Unaware In The City V45 -

You wake up, and the first thing you notice is that you don’t remember falling asleep. This is not unusual. What is unusual is the quality of the light — a flat, mercury-vapor gray that pushes through the blinds like it has no interest in being beautiful. You rise. You brush your teeth. You check your phone. Forty-seven notifications, none of them for you. Not really. Algorithms have learned your name, but they’ve learned it the way a parrot learns a slur — with no understanding, only mimicry.

You walk to the train. Above ground, a billboard cycles through three ads: a perfume that smells like “nothing you’ve ever known,” a bank that promises to treat you like a person (as if persons are what they want), and a streaming series about a detective who solves murders by feeling the emotions of the victims. You think about that for a moment — the privatization of empathy — and then the train arrives, and you forget. unaware in the city v45

You cannot remember.

This is version forty-five. That’s what the “v45” means, though you don’t know who is counting. Somewhere, a system is iterating. A writer — or a machine pretending to be a writer — is generating variations on a theme. The theme is urban disconnection . The variations are subtle: in v12, the protagonist noticed every crack in the sidewalk; in v23, they heard a violin in the subway and wept; in v38, they met someone whose name they pretended to remember. But in v45, you are the protagonist, and you don’t notice anything at all. That is the innovation of this version: the absence of noticing has become the noticing. You wake up, and the first thing you

Outside, the city has already decided what kind of day it will be. The coffee shop on the corner is playing lo-fi beats that loop every ninety seconds. The barista, whose name tag reads “Jesse” but whose eyes say something else entirely, hands you a flat white without being asked. You thank them. They nod. Neither of you means it. This is the contract of the unaware: civility without curiosity. You rise

Lunch is a sandwich eaten over a sink. The bread is dry. You eat it anyway. Outside the window, a delivery driver is arguing with a man in a suit. The man in the suit is pointing at a watch. The delivery driver is pointing at a phone. Neither of them is pointing at the sky, which is doing something rare — a brief break in the gray, a ribbon of blue like a vein. You watch the argument for a minute, then turn away. You have your own arguments to not have.