Where Everything Knows Your Name

Nobody overslept this morning.

That’s because my bed didn’t wake me up.

Of course, then the lights were painfully bright when I did wake up, my kitchen served my morning esklav weak as dishwater, and the morning newspaper, when I picked it up, was showing nothing but a few priority headlines and the configuration interface.

Indeed, it is a tribute to the weakness of the esklav that I didn’t quite realize what was going on until I slipped my wearable on, only to be confronted with the default glasstop and a blinking warning message; authentication claim not found.

Shit.

Okay.

How does this go?

Infrastructure. Utilities. Cypherclerk diagnostics.

Null response.

So that was that. Universal definitely not working, then. Pain in the – well, someone’s got to be the one-in-five-hundred-thousand failure, but…

Search query: where did I put my backup identity documents?

Xinalath: You do not have permission to query this volume for objects owned by this person.

Oh, shit and corruption!

So. About two hours of searching later, I finally found them. In a crate. In the back storage room in the sub-basement. Underneath half a dozen scarves and my grandfather’s fueling tongs.

Then it was time to go and get the replacement installed. Which is easy enough – it can be done at any Imperial Services office. If you can get there.

You do not have the owner’s authorization to operate this automobile.

Oh, shit, corruption, and entropy!

Agent query: summon a chartercar. Payment at destination.

At least from then it was smooth sailing. Apart from trying to get the seat position and the microclimate comfortable manually. And the advertising blathering on about things I already owned or had no interest in. And the stares from passers-by seeing authentication errors when they looked at me.

And the process of removing the old Universal isn’t nearly as comfortable as they advertise.

But it is very good to be somebody again.