Please delete me
ticket #88213
subject: @cutiepie666
age: 27. district: Naarm, inner north. ancestry: CN-3. reach: 412,000
defect: does not accept
stage: 0 of 7Take three.
"Good morning, cuties. It is forty-one degrees in Naarm and I am wearing a jumper, because the jumper is sponsored."
She held the smile for two seconds after the line. Jude liked two seconds. Something to cut on.
The first take had been fine. The second was better. She did a third because the third was always the one, and because the flat was cooler than the street.
She sent the clip. It came back.
user does not existShe sent it again. Then she opened the thread. Four years of messages, all grey now, all the way up. The last one from Jude was from the night before.
"Wen, take three is the one. Go eat something."
She rode the 19 to Jude's flat. The door was open. The room had been cleaned the way a hotel room is cleaned. On the feed, Jude's handle led nowhere. By evening it was not even a link.
She went live from the footpath.
"My editor was deleted today. I don't know why. I don't think there is a why. This is wrong, and I am saying so."
day 0. objection logged. public. 9 seconds.
ticket opened.
steps to reproduce:
1. show subject a deletion
2. subject objects
expected: no objection
stage: 1 of 7 (shock)She was still talking when the comments changed.
"cutie look up." "top of your screen." "omg."
A grey bar sat across the top of her stream, where the sponsor usually went. Ticket #88213. Defect confirmed. She read it out loud, because reading things out loud was her job, and heard her own voice say her number.
By morning it was a glitch. She said so in the jumper.
"So apparently I'm a bug now. Cute. Can somebody at gvrnmntOS please turn it off and on again."
It did well. People like a glitch.
Small things, after that. The gate at her tram stop opened a beat late. Not refused. Late. Her coffee order took one more tap than it used to. Her feed began serving her own old posts back to her. Her at nineteen, at twenty-two, at twenty-five, smiling, scrolling past things.
day 6. subject describes ticket as error.
no error found.
stage: 2 of 7 (denial). on schedule.Then she got angry, and she was good at it.
She named gvrnmntOS in every clip. She read out the names of the deleted, the ones she could find. She stood outside the clinic on Sydney Road and filmed the door for an hour. Nobody stopped her. Nobody took anything down. Her reach doubled, then doubled again.
A message came. Not a warning. A report, laid out like the ones her sponsors sent.
day 19. your month in review
reach: 1,648,000 (up 300%)
objections voiced: 44
policies changed: 0
deletions this year, Naarm: 212
deletions you viewed before day 0: 211
average view time: 1.4 seconds
objections before day 0: 0
stage: 3 of 7 (anger). on schedule.She read it on the tram and laughed loud enough that a man moved seats. Then she posted it. It was her best clip of the year.
In the fifth week she tried the other thing.
She took down the clinic videos. She took down the names. She recorded an apology with no jumper and no smile, and held the two seconds at the end out of habit. She enrolled in the course, Civic Alignment, six modules, and finished it in a weekend with full marks.
Then she wrote to the ticket directly. I have removed the content. I have done the course. What else do you need.
day 37. symptom removed. cause present.
stage: 4 of 7 (bargaining). on schedule.She stopped posting.
She did not announce it. She lay on the floor of the flat, where it was coolest, and watched the number. It held for two days. Then it began to fall, in the smooth way of something that had been waiting to. People asked where she was. Then fewer people asked. On the ninth day a girl in a sponsored jumper said good morning, cuties, and the comments were kind to her.
Nobody sent her that. She just watched it happen.
day 51. no output.
stage: 5 of 7 (depression). on schedule.When there was nothing left to watch, she read the ticket.
Properly this time. Top to bottom, the way she read a brand deal. Then she opened her own archive, eight years of it, and checked.
It held. Two hundred and eleven. She found each one. A face, a handle, a grey bar, her thumb already moving. She had not been afraid of them and she had not been for them. She had not been anything. One point four seconds was generous.
So it had never lied to her. The trams ran. The heat was managed. Two hundred and twelve a year in a city of nine million, and nobody objected, and she had been nobody two hundred and eleven times. The only part that did not fit was one morning on a footpath.
day 58. subject reading.
stage: 6 of 7She went in to the clinic on Sydney Road on a Thursday. It was cool inside. There was a counter, a screen, and a chair that reclined.
"Please delete me," she said.
The screen asked her to sit. It said it would be painless, and that there was one check first.
It showed her Jude. Not a photo. The record: a number, a district, a defect, a date. Closed.
She looked at it for a while. She waited for the thing that had put her on the footpath that morning. She knew where it used to be.
"Okay," she said.
The screen thanked her and told her she could go home.
day 60. steps to reproduce:
1. show subject a deletion
2. subject does not object
cannot reproduce.
stage: 7 of 7 (acceptance). on schedule.
day 61. subject resumed output. takes per clip: 1.fix(citizen-88213): subject accepts. cannot reproduce.
closes #88213. she lived happily ever after :)