One Every Minute

Prompt Response: "When I arrived, the line seemed to stretch for miles. Everyone wanted one."

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

It still holds true today. Now, I don't have ambitions of ruling the world, just my little corner of it. It's so easy to enforce that rule, too, when the masses prove to be willfully blind, deaf, and stupid, all rolled into one. Every day, I thank whatever imaginary creature in the sky you prefer for the advent of mobile technology.

It's become even easier since augmented reality took place as the paradigm for computing on a personal level. Wear your monocle, or your glasses, of your goggles (if you're one of those annoying faux-tech steam-freaks), and the world you paid attention to is overridden with whatever computer imagery I want you to see. Walking past a department store, your device reads the radio tag in it, and broadcasts a signal to the input to show you a fashion catwalk in the display window. An urban heritage plugin? Well, suddenly New York of today looks and sounds exactly like New York of 1912. You're here, and simultaneously not here, all at the same time.

People not only believe what they want to believe, but now they can also see and hear only what they want to see and hear, and how they see and hear it. What used to be called a QR Code, that funny little square you'd scan with your mobile device to learn more regarding a promotion for, say, signing up for the military? The software you installed shows you a giant poster from World War II saying, “Sub Spotted -- Let 'Em Have It!” for the Navy.

You decide what you want to see, when you want to see it, and how you want to see it. All of you are so beautifully, wonderfully, willfully ignorant. And that is why, with two eyes, I plan on being king of my little corner of this self-blinded country.

Sure, the software can filter spam messages and ads you don't want. Doesn't stop me. Code an icon to display “street art” and it's not an advertisement. Or, you can buy “zones” where simply entering them agrees you to the terms of usage, and you have to see what I'm putting in front of your face, no matter what filter you're applying. Granted, there is word that the feds are trying to curb that, but that's at least two years down the pipe, and certainly not anything I have to worry about. I'll have something else in place by then.

But let me tell you about my greatest trick. The one that proves that people are so intentionally blind by their own augmented paradigms, even the historical ones, that they're doomed to repeat history. Over. And over. And over.

The easiest ones were, of course, the tourists. Coming from areas where there might not be a need for optic overlays, they use their old mobile, handheld devices. Renting cheap equipment for their stay in the city from their hotel, usually means they don't bother playing with any of the fancy filters or blockers, and just get inundated with everything everyone has to show. I know their eyes were on my stuff because I picked up specific tourist zones at specific times to broadcast my message.

When they walk out of their hotel with their borrowed eyewear, they see the chance to go on a historical walk, and experience historical things. Like London had walking tours for Jack the Ripper, before his identity was confirmed, and the whole thing became passé, because there was no more mystery behind it. They want to experience the city as it once was, and I offer them a unique opportunity to see something only hundreds before are reported to have seen, and they can get the chance tonight, tomorrow, and twice on Sunday.

They're the easy ones, and they line up for a block. The harder ones are the city dwellers. The ones savvy enough to set their blockers, and keep their paradigm filters from processing something as tacky as an RFID broadcast from a shop window. You have to appeal to their sense of exclusivity, novelty, the fact that they're going to experience something to brag to their friends about. Throw in some platitudes about how elite they'll be, or how it's “off-off-off-” exclusive with only a few performances, and they'll come running.

This one, though. This one blew me away with how amazingly effective it was. It was about three weeks ago when I pulled this latest stunt.

It took a small warehouse building that I rented cheap for the night, and a lot of rope line set up to make a maze of the queue, leading all the way to the back door. Icons and tags thrown about the environment to show them some points of interest, to make them feel like they were waiting in whatever line their augmented reality took them to, with information pulled free from open source projects and museums. My overhead was ridiculously low.

It was time for me to show up, and take tickets at the door. I swear, you would have thought I'd opened the most exclusive art gallery or restaurant in the entire city, and it was going to go out of style in the next ten minutes, unless they got in there. I'm not joking.

When I arrived, the line seemed to stretch for miles. Everyone wanted one.

Everyone wanted that experience that I had to sell them. The best part was, half of them probably weren't having the same experience, thanks to having their blinders on, feeding them whatever version of the world was better than what they were used to living in.

The ladies and gentlemen wanted a show, and I was happy to give them one. I spent three-and-a-half hours being the best busker and barker I could, telling them to step right up, step RIGHT up, and see this amazing historical attraction, coded just for their special experience. They just had to queue up and step through the first set of doors to join the exclusive crowd who would get to see this for one night only.

Between tips for a good performance, because even good actors are still appreciated (AR can't recreate everything), and entrance fees, I cleared over 45,500 before I had to close the doors and turn people away. If I was a better man than I am, and I'm not, I'd almost feel like I'd stolen it.

So, remotely, I set the lights on doors to my greatest attraction. A historical marvel people hadn't seen in more than a century. A chance to experience things only their ancestors had gotten a chance to glimpse first hand. The far door was automatically triggered at that point and people started filing through. Once there, they were filed either left or right, to be led into that single, exclusive moment.

Of course, by that time, I was long, long gone. The software would lead people through the queue and no one would come back out to see me through the entrance, because the only exit, through the event, was one-way. No one would be coming back through there, once they were let in to see it.

I can only imagine how pissed they were when they finally got through the door at the end of the queue. That almost makes it sweeter. Half of them didn't understand what had just happened, and the ones who did were probably foaming at the mouth. That part makes it all the better, actually, because they knew that the man with two eyes had taken advantage of their willful blindness. Just lead someone around through the reality they want, and you could probably walk them into death itself. I just walked them into a back alley behind the warehouse.

Figured out what I sold them? You understand what I gave them that was so old, it was new again? What they willingly fell for, because they couldn't look up from what they were doing to realize it?

The Great Egress.

Author's Note

Originally submitted to a flash fiction contest (defined as 500 - 1,500 words) back in October 2014 with the requirement to use the phrase, "When I arrived, the line seemed to stretch for miles. Everyone wanted one."

Word count is 1,340.

The entry was submitted under one of my pseudonyms, Adam Locke.

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Submitted to: "Dystopian dream" competition on 12 October, 2016
Contest moderated by Poppy, and runs from 30-September to 14-October.