Chipped

1730chipped/ 1410 words

Jan. 30, 2016

Chipped

A short story

My troubles began when I inherited money from my aunt. Suddenly it was possible for me to replace my aging Ford with the latest model of a Lexus hybrid. It had everything, including back-up video what showed what was behind me when I shifted into reverse, a self-parking feature, and GPS.

The World Wide insurance company would give me a special rate if I let them use the built-in GPS to monitor my driving habits. I guess we all think we are better than average drivers, just as we think we are middle class, but aren’t. The Lexus had used up most of my aunt’s money, so I agreed. Anything that saves a little money is good when you are a so-called adjunct instructor.

Adjunct instructor means no benefits and being paid on a piecework basis like someone in a textile sweatshop, paid per button hole. To survive I teach courses in five local colleges, rushing from one to another, a course here, another there, but generally the same thing: what they used to call remedial or bonehead English for kids who think they are college material but read and write at the sixth grade level. Tenure? Forget about it. Tenure went out with the Reagan budget cuts for the department of education.

Even so, I can see that even being a gypsy instructor of bonehead English is a fading profession, if you could call it that. They are developing an on line do it at home on your own time English course. Kids write their homework assignments on screen, send them to the cloud professor which not only checks for grammar and spelling but compares what they write with everything else everyone else writes. Big daddy in the cloud knows.  One instance of plagiarism and you lose your tuition deposit. No appeals. No second chances. Sucker. When Big Daddy in the Cloud kicked in, how would I find work at all?

In the meantime I was really enjoying the Lexus, zipping smoothly from campus to campus and burning hardly any gas even though gasoline has dropped below a buck a gallon. Ah, technology!

Then at the end of the first month I got a bill. According to my GPS driving record, World Insurance said I had been speeding, forty-one in a thirty mile zone. I was just keeping up with the traffic. Nobody drives thirty in a thirty mile zone, or fifty-five on the freeway. If you don’t keep up, you may be rear ended or cause an accident when someone cuts around you to pass. Maybe when the self-driving cars come out with sensors that evaluate all the traffic around you keeping up with the traffic may be a valid excuse for speeding. Not yet.

So World Insurance jacked up my special bargain rate. Seems I had also rolled slowly through stop signs without actually coming to a dead stop. More points off. Considering all the mistakes or violations I had allegedly made, I would not have passed a driving test. I told them I wanted to cancel the insurance and disconnect the GPS spy, but  there was something sinister in the fine print of the policy. No cancellations permitted, no refunds. Only World Insurance could release me, but they would not. I was stuck. But that wasn’t all.

Those rats at World Insurance turned over my driving records to all the little towns where I was teaching: Beaverton, Forest Grove, Gresham… even Sandy where I had made a wrong turn. They all gave me tickets.

They weren’t cheap. Imagine $185 for not coming to a complete, dead stop. I had even been ticketed for going through an intersection on a yellow. The light had changed from green just as I entered the intersection. Too bad, Charlie. Another two hundred bucks. All because I was ratted out by my GPS!

If I didn’t pay, what then?

Thanks to the GPS, the traffic tickers for one month were more than I was making as an adjunct. I decided to park the car and take public transportation, but it was too late. I had missed paying the ticket in Sandy and would you believe? They gave me thirty days in jail. That hit me during school vacation, so I didn’t lose my jobs.

 My cell mate  wasn’t Bubbe the sodomist, just a dead beat who hadn’t paid child support. The jail wasn’t as bad as they put it in crime novels, and I figured at least I was saving on my grocery bill. Then I found out I had to pay motel rates for room and board for my time in the jail.  I was given two years probation after my release, but I had to pay the salary of the PO, the Parole Officer, plus administrative costs. If I didn’t pay? I shudder to think about it.

The kicker was, when I was released, a condition was that I was to be chipped. In the old days someone on parole or probation might have a GPS ankle bracelet. Ah, but one felon had taken off his bracelet and put it on his dog. He let the dog go in Forest Park and then laughed when the cops went nuts trying to locate him, except it was the dog. Back in the slammer, as they call it. An imbedded chip solved that problem.

What I didn’t know, but found out, was that the tiny chip under the skin of my right wrist wasn’t just a locator.  Besides being a built in GPS, it was loaded with my medical records and bank account.

The technician who inserted it, which wasn’t more painful than a flu shot, was proud. “You don’t have to worry about paying those traffic fines any more,” he said, like he had just invented the light bulb. “They are automatically deducted from your bank account. And you hardly need cash or a  credit card anymore. Just pass your wrist under the reader at the checkout and the bill is withdrawn from our account. Nobody can steal your identity.”

Not that anybody would want to steal mine, a known jail bird.. “What if they cut off my arm and use it for the embedded ID?”

That got him. “Maybe we should have the chip under the skin of your scalp. Then they’d have to chop off your head. At that point, the chip would report that you were dead and your accounts would be closed”

“Lucky me.”

I left the Sandy jail a free man. When I flagged down the bus back to Gresham  I just passed my wrist under the reader and the fare was deducted from my account, not that there was much left in it. Same on the Max in Gresham.

They’ve taken away all the ticket machines and ATMs. Nobody needs cash any more. I don’t need to carry my ID in a wallet someone might steal.

Just as I feared, bonehead English is being replaced by Professor Cloud. I am not even an adjunct any more. I sold the Lexus, the only way I could get out of the World Insurance contract. As an unemployed person, my SNAP food allotment is remotely programmed into my chip. The reader at Fred Meyer grocery just deducts what I have spent. I no longer have to show a picture ID anywhere. I am the ID.

I’m a free man. Of course, it is illusory. The International Metadata megabase knows where I am all the time, what I eat, where I go, what I read at the library. Everything.

I  have one surviving old high school buddy, Fred.. He lives in Cuba now.  He sent me a letter, a real letter. It was in one of those envelopes of something synthetic you can’t even tear, and sealed so you can’t open it without destroying it. His letter was sandwiched in aluminum foil. It’s tamper proof.

Fred said he had his chip surgically removed and embedded in a fish. So far as NSA and the government watchers are concerned, he’s swimming somewhere in the south Atlantic. Fred says he doesn’t phone, text, email, or use a computer. He doesn’t have a phone.  Hand written snail mail letters are the last secure means of communication.

Fred says he is getting used to a diet of rice and beans. Cuba needs English teachers The rum is good, the music great,  and the girls willing. I think I’ll join him.