Welcome back to Teaser Tuesday! Today we’re serving up the first section of a near-future SF story about a girl, her boyfriend and a peck of trouble. And yes, the title is a tease because you’re going to come back next time to find out what it means.
Molybdenum
Neel had been threatening to get new tag specs for summer vacation, and sure enough, he did. They were insufferable. They weren’t stupid mirrorshades or dumb specs that PShopped your eyes in real time, they were the latest broadcast specs.
Whatever he was looking at, they would search tags and publish some ironic video commentary. That’s what they were called, iRonic. In Neel’s case, that meant that whenever he looked at a girl, the specs broadcast an imaginary view of her breasts. The nipples were too real. I mean, ok, he knew what my breasts looked like, which was obviously a mistake on my part, but the way the specs could predict what other girls looked like was uncanny. I was sure he had never seen Geeneh’s breasts, but I had, and those specs had her birthmark in just the right place. Maybe she had uploaded her boobs somewhere and the specs had found it. Anyway… Oh, and when he moved his head, the boobs jiggled. Like I said, insufferable and I had no interest in staring at my own breasts when I talked to him, though it was kind of cute that he was thinking of me at least… anyway!
Yeah, so Neel had a weird hobby besides staring at my breasts (which I have to admit wasn’t so weird, after all my tag specs were predictive (at least! And how much had I had to scream at my mom to get that upgrade anyway…) and ALL guys stared at your breasts after the first three seconds, even that gay math teacher did it). Not that I needed predictive specs to tell me that. Anyway.
So Neel’s weird hobby involved this metal detector, which he swore could even detect molybdenum, or something. Why you would want a metal detector that could find molybdenum was beyond me, but this was a guy thing. If it couldn’t detect molybdenum, but there was a guy in Korea who had one that did, then I said whatever, but Neel took it as an insult to his nascent manhood.
So I was at the mall like a good girl told her mother she would be. I was sitting there in the food court watching all the girls flitting past. Just to pass the time I was letting my specs predict which was a virgin and more especially, whose virginity status had changed since last week because I got a tweet that the last week of school was a good time for this status to change in the natural course of things. And of course, anyone who had changed status, I tagged SLUT and dumped that into the public tagstream anonymously. Now I realize that most of these same girls were pubtagging me DORK or 1STBASER so this was just quid pro status quo.
Neel suddenly sits down next to me, and I mean suddenly, since I had no tag warning that he was going materialize out of the crowd with this crazed look on his face. I mean, a crowd should be tagged 30% PROB NEEL or 30 SEC TO NEEL or something if Neel is in it.
“I got something you have to see.” Neel was rarely that emphatic. Or articulate. His specs weren’t broadcasting my breasts. One was broadcasting static, the other a test pattern. Then they were counting down the way old films did and suddenly a gangster (my specs tagged him as Edward G. Robinson playing Rico Bandello) was getting shot and falling, and then they were just frog’s eyes (Bufus bufus, Wikipedia Commons), with a little PShopped sparkle. Neel was obviously having a hard time keeping his mind on things.
“I slapped you the last time you tried to show me that.”
He had regained his cool. The shades were playing Pong. His right eye was winning.
“Jebus, not that! Is sex the only thing you girls think about?” My breasts started to flicker onto the screens of his specs.
“OK, what?”
“Come with me, I’ll show you.”
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