June 2018 RCLAS Wordplay at Work Issue 55

Long gone are the boulangeries that sold fresh-baked croissants with crispy outsides and steaming buttery soft bread on the inside. I can almost smell the butter... "...Hey hold up...Kelly don't press the inflight air fresheners! Bleh! Why would someone want their car to smell like fake buttered popcorn?"

I miss the farmers markets and the fishmongers with oysters in the shell and wild Pacific salmon. Sure, I can order a box of croissants off Amazon and they'll be at my house in under an hour by drone.

But even dipped in IKEA coffee, they taste as though they've been gathering dust in a warehouse. Remember that old saying there's more fish in the sea? Friends don't dish out that advice anymore. Thanks to micro-plastics there are literally no fish.

My mind drifts as I stare out the window at the great grey slabs; from the sky the corporations look like prisons.

Inside they do too, with endless rows of tiny cubicles just roomy enough for the employees to stand at a VR console.

I should know. Kelly and I both work in public relations for the overlord. We go to work, jack into the Virt and communicate with bloggers, social media mavens, viralists, vipers, Instagram narcissists. Selling is soulless in the Twittersphere.

There's no news media, not in the traditional sense. No New York Times or Global TV. The CBC was stripped of public funding when Netflix took over the federal government, but it still produces a few half-decent, corporatesponsored documentaries, though they are too heavy on product placement for my taste.

We were some of the last reporters at The Vancouver Sun, which struggled to put out weak copy with a skeleton crew for a few years until finally closing its doors about 30 years ago, more than a century after it opened.

But tonight none of that matters. We are getting some of the old ink slingers back together for a blow out reunion at the dilapidated tower at the foot of Granville Street on the waterfront.

Of course the building is under water up to the mezzanine, the roof has caved somewhat, and it serves only as a home to squatters, Virt addicts who have scrambled their brains, and non PRIME members.

It is condemned, but the PRIMEpolice won't search the Warming Wastelands, which makes it an ideal venue to smuggle in banned booze.