Ripples 17 by KimB

[Editor's Note: Ripples is a serial story.
The author makes no guarantees as to completing the serial.
Publication dates are located in the left side menu.]

17 Pereō ante Perdō

A waterfall of papers, notes floating like mist, swirled to the floor.

She glared at the empty folder, the crease fully ripped, the contents now patterned the floor. Her sorting useless.

One by one, she collected the pages and placed them on the table. The torn folder sheets, doubled up, now served as a poor man's clipboard, sans the clip. Like many things, in her life, sans was more often the case.

She shuffled the recovered pages into a slightly tidier pile, the new top page drawing her interest. She tabbed through the new pile selecting like pages. Reading each page, adding to her notes. Reviewing the earlier pages.

Back and forth she went.

The pages she carried away from the Fruit Stand Store, their shiny surface reflecting the poor lighting, declaimed many things. Then they declaimed the opposite.

Lost is not Lost.

Found is not Found.

Theft is not Theft.

Or maybe it is...

Like the jetsam she picked up on the beach, phones were also thrown away. While recycling was often touted, recycling often meant "sending it to a dump in China". The majority of phones ended up in drawers. Some got resold. Some donated.

The news that even old phones could be harnessed against their previous owners, extracting old contact lists, old photos, music/videos, stored messages and emails made them gold mines to those so interested.

The phoront separated from its human host could no longer pretend to protect the host's interest, and regurgitated it's contents readily. Subjected to indignities, lies, and mistreatment, the phone had little chance to survive intact. Or rather, survival was re‑determined by the extent of the compromised chips that allowed the phone to function.

The unique identifier that every phone carried could be turned off by the telecom carrier, blacklisting the phone, but depending on the circumstances of how the phone got separated, this often didn't happen or it didn't matter. Much of what the phoront did or didn't, was independent of having an active connection.

Smartphones, she reflected, were a lot like James James Morrison's Mother:

LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!
JAMES JAMES MORRISON'S MOTHER
SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID.

Because it mattered very much

"how she got down to the end of the town".