LeafLink (ONC 2024) (Complete)

Chapter 2

We sit in a huge SUV. I lean against the window, feeling the car's frame vibrate from the idling engine. My gaze is focused on the view outside, and I'm eyeing the little cottage that will be my new home. Locust Valley is a far cry from the pulsing world of Manhattan. It is a strange mix of suburbia and urban superiority, dominated by New England forestry and sprawling McMansions. This place was a classic archetype of Long Island - until BioLink moved in and turned the site into a town-sized laboratory.

Sitting next to me is another newcomer. It's a woman about my age; dark, with kinky hair that she fidgeted with the entire ride from the city. Her name was Bridget, she told me, and from her accent I knew she was a city native. I liked her for that, and it made me feel a little bad about how nervous she seemed, even though it wasn't anything to do with me. It meant I was a little more conversational than usual, had even tried guessing where she'd grown up.

"Brooklyn Heights?" I had asked her.

She looked over, gave me a crooked smile. "Fort Greene. You're from the city too." She hadn't phrased it like a question.

I nodded. "Can you tell?"

She snorted, "You're kidding, right? You sound like those Italians, the guys who run around flipping brownstones all day."

I had laughed at that one. "Not bad. My family is from Gravesend."

"That's deep Brooklyn," she nodded approvingly.

"I know," I said. Then I added, "I thought I'd spend my whole life in the city."

Her smile had wilted then. She turned, glanced out at the passing scenery. The tension I'd fought so hard to dispel came creeping back. "When it first showed up in the news, I thought it was a joke. Like, UFO shit."

I knew what she was talking about. "Yeah, I get that. A lotta people thought that." I didn't. Call me paranoid, I don't care.

"Yeah, well, when things went official, it was almost worse. I was - am - pissed. It's just another way to eventually kill the artists. To have something else create."

Ah. It was resentment in her voice. That was better than the alternative, at least. There were people out there who were afraid: the religious, the old, the conservatives (although tell that to the business owners who are chomping at the bit). There are people that fear LeafLink. They fear the shadow of it, the image that crappy sci-fi movies and conspiracy blogs and small-town sermons have crafted with gleeful abandon.

But that wasn't Bridget. She was like me, although she hadn't expressed it yet. Someone who had lost their job - their future - to the efficiency of change (she was also terribly wrong about her prediction, but we'll get to that later).

But at least it seemed as though she wasn't completely antagonistic about it. Otherwise, she wouldn't have taken the job. But who knows? People are desperate these days. I know I was. I've disliked LeafLink for a long time. Now that it's employing me, that feeling has simmered down to a vague sense of wariness.

"It's weird, isn't it?" She had said to me, once we'd crossed into the town limits. "I keep resisting the urge to pull out my phone, and well, do anything with it." I nodded, because I understood where she was coming from. It was strange, not being able to alleviate my idleness with a perusal through social media, or to play the online puzzle-word games I had slowly become addicted to over the years. There was still sporadic cell service, of course (we weren't savages!) but Locust Valley was effectively cut off from every aspect of the internet. No websites, no streaming, no porn - it was truly a kill switch. Of course, since the goal of LeafLink was to replace and 'to elevate the digital experience,' as BioLink likes to claim, a blackout zone was necessary. I'd like to think I wasn't dependent, but now that I had actually arrived, armed with little more than the clothes on my back, being disconnected from the world was sending spikes of apprehension through me. It makes it hard to know if the people I've left behind have even noticed I'm gone.