Day 0
"Are you on WhichWatch?"
Charles was wiping down the bar and hadn't seen the woman approach, so his head snapped forward at her words.
"Which What?" he asked.
"WhichWatch!" the woman said excitedly. "It's that new video app."
"Right," Charles said. "Customer was in here earlier talking about the algorithm or something. Nah, I'm not really into that stuff."
"The algorithm is the best part," the woman said.
"Can I get you a drink?" Charles asked, trying to change the subject.
"I'll take... a Sex on the Beach."
"Coming right up," Charles said, selecting his ingredients and mixing them.
The woman across the bar continued unabated. She wasn't unattractive -- quite the opposite, but something about her seemed... odd to Charles. She had wavy red hair and dark brown eyes like a rich wood. She wore a dark green dress that hugged her chest and hips in a fitted way, a little old fashioned, but also somehow timeless.
"The algorithm has been trained on the largest dataset of any app up to this point, so it's perfectly attuned to its users. It takes a few days to adjust to you, but once it does, it syncs up with your personality and ideology to show the perfect vids for you. And it's all automatic, they don't store your data or spy on you like other apps."
"Like the Feed, you mean?"
"The Feed stores all your data on their servers and builds an algorithmic profile that they then sell to advertisers. WhichWatch stores all your data locally, encrypted on your phone or device, and its parent company couldn't access it even if they wanted to."
Charles put the Sex on the Beach down on the bar between them.
"You wouldn't happen to work for said parent company, would you?" he asked her.
She smiled. "Something like that."
Her hand raised from behind the bar, and Charles saw a twenty dollar bill in it, though he did not see where she had produced it from.
"Keep the change, Charley," she said, taking the drink.
"Charles," he said. "Only my sister gets to call me Charley."
"She's a lucky girl," the woman said. "She like your tattoos?"
Charles looked down at his bare forearms, turning them over to show them off to the woman across the bar.
"As a matter of fact, she does," he said.
Looking back up, he found that the woman had vanished. He looked both ways up and down the bar, but she was nowhere to be found.
Charles found the twenty dollar bill that the woman had offered in his hand, so he knew that she had to have been real, not some kind of dream or hallucination, but the sudden disappearance and the oddity of her stuck in his mind. He couldn't help but feel like something was off about the whole interaction.
The rest of the night was uneventful, the few regulars sitting around until the bar closed, walking out with Charles as he locked up, wandering off into the streetlights casting golden cones toward the road. Charles faded into the backstreets, empty at this time of night, until he arrived at his apartment, seeing the light on from the stairs out front.
He let himself into his place and found his little sister, Evelyn, laying sideways on his couch, watching some vid from her Feed. She looked up at him with a relaxed smile and lightly glassy eyes. She was in her clubbing clothes, a short black skirt and a black shawl over a spider-web pattern tanktop. Her hair had been blue for about a week, and was less vibrant but still striking.
"You have a good night?" Charles asked her.
"I had a few drinks," she said. "No adventures."
"Can't win every night," Charles said. "Want a nightcap?"
"That would hit the spot," Evelyn said, sitting up as Charles passed her on the way to the kitchen. He couldn't help but feel her eyes on him as he passed, admiring his tattoos, his body, his form, something he did not know.
In the kitchen he put his cell phone down on the counter and cleared notifications he'd gotten throughout the night, flicking them off screen between pouring ingredients. He stopped at a certain one though, a push notification from the Shop advertising WhichWatch, the "world famous video app." He considered flicking it away as well, but something stopped him. He put his phone back in his pocket and finished mixing the drinks.
Making his way back into the living room, he placed a glass down in front of his sister, before sitting down on the couch beside her.
She took her glass and sipped it.
"Mmm... a La Rousse. Someone's in a good mood tonight."
"Just good company," Charles said.
Evelyn smiled and let herself relax against his chest, her cheek sinking into his shoulder as they watched the vid together. Charles reached over and turned out the light.
"Thanks, Charley," Evelyn said.
They sipped their drinks until they were gone, and then, after a few moments, Charles felt Evelyn's breathing change, felt her muscles loosen, felt her body melt against him. Not for the first time, he wished that he could be closer to his sister, more intimate, without the restraints of these blasted clothes. His heart was full and fiery as he finished the vid without her, then turned out the light.
His phone buzzed again, and he moved it so as not to disturb his sleeping sister. The Shop was asking if it could download WhichWatch, a red and a green button at the bottom of the screen. Charles looked down at Evelyn for a moment, remembering the girl at the bar. Something inside of him made a choice, and he tapped the green button. His phone showed the app downloading as he slid it off onto the coffee table, letting his head fall back against the side of the couch and holding his sister to sleep.
Day 7
"Did you get that vid I sent you?" Evelyn asked.
She sat down at the bar across from Charles, placing her small blue purse down in front of her. Under what looked like a new leather jacket, she was wearing a blue dress that matched her purse and hair.
"The one with the cocktail recipe?" Charles asked.
"Yeah," she said.
Charles placed a margarita glass down on the table in front of her and began combining items in a shaker. A minute later he poured out an apple-colored drink into the glass, garnishing it with an apple slice.
Evelyn took it and sipped at the edge.
"Good?" Charles asked.
"Excellent," Evelyn said.
"What is it?" a patron asked, leaning over the bar beside her.
"It's called a Cuffing Season Cocktail," Charles said. "You want one?"
"Please," the patron said.
Charles prepared another one and placed it down in front of the patron, who sipped it.
"That's tasty," the patron said. "If she showed you how to make it, you should name it after her though."
"There's already an Evelyn cocktail," Charles said.
"A Lady Evelyn cocktail," Evelyn said. "I'm hardly a lady."
"Don't talk about the bartender's sister that way," the patron said with a smile, putting a ten on the bartop and wandering off.
Evelyn shook her head.
"So, you've had WhichWatch for about a week," Evelyn said. "How are you liking it?"
"It's fine," Charles said. "I don't see what the big deal is. I open it up, find out a new drink recipe, I close it. Everyone in the city keeps talking about how great it is."
"It's fun though," Evelyn said. "I like sending you vids."
"I like you sending me vids," Charles said.
"You should send me vids, too," Evelyn said.
"What kind of vids do you want me to send you? Cute animal vids? True crime stuff? People making art in their coffee foam."
Evelyn rolled her eyes.
"You're always so serious, Charley. Anything that makes you think of me. Your Watch algorithm must be calibrated by now, it's been a whole week. Surely there's something in there for your sister."
Charles looked away, grabbing a cloth and pretending to clean. As a matter of fact, something had been popping up in his Watch algorithm that reminded him of Evelyn. It was called the Try Taboo challenge, and Charles had considered deleting the app off his phone if he kept getting vids from it. He didn't even know how the Watch algorithm had decided to send him the vids, what in his data had convinced them he'd be interested in them.
It started a couple days after he'd installed the app. A vid came up as he was scrolling along in a moment of boredom. He thought he remembered waiting at the post office, though it could have been anywhere.
The vid started off with a pretty Latina woman staring into the selfie camera on her phone.
"I'm Ariana," she said. Her words appeared on screen in small captions as she talked.
She tilted the camera to reveal a man beside her, and in the movement Charles could see that they were on a bed together.
"This is mi hermano, my brother, Fernando."
Fernando gave a cheesy smile and a head nod.
"Voluptas Videos is offering one million dollars to one lucky couple who submits a vid using the hashtag Try Taboo, and come here."
She zoomed the camera in on her face.
"I want a million dollars."
The sides of her lips curled up like she'd just made a funny joke.
"So today Fernando and I are going to try taboo."
She zoomed the camera out so that they were both there again, then turned to her brother. They looked at each other for a moment, him looking down at her lips, her looking between his lips and his eyes. Then they kissed. Charles expected a sudden twist where Ariana decided she didn't like it and pushed Fernando away, but a few seconds later they were still kissing. In fact, they were kissing harder now, Fernando pressing against his sister as they both entered the center of the frame.
Charles was watching the vid when he heard his name, suddenly snapping back to reality as he closed his phone and slid it into his pocket. As soon as he finished his errands, he went back to his apartment and opened the app again.
The next few minutes of the vid were just an escalation of Ariana and her brother making out on (what Charles assumed was) her bed. But then Ariana moved her phone to the side table, propping it up on something so that the camera was pointed at them. Then she began to take her top off.
As the fabric of her shirt was about to rise above her nipples, the vid froze.
