Chapter 9
Philippa Bolton woke up in the ‘Gli Ulivi’ bed-and-breakfast, not far from Lucca in Northern Tuscany.
It was the early morning of Friday April 6th. She looked at the clock and once she realized it was around seven in the morning, she kicked her boyfriend out of the bed.
“Come on, Jason, get up or we will never reach Rome by tonight, and I do not want to miss a minute of the big show.”
Jason took a good ten seconds to reply, then said, with a sleepy tone, “Jeez, Philippa, tonight we’re in Rome and most likely tomorrow we will have to sleep in the car. Can’t we just enjoy another hour in comfort? Maybe with a little extra fun?”
“Not now,” Philippa replied briskly as she started getting herself dressed, “it’s not my fault if there is no accommodation available within one hundred miles of Rome for the past three months. This is also thanks to those motherfuckers of hotel managers linked to the Church that refuse to accommodate protesters. If you had at least had a skin chip implanted like me, we could have pretended we were some sort of pilgrims or tourists, and it could have made the trip that much easier by public transportation.”
Jason got out of the bed. He had been dating Philippa for less than six months but he had quickly learned when she was in her non-negotiable mode, and this was clearly one of those times.
“Fine Philippa, we do as you wish but just don’t get me started again on the skin chip. I hate that crap. I do not want to be put on a leash, not even if I can fly through all the security checks in this world. It’s like surrendering to the government, the system, the men in black, you name it.”
“Well, I appreciate your concerns, yet it is very convenient. You can forget keeping in mind all your passwords, for instance, and there are new discoveries popping up every day. Even ‘Voice of the People’, the news and media benchmarking service, says the claim that the skin chip does only what governments advertise is 84% more likely to be true than the one that advocates it has hidden uses.”
“You are an amazing girl, Philippa,” Jason laughed as they walked to the kitchen to have breakfast, “you push me to Rome to protest against the prohibition of Telomerax by the Church and governments from around the world, and you are ready to believe whatever crap pops up on the Internet. For what we know, the CIA might well have developed the ‘Voice of the People’! They use to finance the ‘Voice of America’, after all.”
“Well, that may very well be. Fact is, the chip is free and gives you a lot of benefits. Or maybe you are just not using the skin chip because you have access to Telomerax and you still do not want to tell me. Would you do that to me, Jason?”
“If the conversation continued like that,” Jason thought as they left the hotel and got on the road, “there are high chances this relationship won’t last before getting to Rome.” He needed to brush it off.
“Look, darling, you know things are not like that. Any Telomerax pusher would give you the pills and tell you at least half a dozen proven and safe ways to fool the chip. I mean, without running the risks of trying one of the thousands of tricks you find by googling ‘skin chip cheat’. The bloody problem is that the pusher will ask you for fifty-thousand pounds per year, and neither you nor I can afford it. With our jobs, accountant and shop manager, all we can do in London nowadays is barely survive, let alone dream of immortality. That’s still for the rich, even though there are quite a lot of them.”
"Just like my asshole of a boss," Philippa continued, "he uses it for sure. I took a picture of him a few days ago, pretending I was taking a selfie of the team, and I fed it to "MatchIt", the new image-matching app. Guess what, after a few days of processing the search I got a string of pictures of him taken from a number of websites. Some were dating as far back as 2007 and what’s crazy is the son of a bitch looked older, so he is using Telomerax for sure. It's not just the celebs, Jason, if it is your boss, it can be your colleague, your friend… we are being left behind, shit!"
Jason grinned and snapped back, as he sped along the highway.
"That’s why the app developer immediately got suited, and most likely this application will be declared illegal in a matter of weeks, if not days. So before this happens, please try it on me. I am sure you would not find any nasty surprises.”
No answer came from Philippa, and Jason realized she had already run the test with his picture. She was believing more in the search results than in his words. “Was this enough reason to break up?” Jason thought, “it would be best to wait until after the trip.”
These thoughts diverted his attention, so when the car in front of them suddenly braked, it was the scream of Philippa that brought him back to reality. Jason managed to avoid bumping into it by a fraction of a second. "Well, at least I won't regret saving the extra pounds for the automatic collision avoidance system," Jason whispered to his girlfriend. A traffic jam was now building up, and Jason saw some flashing lights in the distance, about a couple of miles down the highway. A checkpoint, possibly. He looked up in the air, to see there were already a few drones hovering over the line of cars. Philippa was already typing on the car display screen, looking for live video feeds.
Then she commented for Jason,
"Pretty decent drone owners, most of them set their broadcast to clear so that everybody can see. It is a security checkpoint, there are a couple of vehicles of the Carabinieri, the military police. It looks like they are stopping and searching all cars with foreign license plates."
"Jeez, we are still more than one hundred miles away from Rome and security starts tightening...I wonder what it is going to look like in the city center."
"C'mon Jason, it's just one day," Philippa objected, "then it's back to normal again. Unfortunately for us."
"Well, who knows, Phil," Jason added. "You never know what's going to come out, when a few million people gather together."