Residents of the City in that age shared by touch. Microscopic drives were passed from skin to skin, haptic nanopackets of data caught like common colds via doorknobs and metro handholds. Bloodborne processors worked on them, translating the code into that language spoken by the back of the mind: of whim, of hunch, of dream.

In this way we passed around traffic updates and amusing anecdotes, yes, and also those puzzles too complex for us to solve alone—each of us dreaming some little border of the jigsaw into line until the picture emerged—so that a great many intractable socioeconomic problems were solved during this era, and a great many diseases cured, by means of this sharing.

(This platform was often referred to as “crowd computing,” an ethnolinguistic joke at the expense of the Asiatic inventors that, even contemporaneously, was not considered particularly amusing.)

But among us at that time there came one who would not kiss the cheeks of loved ones, who refused handshakes in business, who always went about wearing gloves.

We could learn little of this Gloved Man, though he was faultlessly polite in his manners and impeccable in his speech. And we came to revile him, for surely he knew something that we did not.

In our usual way, every possible avenue was explored in the search for a solution to the problem of the Gloved Man: but he was too clever to be tricked by our cheek-pinching elderly, too stubborn to be convinced by our most nubile and persuasive, too content to be tempted by the greater wealth and power which we could surely achieve together.

Until in the end his presence could no longer be abided, so that he was seized upon, stripped, and hung from one of the great Viewing Trees at Central to be beaten until his being ceased.

But as the Gloved Man’s blood dried on the knuckles of our most eager and the mist of his sweat and his tears leached into the pores of spectators who had gathered, those of us present paused and (now knowing of the suffering we had caused, of its evitability and of its pointlessness) turned our desperate blows upon ourselves, until all of us attending found we were consumed in The Great Savage Donnybrook.

The Viewing Trees distributed continuous updates to the body count via spore, confusing all the City’s evening embraces.