What happens when you sign up for a hi-tech digital behavior modification program to get healthy, but you don’t much enjoy the experience?
I’ve been experimenting with microfictions, short SF stories (1,000 words or less) that help me explore and illustrate aspects of how our lives might evolve within digital transformation.
Here, then, is another microfiction.
Next time, I’ll dig into how realistic this story is.
Fleeing the Emerald City, a Microfiction
Calvin hated the person who had done this to him. Calvin was that person.
The bakery was sampling little slices of pecan pull-aparts redolent with cinnamon… and was that a hint of nutmeg? That’s what did him in, waiting in line to buy his dejecting (but at least edible) multigrain sandwich bread.
Pull-aparts were Calvin’s kryptonite.
He couldn’t see them, but he could smell them. The samples were on the counter in front of him. His gaze followed, Denise, the baker with the big smile and the full sleeve of ink (all Maurice Sendak wild things dancing down her left arm) as she walked to the slicer. The whole grain breads, taste free bran muffins, and gluten free (how did gluten free bread even exist?) options all popped in high def clarity. The danishes, pastries, cookies, cakes, and white flour breads—Calvin knew they were there, but his glasses blurred them.
Calvin had been praying for a diabetes diagnosis because then his crappy insurance would cover Ozempic (not due to go generic for years), which would tune the intensity of his urges, reduce his boundless appetite for treats savory and sweet. But his blood sugar was fine. Damn it. He was just fat. That put Ozempic, Wegovy, and their ilk beyond his economic reach.
Karl, the Physician’s Assistant who was his only regular health care contact, had scolded him at his last biannual physical. Weight up. Blood Pressure up. He tried exercise, but that only kept his weight from going up even more. He tried joyless salad lunches, then was hungry and unable to focus. He tried going vegan, then spent his days shoveling nuts into his mouth until, on the brink of finding a tall bridge for a swan dive, he’d wind up at McDonald’s, ravenous, ordering a 12 pack of chicken nuggets with a side order of shame.
Calvin’s desperation had been palpable; Karl told him about Nudgetekk.
He already wore glasses, so the Nudgetekk service replaced his specs with new smartglasses that included his prescription plus Heads Up Display technology that rendered healthy food visible with crystal clarity and blurred out the bad stuff.
Trips to any supermarket got faster. The Nudgetekk AI synced with the market’s AI, mapping out a route that first took Calvin to the colorful produce section, then skirted the cloudy gray aisles that he knew had consumer packaged goods, processed foods, high salt foods, and alcohol. When he would put healthy items into his shopping cart, little thumbs up icons would float up from the bottom of his lenses, and the connected earbuds would emit tiny sighs of happiness.
The glasses and earbuds also filtered out commercials for fast food restaurants, doughnuts, soda, and beer—whether the ads were on video, audio, billboards, or in print. Calvin always knew that he was missing an ad for treats when the screen grayed out or his podcast started sounding like the teacher in the Peanuts cartoons, but knowledge of a stimulus wasn’t the same thing as the stimulus itself.
Nudgetekk provided similar positive reinforcement when Calvin later ate the healthy foods or ordered another goddamn restaurant salad. It was gamification: the better he ate, the more points he scored, and he could see his week-to-week progress in a weight-loss leaderboard that popped up if he looked all the way to the right and held his gaze on a tiny floating target.
He didn’t have to keep the glasses on—the way the citizens of the Emerald City had green lenses locked onto them in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—but Calvin’s vision was bad enough that without glasses he couldn’t see much, and his Nudgetekk would emit quiet whimpers if he took off the glasses and earbuds when he wasn’t in bed about to go to sleep.
It was working. Slowly. So slowly. The leaderboard charted infinitesimal weight loss. Calvin thought his BP was stabilizing, too, but his home blood pressure cuff wasn’t smart enough to sync with Nudgetekk, and he hadn’t wanted to spend the money to buy a new one.
The problem was the bakery. Nudgetekk did not have nasal filters, so when Calvin walked in his nostrils flared to suck in a yeasty symphony of deliciousness.
Also, the bakery was old school. Not smart. No AI to sync with Nudgetekk about its inventory. The bakery was small enough that all the foods, blurry and clear, were in the same place. Calvin’s smartglasses had to work harder to decide what to blur out, and the earbuds couldn’t filter out conversations the bakers had with other customers about their yummy purchases, so Calvin heard resolve-weakening chatter about chocolate chip danish, black and white cookies, and raisin pumpernickel bread.
As Denise sliced his multigrain, below, in the blurry peripheral vision outside his lenses, Calvin saw the pull-apart samples on a plate next to his left hand. Spider-like, or like Thing from The Addams Family, his fingers found a slice and popped it into his mouth, which then exploded with saliva and joy.
Back from the slicer, Denise twirled the plastic bag shut and wrapped it with a wire in an expert flourish. “Cash or credit?” she asked.
Nudgetekk didn’t track Calvin’s cash purchases.
He closed his eyes and swallowed sugary spit. “Cash,” he said in a small voice, knowing what would come next.
“Anything else?”
Calvin opened his eyes to meet Denise’s gaze. She was in focus. Pretty. Brown eyes. A dash of freckles across her nose, which sported a dainty ring in the right nostril.
“Sir, anything else?”
“Um,” Calvin said. Then he inhaled through his nose. “Yes, one of those things.” He pointed at the sample plate next to him.
“The pecan pull-aparts?” Denise asked. “Those are my favorite.”
“Yes, please,” Calvin said. He handed over a $20, then left.
Sitting in his car, Calvin looked at the pecan pull-apart in his hand. Nudgetekk couldn’t filter the actual pastry. It was beautiful.
With mixed feelings, he took a bite.
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