She pinged her Nous Assistant app, Aida. Aida had a warm, professional voice with gentle optimism. Clear and articulate but not overly formal.

  Aida was a general purpose app good for real time tasks involving search, data, and giving drones commands.

  Mindt thought that might be interesting to see if he had any further info, but he was likely swarmed with messages right now and from the video stream, it seemed like he was just as confused as everyone else.

  Checking her other messages, it seemed no one had any idea what was going on. Some theories on Jiem already popped up, including reaction videos, and posts shaming Nishigatana.

  Mindt rested her gaze out the window. Wispy strings of clouds floated below -- like a balding man's head she could see the land below the gaps. Her mind wandered. She thought about a bald man she saw while boarding the airplane. She could see him now a row ahead of her, with a striking shiny head in the sea of thick manes. The name above him said Retro. Without prompting, the posh voice of her Wiki app came into her mind.

  Mindt muted the wiki app. She didn't care about baldness.

  She thought again about the dog and of Nishigatana. What would Nishigatana go through after being doxxed that like? Assuming Jiem really hacked everyone's Nous implants, Nishigatana's now the most famous person in the world. In an instant. More famous than the plutocrats, than gods. What would that be like?

  Sure, he will not be liked, but he would be popular. And with that he could use it to tell a story. His version of why he was kicking the dog. If he spun it right, he could lie how his ailing mother needed money since she turned down Universal Basic Retirement, or those spilled noodles were the only meal he'd had in days, after working long hard shifts at, wherever he worked — plumber, pest control, whatever.

  Mindt thought it was a bit of a stretch especially with an apartment that big, but it could work. She could see the headlines now, "Nishigatana, the Dog Kicker, is a Misunderstood Victim of Society".

  Or better yet, why Jiem singled him out. Did Nishigatana have a secret?

  She suddenly wished she was the one Jiem had picked to stream randomly to the world. Was it worth kicking a dog? Mindt could not reach an answer when Nous Calendar pinged her.

  Mindt sighed. The Calendar app was an asshole with a snooty voice. She would describe the Calendar as "condescending librarian".

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  She had been a meme creator for 5 years now, and she was on the rise. She had a few sponsors, and she was making a decent living, but still had years to go.

  Clearly there would be no nap for her with all this excitement going on and now work to do, and she opened her workstation. A browser appeared in her field of vision. The socials were flooded with memes about Jiem already. Millions of reactions in moments -- likes, emojis, bookmarked posts -- she was already way behind. She wanted to check the news as well but thought it would be best to get the memes out first.

  Mindt liked searching smaller countries that wasn't part of the mainstream. Bulgaria was down to 4 million people overall, most of them on UBR. Not only did it make her job easier as a professional meme creator in a largely non-competitive region, it let her get fresh content that she could easily modify and cross post to larger regions, hoping to strike big. She had to be careful not to reveal her sources, otherwise Bulgaria and the balkans would be flooded with other meme creators.

  Browsing through the comments, she gave a laugh at one of them and she muttered in Bulgarian aloud, "let's go", which resulted in a glance from Retro, the bald man.

  Mindt mentally selected 3 of the comments.

  It felt like she was hit in the chest, Mindt lost focus on the workstation information windows. The bald head of Retro ahead reflected light from the sun into the aircraft cabin. Chose to be bald, she thought. Bold or just oblivious? Just then, a time sensitive message came into her head.

  Mindt blinked back and resumed her attention on her workstation.

  Mindt wanted to add a bunch of excited happy face and money emojis to her message but swore she would only use spoken natural languages even when communicating to her Nous apps. Though it was hard to describe what a natural language even was these days considering half the population spoke using only images, evolving language itself into its most simplistic base. But to her, spoken languages allowed her to convey her true message. One of her fears was to become someone who could only speak in images, an increasing problem in society. These people lived completely normal lives since N0us auto translated everything for them, but to Mindt, it just felt wrong.

  She would already be flagged for shorting Synapto, delegating a huge chunk of her savings on that bet, and didn't want to take another risk for her income.

  She pinged her money app.

  She didn't want to jinx it, but she was wondering how close this would get her to financial independence. Finally, she sighed.