"So what does a holo-scribe do?" asked Essabrou.

"I'll demonstrate. Do you have an AR device?"

"Not a very good one," said Essabrou. They slipped off their pack and began hunting through it. "I'm saving up for an upgrade."

"You should keep it somewhere handy while you're in Forash Market," said Welton, "if it's not the sort you can just wear." He tapped his spectacles. "I wear mine all the time," he said.

"Is it that important?" asked Essabrou, their head buried in the backpack. They had, Welton noted with mild interest, a blowhole on the top of their head. He wondered how long they could keep their face submerged in the stuffy confines of the pack.

"It's quite useful," said Welton. "A lot of shops have signs and price lists and things done as holos. And more importantly, there's a directory that can show you the way to any registered booth or stall by projecting arrows in front of you."

Essabrou re-emerged with a pair of what looked like squarish cardboard binoculars held in front of their eyes.

Welton whistled. He'd spent a long time after his conversion re-learning to whistle as a pig, and here it was, paying off once again. "That is a cheap one," he said. "Can I see it?"

They handed it over.

"You could attach a strap to it or something," he suggested, "to keep it balanced on your nose. I guess."

"Nah," said Essabrou, "I don't want to tear the cardboard too much. It needs to last until I can replace it."

Welton pulled off his spectacles and peered through the cardboard apertures. "I hope you can replace it soon," he said. "You'll want one that you can use in the rain without worrying that it'll fall apart. What are these lenses? Good grief!"

"That's not entirely the device's fault. I just throw it in my backpack, so I guess the lenses get scratched up a bit."

He pointed it down at his menu. "Never mind the scratches, though," he said, "what's the resolution on this? I can't even read the holo versions of half these menu items. This isn't augmented reality, this is... what's an antonym of 'augmented'?"

"What's an 'antonym'?"

"OR," said Welton. "Obfuscated Reality. That's what this is."

"Is it really that bad?"

"What's this blocky shape that keeps appearing in the corner? The wobbly black thing?"

"Um," said Essabrou, "I'm not sure."

Welton put the device down. "No, really," he said, "what is it?"

"It came like that! I swear, I have no idea!"

"Then why do you sound so- crap!" He threw it away from himself. "No! What's it blocking, Essabrou? What's it blocking? What appears there behind the black shape?"

"Why do you sound so panicked?" Essabrou started to sound a little panicked themself. "The lady swore it was safe."

"Swore what was safe?"

"Look, even if the block fails, it doesn't matter. That company's been dead and gone for ages. You can't even buy their product anymore. So what harm could their ad do?"

Welton's face went grim. "Don't use it," he said. "Don't use it ever. You should destroy it. If it has an adaptive ad, you should destroy it, no matter what code's been hacked in place over the top to try to protect you from it."

"It's fine! I've been using it for a while now. No weird urges, no sudden compulsions to drink soda or whatever."

"None that you're conscious of," said Welton. His fur had gone damp with sweat. "That's how they got people, you know. More than anything else. People didn't take advertisements seriously. The big corporations put more and more time and effort into making them insidious and persuasive. And for a while, it only sort of worked. People would get advertising jingles stuck in their heads, and they'd be annoyed, and they wouldn't really buy the product any more than they would have anyway. Subliminals didn't work at all. But the ads were everywhere, of course, making people aware that products existed as much as possible. And people took them for granted. They faded into the background.

"And then AI blew up in the early 2020s. All of a sudden, the secrets of the human brain were unlocked for the big corps to use and abuse. Or at least, for their AIs to use and abuse, based on whatever vague directives they'd been given. And ads became persuasive, just how all the marketing executives thought they wanted them to be."

Essabrou was on the edge of their stool. "Is that really how it happened?" they said. "Is that how the war started?"

"Kinda. Honestly, nobody knows for sure," said Welton. "But it's at least part of how it started. It was one of the main goals of the counter-AI movement: Find a way to stop those ads from getting into peoples' skulls and reprogramming them."

"But can people really be reprogrammed like that? Just by looking at an image? That seems hard to believe. It makes for a nice story and all, but-"

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

"Right," said Welton, "it does seem hard to believe. Magical pictures that brainwash you just because you looked at them? Nah, no way. But at the most basic level, images can and do change the state of your brain. That's part of what 'seeing' fundamentally is. And words are a special case where the act of looking at a bunch of abstract symbols causes your brain to take on whole complex states that would seem to be totally unpredictable from just the shapes of the letters. You have to learn to read first, sure, or it doesn't work. But still."

"Yeah, okay," said Essabrou. "I think I followed that. But we're talking, just, images. Not even writing. And I've never heard of anyone killing all their loved ones and then themself just because they read a weird book."

"Depends on the book," said Welton, darkly. "And the person. But that's the catch, of course - everyone's brain is different. You can't even reliably get people to agree with you by telling them raw, hard facts, even if the evidence is right in front of them. You have to figure out how to make things make sense not just in general, but in the context of their particular worldview. That doesn't just mean telling them the right facts, either, or telling them the right facts in the right way. They might still not listen. You have to appeal to their emotion, or catch them in the right mood, or deal with all sorts of other things that can interfere. It's an extremely hard problem - and the answer is different for every individual person. That's why persuasive advertising doesn't normally work. You can't trick different people into all believing the same thing the same way, no matter how good you are. And in order to trick any of them at all enough to rewrite their core view of the universe, especially just by showing them a glimpse of some particular image in the corner of their vision, you really have to understand them. I don't know how it does work, but if there's any hope it will work, the image has to be designed for them and them alone. And that's already assuming you have some kind of algorithm to generate it that's beyond the scope of human understanding, practically by definition. You could only do it with the kind of wild optimization power that AIs were capable of achieving."

"So what I'm getting is, as far as my AR device is concerned, even without the block, it wouldn't be the right image to get inside my head, or your head, or probably anybody's head who's still alive," said Essabrou. "Right, professor?"

"That's the thing, though," said Welton. "The best efforts that the AIs dreamed up affected roughly one in twelve people. Which is astoundingly good. Impossibly good, I think, for a generalized image. Maybe they had some way of injecting their own code into the devices they infected, so they could observe their victims and figure out what made them tick before generating a customized image just for them. But there's problems with that. Not all of the infected devices had the computing power to do something like that, for one thing. I mean, it takes work to map a human brain out under the best of circumstances, right? At the very least, you need somewhere to store the map you've made, and a lot of the old AR devices and so forth didn't have a fraction of enough room for that. But here's what I figure:"

Essabrou had eased back from their stool's edge. "Okay," they said, "what do you figure?"

"Maybe the image isn't directly persuasive as such," he said. "Maybe it's like... so when you read text, your brain does some work. You imagine something. The images you imagine aren't part of the text, they're what happens after your brain processes the text. So maybe the images are like little computer programs that your brain automatically runs, translating the- the payload into terms it will understand. The picture you see isn't the one that brainwashes. It's the picture that the picture you see makes you imagine."

"Right," said Essabrou. "The picture that the picture you see makes you imagine. Sure."

"But that's just a guess," said Welton. "And obviously you're losing interest in this."

"Sorry, I guess I'm just not as smart as you," said Essabrou.

"Hey, woah! If I were smart, I wouldn't talk some poor stranger's ear-holes off like this. Look, all I'm really trying to say is, leaving all the theory or whatever out of it, we know the images are terrible and deadly, because they were. People saw it happening. Some of them experienced it happening and survived. The old myth about the family who drank themselves to death on cheap orange soda is probably just a myth, but the stories I've read about what actually happened, based on firsthand accounts, are worse."

"So?"

"So don't use that AR device," he finished.

"Ugh. First you tell me it's vital I have one just to find my way around around here, now you tell me I can't even use the one I've got." They walked over and picked it up from where Welton had knocked it onto the loose wooden floorboards of the pierside restaurant.

"Sorry," said Welton. "I dunno what else to say. It's the truth."

"But I really have been using it with no side-effects. Anyway, won't the scratched-up lens ruin whatever brainwashy image might be programmed into it, even if for some reason the block doesn't block it?"

Welton hesitated. "Well," he said, "I guess maybe."

"There you go, then."

"But nobody who was infected knew they were infected," he protested. "And sometimes it didn't manifest until a long time later. Years later, maybe. People who took extra care to avoid looking at anything that might have an AI ad embedded in it still went funny thanks to something that'd gotten in before anyone knew the AI ads existed in the first place. And when it comes down to it, nobody really even knows how it worked. So it's hard to say if anything's safe. Even today."

"Yeah, but that's just life, right?" said Essabrou. "Life's not safe. Can't let it stop you from living it." They said it with the smug finality of someone sure that their wisdom has trumped someone else's intelligence.

"Yeah, but-"

"Hey, if you don't want to use them, that's fine. You have your own pair. Anyway, it's getting pretty late. I'd better get back to my berth." They put the device back in their pack and zipped it up. "See you around, though, eh?"

They left Welton sitting alone at the tall, round table, watching forlornly as they slapped their flippery feet down the pseudo-gangplank that led from the restaurant to the river's shore.

"Did I just screw up two in a row?" he asked himself.

He raised a hand and called the waiter over.

"Yes? What'll it be?" said the waiter, using that superficially polite voice Welton had become accustomed to from people who weren't totally prepared to serve an anthropomorphic pig.

"Can I see your drinks menu?" he asked.

Rakkel still had not found the riverside.

This baffled xir. The river ran through the whole dang city. In fact, there were two of the things. Walk in any direction for long enough, and you were bound to hit one of them, right? That or the city's edge.

But xe hadn't.

Xe thought for sure these warehouses, at the very least, would be close to the riverside. It only made sense. That's where all the cargo traffic went, after all. But xe'd been walking for long enough that xe felt sure xe should've seen it, or at least heard it. Or if not that, then the marketplace, which shouldn't be so far away. Xe'd been in the heart of it on the other side of that building.

Up ahead, xe saw a wall. It wasn't a friendly wall. It had - xe thanked xir good night vision for letting xir see this, because the sun had gone quite low by this point - barbed wire along the top. Or something of the sort. It extended in both directions across the street and upward for several times xir height.

Where the heck am I? xe thought.