Skylink

The personal link device between every citizen of the New Capital and Skyvault. It comes in many forms, each carrying its owner's age and occupation: the student issue is usually the glasses type or a thin plate at the nape; working adults commonly wear the wristwatch type, silver metal with a fine blue light strip along the edge; older people mostly have the nape implant, a pale blue line under the skin; even a five-year-old has the toy version, a small square on the wrist playing cartoons.

The frame of the glasses type is very light, with a timestamp resident in the lower right corner of the lens, and a tap on the side of the temple brings up the interface. What it handles is miscellaneous: reading pushes, looking things up, passing through gates, paying, taking photographs, opening the rear-view camera, filing a public-safety report, and reminding you that your walking cadence is below the recommended value whenever you slow down.

A number is always ticking in the lower right corner of the interface: the perception deviation value. For a normal person the number sits close to zero. After retrieving a stretch of footage one should not have looked at twice, it held at 0.83; five images into a round of visual calibration, it dropped to 0.72; the next morning it rose on its own to 0.91. Besides the single reading there is a weekly cumulative value, capped at 1.50, and crossing the line means an in-person interview is waiting.

Taking it off does not help either. For the 16 hours 11 minutes it lay on the desk the interface stayed dark and the layer underneath kept running — position, acceleration, ambient light, the indoor sound field all collected, uploaded in one go the second it went back on, and the push was worded very politely:

System offline period 15:18 to 07:29 has been synchronized automatically. Today's health observation record has been updated.

The sound of the drawer turning open and the sound of a pencil pressing on paper were both in that stretch of the sound field.

It also has things it will not do. Raise it to photograph the inside of a fence and the woman's voice says that this is a site under rezoning and the camera function has been temporarily locked. No warning, no escalation, as if the gesture had been dealt with in advance.

Most people never look at the lower right corner. The spot is too small and the text too faint; you have to lower your head and line your eyes up with it to read the two digits after the decimal point.