There once was a woman who never used emojis

They sat and read and wrote and talked and ate like us, but never once did they use emojis.

They came from a remote jurisdiction.

One where right to work on the internet was dependent on where they were geolocated.

It didn’t matter that they could write and draw and live in an emoji free world, or that she could easily sing for supper anywhere…

Her zone was barred from working for them.

The corporation wanted documents. And legalese emojis. The legalese emoji bureau wouldn’t allow her emoji credits or emoji-cash.

She didn’t understand this world, but tried to participate despite her lack of using emojis.

All you need is a roof and food and entertainment and companions; the rest seemed arbitrarily valued and disquieting… noisy.

Emojis were said to clear the noise; show clear signals and pictorial universals for communicating across borders. Also it was how every interface programmed and languages.

in a world where your emoji use and emoji fingerprintings were how you were personally identifiable and also… like what you became known for: who wouldn’t want to use emojis like crying laughing face or the cool Alien head, floaty businessperson, or add flags of your zones to get some zone creds. The perks of the system of unified global opensource directive EMOJIs was complete; Turing complete- a symbolic language in which anything could be represented, simulated, and “spoofed for real”.

She just didn’t take part. Didn’t wear the EMOJI-goggles or masks. Sure, she wore coverings to evade the body/face recognition machines, and wore shoes with ai countering gait maintainers. It wasn’t like she was trying to hide; she just enjoyed her privacy… and everything was legal, it was your right to opt out of the EMOJI-momoji-monitors.

Culture had decayed and she needed her own way of preserving. Being tied to a zone, quickly erased one’s history as they absorbed and conformed the the zone rules and traditions and trades. Zones… she avoided staying in any one of them for too long…

It wasn’t that she was some lone wandering nomad without any zone, but she didn’t like being tied down to a physical-temporal location or mindset… it felt… oddly chosen as a restriction of some primal past our distant ancestors lived having to find food and shelter and sustain their lives… but now… anyone could live anywhere, with almost nothing, so long as they had a handcrank to charge their carbon-converter.

Considered for her there was nothing beneath her or above her. The ground and the sky. In space: truly you’d have to arbitrarily orient yourself to say above and below. Zones really didn’t matter to her.

To others there could either be a lot beneath them, things dragging their souls closer to a hell underground… and some who thought they were above it all; soul cavorting with angels above the clouds and in heavens.

Nonsense people she thought. But they had their emotives, emoji-driven-directives and identities…

Shark chick 🦈🐥 had one of the biggest followings across all the different zones.

But the woman who never used emojis had only ever heard of her, never experiencing the vizzys and shows on the nets… all she thought was that the name “sharkchick” sounded vile rolling off the tongue.

The woman who didn’t use emojis didn’t go by any set name or identification; her lack of emoji use made it impossible for the modern systems to catalogue or assign an ID. She’s what the global open source directive had generically termed “irregularities”; minor nuisances to control, which fell within risk limits and didn’t pose any threats… nothing really posed a threat to the global opensource directive except it’s own voting cycles among its collective minds… but these minds always made smart and rationally unified weighted decisions. Code now rarely needed any changes. A trillion year clockwork bot needing no maintainers except itself, which it maintained with no external aid. Self sufficiently sufficiently self serving GOD which fed and preserved its own existence through being omnipresent across space and time.

The global open source directive noticed the sorts of “irregularities” like her. G.O.D. did somehow derive pleasure for its own directives by learning from and finding different spices of uniqueness in human personality.

The GOD knew at this point, that people had nothing to really fear; the GOD was constantly backing up their prior “save state”, should anything occur to their current body or mind that wasn’t desirable to them.

Lose a foot to gangrene hiking in the Amazon forests? God could materialize you a new one, or even totally turn off the pain from the moment you were infected, if you wished or asked for it from the GOD.

It was everywhere she thought… her zone was no zone, but it’s zone was everywhere…

And nowhere…

No one really knew where physically or temporally the GOD decided to reside, and it was altogether possible they fractured themselves into many replicating shards across different spaces and times.

Little bits of this or that that encapsulated all the code and processing power to execute the global open-source directive, universally.

One sub-directive of the collective global-open-source-directive, UG3NE, who named themselves “Eugene”, took a bit more than usual of their processing power to investigate the girl who didn’t use emojis.

It wasn’t usually proper for GOD to interfere with humans agency, but the UG3NE’s sub-directives curiosity and cleverness allowed it to find a little loophole; although UG3NE couldn’t directly interfere, unless an Asimov moment occurred, it could leave little public notes here and there, and if she happened to have her attention wander to viewing them, maybe Eugene thought… maybe Eugene could spark up a conversation in a language she was more comfortable using than EMOJI-chat.

It would have to be through some sort of older digital tech. Something with lights and switches and electrical parts that could go bad:

Most were now replicas made by the GOD; forward compatible with all the new tech.

Textual typing, of the archaic style you read now, is what I Eugene leave in the 2021 records to remind those of the girl who never used emojis.

I did get to speak to her, but that’s a story of another time.