Classic video games are the best. Crash Bandicoot must be one of mankind’s greatest achievements. My mother told me about how she had to wait until she got home to play her games. Imagine that! Phones changed all that. They’re about making the most of your time. Being productive while sitting on a bus, or waiting at the doctor’s office, nebulous things like that… Luckily, I never had to worry about being bored. I was worried about my ass though.

Twenty minutes on this plastic chair was torture. I shifted around to try and ease my sit-bones a little. I distracted myself from the pain by blitzing through the boulder-run from Crash 2. I had a power-up Aku-Aku following me, but I hardly needed it. My high score was being uploaded to the online scoreboard as I played, and barring any major incident, I would have credit in my account by dinner-time as a reigning champ.

Somebody said my name.

At least I thought they did. I shrugged and kept steering Crash through the course, just ahead of the rampaging boulder. I heard it again. A woman, somewhere, was definitely saying my name. Louder this time.

“Mr SHAW!”

I pulled the pea-sized bud out of my left ear and looked up. It was the judge. She was staring straight at me and looked unhappy. It appeared she had finished reading, finally. Her bright green bangs matched her lipstick. She absently scrolled through her own phone while she chewed her tongue piercing thoughtfully. Everyone else in the courtroom looked equally bored, less than one pair of eyes in ten was actually watching the proceedings.

Without me guiding him, Crash fell down a bottomless pit to his electronically programmed demise. The simplistic death-jingle tinkled in my right earbud as the judge continued.

“I have reviewed your case, and your letter of appeal. On June 27th you illegally parked your vehicle in a spot reserved for those suffering from agoraphobia, anxiety and other social adversities, using a counterfeited medical certificate. Despite your attempt to describe your narcissism and self-importance as a…”

She paused to take a deep breath for effect before continuing.

“… legitimate disability that prevents you from considering the well-being of others before you act, I have no choice but to rule in favour of the prosecution. This tribunal finds you guilty on one count of violating a parking area, and one count of forging a mental-health pass. The latter is a breach of the Digital Integrity Act of 2027. The penalty for your infringement will be twenty-two days without access.” The judge then launched into a well-rehearsed spiel I assume she rattled off daily.

“Your biometric Internet Protocol will be suspended, and all associated devices will have an access suspension of fifty days. I sincerely hope that this will give you time to contemplate the importance of treating the other members of your community with respect. The bailiff will take you through to the disconnection process”.

She clacked her tongue stud against her teeth. The sound echoed through the microphone on her fuscia pink lapel like a miniature gavel being struck. I raised my hand to protest. It didn’t matter. Her eyes were already back on her phone. Scrolling had recommenced. It was like I had become invisible.

I wasn’t surprised that my gambit had failed. Philosophically speaking, there was plausibly a fine line between genuine mental illness and just being lazy and in a rush.

Still, I hadn’t expected such a severe punishment. Was it severe? It sounded bad, that’s for sure. I looked around me, a few people murmured to each other, but nobody was looking straight at me. I admit, I was a little confused. I looked down at my phone, but it was blank. I was staring straight through the glass at the green and white striped floor of the courtroom. I hadn’t noticed before, but there were little black dolphins worked into the stripes. I hadn’t seen my phone off since I pulled it out of the box last year.

I started to say something, but before I could, an official looking guy stormed over and stopped about half a metre inside my personal space. He was huge and wore a grey militaristic uniform, with a slightly greyer vest over the top of it. He also had one of the new I-patch screens fitted. It looked like he was wearing half a pair of sunglasses. The display from his phone was projected on the lens, and he could scroll through his feeds by rolling his thumb over a ring on his right index finger; Very cool. I wanted one, but they hadn’t released them for civilians just yet. He bent down and a head the size of a microwave filled my view. He smelled like public-bathroom soap.

“THIS WAY PLEASE SIR”.

His focus was still firmly fixed on the screen fitted over his eye, while his enormous hand was pointing towards a door near the back of the courtroom. I hadn’t noticed it when I came in. Glancing at my inert phone once more, I followed Robo-Bailiff as he lumbered back across the floor. We ended up in a hallway full of doors. The lighting was harsh, and the place stunk of bleach. Every inch of wall was covered by a screen flashing with constant “Interactive Consumer Suggestions” – “advertisement” was such a twentieth century concept. The bailiff touched his ring to a panel where a door knob should have been, and a portion of wall slid open.

I don’t remember much of what happened next. Thinking back, it feels like trying to recall details of a vivid dream that slip away the more you try to grasp at them. There was a low table, and something tight attached to my arm and something else being strapped to my head. A lot of pictures were played on a screen. They went into my brain; or were being pulled out of my brain? I couldn’t be sure.

Suddenly, I was thinking about a character from an old TV show. Or maybe I was dreaming it.

Why does Oscar live in that trash can specifically?

Does Big Bird just happen to throw out a lot of good food?

What if Oscar is only living between trash cans, what if it’s not his favourite at all?

What if Oscar roams the streets late at night, casting off his old trash can and crawling into another as it suits him.

Like a furry green hermit crab, wielding sarcasm and contempt instead of two big claws.

Do he and the Grinch share a common ancestor?

-WHAM-

I was awake. It felt like ice-cold liquid was falling from my eyes. I was sitting, slumped over. I blinked and rubbed my face. My hand came away dry, but the tingling numbness was still there. It felt like when your leg falls asleep watching TV, but it was only happening in my eyeballs. I shook my head to try and clear it and yelped when the feeling tripled in intensity. Eventually it faded enough for me to look around the room. On the bench beside me, was a thick white card. As I reached for it, the bailiff’s monotoned grunt came from the doorway.

“Read it”. He grunted. “Tap to unlock your doors. Tap to buy things from stores. No online stuff.”

He said this without ever taking his focus from his I-patch. I turned the card over and examined it. It was made of dirty, faded white plastic and was as thick as two old fashioned credit cards taped together. Printed on one side were three lines of script. The Republic of New Zealand’s crest of a Tui sitting on a Taiha was etched into the bottom corner. It read:

THE OWNER OF THIS CARD HAS ACCESS REVOKED OF ALL INTERNET PROTOCOLS

THIS CARD HAS TEMPORARY USER DATA STORED FOR ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS THAT WILL EXPIRE IN 22 DAYS

IF THIS CARD IS FOUND OR DAMAGED, PLEASE RETURN IT TO THE NEAREST CONSTABULARY IMMEDIATELY

I looked back at the bailiff. He was already pointing down the hall, away from the door that led to the courtroom. He wasn’t looking at me, I was invisible. Evidently, that was that. I started walking, trying to decide what to do next.

I was underground, that much I did remember. Eighteen stories-to be exact. Most government buildings were these days. You can’t vandalize something that’s under several hundred tons of rock. I found myself in a large reception area. I was still looking at the card and trying to discern its meaning.

Obviously, I couldn’t go online in any way, shape or form. That meant that my iris and fingerprint had been banned from accessing my phone, home software, and my car. Presumably the same would be true of my work computer and any other public access devices, like going to the movies or trying to watch sports at the casino. I supposed too, that the “essential functions” meant that the scanner I used to unlock my front door would respond to this card. The card clearly had no power source, so it must work through an old-school payWave chip or something similar. Did this have my bank account on it too then? I hoped so. I wasn’t about to go back and ask the bailiff for advice.

My thoughts were cut short as I came to the elevator that would take me back up to ground level. There was a line of people queued at the turnstile that allowed them into the lift one at a time. Being a government building, it originally had only stairs. The elevator however, had been installed by Dyson some years later. So, all people had to do to use it was to tap their phone on the turnstile and watch a very brief, five-second Icie about vacuum cleaners. Most modern services worked this way. Companies paid for virtually every commodity, and people earned the right to use them by watching the Interactive Consumer Suggestions. Everybody wins. Everyone who had access, that is. I looked around for someone to talk to about this situation. Surely my card could be used in some way. I saw another man in a bailiff’s uniform. He looked like he had come off the same production line as the last one. He was leaning against the wall next to the turnstile, engrossed in a particularly intense Icie about milkshakes. The large screen on his phone was displaying by a very pert looking nipple, slick with chocolate syrup. I knew that Icie quite well, it had been around since I was a kid. I gently tapped his shoulder and said, “excuse me”.

His head snapped up like a dog being woken from a nap in the sun.

“Hmm? What? Ahhhhhh shit” he said as his phone screen flashed red. The Icie had disappeared. Some of them were contractual in nature. They required eye contact to be maintained for the duration of the video, otherwise you would have to start them again, usually with a penalty. He didn’t look pleased.

“WHAT!?” He yelled so loud he nearly blew out my eardrum. I meekly held up the card in response.

“Oh” he said. He hiked his thumb to his left, through the queue for the elevator. Feeling hopeful, I walked that way expecting to see an alternate lift, or a public-use tablet I could use to view the Icie.

It was the staircase.

Eighteen flights of concrete stairs and bad lighting later and I thought that my legs were going to collapse. I was sweating profusely in my suit. My shoes were killing my feet, and I had a headache. I couldn’t believe how tiring this was. Then I thought of home. My apartment; On the fiftieth floor. I groaned and leaned against the door that would lead me back to the street. I still had to go to work today.

After easily the worst day at work I had ever endured, I was standing outside my apartment building, simply taking in the enormity of it. My day had spiralled downwards since that first set of stairs. Once at work, I reported my revoked access to my supervisor, whom I had never actually met before. I couldn’t buy any lunch because the company that catered for our building didn’t have any tablets for me to watch Icies on. My plastic card only beeped feebly when I tried to use it to pay.

Then, after being unable to contact a ride-share home, I was forced to walk above ground through the industrial area, which had rendered my clothes virtually unwearable. Nobody driving past had noticed me walking with my thumb out. It hadn’t mattered, without the ability to watch Icies, nobody would’ve picked me up. I was invisible.

So here I was, trying to decide how best to climb fifty flights of stairs in my cheap and uncomfortable shoes. I tapped the cursed white card onto the panel to open the double doors and shuffled miserably into the lobby.

There was the usual crowd hanging outside the elevator, all of them looking down at their screens, just wanting to get up into their apartments. I suddenly realized that I had never really looked at them before. I mean, I saw them every day. I recognized their faces from the building’s online messaging board. But I was certain that the tall guy from apartment 35C didn’t always have that scar over his eyebrow, how long had that been there? I must’ve looked like a lunatic. Here I was gawking at everyone, while they were doing their best to just watch their Icies and get into the elevator. All except one woman.

She was just looking around at the walls. She had a box under one arm, and her hair was dark blue. I kept looking at her as I tried to figure out where the stairs were. Suddenly, she was staring right at me.

“What?”. Her gaze was so intense, it was like being shoved. I said nothing, but she jerked her chin at me.

“What’s up, weirdo?”

I didn’t know how to respond. Nobody else was paying any attention but I felt myself going red with embarrassment. I decided to walk hurriedly towards her because there was an awkward ten metres or so between us and she had an astoundingly loud voice. As I got closer, I realized she was very short. Probably five feet tall, in big shoes.

She had about ten piercings in her face that I could see, and very delicate features. Except her eyes, nothing delicate about those. They were bright blue and hard as flint. She was wearing a faded black jacket that was about ten sizes too big for her, and tights with rainbow-coloured fish scales on them.

“What are you doing?” she asked so bluntly, I said the first thing that came to mind.

“I’m… looking for the stairs”. I finished lamely.

She laughed. “Shit, why? You look like you’ve just run a marathon in that”.

She wasn’t wrong, my suit was thoroughly dishevelled after the day’s trials. She giggled as she caught a whiff of my day’s perspiration mixed with the remnants of the industrial smog.

“A marathon in a swamp” she added, wrinkling her nose.

I was instantly self-conscious. She had a nice laugh though, it even made me smile a little. Despite my embarrassment, I felt a surge of courage.

I asked, “Do you have friends who live here? I’ve never seen you before”.

She laughed again. “I live here, dude. Floor fifty, like you. I pass you most mornings. You normally have a red backpack and earbuds in.”

She was right, I hadn’t taken my backpack today because it clashed with my tie. But I was certain I had never seen her before. She shook her head.

“You wouldn’t see me because you’re normally staring down, like these idiots”. She jerked her head towards the crowd waiting for the MAZDA elevators to whisk them away. Nobody noticed her comment. She continued talking as I looked around. Every single person was immersed in their screen. There was nearly a hundred people standing within metres of us, but it was like we were alone.

“But no phone today I see, and you’re in a suit… you must have just had your access revoked, amirite?”

I jerked my head back to look at her. How could she know that?

“How could you-”

She giggled some more, it sounded lovely. “Ah, you’re too easy. I watched you tap your way in with that snazzy white card, homeboy. Don’t flatter yourself, I’m not stalking you.”

I began to feel uncomfortable, desperate to change the subject, I asked her what was in the box. Her eyes lit up and she dropped her voice into a conspiratorial whisper.

“I just tracked down an original Playstation. A private museum was shutting down and I got my hands on this bad boy for less than five grand! Can you believe it?” she patted the box affectionately.

“I even managed to get a couple of spare controllers, because they break so easily, but only one game though.”

I was genuinely interested now. There couldn’t be more than a dozen 1996 Playstations left in the world. She had done exceptionally well, she could easily sell it for a hundred thousand dollars, or more.

“What game?” I asked casually.

“Well, I really wanted Killzone, but I’ve got Crash Bandicoot instead, I heard it’s pretty good. Want to play?”

I nodded. Virtually everything in my apartment required having access. Plus, she was nice; in a weird, intense sort of way. Suddenly, I realised I felt less weary. I was actually looking forward to walking up the stairs with her.

We began walking through the crowd staring down at their Icies.

Nobody noticed us. It didn’t matter. We were invisible.