Flesh Telemetry

At least I'm not going to fuck the mail drone on live video. The joke falls flat, and not just because your mom isn't there to hear it. She wouldn't have laughed anyway. She has never understood that biogging isn't porn, that you're just streaming your body metrics 24/7, and if that includes sleeping with your boyfriend that's just part of it. It's not porn.

(But you know most professional bioggers try to look hot in their profiles, and maybe you'd have less followers if you didn't look like you do. But it's not porn.)

And you're not harming yourself. That part you don't say aloud, but that part is the important thing, that part is why you're waiting for the mail drone to bring you a package with something you'll drink, take, inject, or snort — you hope it's a pill, you hate needles — while more and more of your followers start commenting on your cortisol levels and the stress obvious on your brain readings. 

Some of them had been pushing you to cut or burn yourself, to keep up with other bioggers, the ones who don't have dangerous or interesting jobs and have to hook their followers some other way. They had demanded your quantified sex, and when they got bored with that they had demanded your quantified pain. As the ad money began to fall you almost did it. You only hesitated because you knew what that lead to, what other bioggers had had to do after that, and that had scared you so much there had been a dozen threads about your heart rate and lack of sleep.

And when you were at your worst, timed maybe to the minute, a VC bot pinged you offering sponsorship money and a way to do original content that did not involve a kitchen knife. The offer had been valid for four minutes twenty-three seconds, the oddly optimized countdown either effective or overkill because you had signed at once. Better that than a kitchen knife or worse.

The mail drone will be at your apartment's door in about seven minutes with whatever it is the VC bot wants you to demo. Your audience numbers have never been higher. You feel scared, regretful, exposed, alone. You know they can tell.

The engagement metrics climb higher, comments slowing down, the numbers of a watchful beast holding its breath.