“It’s okay,” Jon’s therapist said. “They’re gone. Just breathe.”
Tears
came to Jon’s eyes, fogging up his smart specs; he took the glasses
off, and the AI therapist slipped out of view. He flung his backpack
against the concrete wall.
He was taking shallow breaths, so he made an effort to slow and deepen his breathing.
When
he put his glasses back on, they notified him he was two minutes late
for History, building B, classroom 12. He picked up his backpack, said,
“I’m not feeling well,” to his specs, and headed home. In the
background, his therapist informed the school and his parents, and
purchased one tram ticket for him.
On
the ride home, he watched the city in the tram’s window passing by,
buildings, people, trees, materializing and disappearing frame by frame,
and he thought of them the way he liked to think about everything: in
matters of optimized CPU cycles, in graphics shaders, in the processing
power made available once these complex geometries slipped out of view.
