Empathy is usually pretty useful, but there are moments when I wish I didn’t have any. This was one of these. My (now ex) girlfriend was sitting on her couch, her eyes glistening wet with tears. I really should have taken some blockers before coming here, but I pride myself on going through my personal life without pharmacological support, so my mirror neurons were screaming at me. Look at her! She’s in pain! And you’re the reason!

Empathy can be rather painful and unpleasant. And to add insult to injury, I was also getting quite bored. I had nothing else to say, and I felt like I have exhausted all the words I wanted to use about half an infinity ago. Yet I didn’t know whether it was appropriate to rise and leave now, or should I still wait some more. Normally, I would browse the net to kill time, but Jane was looking at me and would see the specks of light in my eyes, and it would hurt her even more, so I had to live through reality unagumented, like a straightedge.

And then my pager beeped and vibrated.

You probably don’t even know what a pager is, so let me explain. It’s a device for one-way, fully encrypted communication, which pretends to be something else entirely. My pager was shaped to look like a lighter, and I carried it in my breast pocket. A possession of a pager is a class II felony, unless you were a member of the giant shadowy world of security with appropriate paperwork and licenses.

I wasn’t.

Still, Jane thought I was. Incidentally, this a notion she curiously got on her own, since I very carefully made sure that I didn’t directly represent myself as a licensed law enforcement or national security operator. She was a law abiding citizen and thus her phone included a legally mandated sealed lifecorder functionality, so all our conversations were potentially subject to a subpoena.

I had a lifecorder, too, of course. But mine was actively paranoid, highly aggressive and utterly illegal. It was encoded with a shard of my personality, which in itself was a class I felony and would land me in one of the gitmos faster than I could say “don’t shoot, I’m unarmed!”.

What can I say, in my line of work you can’t be overly risk-averse.