Guide-Dance
by Robert Reed
Your phone rests in your hand, your mouth hangs open. All that comes out of you is one exceptionally stubborn silence.
Your guide awaits, as silent as you.
Your guide is an application connected to plantations of servers capable of light-speed thought. But you aren't capable of very much. For whatever reason, you're nothing now but an incoherent collection of flesh and pain.
"Flesh and pain," you mutter, and your phone says, "I can't quite hear you, sir."
The app asks, "What do want from me today, sir?"
The simplest question.
"Happiness," you say. "Show me the way to happiness."
All of humanity is in motion. On legs, inside cars, and through the sky, yes. But mostly inside these million-year-old brains.
The app has given you a map and one fat line to follow, and you're only role is to agree or disagree. You agree, and the car accelerates, brakes and turns and accelerates again, software chasing a remarkably specific address. It's interesting to mark how far you need to go to find happiness. Five states to cross. Major highways and then a minor highway twisting across a landscape you've never seen before. But that's how the app works. Feed it your profiles and give it a single-word wish: Happiness. Enlightenment. Love. There are other words, but those are the favorites. Available for just 23 days, this app has become a global phenomenon. That's what every news report claims. Right now, a billion people are on the move. That's what your eyes tell you. Flat country, all of it underpopulated, yet the traffic is heavy, heavy. Multitudes ride alone or sometimes with others. Families in some cases, but not always. Strangers have been paired together. How can you tell? It's the way they sit side-by-side. The way one pays strict attention when the other speaks. Only strangers hang on each other's words like that.
Needing fuel, your car pulls off the Interstate and parks, plugging into the juice port.
And you step inside a convenience store.
Nobody works the register. Almost nobody is working anywhere today. But one pretty lady has borrowed a stool, elbows pressing against the counter, studying every face that passes through sliding glass doors.
You say nothing.
She answers with her own silence, glancing back at her phone.
This is not your destination, and she isn't waiting for you. And here is the new normal: Full of purpose, people do an exemplary job of ignoring everything else, including one another.
The men's bathroom is filthy, but welcome. Snacks are depleted but adequate. Your phone takes responsibility for payments, and out you go, and on you go, juiced up and fed well enough to reach the end of your journey.
The app is small and elegantly written and remarkably bug-free for software that wasn't seen in the wild until last month. Called Guide-Dance, it seems like a clumsy play on the word "Guidance." Clumsiness implies a poor translation by a Chinese corporation or a clever joke by the AI mastermind. Except this elegant bit of code was actually crafted by a young woman in Hamburg, and she named it after her favorite two cats.
