Skip to main content

Scifi short story where everyone's lives are recorded, and based on this everyone is ranked at every different skill there could conceivably be



I read this story in the last 10 years. It is a scifi short story, probably published in Giganotosaurus or some other sci fi short story collective. Definitely published online.



The story is kind of like "The Entire History of You" from Black Mirror, where people's whole lives are recorded by small devices. Except the conceit in this story is that everyone's "talent" at different things (think... everything from juggling to cooking) is ranked, and social value and popularity is derived from this.


So this leads to a bunch of people trying to find the obscure thing that they can climb the rankings in (I seem to remember the protagonist was at one point in the top 500 Male jugglers under 30 or something like that). Then one day, he has sex, and is suddenly the number 1 Male Lover in the world. I think this happens, at least.


Later on, he finds a community who has given up the devices, and finds joy in doing things even though they aren't the best at them. I remember the girl being impressed by his juggling (?) "even though he isn't even in the Top 100", and the love interest's lack of world-weariness enlivens the protagonist.


Thank you to anyone who ended up reading this!



Answer



Camera Obscured by Ferrett Steinmetz. I read it in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, which from the ISFDB entry would appear to the the only place it has been published.


The story starts:



It had been a week since Victor “Yo-Yo” Pino had been stung by a hundred and seventy-four bees. And after a brief hospital stay at the 8,546th best emergency care center in the world, Victor's mother made him go back to his classes at Wilkinson High, the 4,378th best high school in America.




Your recollection is lightly off. Victor wants to be the worlds best lover (hetero male) and figures out the secret to this is just to be a nice guy. The current top lover is a chap called Angata Mahamoud:



It didn't matter. On the third afternoon, as Victor lay dejectedly in his bed, kismet struck in the form of a television show—specifically, a documentary on the the ex-girlfriends of Angata Mahamoud, the World's Best Lover (Hetero Male).
...
Truth was, Victor realized, Angata wasn't that great a lover. He was simply a nice man who'd had the good fortune to sleep with four women who had no other experiences to compare with. Angata had stumbled into an isolated bubble of four people, none of whom had even kissed anyone else in the world—so the Worldwork algorithms couldn't contrast and compare their results with those of previous lovers to fine-tune the thousands of other factors that made people over-and under-estimate someone's skills in bed.



So Victor sets out to find six girls he can sleep with who haven't had previous lovers. This search leads him to Rosalie, the girl he tries to impress with his juggling:



He thought about listing all the things he couldn't do, but that would have taken too much time. “I can juggle,” he volunteered.

“Get outta town,” she said, punching him in the arm. “You're like a piñata, Vic. I keep poking you and weird shit falls out. Juggle for me.”

His stomach clenched; he hadn't juggled since his final ranking (3,212,091st). “I'm not good at it.”




Spoiler: it doesn't work out.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize Missy right away?

So after it was established that Missy is actually both the Master, and the "woman in the shop" who gave Clara the TARDIS number... ...why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize her right away? I remember the Tenth Doctor in The Sound of Drums stating that Timelords had a way of recognizing other Timelords no matter if they had regenerated. And Clara should have recognized her as well... I'm hoping for a better explanation than "Moffat screwed up", and that I actually missed something after two watchthroughs of the episode. Answer There seems to be a lot of in-canon uncertainty as to the extent to which Time Lords can recognise one another which far pre-dates Moffat's tenure. From the Time Lords page on Wikipedia : Whether or not Time Lords can recognise each other across regenerations is not made entirely clear: In The War Games, the War Chief recognises the Second Doctor despite his regeneration and it is implied that the Doctor knows him when they fir

Did the gatekeeper and the keymaster get intimate in Ghostbusters?

According to TVTropes ( usual warning, don't follow the link or you'll waste half your life in a twisty maze of content ): In Ghostbusters, it's strongly implied that Dana Barret, while possessed by Zuul the Gatekeeper, had sex with Louis Tully, who was possessed by Vinz Clortho the Keymaster (key, gate, get it?), in order to free Big Bad Gozer. In fact, a deleted scene from the movie has Venkman explicitly asking Dana if she and Louis "did it". I turned the quote into a spoiler since it contains really poor-taste joke, but the gist of it is that it's implied that as part of freeing Gozer , the two characters possessed by the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper had sex. Is there any canon confirmation or denial of this theory (canon meaning something from creators' interviews, DVD commentary, script, delete scenes etc...)? Answer The Richard Mueller novelisation and both versions of the script strongly suggest that they didn't have sex (or at the very l

the lord of the rings - Why is Gimli allowed to travel to Valinor?

Gimli was allowed to go to Valinor despite not being a ring bearer. Is this explained in detail or just with the one line "for his love for Galadriel"? Answer There's not much detail about this aside from what's said in Appendix A to Return of the King: We have heard tell that Legolas took Gimli Glóin's son with him because of their great friendship, greater than any that has been between Elf and Dwarf. If this is true, then it is strange indeed: that a Dwarf should be willing to leave Middle-earth for any love, or that the Eldar should receive him, or that the Lords of the West should permit it. But it is said that Gimli went also out of desire to see again the beauty of Galadriel; and it may be that she, being mighty among the Eldar, obtained this grace for him. More cannot be said of this matter. And Appendix B: Then Legolas built a grey ship in Ithilien, and sailed down Anduin and so over Sea; and with him, it is said, went Gimli the Dwarf . And when that sh

fan fiction - Does the Interdict of Merlin appear in original Harry Potter canon?

In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky a concept called the ' Interdict of Merlin ' appears: (all emphasis added) Chapter 23: His hand on the doorknob, Harry Potter already inside and waiting, wearing his cowled cloak. "The ancient first-year spells," Harry Potter said. "What did you find?" "They're no more powerful than the spells we use now." Harry Potter's fist struck a desk, hard. "Damn it. All right. My own experiment was a failure, Draco. There's something called the Interdict of Merlin -" Draco hit himself on the forehead, realizing. "- which stops anyone from getting knowledge of powerful spells out of books, even if you find and read a powerful wizard's notes they won't make sense to you, it has to go from one living mind to another. I couldn't find any powerful spells that we had the instructions for but couldn't cast. But if you can't get them out of old books,