backdrop. Text engraved on the plaque reads, "Four hours of steady work face you. You rub blindly at one wrist with the other hand and reattach the brace, molding the various input/output feeds back into their ports, the audio, visual, haptic, mouth-smell and pure reason. It was typical, routine but aggravating, setting tons of exits dark, setting properties manually on editing, the west exit of the dining car that must be unpick able, the pencils that must be broken of their lead, the rotation speed on a deck of hypercard that must be trued with the accelerating average saccade rate. Then a bunch of identical or nearly-identical descriptions to reset on every atomically-detailed manual interaction object, re-spawning every item instanced in the idiorrhythmic skate’s mini-bar, for example, or buffering every one of the phalanstery’s refractor diodes. All it goes to show is that your’e working against the software too much, Now with three upward blinks interspersed with a short series of lip tics into the facial interface meshed into your latex balaclava respawn the set of tri-fold hologrammatic welcome brochures. You could be much more productive if you had the chance, but that’s how it goes. Athos is closed-source and always has been, the massive influx of new residents with new needs notwithstanding. Idle thoughts, ancient history, better to spend it artificially deflating the calorie currency on the skate’s all-you-care-to-eat buffet, to fuck just a bit with the schismatic flesh mercantilists in Madalay District. Set chafing capacity to maximum. What joy is there in living. You yourself had kong since ceased to register hunger. When you notice it, it’s not that you’re not hungry - you could choose to feel the effects, lightheaded every time you bend down to tap a pressure gauge, blurred vision when you stand back up, the constant headaches and fatigue. But the feeling of emptiness, that the stomach is a void to be filled with raw materials from the feed-cache or a sub auricular puff of enzyme slurry, that was gone. The propriety of that sense of internal space, of endogenous and unaccountable degrees of internal freedom for desire, bent back towards its opposite. Your tasks, the purest extension of a certain kind of unfulfillable desire, await you no less for that. If you simultaneously adjust a row of damper switches to their most neutral position, use the flat edge of your palm. The idea that in times of harsh exogenous conditions, in which so many resources are bound to sheer homeostasis, the tariff that must be extracted for the use of symbiotic system of immersion actually decreases. The last switch cannot be turned off, Paradoxically, as things get worse overall, the worsening situation costs increasingly less to maintain." |