---

Chug the Tea Leaves, Chuck the Ads

by Tim Chawaga

I wake up to a message and a certain intuition that my first ad of the day will be for Bubble Fresh.

I can almost see it, flashing through my MindzEye, just in time for me to grab a pack at the newsstand. Bubble Fresh Gum on my morning commute always means it will be a good day. The question is what kind of good, and the answer is in the flavor: Spearmint for promotion, Juicymint for romance.

Last night, against the odds, Joleen unghosted me. This morning I hope for Juicymint.

The ad arrives. I’m still on the subway. It’s early, which isn’t good, but not necessarily bad. It’s a brand I’ve never heard of, with a name I can’t even pronounce. For a second I still think what I’m seeing might be gum; just unwrapped and pre-chewed.

But then I read the copy and I see that it’s about as far from gum as you can get while I guess still being roughly the same shape. I don’t think it’s meant for eating but I was hoping so badly for gum that I imagine cracking it between my teeth, shards and splinters piercing my cheeks.

I stop, mid-stride through the car doors. People push past. I search the ad for clues, like I was taught. I miss the bing-bong, and the doors close and crush my backpack and for a second I am paralyzed, soon to be torn apart by the pull of my feed and the perpendicular pull of the car down the platform.

The doors open again. I blink the ad away, ignore the ire of my fellow passengers. When I reply to Joleen my hands are shaking. I walk right past the newsstand, relieved to see that it is closed today, no gum anyway, as if this might explain it all away.

My relief is brief. The ads do not abate.

By the time I get to work I’ve blinked another dozen or so away. I do my best to ignore them, but then a particularly gnarly one appears during our daily stand-up and I can’t help it, I gasp, loud enough to stop the meeting in its tracks.

“Bad ads,” Tod mumbles, sagely, like I’m just another corporate greenhorn. He likes to wrangle greenhorns, it shores up his own position. He’ll tell me what I already know, and if or when I cleanse myself, he’ll take some credit.
I’m not green, not anymore. I’ve been climbing the floors for eight years. I’ve gone up and up (and briefly down) and up. I can handle a bad ad or two.

But these ads aren’t just bad. They’re weird. Indecipherable.

Even, maybe, dare I say it—sinister. When I close my eyes I get the (irrational, technologically impossible) feeling that these ads could pierce the barrier of my eyelids, and from there take the open highway to my brain, my dreams.
Obviously I don’t say any of this to Tod. He ends the meeting early, clears the room like it’s a confessional and he’s my priest. Or, more likely, it’s a quarantine and he’s isolating me from the others in case my ads are contagious.

“You know where you gotta go,” he says.

“I know, Tod.”

“You gotta go to my man Rito.”

Every tech exec on every floor north of ten knows where to turn when their feed goes south.

“Rito’s a mad lad,” Tod says. “He’s the guy you need if you gotta read the future in your ads.”

---

I take the elevator down to street level, scrolling down the feed of Tower Town. Tod took me here almost two years ago to meet Rito after a particularly bad ad.

“I’m too smart to believe in God,” Tod said, like I wasn’t already on board. “I put my faith in that other Almighty, the algorithm. The algo predicts your future; God can only forgive your past.”

Everyone knows the MindzEye algorithm that sends you ads is sophisticated enough to reliably tell the future. Everyone knows someone whose life was saved by an early cancer detection when their feed started sending them mysterious ads out of the blue, for things like anti-nausea medication, deals on interest rates for medical loans, bedpans. That’s the obvious example anyway.

But there are other ads, just as ominous but not so obvious. For those, the savvy ad-believer goes to a professional.

“If you’re not going to listen to good advice,” goes a common Tod-ism. “You might as well just go to church.”
Rito works at Thothricot, which is on the same block as the Ukrainian National Home with the little restaurant on the first floor. Dad says he likes that restaurant better than the famous one on the same block, but it’s just that the famous one was Kelly’s favorite. The entire block is under PlasTech Tower, which is tall but not as tall as HuMaintain, which is where I work.

It’s late afternoon in January, but it might as well be midnight at street level in Tower Town. Thothricot’s window is a neon orange piece of fruit in a golden cup, loud and proud and blinky, bright enough to catch the attention of someone whose MindzEye is flooded, like mine.

I step through the door. Inside it’s cool and white, inner peace in LED. I am greeted by the scent of their trademark incense. It focuses me. I am ready for Rito.

The woman at the front wears the Thothricot uniform, a yellow t-shirt and purple vest and a gold hat, sort of a wrapped skullcap, lightly puffy, inching as close to a turban as possible without quite being appropriative. “Do you have an appointment?” she asks.

“Yeah. Robert Volk. Where’s Rito?”

“I’m sorry. Rito quit yesterday.”

My feed is blinding. I squint through it.

“Quit?” I repeat back to her. “Why?”

She frowns. “I can’t say, actually.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Uh, well, both, I guess.”

I blink, stupefied, and let her guide me to my seat at the bar, across the smooth granite floor. A tall man in flip-flops, jeans, long dark goatee and turned up mustache emerges from the back. He is a Zoltar fresh from beach volleyball. He calls my name. His name is Bryce. He doesn’t look up from his tablet.

“What brings you in today?” he asks, no small talk at all.

“Bad ads.”

He nods, and his face flashes briefly with corporate-trained concern. “Let’s take a look.”

I give him the pairing code for my MindzEye and he connects to my feed. I scroll back to the first ad, the one I saw on the subway.

Bryce frowns.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Tiny bone,” I say, in a tiny voice.

He doesn’t respond, so I go on. “A rat bone. No wait, mouse? It says it’s a femur. It’s an ad for a single mouse femur.”

“Wow, yeah,” says Bryce.

“Just the femur. Why just the femur?”

“Do you collect…” he trails off, but he’s about to ask a standard question, to eliminate the possibility that I have inflicted these ads upon myself with my own search queries.

“What?” I reply. “Do I collect mouse femurs?”

“Well, do you?”

“No.”

“Do you have a pet snake?”

“Look, it gets worse. Check it out.”

An ad to go hiking in that national park that was just buried by an erupting volcano.

An ad from a flood insurance agency, with a digital image of me, surrounded by all my possessions, while water rises rapidly through the window of my apartment.

An ad in favor of smoking: “Life is short, Bolos burn long. The difference between burning bright or not at all is a Bolo cigarette.”

Bryce throws all this data into his tablet, consults the Thothricot handbook and then feeds me my diagnosis, which is basically that he has no idea. He suggests that I buy everything I get an ad for and keep as much of it on me at all times. With him still in my feed I purchase flood insurance, hiking equipment and a brochure for the park that doesn’t exist anymore.

He doesn’t mention the mouse bones, but I buy them anyway.

One thing I really liked about Rito is that he usually wouldn’t tell me to buy anything. The first time I saw him was the day I suddenly got an ad for grief counseling. I was a mess. I felt like everyone I loved was someone I was about to mourn.

Rito turned me right around. He told me that instead of thinking of impending loss like a tragedy, think of it more like a countdown clock. One last chance to beat the buzzer, to connect and make it count.

So I went through my contacts and saw everybody, people I hadn’t seen in years. I was acting like I was the one who was about to die. But Rito was right—just like that, my ads were different: doubles tennis lessons with my friends, cruise packages for my parents, new suits in colors other than black.

In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t think too hard about it, because I could have deduced who it was by who the ads ignored. When what happened happened, I did fall a few floors. But I think without Rito it would have been more, or I wouldn’t have bounced back so quickly.

That’s just good customer service.

---

When I leave Thothricot I briefly consider turning my MindzEye off.

I can’t, though. Too many post-work happy hours comparing feeds. If I turn it off for too long, Tod and my bosses will be able to tell. Before I know it I won’t be going up anymore and I might even be going down.

The unghosting girl Joleen and I have been texting sporadically all day, and I’m replying to her when I get another ad, this one for rancid boiling frying oil, and another for flossing, a man choking on his own loosened teeth. It’s too much. I get off the street and take refuge inside the National Home, down the hall to the restaurant.

Even here, there’s no escape. When I look through the window I see an ancient version of myself, alone, sipping a steaming bowl of blood.

I jump back and close my eyes, push away the sight of my own sad blood-slurping future. But when I open them again I realize it’s just Dad, drinking borscht by himself in a booth. I forgot that his girlfriend Mira lives close by.

He sees me, beckons me in, like he’s inviting me to become him, even faster than I am already.

---

We sit in silence for a while, our small talk exhausted in record time. I can still remember a time when the lowest he’d go for lunch in the city would be omakase on the thirtieth floor. Now he spends all of his time street-level, or alone at home.

“How’s the ads?” I ask, like I’m talking to a co-worker I haven’t seen in a long time. Which I guess, sort of, he is.

He glances at me. I see the teal twinkle in his eyes. His ads must be so bad. Would he even tell me? Ads for cash for gold, paycheck advances, estate sale services? Foreclosure advice? Places to sell his blood? What kind of ads do people get on the way down, when the ads know they don’t want to come back up?

He just shrugs. I could needle him, but I don’t. It’s for the best, I guess. I’m not about to tell him mine either.
“It’s Christmas this weekend,” he reminds me, between gulps. It’s early January, so he must mean Orthodox Christmas, what we always called Ukrainian Christmas.

I nod. “Are you going to Olga’s?”

He shakes his head. “They’re coming to me.”

I see an ad for discount diet pills whose main side effect is extreme and rapid aging. I buy them.

“You know,” he leans in, conspiratorially, his face lining up with a picture of a roaring bear in my feed. “You’re always welcome.”

I just nod, and do my best not to wince.

Without my sister, and now that Mom moved out, it’s just me and him. I do call. I call more than I did before.

His soup is gone. We get up to go.

“I beat you, you know,” I say. We’re back on the street. It’s late now. People have been out of the Towers for hours. They swarm the street-level bars. “Last month. Didn’t even realize it.”

He just nods, and grunts, and pretends to know what I’m talking about. He’d promised that when I got promoted to floor sixty-seven or above, officially higher than he’d ever been, he’d take me to Keen’s.

“Oh,” he says, when he gets it. “That’s great. So long as you’re happy.”

---

All my orders are waiting for me when I get home.

I go to work the next day, smelling like a humidor, wearing hiking boots. The diets pills give me gas. The tiny white mouse femur is loose in my pocket.

The ads persist. If anything they’re multiplying, in volume and intensity. Ads for rusty, antique firearms, military-grade laser pointers, concrete shoes.

Something that is becoming obvious: They aren’t actually telling me that I’m going to die. They seem, instead, to be encouraging me to kill myself. Except for the ad for mouse bones. I guess there isn’t really a good way to kill yourself with mouse bones.

But the rest of them, definitely. Rito would have absolutely caught that. He would have given me good advice. He would stop this, whatever it is. I need to find him, or I’ll never taste Bubble Fresh again.

I’m supposed to meet Joleen after work for drinks at street-level. I stop at Thothricot first and try to get someone to tell me where he went. No one seems to know. One tech almost tells me, but then a manager comes by and she shuts down.

---

“Siblings.”

Joleen’s statement is really a question. She’s reading from the same first date checklist that I am. Still, it catches me off guard. I’m distracted by an ad for a human-sized drum of hydrofluoric acid.

We’ve been co-workers for a while, she and I. There was a sweet spot where our floors lined up, but then she did really well on a project and she just shot up, all the way to one hundred fourteen. I’m about forty floors under her now. If I ever get to one hundred fourteen I could stay there for a while, maybe. They have a karaoke room.

Dating in this town is impossible, everybody’s too ambitious, on their way up or down. Nobody’s ever going to the same place at the same pace. Joleen and I reconnected at the holiday party which was, yeah, nice. She tells me that she ditched me last week in favor of a yacht party with fireworks, which, fair.

“Sister,” I say, then, without thinking: “She passed away.”

Joleen blinks, checks her cheat sheet. No help there.

“I’m sorry,” she says, a nice safe riff.

“It’s okay. She got, um, hit by a truck.”

“Oh,” she says, but she looks appropriately surprised. The algo made random traffic deaths virtually obsolete. If an accident is in your future the ads will sell you protective gear well in advance. It happened to Tod, he wouldn’t go get coffee without putting on a motorcycle helmet and sticking a huge checkered flag in his butt.

But my sister never got a MindzEye. She’d been a government contractor for too long, was too disturbed by how easy it was for anyone to track you, to learn everything about you, just by tapping into your feed.

Because she did it all the time.

I paused, mid-sip, remembering the thing that Kelly built. She showed it to me, when I made her go for coffee out of the blue, before I knew it was her I would lose.

“I have to go,” I say. “Something’s come up.”

I stand up to leave. Joleen is fidgeting with her tiny drink umbrella, peeling the paper away from its tiny stick frame. It’s precise, delicate, almost surgical. I am overcome by the sudden urge to stay and watch her take the whole thing apart.

But then I get an ad for discount open-heart surgery at the community college and I have to blink away.

“Hey,” she says, while I’m putting on my coat. “Fair is fair, so. You get one ‘Get Out of Ghosting Free’ card, too.”

Her smile is shy and so bright that it dims an ad for a DIY wheat thresher repair manual. That line is hers; it’s not on the checklist.

---

All the lights are on in my dad’s house when I get there. I’m going to just let myself in with the key, but I can see activity in the living room.

It’s Christmas Eve.

One of the older cousins opens the door. I forget his name, it might be Steve. All the furniture in the living room has been cleared out. The tree is in the middle, and surrounding it is… tents? Camping tents. I blink, just to make sure I’m not getting more hiking ads, but then I see that there are people in the tents who I vaguely recognize as people I’m related to, and my dad is inside one of the tents with his legs sticking out, chatting away.

His girlfriend Mira’s there too. My dad brings me around. I want to tell them all not to bother remembering me, I’m not staying long. But then we go to the kitchen and he starts to make a plate for me.

I hate Ukrainian Christmas food. Gefilte fish. Holopchi. Cold sweet barley that’s supposed to be for luck. Luck is pointless if you have a MindzEye. Kelly ate the barley every year, threw her dixie cup back like a shot.

My dad’s eyes are a dull, un-illuminated brown.

“Your MindzEye is off,” I say.

He blinks. “Well. I’m with family right now.”

“Someone could be on their way to rob the place. We could be hit by lightning.”

I get an ad for a tinfoil suit.

“I assume you’re here because you need something,” he says. “Didn’t even bother to tell me you were coming. You’re not here to see the family.”

“These people are barely my family. I don’t know them.”

“So get to know them. Listen, Bobby, we don’t know how much time we get.”

“Yes we do. We absolutely do. Last year I got an ad for a plot in a graveyard that won’t even be built for another seventy years.”

He squares off and folds his arms, his typical stance for when we’re fighting.

“So tell me,” he says. “If you know everything about your life. Why is it that whenever I see you, you look so miserable?”

“Better than looking like I’m waiting for a truck to hit me too,” I reply, and for the first time, I welcome my feed of cursed ads, if only to obscure his reaction. I turn and head for the basement. I stub my toe on the table.

Kelly’s things are all in cardboard boxes in a pile on top of the ping-pong table. I search for half an hour. I find it, deep in a crate marked “HOBBY.” A metal box, a little bigger than a deck of cards, with the sides cut out to expose the I/O ports of the circuit board inside, the original label modified a bit:

TrAceROuTer

Her TAROT, she’d called it. She’d said it like an acronym, though I guess it wasn’t quite that really. The whole board is glued to an actual tarot card—The High Priestess, which summed up Kelly’s opinion of herself pretty well, actually.

“Pedaheh?”

Mira’s voice startles me. She holds up the plate of dumplings. “They’re the fortune-telling kind,” she says.

I eye them warily. They are my favorite Ukrainian food, but I can tell from their texture, the way they bulge, that they have fillings that I will find gross.

“My grandmother came over around the same time as your great-grandparents,” she says. “But from Kyiv. Right before they came, there were air raids, they had to take shelter in the subway tunnels. So on Christmas we’d clear the living room, and set up tents, and everybody would bring a little potluck. Here, take one. The world is cruel. You kids think you can outsmart it. No one can.”

I take a bite of the pedaheh.

“But it’s nice to be together,” she says.

Horseradish fills my mouth and something hard. I spit out a cherry pit. Mira claps her hands and makes that noise you make when a puppy does something cute but stupid.

“Ah! You’re going to have a baby!”

Mira makes me come up the stairs and say goodbye. My dad sees TAROT in my hand and tears up, and before I know it, I’m hugging him close, in the middle of a tent city of strangers in my living room, his sobs like bombs bursting above me.

---

Once I figure out TAROT it is frighteningly easy to pinpoint Rito’s favorite coffee shop and when he likes to go there. I slide into the empty side of his booth.

It’s strange to see him in his civilian clothes, although he remains distinctly Rito-like, paunchy and jolly, with bangles up and down both wrists. He is surprised until I tell him in detail about my bad ads and then he is surprisingly unsurprised. I show him TAROT.

“The High Priestess,” he says. “Inner wisdom, intuition.” He drains his macchiato and rolls up his sleeves. “Okay, let’s talk it out. So you think the ads are telling you to kill yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Now why would they do that? If you’re dead you can’t buy any more stuff.”

“Hmm. I never thought about it that way.”

He leans in. “It’s not a rhetorical question, bud. Why would the algo do that?”

There’s an intensity to this Rito. Thothricot Rito would push me, but only a little, give me something to chew on. Maybe it’s just that my ads are that dire. It scares me a little. I can see into his eyes, they are blue like the view of the skyline from a high floor in HuMaintain on a clear day. His MindzEye is off.
“Oh, well, um, hmm,” I say.

“Everyone thinks the algo predicts the future.”

“It does.”

“Sure, but. People made it, people have blind spots, wants and needs and fears. The algo has fears too. It’s self-interested, just like we are. How would the algorithm benefit, if, say…” He runs has finger across his throat and points.

“If I died?”

“Why do people push away other people? Why do they cut them out of their lives?”

I think of my dad, try to blink him away like a bad ad. He stays.

“If they’re bringing them down,” I say. “If they’re bad for them.”

“Not just bad,” says Rito. “A threat.”

“How could I possibly be a threat?”

“You have a lot of control over your life, actually. The algo prefers it the other way.”

“I went looking for you because I’m spinning out of control,” I said. “Because I’m losing what little I have.”

“Are you? You always sound really enthusiastic when we’re talking things out. Your buddy, Tod? He just tells me to tell him to buy stuff.”

I chew on this.

“Why doesn’t it just tell me to turn my MindzEye off?” I ask. “Why do I have to kill myself?”

“Good question,” says Rito. “There’s hope for you yet. Think it over. Let me know.”

And then he gets up. He gives me a physical card.

“This is blank,” I say.

“Not meant for wandering Eyez.”

He winks, and leaves me to pay for the coffee.

---

I think it over.

But still, right before I do turn it off, I tell myself that it’s just for an afternoon.

Quiet compresses me like a weighted blanket. I see the trees, the way they turn themselves towards the scant sunlight that breaks between the towers. I almost forget about the card. What was filtered out from my MindzEye is now clear, in the sharp angles of a font that is both hip and occult:

Chug the Tea Leaves, Chuck the Ads
Rito Mitchell, Anti-Algo Activism
Now Hiring
Inquire Within (Yourself)

Was the algo afraid that I’d take Rito up on his offer? Was it preserving itself by flooding my feed with unsafe ads? Maybe. But that doesn’t really make sense—if I had never gotten the bad ads in the first place I would never have found Rito again.

The afternoon stretches into evening and two ghosts give each other a second chance. Joleen doesn’t seem to notice that my second-date queries are a little off the cuff.

We make it back to her apartment. There’s a nook in the hallway, on the way to the bathroom, a table like a shrine, with a dioramas, a dollhouse? She sees me staring at it.

“Oh shit,” she says. “Sorry, I’m sorry. I turned the filter on, you shouldn’t be seeing them. I must have messed it up.” She’s blushing now. “They’re gross. It’s just like, this stupid gross thing I do. My uncle is a taxidermist. God, I’m so sorry.”

“They’re great,” I say, with greater understanding. I remember the first cursed ad, the one that started the flood. The algo sold me something it knew that I would need, and knew the only way I’d need it would be if my MindzEye was off.

And I would only turn it off if I was listening to Rito.

I look at Joleen until she focuses on me through her panicking feed. She relaxes when she sees I mean it.

“Yeah, aren’t they?” She grins again. “There’s a reason why I skipped the bit on the checklist about our favorite hobbies.”

I want to switch off her MindzEye and see the brown in her hazel eyes, hidden beneath electric teal. I sweep my hand over the diorama. It’s Victorian, a dollhouse populated by tiny rodent skeletons, dressed in gowns and suits, drinking teensy cups of tea.

There’s a little girl mouse sprawled on the floor. Her left leg dangles loosely, femur snapped.

I pat my pocket, feeling its replacement.

---

Host Commentary

And that was our story: Chug the Tea Leaves, Chuck the Ads, by Tim Chawaga. About the story the author had this to say:

I love tarot, I find it very calming. It makes me feel like an active participant in my own future. When I started thinking about this story the fortune-telling aspect shifted immediately into a source of acute anxiety, once it was tied to advertisement and had a profit motive. So it’s about that, and I guess whatever that says about the free market.

But it’s also about the particulars of that anxiety, which is the anxiety of powerlessness. It reminded me of my early 20s, early hustle years, when I was broke and single and not a particularly skilled or productive employee. I often pictured my own death, in a sky-is-falling kind of way, much more than I do now, even though there are arguably more viable apocalypses in the zeitgeist today than there were in 2010. Serenity, when I can find it, never truly comes from something I’ve bought.

What this story reminded me of was a marketer of Target whose story was told on NPR. He had created tracking algorithms so sophisticated that it started sending a teenager junk mail with ads to help her prepare for her new baby. Her father came in to yell at them for sending baby ads to a teen girl, and then a week later apologized because she was indeed pregnant, but hadn’t told her dad yet.

The fact that we are so predictable — even before the science fictional aspect of this story — scares me, and every once in a while I want to buy chewing tobacco, or seven pairs of sunglasses, or a window frame, just to throw off the things tracking me.

On the other hand, Instagram knows I’m really into solo RPGs right now and are serving up ads to promote each new game that comes to Kickstarter, and I hate that I’m excited about every one of them.

And our closing quotation this week is from Julius Caesar written by good old Bill Shaxbeard: “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”

Thanks for joining us, and stay safe, stay kind, and have fun.