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Episode transcript:

That boy was back, on the skateboard, and Linda heard him clamber up the steps.

There was a silent pause … not again.

Linda was up and over the counter, but it was too late. She watched the boy slap the sticker on the glass of her front door and then skid down the steps on his board.

Some places were sticker places, but not Linda’s pizza place. She prefered a clean look. No decoration, in a minimalist celebration. Linda opened a door to inspect the damage. That damn “Viva Coco” sticker. What did that even mean?

She scrabbled at the sticker with her fingers, hoping she caught it before it was really stuck, but that’s not how stickers work. She’d need to get the scraper. That could be a problem for later, she decided.

“Viva Coco” could live on for a little while longer. Instead, Linda gave up on the business day and went for a walk.

Ads assaulted her on the sidewalk, but because she didn’t have her watch with her, they were addressed to an impersonal, “Hey, friend … couldn’t you go for a dog massage, bite of Yunnan food, afternoon dose of Botox?”

It was weird, she noticed, how little she had noticed how well tailored to her demographic the ads usually were. No one even complained anymore that the watches were probably listening to your private conversations, but now Linda had to wonder … were they?

How else would they know that Linda was the target market for earrings shaped like allergy medication but not the one for baby onsies proclaiming a fandom for the band Beach House.

Passing by her friend Miriam’s coffee shop, Linda left the public sphere where she was fair game for the entire world’s commercial ambitions.

More importantly, Miriam would let Linda get a cup of coffee without her watch.

“Not doing lunch today,” Miriam commented.

“No. No one comes around, so it’s more trouble than it’s worth,” said Linda, in a statement that in that moment felt true enough.

“‘More trouble than it’s worth’ is the entire beingness of a small business,” said Miriam.

She plunked a latte on the table for Linda.

To be honest, Linda didn’t really like coffee. She played with the foam, and watched the other customers take photos of themselves around the shop. Miriam’s shop was a perennial hot spot for the snapsters. She had impeccable design sense, and switched up the art on the walls often enough that your pictures were recognizably in a spot everyone wanted to get in their photo, but you could maybe be the first to claim your unique angle.

There was a girl with the tags still on her trendy, boutique dress. The store would absolutely know that she had worn it around. Brian had mentioned it once, when they saw someone else doing the same thing. His company had something to do with AI merch tracking for retail. The program would have followed both the girl’s face and the RFID chip in the shopping bag as she passed the various city surveillance cameras and could easily match her to the resulting posted Instagram photos.

But if she had enough followers, they might not care that she had worn it outside. Their AI would make that calculation for them at the point of return. It’d be embarrassing for the girl to get rejected, Linda imagined. But maybe it wouldn’t. Different people had different levels.

A young man sat down at the table across from Linda.

“Do you mind?” he asked.

There were pleanty of open tables, but was Linda actually going to say no? The young man scanned his watch feed for a few minutes and then looked back at Linda.

“I don’t know what I’d do without this thing,” he said.

He was too young to be hitting on Linda, in her opinion. She nodded and looked over at Miriam who was busy actually working.

“Where’s your watch today,” the young man asked, not quite casually.