The GPS of fear would not pinpoint. I tapped my wristwatch laptop glass, thinking the problem was my micro-pentium generic processor. Which was notably degraded from infancy onward. Seiko had stopped outsourcing, and brought computer engineering inhouse to try and cut costs. I made the mistake of buying the low-end previous year’s model wristwatch, non-refundable, at the great Sears liquidation sale of 2016.
What an event. Watching the grandpa of one-stop shop household name catalogue-innovator cookie-cutter corporate entities of 20th century America, finally get sucked up into a big gulp straw from the bottom of a concrete bunker once symbolic of its own institutionalized permanence, by the bottomless pit of American consumer thirst. Essentially cannibalized by the monster it helped create.
I stopped tapping when i remembered the news that was broadcast to my ocular contact sensors via Amazon satellite delivery through a drone intermediary hanging stealth in the sky, not a half-mile from my head.
The Ebola virus had swallowed half of Africa and was now resisting arrest on every continent. More than a quarter million dead, ten times as many estimated infected. Wow. What a nightmare. And still the global response was tepid and decentralized.
Putin kept telling the world how he could not understand why Russia’s task force of scientists, doctors and engineers had not yet participated in the leading nations efforts toward containment. He claimed to have mobilized them one year previous. Another great mystery. The States were meanwhile stretched completely gumbubble thin, fighting the perceived enemy in Iraq.
I realized then and there, that my Seiko low-end theory was miscalculated. My microprocessor was not at fault. Nothing could pinpoint the GPS.
Fear was ubiquitous, gumbubble thin, and this very moment crawling up the back of my spine.
K IS SILENT 