tiamonds

Chapter 1
When I smashed the room-length mirror in my apartment, I was thinking about how much I hate my jobs. There's still some folks who only work one, or a few who don't have to work; mostly, I'm told I should be thankful I can work more than one. That was the thought which led me to break the mirror, the self-hatred which prompted me to destroy my likeness. Really, any opportunity to hate oneself can lead to a self-destructive blow, one which simultaneously destroys one's reflection and injures one's hand. I'd punched a lot of walls lately, too, but the mirror seemed fitting.
Now, when I look at the mirror, I think either of Ballard or Camus.
I didn't put the mirror there, you see. It was there when I moved in, and at first it did a masterful job of making the room look bigger. Apollonia said it makes it seem like there's another room, and another us, on the other side, but to me it just seemed to make the room more spacious and comfortable. It used to be harder to make and ship large mirrors like this; I'm told it's easier now, something about tiamonds making them easier to fold.
The Ballard story has a bunch of people living in cramped quarters, filling every corridor and room in tiny, parceled spaces, too close to their neighbors and often without meaningful partitions. The lead characters find a space unaccounted for in the floor plan, and decide to squirrel it away. When they find an old armoire with a fold-out mirror, they move that in to make the inside of the room seem even larger. I think that's why the mirror was installed: to make us more comfortable with our confinement.
So the mirror is the illusion of space, as though space could be folded up and coalesced and sold the way time is. I'm pretty sure that's at least half true, but if I say that to my doctor, he'll take me off the meds, I'll be down to only one job, and somebody else will get the apartment instead.
The crater where my fist broke the mirror is Camus, I guess. My circumstances are awful, but spite can make any circumstance bearable. Instead of hating myself, I can hate my circumstances. Smashing the mirror dispells the illusions. And if I have to squirrel away time the way those intrepid tenants squirreled away space, at least it helps to remember why I'm doing it.

Tiamonds aren't really that precious. You have enough people, with little enough to do with their lives, that tiamonds are a dirt cheap commodity when you need to make them to murder someone in another country. I'm sure the military has to pay a little extra for industrial tiamond-tipped bullets, but that's nothing compared to the jewelry market.
By law, tiamonds have to be destroyed rather than resold. Licensed vendors are allowed to sell them once. In practice, of course, there's not really any way to tell how often a tiamond has made the rounds, and a tiamond given as a gift can skirt the law by gifts given in return. Naturally, when you need a wedding ring, nobody's handing them out, and damned if everybody isn't expected to have a tiamond ring nowadays.
I'll give them that, they're a beautiful shade of blue. It's the same shade I saw in that dashboard light late one night when my mother was driving us home, and the snow was flying at the windshield like stars at warp 8, and all seemed right with the world. I know how it got there, though. Somebody put it there, because they had time to spare and the industry wanted another tiamond. There's certainly enough of them around.

I suspect most people spend a lot of time thinking. Between my three bodies I don't get much time to myself, but I have a lot of it nevertheless; while one of them experiences sleep, the other two alt-tab, multitasking or staring off into space. This adds at least eight hours to my day, but probably a lot more than that as long as I don't miss a bus stop. Transit eats up a lot of time for one body, and the only time I'm perfectly certain to get to myself is when two of my bodies are en route somewhere. I assure you, the art of conversation is long lost to my social class; I've tried using that time on the bus, but there's something vaguely unnerving about everybody just standing or sitting around, their wallflower eyes glazed over, while their minds are off somewhere else. It serves as a reminder that I should probably be at work, not bumming around on the bus. Old Puritan work ethic, that vintage notion that, if you're determined and work hard enough, it all pays off, and this shows in your standing. I suspect it also shows in your posture.
Since I don't have a lot of time to myself, my only privacy is in my head. I can sit and stew with the best of them, full of resentment or self-pity or just thinking of that novel I keep trying to find the time to write. (I haven't a clue who would read them.) In a sense, I have all the time in the world. If I am willing to short one of my bodies on sleep, I can even attend a party part-time, taking a few minutes on my break to have a little fun at someone else's pad. I always think it's sad to see a wallflower at a party, but honestly, even the rich don't spend more than a few minutes in any one place. It seems to be human nature to alt-tab at the slightest hint of boredom or whimsical curiosity. It hasn't put a total end to parties. It just means folks spend more time wallflowering at them.
One of my thoughts is that wallflowers aren't really who we take them to be. When Alfa is glazed over and staring off into space, his heart is beating, he's digesting or whatever he needs to do, but he doesn't seem to have any conscious experience. There's admittedly not much visible difference between nodding off, navel-gazing, and wallflowering. I suppose really I'll never know if I'm kicking somebody out when I move in, but there's never been any evidence of it. So you have this appearance of a person you know, and it doesn't much matter whether it's Alfa, their original body, or any other body they've got right now, since they all look more or less the same.
I'm not talking about a soul, though. That's a sort of essence within appearances, and I don't really believe in such things. I grew up on Sartre, so even if that sort of thing existed, it wouldn't much matter to me. I'm just saying, when I tab out of Bea into Cee to go to a doctor's appointment, Bea isn't me anymore, because Bea doesn't have my conscious experience. While I'm Cee, Bea isn't really thinking about how he's going to assert to others that he's actually a really swell guy, or that he's fun, or a dumbass; he's giving or taking anything, he's just breathing and digesting and maybe sleeping.
They need to sleep, though, or else you start having hallucinations when you tab in, to say nothing of getting a cold or somesuch. It's really inconvenient. This means they dream while they're wallflowering, but I've never tabbed into a sleeping body and found a dream in progress. It's not a common practice, though.
My mother told me about this time in college where she tried marijuana, and the result was that she lay under a tree, while looking down from the branches of that tree, wanting to get down to her body. Later she managed to restore herself to her body. She says it's a very atypical reaction, and indicative of an allergy to it. I guess you can be allergic to almost anything. I guess that's what got me panicking the umpteenth time I was stoned at a party. I felt like my soul was looking down at about a 20 degree angle relative to my eyes. This might be hard to explain if you've never had an experience like it. I kept trying to drop my chin to realign my head with my soul's head, and my vision kept drooping. I got really scared that I was developing a Jumpex allergy. I'd lose my job, my apartment, probably everything except a tiny stipend from a class action suit. I figured maybe it was a borderline case, really minor, and if I could just get my head together, I'd be fine.
"Get my head together," of course, made me laugh. So I sat down on a sofa, with my chin on my chest, and waited it out. I got very hungry, especially when my host ordered pizza and I wasn't able to stand up to get any, but everybody thought I was a wallflower and ignored me.
Later on I realized basically I'd had a weird experience, probably something extra in the bud; it wasn't legal then, so you had to get it from dubious sources. It made me start worrying about what would happen if I really did have a Jumpex allergy, but after a week of no problems I stopped worrying about it.

Chapter 2
I was taking a few seconds off between calls, probably ruining my uptime for the day, alt-tabbing back to the party Cee was at. For some damn reason, I couldn't stop looking slightly downward, as though my head were too heavy and my eyes wouldn't stay up under their own power. I tried to shake it off, but my movements were sluggish; everything around me seemed normal, but I myself was out of sorts. I went back to Alfa and took another call, leaving Cee to wallflower a little longer. The guy on the other end of the line barely took the time to threaten the life of my dialing name before he hung up, and I went back to Cee.
Sure enough, Cee was still not okay. I tried to stand up, and up turned out to be jarringly high; I was looking out over a sea of nodding heads before I realized I couldn't read the marquee anymore.
All the time in the world wasn't really mine anymore.
You're supposed to see a doctor immediately when this sort of thing happens. You take some Jumpex and then you can't read, it means you're having an allergic reaction, and you can't alt-tab anymore. One body for the rest of your life, and if you're lucky, one job and a small group-home. It seems to happen to more and more people nowadays, but I never knew anybody it happened to.
Then again, maybe they just haven't told anybody. It was a hell of an experience. I looked back and saw Cee's chair was empty. I was standing in mid-air, and nobody could see me. I'd never studied the symptoms, but it all sounded pretty familiar. A classic allergic reaction. I'd been using Jumpex without any problems for a long time, but now it was all borrowed time.
Borrowed space, too, from the looks of it. Everything looked small, compressed. I tried to take a small step and ended up leaning invisibly against the wall, still hovering. At least I was out of the crowd, but I was starting to get dizzy.