June, this year
I’m in the basement, in the dim light creeping in from the doors below the deck. But . . . it’s weird.
Electronic green spots flash before me, dazzling my left eye.
I turn my head away from them, but they follow me.
I shake my head, but they mimic my every move.
I blink, trying to refocus.
The lights crystallize, form into type. Words, floating in front of me, slightly to the left, but not so far that I can’t read them.
FRIDAY JUNE 16, 6:03PM
1274 CELESTINE DRIVE, LAKE BLUFF, IL 60044
[MORE INFO]
[GO TO MAPS]
[GO TO EMAIL]
[GO TO CONTEXTS]
What the fuck is that?
I blink again, several times rapidly, and the words change.
FRIDAY JUNE 16, 6:03PM
CONTEXTS — MOST RECENT:
EVAN CONTACT [TODAY 3:15PM]:
HONEY, PLEASE CONTEXT ME, WORRIED ABOUT YOU.
YOU LEFT IN SUCH A WEIRD MOOD EARLIER, AND NOW YOUR CONTACT SAYS YOU FLEW TO O’HARE AND YOU’RE IN ILLINOIS?
?! DID YOU GO VISIT YOUR OLD FRIEND BONNIE?
SHE’S THE ONLY PERSON I CAN THINK OF WHO LIVES AROUND THERE.
PLS CONTXT ME AND LMK WHAT’S GOING ON. GALA IS TOMORROW NIGHT AND I NEED YOU BACK IN CALI. LOVE YOU.
What?
These words in my vision are totally disorienting, and a wave of dizziness washes over me.
I slump down onto a plastic-covered armchair, unable to stop myself blinking in rapid succession as I adjust to the type embedded in my left eye. The words change again, resuming their original text.
What the hell is in my eye that’s doing this? When I close my eye and move it around, I can ever-so-slightly feel something there — not uncomfortable, more like what I imagine a contact lens would feel like.
And what on earth does “context me” mean?
What crazy world am I in now?
This is nuts. I need to figure out where I am, whose house this is, and what’s going on.
Maybe the weird eye-words can tell me, though. Maybe they’ll be useful for something.
I blink twice, hard, and the [MORE INFO] text below the house’s address obligingly expands.
1274 CELESTINE DRIVE, LAKE BLUFF, IL 60044
PROPERTY OWNERSHIP: NUMBERED COMPANY 394756, SHANGHAI, CHINA
RESIDENCY STATUS: UNOCCUPIED
MOST RECENT PROPERTY TRANSFER: NOVEMBER 2016
FORMER OWNERS: BEN MASON, BONNIE MASON [ESTATE TRANSFER]
PREVIOUS OWNERS: FRANK MASON, ANGELA MASON [DECEASED]
The information rolls backwards through time, showing the full history of the house, the further I read downward.
I blink twice again, and the text goes back to what seems to be the main menu, which is much less obtrusive.
Okay.
Super freaky, but it is useful.
Now I know that Frank and Angela are dead again — still — in this reality.
Just like in mine, the house was transferred to Bonnie and Ben in the will after the accident.
But instead of Bonnie buying out Ben with her half of their inheritance cash, they apparently sold it to some overseas buyer, and it’s now unoccupied.
At least I won’t stumble across some poor family having dinner this time.
And that gives me some time to regroup and figure out this eye-text thing before I go out into this brave new world.
I tread upstairs, where no lights are on but the sun is streaming into the kitchen.
It’s in the same decorative condition as the Masons had it years ago, pre-renovation by Bonnie.
Clearly the new owners haven’t lived here much, although there are signs of occasional use.
A toaster on the counter still has a few crumbs on the top; an electric kettle is a quarter full of water.
But the house is uncharacteristically chilly, despite the warmth of the day, as if it hasn’t been heated or seen human activity in a long time. I check the fridge, and it’s empty aside from a single can of diet soda, which I grab gratefully.
I mean, it’s only a very small theft.
In the large living room, a red tufted formal couch has a plastic sheet over it, and there’s a small side table, plus a media cabinet with a TV screen on the far wall.
Other than that, the room is empty. I check through the windows at the deck, where there is no patio furniture at all, just bare decking.
I open the soda, take a swig before placing it on the side table, and move the plastic to sit on the hard couch. This place may be a good respite for now, but I won’t be comfortable here for long. I need to figure out who I am in this world and what the hell is going on.
One thing is for sure — I’m not in a world that’s anything like my home, given the text in my eye like I’m some kind of Robocop.
If only I could figure out how to work it, besides rapid blinking, which only seems to be getting me to property information, emails, and something called Contexts, which seem to be this world’s version of regular texts.
I need to ask more questions. But how?
I pat down my pockets to see if there’s also a phone I can use. I’m in a pair of fashionably wide jeans, a black tank top, and some expensive-looking sneakers. There’s also a pair of sunglasses perched on my head.
The jeans yield no phone, but there’s two sets of keys, one with a car key bearing a Tesla logo and a car rental-branded keychain, and a set of house keys with a fob of some kind.
There’s also a lump in the small inner pocket of my jeans.
I dig into it with what I note are acrylic-nailed hands, way more manicured than usual, and find a case bearing a flat C-shaped logo, and inside, a pair of sleek earbuds, with an empty circular chamber above them.
Maybe the earbuds, which must have a built-in mic, will help me communicate with this eye-information portal.
I put them in, and they beep.
What to ask?
“Where’s home?”
Nothing.
Crap, it’s probably like Siri, where you have to say “Siri” first before it’s activated, otherwise it would be answering all the time. But what’s the trigger word for this tech?
Hmm. The earlier text message from some guy I had read said “PLS CONTEXT ME” and the texts seem to be called “Contexts” — so maybe “Context” will work? That would be the most intuitive, anyways.
I try again, speaking slowly and clearly.
“Context, where’s home?”
Still nothing. Damn. What now?
Something else from the text from that guy that struck me as weird . . . “YOUR CONTACT SAYS YOU’RE IN ILLINOIS.” Maybe “contact” is the right word — after all, this thing is definitely something in my eye.
“Contact, where’s home?”
A beep. Okay, great, that worked.
An electronic voice, male-ish.
“Your home location is set to 637 Fletcher Drive, Atherton, California 94027.”
California?
Oh, right, that’s what that text had said. “I NEED YOU BACK IN CALI.”
And I’ve heard of Atherton — it’s a famously expensive suburb of San Francisco where a lot of the tech billionaires live, according to my favorite real-estate reality TV show.
Something else the message had said . . . “LOVE YOU.”
From somebody called . . . what was it? I blink my way back to the text.
Someone called Evan. Whoever that is.
I’m now in a world, as I had feared, where I’m with somebody I don’t know in my real life.
Who is this guy? What’s our history?
“Contact, who is Evan?”
It’s a long shot, given there are a gazillion Evans, but maybe my eye-tech will know who I mean.
A beep, and the voice again.
“I’m sorry. Could you please be more specific?”
Shit. I wish I could.
Oh . . . hold on. He’s in a relationship with me. So if I add my own name . . .
“Contact, who is the Evan who is in a relationship with Millie MacKenzie?”
Beep.
“Your identity is set to Millie MacKenzie. You are in a monogamous romantic partnership with Evan Chen, founder and CEO of Contact Technologies PLC, a Fortune 500 company. You and Mr. Chen have co-habited in Atherton, California, since 2016.”
Contact is a company?
But hold up, that company name is familiar. Yeah, that’s right — I remember it as some promising tech company that failed spectacularly, maybe a year or two after I graduated. I even met someone high up at Contact at a fundraiser that the Notables sang at, at the end of my senior year.
And his name had been Evan.
Oh my God, it’s that guy. The cute Asian-American guy I spoke with for all of thirty seconds before he left to take a call, or something.
I’d laughed about it with Bonnie at the bar later.
And I’d even thought about Evan once more, a year or so after meeting him, when I read that his company had collapsed.
But, in this world, Contact is a highly successful Fortune 500 company. It didn’t fail. And I must’ve gotten another chance to see Evan that night of the fundraiser, or later, because now we’re evidently together.
“Contact, what does the company Contact Technologies do?”
“Contact Technologies, founded by inventor and CEO Evan Chen, is a publicly traded company under Nasdaq:CNTC that develops, manufactures, and sells augmented reality and telecommunication technology that operates through an artificial-intelligence-powered contact lens worn by the user, along with compatible earbuds. Contact is the fastest-growing company in the US by revenue for the past six successive years, and is currently ranked eighth on the Fortune 500 list of the US’s biggest companies, reporting $221BN revenue in the last fiscal year.
Contact’s core products have been rapidly and widely adopted among consumers in North America and Europe, and in 2022 outsold smartphones in those markets for the first time.
In 2021 and 2023, Contact won Tech For Global Good awards for its work on digital vision augmentation for blind and partially sighted users. ”
Holy fuck.
That tech is what I’m wearing in my eye, right now, and what’s telling me all this information. It’s telling me about itself.
Talk about meta.
Okay, so I’m wearing the AI-powered contact lens-slash-comms device that never took off in my world, but somehow did in this one. And I’m living with the guy who invented it. Presumably someone who is now a majorly famous tech billionaire, in a home in San Francisco’s mecca for tech billionaires.
This is wild.