🦺 The Evolution of Mobile Communications

Welcome to the nineteenth edition of Safe For Work. We’re continuing to explore communication and connectivity. And our first short film has been released.

The girl is a brunette, which is a thing that people sometimes are, and have mostly become okay with. Her name was Abigail for the first fourteen years and nine months of her life– up until today, her name has been Abigail Perry. She is a member of the Jazz Club as a singer. She is walking along the sidewalk in front of her high school, where she is a freshman. She is looking at her phone; her best friend Shelley, who gets home earlier than her because she isn’t in any after school clubs, has sent her a picture of her cat Fitz, who she and Abigail have been steadily composing a series of short operas about in that certain way that teenagers– and particularly brunettes– tend to do. 

In the street beside her, some boys from the school– Juniors and Seniors– are filming each other trying to perform skateboarding tricks. They have all bought skateboards to film each other on, and have been filming each other out here day after day for the past month– and not a single one of them has come even slightly close to actually pulling anything off. It just can’t be helped. But they’ll get there, they tell themselves. They have to. This is their niche, and it won’t last forever. Now is the moment to really get competitive in the space. So here they are. 

Abigail is wearing perfectly ordinary sneakers. When she catches her foot on a fallen branch in the middle of the sidewalk, her perfectly ordinary sneakers do absolutely nothing to prevent her from falling straight down on her face in the background of the video of the latest attempt by Jason, who has what he wants to call a goatee, trying and failing yet again to perform an ollie. 

Within a week of today, nobody will ever refer to Abigail Perry as “Abigail”-- or very nearly nobody, outside of her family and teachers. For the next eight years of her life, she will be “Girl Eats Pavement”.

When she is seventeen, despite her perfect GPA, she is rejected from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. The admissions counselors do their best to be compassionate; “The headlines write themselves, unfortunately,” they all tell her. “‘Girl Eats Scholarship’-- ‘Will the Princeton Dining Hall Start Serving Asphalt?’-- ‘Yale Accepts Internet Meme– For Clout?’”

She ends up going to Community College a few miles away and majoring in business, with a minor in mechanical engineering. Her mother and father are inconsolable. But Abigail? Abigail Perry has never been a quitter. She decides that this sort of thing is never going to happen to anyone, ever again. Her parents take out a second– and then a third– mortgage on the house, and Abigail starts a company, with a singular vision in mind. She’s going to change the world. 

Five years later, after millions of dollars and millions of man-hours of agonizing research and development, Abigail Perry stands in a green blazer and also pants on at the center of the main stage at the Breakthrough Technology Pavillion in Omaha. She has a microphone clipped to her collar. She has just finished the part of her talk where she tells her story. 

“...and that’s why I decided to do something about it,” she says. “I decided that things were going to be different now. And you know what people said to me? When I wanted to change the world?”

She pauses for effect.

“‘It just can’t be helped.’-- that’s what people said. That’s what people always seem to say,” says Abigail, “About things like tripping. But…”

Here’s the big kicker. Dolly Madison, fifteen years old, strides across the stage in a shiny new pair of Stumble-Stoppers. She is blonde, which is another thing that people sometimes are, for a series of reasons. Her hair is perfectly kept and her skin is as good as a teenager’s can reasonably be. Her fashion is precise and stylish– perfectly on point. 

But her limbs are gangly and new; some things just can’t be helped, right? And the stage… only now, it’s starting to make sense, all the branches and rocks and lopsided obstacles strewn across the stage. Dolly smiles at the crowd– they give her a round of applause, and doesn’t she deserve it?

Abigail applauds along with everyone else. And then “Alright, Dolly…” she says. “...phone up.”

Right on cue, Dolly reaches into the pocket of her periwinkle-and-black striped dress– it’s the latest thing– and she pulls out her cell-phone, raises it to her face, and starts texting. Simple enough. But now here comes the big moment. 

“Go on ahead, Dolly. March.”

And so she goes on ahead: Dolly Madison goes marching forwards with her eyes glued to her phone, and her phone more or less completely blocking any possible view of the path in front of her. 

And she trips. Oh, dear Lord, does she trip. Practically on the very first obstacle– a big twisty branch taken from among the roots of the old tree at the edge of the parking-lot outside– must have fallen during a storm. Dolly’s toes catch on the branch as she is walking, and she immediately begins to topple forwards– but her shoes are having none of it. A series of precisely tuned gyroscopes and microjets firing sharp pulses of air quickly reorient her foot, her leg, her entire body. Like a scene out of some wild science fiction movie, Dolly’s tumbling self swoops impossibly through the air, coming somehow back to perfectly upright as she continues her blind walk across the stage. 

Abigail lets out a long breath; the damn things are calibrated properly this go around. That’s how it goes in all the test runs: when the shoes are able to get past the first obstacle, they’re able to get past all the rest as well. It’s all downhill from here. Dolly stumbles and fumbles and topples and sprawls and pratfalls her way across the rest of the stage, all the way from one end to the other, almost subconsciously aiming for the worst possible scenarios– she’s a bit of a showgirl, herself, Abigail is realizing; Dolly is going to be absolutely great when they start running TV-ads. Over and over, it seems like she’s really going to tumble and hit the ground– surely, this time it’s too much to ask the system, surely, this time the angle is wrong, surely, this time, there’s not enough of a chance to react– but over and over, she finds herself upright, carrying on. Like magic. 

“Never again!” declares Abigail Perry triumphantly, after Dolly has reached the other end of the stage and taken her little bow, smiled her little Dolly-smile, after the thunderous applause has finally started to properly die down. “What happened to me will never happen to a teenage girl ever again!”-- and just like that, the applause picks back up, even louder than before– because it really is like magic, isn’t it?-- the things technology can do! The world really has changed– and it’s changing every day. 

Of course, the applications extend far beyond just teenage girls. Industrial safety invests billions. Not to mention the military. And all that is just the beginning. Soon enough, Abigail Perry is the woman to be– honorary degrees from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and MIT, too, to top it off– TIME magazine cover, “Meme to Millionaire”. Soon enough, it starts to feel to her as though the whole nightmare had just been that– a bad dream. Like it had never really happened at all. Soon enough, she’s married to a lovely husband, with two beautiful children, a son and a daughter– and naturally, she has both her children wearing Stumble-Stoppers as soon as they’re old enough to walk. She’s not taking any chances with that. She’s got the shoes onto their feet even before she’s got cell-phones into their hands– you can never be too careful. 

But then, when her daughter Hailey is eight years old, a bad sneeze at a family restaurant while holding a forkful of spaghetti sends pasta and sauce splattering all over the place, including all over herself. A boy at another table is filming his brother’s birthday party, blowing out the candles, and he captures the moment in the background. He’s already captioning the video “Crazy Sneeze Girl” before Hailey has even finished cleaning herself off, in tears. Abigail’s husband consoles her out in the car, the best he can. “It’s okay,” he says, “all those Ivy League schools are overrated. Community college is great. And who wants to have friends or fall in love or go to prom, anyways?”

“What’s wrong with me?” Hailey sobs. “Why did I do that? I can’t believe I did that! I’m a horrible freak!”

“People sneeze. Some things just can’t be helped,” says her father.

But her mother? Abigail Perry has never been a quitter. “Never again…” she whispers. She knows exactly what to do. 

Short scifi film- All About Timing

Inspired by Black Mirror and our story in issue #8

See you next week as we continue to explore communication and connectivity. Stay safe.