stream-of-consciousness writing, an America that was near-future and is now current.
“Antonio says, Tata, Eva says, a blank robot to the nth power, Elsi says, so Jonathan Smith called me and my first thought was, because by then there were already reports about the abductors hiring data science vendors who would merge data from our devices with transactional data amassed by former NSA employees to locate their deportation targets, my first thought was the abductors know my location, Elsi says, I think by then they were already running probabilistic models borrowed from epidemiology to create all sorts of data linkages, Antonio says, I remember thinking if they know my phone number, Elsi says, the abductors can type it into their database, match it with a device ID, and query the coordinates of my device, so you switched off location services, Antonio says, yes but I knew they probably already had my location history so they could simply query the last twelve months and narrow down their target location to the coordinates with the most activity, so you gave your number to your sister before the abductors began to amass this kind of data, Antonio says, yes, Elsi says, and yes, by the time Jonathan Smith called me there were already “there were already reports that the American abductors were trying to meet their aggressive quota of deportables by capturing people when they appeared at the detention centers to claim their family members, but you were safe since you were born in the United States, Antonio says, I was but when I was in college, Elsi says, my freshman year at Columbia I couldn’t make ends meet so I requested food stamps for like a month, so they stripped you of your citizenship, Antonio says, the law had already passed that if you had received government benefits you could be denied citizenship or could be stripped of your citizenship, but I hadn’t received any notice yet so whenever the phone rang I would say to myself my time has come, or I would say to myself some kid out of college is probably at a data center in Utah right now loading the time series of the food stamp data, one state at a time, and once that’s done some other kid out of college will join the food stamp data with the ethnicity data and create a file that includes me, and yes, by the time Jonathan to the nth power called me…”
by aacool