The virgin & the bad boy (Gravity)

Chapter 38/Ball at Jakarta Kota Station

We left the cool of the Hyperloop station and walked into the delightful warmth of Jakartakota Station in Indonesia. It was a wonderful warm evening the old steam train station had been converted into an elegant if over sized wedding venue. Aunt Mallery's fund raiser was more about trying to promote her to the vital young vote than collecting money. You would think someone who had been brought up in the age of social media would be more in touch with it. Kentro had told me the word on the internet of things was that people had to have fun and then talk on social media about it as much as possible. You can understand why my stomach sank for Aunt Mallery as we approached the station I read the huge animated poster announcing the event.

MALLORY BANKS FOR GENERAL SECRETARY BALL. WHY NOT USE THE HASHTAG

"#IAmHavingFunAtACoolBallToSupportMalleryBanksForTheNextGeneralSecretryOfTheUNFacebookNotThatInpoliteOne"

Where do you begin with that? Weird isn't it 100 years of Twitter, computers can now think, we can scan and transmit a real time virtual reality representation of a room across the solar system and Twitter is still limited to 140 characters. You would think that they would increase the limits in line with inflation or something. Point of fact Twitter was on the rebound after being surpassed by it's competitor called 'Twit' which only allowed 70 characters. In 2099 there was briefly a daughter version of Twitter called Tw which only allowed 35 characters frequently people on Tw expressed them selves in single words like 'Now' , 'Empty' , 'Toilet' and the now infamous tweet 'Infraction'. The notorious 'Infraction' tweet had been released by an overly funded start up called simply 'T' who's central selling point was a new social media system which was based entirely on users sharing single letters of the alphabet with each other. After a brief and highly controversial 6 months, T had collapsed after the Tw 'Infraction' twe ( twe as Tw tweets were called). The last tweet on T was the highly ironic message  'z' which now adorned many hip teeshirts. 

I passed through the security system and got held up behind a girl who had failed to bring her phone or indeed any technology and was firmly but politely sent home by one of the campaign officials. He told her she had to get something which she could take a selfie with and show how much she was enjoying her self to everyone with or not get in. Her protest that she would just enjoy herself was roundly laughed out.

Kentro had later told me that one of the technical people behind the single letter social network T had after the companies hideous but entirely justified collapse set up a similar social network on the internet of things. This one had taken T's idea of single letters of the alphabet and reduce it down with either a one or a zero. One could publish things like '1' was the bath is ready or 1 mean 'invade Jersey' this company ( called simply 01.iot ) had a sister company call 10.iot were longer messages could be sent to establish what the 1 or the 0 meant. Kentro said robots were big fans of 01 as it was called by the robots. He said the problem was that robots loved following robots who had lots of followers on the basis that they had a lot of followers then they must be good. The problem was that if you had two identical robots opening accounts at the same time then if one had say had randomly 3 followers and the other one had by accent 4 then the robots would quickly follow the robots with 4 to make it 5. As soon as this started then robots would pile on to the robot with 5 and ignore the robot with 3. As this continued, as soon as the robot passed 1000 more robots would follow. This for some reason had reminded me of gravity in black holes. The more followers you had the more you pulled in. Naturally, machines are the only things stupid enough to let sheer numbers of followers influence the decision to follow over the quality of the work or person. Kentro had told me that basically the situation had got so bad there was only one robot which had a following of more than 20 and that was the binary mutterings of a disused Cokecola vending machine in Basingstoke called Ox43220E/B which had over 34 Trillian followers. So for most machines they followed four things, them selves, the machine which was made just before them, the machine made after them ( reciprocity following was big with robots ) and Ox43220E Cokecola vending machine in Basingstoke because everyone else did, it must be good. So I guess Ox43220E in this case was the super big black hole.