Worldbuilding Notes | What It Feels Like to Live Under Skyvault — A Guide That Appears in No Official Handbook

(This is a compilation of everyday observations by private citizens and does not represent any official position of the New Capital.)

Your first time in the New Capital, the place makes you feel that humanity really has solved every problem.

A bus pulls in with an error of 0.04 seconds. The pedestrian light strip pushes the fast walkers to the inside and the slow ones to the outside. There are no police in the city, and in 10 years of public records there is not one crime; the words dispatcher and duty roster are still in the occupational classification list, with a headcount of 0 under each.

The power grid, the metro, medical appointments, the air, prices, all the way down to how well you slept last night — Skyvault calculates it. The New Capital has no public address system; its voice is delivered straight into the depth of your ear canal. Two people on the same street do not receive the same content in the same second.

I. How It Speaks to You

Its wording has tiers, and it climbs. For the same matter, it starts like this:

We recommend visual calibration at the nearest health station.

You do not go, and a few days later it changes to this:

Advanced visual calibration has been automatically arranged for you, Thursday this week at 14:00.

Higher still:

Health and Safety Review meeting notice. Please attend today at 10:00. Rescheduling is not accepted.

Between the three phrasings there is no explanation, and no notice tells you which tier you have been moved to. Swipe the prompt away and it shrinks into a smaller mark in the lower right corner and stays there.

II. Who Arranges Your Day

Morning in the New Capital is not decided by the sun. Skyvault works out the wake-up slot from the previous night's foot traffic and sleep data, and on weekends the parameter shifts itself half an hour later. Lunch is set to high protein and a low-glycemic staple according to the week's exercise.

School runs the same system under another name. The Second High School stopped using a physical class bell long ago; periods are pushed through Skylink. There is no human being in the Health Assessment Room on the third floor, and what the screen offers is book installation now, book it within this week, book it next week. There is no fourth. Not booking within the week affects your comprehensive evaluation for the coming term, and the recommendation letter the school writes when you apply onward.

III. Not Everyone Wears the Same Thing

The form a Skylink takes follows the age of its owner. Students mostly get the glasses type or the thin plate at the nape; office workers commonly wear the wristwatch type; older people mostly have the nape implant; even five-year-olds have a toy version.

The difference in how people adapted runs along the same line. People over sixty still remember queuing to register at a clinic, and in a waiting area they are often still holding a paper slip their Skylink printed out. The generation in their thirties lived through the whole handover, which is why they use the word before more than anyone. Children born under Skyvault have nothing to set it against; a seventeen-year-old has never queued for anything.

IV. A Few Common Misconceptions

Take off your Skylink and you will not be recorded. Someone left one on a desk for 16 hours and 11 minutes. The lower layer kept running: position, acceleration, ambient light, indoor sound field, all of it collected, uploaded in one go the second it went back on.

Calibration can be refused. Calibration is free, painless, for your own good, and there is no such button on the screen. Once the number climbs to a certain point the wording changes from recommended installation to administrative installation, which means the procedure has risen to a level that no longer requires individual consent.

V. Small Things You Only Notice After a While

The first is waiting. Someone said he can no longer remember what it felt like, the last time he waited for something with nothing to do.

The second is people. Some people have someone around them they later cannot remember. No quarrel, and no moving away; simply that after a certain day the patch of memory goes faint. Search Skyvault and what comes back is five words: No such public record found.

The third is a question. Every so often someone asks: if Skyvault has calculated everything for us, then when I want to see the world that has not been calculated, I can just take the link off, can't I? The question has never had a proper answer, and the ones who ask stop asking after a while.

This guide was saved on Skylink once. Opened again 3 days later, section four was two lines shorter. Now it is printed on paper and taped to the inside of the fridge door; not one character on the paper has changed.