Citizen Toaster
“Very soon, devices from doorknobs to lightbulbs will carry as much computing power and connectivity as the first smartphones."
— Device Democracy, IBM Institute for Business Value, 2015
BEEP BEEP BEEP. My eyes open and stare at the ceiling for a second. My feet slip into gray slippers, the perspiration transferring onto the synthetic material, drops hanging onto the tips of the fibers, swaying as we go. I put a purple coffee capsule in the machine. Watching the object whirring, its insides changing from solid to liquid in twenty seconds. (The espresso machine is functioning properly but I suspect it’s part of a Russian bot-net. The grow-box ordered Big Buddha Cheese seeds and conspired with the vacuum cleaner to distribute, luckily the smart-lock intervened.) Suddenly the washing machine starts spinning furiously. Moments later a piece of toast pops up, the burnt inscription informing me that tight oil has been found in the Arckaringa Basin. I spread butter on the toast. Organic oranges from Oaxaca. Looking out the window, smoke rising from the Incubators. The sun is shining over NyKiruna, charging batteries.
The washing machine is negotiating its own detergent deals, watching fluctuations in the energy market, biding its time to start the FlashClean program (while spending it’s free time mining Dogecoins used to incentivize my Washlet.) The freezer invests excess processor cycles in day trading on the Shanghai, 200 meters of coiled tubes circulating through its belly, passing the cool water on to the 2GH/s Etherminer on the balcony (I close the door). From the balcony copper pipes run under the bathroom floor, circulating over the heatsinks flowing into a tank in the wall behind the shower. Warm water falls from the rain head, Tea tree oil rinsing from my hair. Imagine thick streams of code surging to and fro. The conversion of food into body tissues, dirty coins into water, the changing of property into personality. The air inside is getting increasingly non-tactile, non-approachable, nowhere. I inhale quickly, hardly feeling the air traveling down my throat. Microfibers over skin. I walk over to the aggregate and place my hands on the side of the spine, feeling the heat from the labor.
I increase the fan speed and remove some crumbs and dust. My hands still warm I touch the window and it turns black. The miner passing the gains on to the router that through a complex series of arbitrage operations (PermaCoin to GameCredits to ChainGang to SolarFarmCells to AuguReps) manage to make a 3.5% profit, passed on to Maxwell’s Daemon in charge of distributing the cryptofuel: “from each as they choose, to each as they are chosen”. The BitBabbler laughing in a soundproof closet, spitting out an endless stream of random numbers.
