So, you found this journal, huh?

I’ll just assume you're either:

A: Some government operative snooping where they shouldn't.

B: A Saurian who salvaged this, assuming you guys won the war and enslaved earth. Or,

C: A random dude from the future that found this phone, possibly buried in some shithole.

Regardless of which, it doesn't concern me anymore. So… let's start at the beginning, shall we?

Hello! My name is Eric Mohammed. Quite strange, yes? Here I am with a western first name and a typically Middle Eastern last name. Imagine growing up as a teenager living in a trailer park and you’ll get a better picture of how my life went down.

What can I say? My life is full of clichés.

Add to that the fact that my parents were piss poor and couldn’t afford an aug for their child, and the picture gets bleaker still. When you consider that I’m uglier than a disfigured pit-bull and it gets even more interesting. The fact that my parents died in the 2065 riots and left me as an orphan is yet another cliché you’re familiar with. The fact that my only useful skill is salvaging old shit that people throw away is the only plot flavor added by the dumb fuck writing my messed up life story at this point.

Middle Eastern heritage. Check.

Piss poor. Check.

No family alive. Check.

Ugly as fuck. Check.

Living in a trailer park. Check.

No augs. Check.

Failure at school. Triple fucking check.

I pass the fucked up test, see? Every fucking bully gets a hard-on just looking at me. That’s before they commence by fucking my shit up, taking me apart verbally or just beating the shit out of me and pissing all over my shivering body in the aftermath.

But let me elaborate on that last one. You sound quite intelligent, Eric. You sound so smart. You’re good with repairing tech. You seem to be oozing intellectuality. Why are you a failure at school?

Fucking augs, man.

If you’re from the past or have been living in a cave for the past forty years—I won’t judge man. I mean, no cave-shaming here—then let me enlighten you. Augs are the new mobile phone. In modern society, your augs are who you are, and if that’s the case and you really don’t know what augs are, then you’re without augs, and If you’re without any then welcome to the fuck-up club. We’re brethren in fuck-uppery now, welcome to the Order.

Essentially, augs started as an edgy invention for the rich. A set of cerebral implants to improve learning speed and social skills. A massive success if you don’t count the first five or so unfortunate volunteers who became vegetables thanks to it—I heard they quite like the life of The Uploaded—but I digress. Suffice to say, it was a massive success. So successful—in fact—that it turned the team who invented it into billionaires overnight. A team which, thanks to a loophole in their contracts, managed to elope before the patent was issued, and started a two dozen corporations that sold their own versions of the stuff.

This led to an average consumer version sooner than you’d expect, and suddenly: augs were the norm. But then again, we’re human, and in the spirit of capitalism: augs got all the firmware that used to run on a normal handheld phone. Suddenly, your alarm, your calendars, your emails, your phone calls, your games, your in-app purchases, your apps: all were now a part of you.

Oh, and did I forget to mention? The whole fucking internet.

And with the whole fucking internet at your fingertips to act as your external memory storage device, how could non-augs compete?

Non-augs, a.k.a: the appless. That’s me. App-less, not apples, there. Before you made that pun, I butchered it for you.

Appless. A weird term, huh? Yeah. That’s the slang name the augs came up with for us, their non-augmented brethren living in the stone age, and my late parents—the lovable idiots they were—didn’t “believe” in augs. They lived and died blaming their own parents for giving them augs and were adamant that I grow “pure”.

So, of course, they made that choice for me. Their little innocent sacrificial lamb. I was to be an experiment. I was living proof that humans could exist and function without augs in this day and age. Well, fuck you dead parents, and thanks for nothing, ass-hats.

Fucking anti-augs.

The thing is… how am I supposed to study, attend school, meet new people, be social, or live a normal life with just a damn old mobile phone in my hand? How can I compete with a normal student who has access to the whole fucking internet at their beck and call?

Wait. Let me explain that bit, and also explain the reason I was moved to special-ed. while I’m at it.

You see, augs can learn something in a fraction of the time it might take me to comprehend. Like we’d be learning a topic. Say for example: learning about space and the solar system. The teacher starts by accessing their augs and initiating a session, which is then broadcast into every aug in class and causes the AR—augmented reality—module of the implants to activate.

The AR module then projects a simulated model of the solar system in the minds of everyone in class. Except me.

Whilst everyone is watching a model solar system with their eyes, I have to point a stupid ancient phone with inferior graphics at the ceiling to see anything. I have to fiddle with zoom controls to interact with the simulation. I have to be the class oddball, and everyone laughs and points at the Appless idiot waving his phone in class.

Then I’d get angry and sock a fool, or throw my phone at them and spend the rest of my class watching the peaceful, non-augmented thin air of detention.

See what I mean? What future did I ever have to begin within modern education?

After this happened a couple of times it was quite obvious to everyone that I wouldn’t fit in, and at the start of the next week, I was moved to special education, at the recommendation of my teachers, and the school principal himself.

I now get to enjoy my time among my “special” peers. No offense intended it’s just… let’s just say I’m not too keen right now. I have a lot of issues and I’m barely able to contain my “teenage angst” at this stage.

So yeah, Appless, poor as fuck, ugly, orphaned, bullied, and I dunno, why not lump me with the dudes with learning disabilities, or worse?

It was too much, after a whole year of this shit, today I was going to quit school.

But school didn’t quit me.

I returned “home” that day to find out that my trailer had been broken into.

Apparently, the scraps I was keeping for a rainy day belonged to someone else and I was just borrowing them temporarily.

They stole all the shit I had salvaged over the years. My current project, a salvaged PlayStation™ 6 was stolen, too.

They even stole my cooler. The motherfuckers. They probably would have stolen the mini-fridge too, if the trailer still had one.

No more cold underage beer then. It went against my father’s Muslim heritage anyway. Fuck it.

Now, as for options: I could join a gang to mug people or something stupid like that, or join the biggest gang there is, and mug some aliens while I’m at it.

Yeah. I’m talking about the big M, the military.

You see, after WWIII—the shortest war in history—military service became mandatory. Except for non-augs, so at least I had that going for me. All according to my parents’ wishes.

But now I was about to fuck up their dream. The last farewell from me, if I may.

Volunteering to the military as a non-aug entailed something else, though. I’d have to sign another separate contract for military-issue augs. I’d finally get my own wings. I’d break out of my cocoon and become a marvelous Homo Novus. I’d finally get to be a real boy.

Pinocchio’s got nothing on me.

So, join the military. The first step is to get my papers in order.

Thankfully I had everything stowed away in my trailer. Let’s rummage through it and find my hidden stash of important documents, like, perhaps, my birth certificate?

Shit.

Who the fuck steals a birth certificate? What use would someone have for one?

Just then, a thought strikes me.

Did I forget to mention that everything is now authenticated via augs, and normal people don’t need birth certificates any-more It’s because their augs act as a social security number… So, could it be…?

Forgery had to be done either electronically or via old paper trails like mine. What use is a birth certificate without an ID and a social security number to accompany it?

Feeling my heart hammering in my chest, I reach down my hand to my back pocket to check for my wallet and my heart drops.

Triple titty fucking fuck.