there is no bad weather, only bad clothing.

the masses of human beings in the middle of the city.

a two-dimensional film of people, millions of people.

crammed, moving slowly, in waves.

and yet, from above we can see.

perched.

sat.

and then the one in a million. two of them actually.

they approach through the film. a region forms around them.

they pass

they stop.

their wakes continue and interact until they disperse into the noise of the film.

they approach each other again, directly this time.

I call to my neighbor to move in for a closer look at this. My closest neighbor at this time is Bill. He's seen a few one-in-a-millions together before. He'll like to watch this.

....

the sea of people and things around me do not annoy or trouble me. not any more than the sea did and does to the captain.

the pleasant lights, the shining lights, the gentle sounds and the serious sounds.

there is no bad weather, only bad clothing.

a key feature of all modern eye gear of the past 40 some odd years is of course the filter. Filtering layers and overlays is common. Most people these days like to keep a constant ad stream running. I filter almost everything out. Including other people.

to me, it is a dark, or light or grey world.

I run algorithms on the vision detection system to overlay colorful patterns which represent the properties of the crowd. There is endless information in these millions of us, wandering around this city desert.

I must have mouthed the words, "city desert" as a brief, subtle search notification showed an image of the event 'burning man', which was begun some many decades ago.

but my 'city desert', with the sea of millions at its heart lived atop a concrete-coral in the bay of San Francisco.

there are a few of these deserts around the planet. the San Francisco one is quite popular, and although more expensive in the goods being sold around, is so much safer than any of the rest.

Oh, don't get me wrong. this place has its fair share of the bad stuff. It's just statistics. But statistically speaking, you have 10 times less chance of being stabbed here, and that's a fact.

for me, I have a 10,000,000,000 less chance, which is way better than the 10,000 times less chance I would have in the Atlantic homestead market. you don't want to go there.

what I do is that I use a special blend of stimulants in conjunction with my transcranial direct stimulation, ekg oscillation inducer to speed my mental functions by a factor of around 200. So everything moves about 200 times slower for me.

The longest I've done this for is 24 days. And that is up until now. And this is the first time I've done it.

But understand, that is 24 days real time. for me it has been an experience of 480 days.

at any rate, back to the task at hand: going through the market looking for a couple rare elements. treating the crowd as a non-newtonian fluid. and then I saw another one like me!

moving through the fluid. and that person also saw me.

we both stopped and the sea of people washed by us.

to my eyes, all was a pitch black except for the hard glowing white outline of that one person. Some effects to my peripheral vision represented collisions in the crowd, but I allowed them to happen and ignored them.

we began at the same time, by coincidence or virtue of the state of the system of people in which we were embedded, to move towards one another. It would take 10 seconds real time, which would be over 33 minutes to us, and so I initiated a friendly hello via chat.

...

Bill landed next to me. "Hey ty. I can totally hear their microwaves!"

I cast Bill a skeptical glance, "You can't interpret their radios, Bill. You know that."

"Shh!" Bill tilted his head and then spoke, "yes, they said hello, did some crazy sounding stuff, which I think is some kind of detailed exchange of information (only these one-in-a-millions do these things so I'm very excited about this) and talked about the film of people around them."

"How do you know these things Bill?"

"I have this audio headset with a coil and genetic antenna. I can't decode the data streams, of course, because they are crazy encrypted. But I can see and head the pauses and interactions of the data exchange and thus guess at the protocols or what they are doing. This works for lots of AI systems, it's how I get all those free hot dogs."

I widened my eyes and jumped a bit back, "so That's how you get all those free hot dogs! You are so crafty Bill. Crafty crafty crafty."

...

information exchange could happen at 2000 times normal speed, once a data link was established. and so in the 10 seconds as we approached one another, we began what would be a friendly and enjoyable 5 and 1/2 hour conversation.