Everything about her was calm, inviting. My mother, I knew, would have loved her: her way of keeping her hair parted on the side just so, her nails kept clean, the simple cut of her black mohair jumper. I wanted her to like me. I knew she didn’t.
SO YOU WANT TO LIVE IN A PIVOT CITY? SIDEWALK LABS
“I’m sorry, I didn’t think driving to a chemist to get my girlfriend painkillers could be considered gluttony on my part.”
1
Sarah Barns
“Look, I know you know all this. I know you know where I was. I appreciate my behaviour at times may not have lived up to the expectations set out in the Pivot City Compact. I don’t try to excuse my behaviour, although I would ask you to understand that I am, in essence, only human. I make mistakes. I am impulsive.”
763
She looked back at me with smiling eyes. Eyes that said ‘Me too.’ But she said something different. “We are beyond the point when we can use human frailty as an excuse. We all, living here in this city, have a responsibility to future generations. Once we go over our carbon quota, that’s it. Further consumption of any kind that is likely to lead to increased emissions is tantamount to theft. When it comes to carbon, in the terms set out in the Pivot City Compact, this is a zero sum game. Your gluttony is someone else’s poverty.”
764
1
The following speculative fiction is a satire that imagines a city run through a corporatized governance model that polices individual behaviour. Such a thought experiment could equally apply to other places and smart city companies such as Cisco or IBM. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for the purpose of conducting a thought experiment without intent to infringe.
765
“That I appreciate. The thing is, the data we receive isn’t coded according to intent. You may have been helping another person, but it’s logged simply as distance travelled. And you’re over your limit. Big time. We do offer all customers a 10% buffer, in recognition that unforeseen things, events, emergencies, do happen. We get that. You, however, exceeded your quota one in every four days last year and 35% of days in the year before. You must understand these excesses are simply inexcusable.” DAMN. Of course she’s pretty. That’s the point. She is pretty and she follows the rules. Me? Somehow I seem to be the one who is always breaking things. Exceeding the quota. Leaving the phone at home. Shouting at Alexa. Hosting late night parties for dozens of our closest friends. When everyone piles into Ubers at the end of the night we’ve been happy to wear the inevitable spike in exit-miles from our address; somehow, we figured this data wasn’t associated with our personal accounts. We only found out six months ago we were wrong.
768