“Exactly,” Mr. One said, bowing his head in reverent approval. “That really rounds out the customer-slash-viewer experience.”
I spend my breaks poking around on my handheld e-frame—a sadly outdated, brick-like model that I rent from the debtors’ colony where my older brother and I live because he’s so far in debt. For work, I use its recognition software to identify appetizers so that I don’t accidentally serve gravy fries to a kid who’s ordered cheese fries (trust me, our gravy and our cheese look identical). But during my breaks, I use it to browse FeedBin for top-rated feeds.
I like to watch the feeds from cameras planted in stores and offices and restaurants. Even a lot of security cameras are connected to the Internet these days, although I don’t really care to watch someone standing in an elevator. Sometimes I find a real gem of a feed coming in through the built-in camera in someone else’s e-frame. People will whip out their e-frames to film just about anything happening around them and they’re not shy about sharing it on the Internet. A lot of times that’s the best way to catch the weirdest or coolest or most embarrassing stuff. Not everyone likes to be on camera—I get that. But if a big corporation decides your feed is popular enough to advertise on, it means you get a cut of their ad revenue, so at least you get paid for your humiliation.
Lately I prefer to watch streaming video of People Having The Worst Day Ever so I can add sympathetic emoji in the comments section (except my e-frame doesn’t support emoji, so I have to transcribe them): Jaycub of Mill Creek gets dumped for a guy wearing a shirt that says Llamas Love Me (Teary Face). Middle-aged Darren goes on a series of soul-crushing interviews, during which he realizes his computer skills are hopelessly outdated for today’s job market (Dismayed Face). Overlarge Allasin weeps on the pioneer costume of a Little-Bitty Prairie ride-operator because her overlarge son can’t fit in the safety harness for Wagon Train Chase (Dismay with Inverted Eyebrows).
Sometimes I use my e-frame to call up their locations, the Jaycubs and Darrens and Allasins. I think about heading out to Mill Creek Mall or Technology Is Supreme Office Park to watch the events unfold before my own eyes, or even stick out my e-frame to add another feed to the Bin. But then I think of Griffin.
I met Griffin at the MyFuture debtors’ colony when my older brother (and legal guardian) was sent there with me in tow. Griffin had been in with his dad for three years already because of a massive amount of credit card debt that had been bought out by a ruthless collection agency. My brother had a messy mortgage that he’d tried to take on after our parents’ death, plus medical bills from our parents’ last few comatose weeks of life. In hindsight, we should have sold the house right after our parents’ car accident and used the money to pay the hospital. But how can you sell the rickety porch your dad built, or your parents’ bedroom, or the marks your mom’s favorite swivel chair left on the wall? You can’t. So you end up giving it to the bank when your mortgage falls into default.
Griffin got me the job at Flavor Foam so I could help my brother chip away at his debt and get out of MyFuture. As a minor, I can’t have any debt attached to me and can come and go as I please. But Brandon’s stuck there, can’t even go around the corner to get a burger or take a swim in the lake or anything. Not even to, say, get a job with which to pay off his debt. What he can do is try to come up with some clever activity that will make his feed popular and attract advertisers. But nothing that involves nudity, or suggesting nudity, or suggesting anything else that typically goes on in a motel, because then the government comes in and confiscates all of MyFuture’s cameras and e-frames, and no one makes money, least of all Visa. The government doesn’t mind what your average person does with a camera and an Internet connection, but it’s pretty intent on preventing debtors’ colonies from becoming porn plantations.
Residents in MyFuture are great at pulling together to attract hits on their feeds. Once we did a reinterpretation of Les Misérables, with Javert as an obsessive collection agent and Jean Valjean doing everything he could to avoid having his adopted daughter grow up in a debtors’ colony. Small-time review sites called it “poignant” and “relevant,” but Rotten Tomatoes never mentioned it, and it didn’t catch on at FeedBin.
We also had a good gig going where we charged local schools to bring in kids so they could see firsthand the dangers of high interest rate credit cards. But a couple of credit companies shut that down real fast with some bad press about children being exposed to former addicts and dropouts.