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

harry potter - Do the Kwikspell courses work?

In Harry Potter we are introduced to Kwikspell course in The Chamber of Secrets (and never hear about it again). We see Filch taking courses, presumably by mail. The descriptions of Kwikspell make me think it is for people who are weak in magic (kind of like how Neville was supposed to be when he was younger), but had magic in them nonetheless. However, Ron's comments later in the chapter make it sound like it is mainly for Squibs to learn magic. However, it is strongly implied through out all the books that Squibs are essentially Muggles, and will never be able to do magic. How then is a Kwikspell course supposed to work? Do we have any information to know if it works at all? Is it a scam? An answer from any level of canon is welcome. Answer Kwikspell courses are (probably) useful to some wizards, but not to squibs. The Kwikspell course literature comes with two testimonials. Madam Z. Nettles of Topsham writes: ‘I had no memory for incantations and my potions were a family joke...

futurama - How much time is lost in 'Time Keeps on Slippin''

In time Keeps on Slippin' , Farnsworth creates a basketball team which he matures by abusing Chronitons. This leads to time skipping forward by random, but ever increasing amounts. How much time was skipped in this way? Answer Unfortunately, I don't think a good estimate can be made for this, for two reasons: Many of the time skips move forward by an indeterminate amount of time. At one point, the Professor mentions localized regions of space skipping forward much more than others. We then see two young boys on the street below complaining about having to pay social security, only to suddenly become senior citizens and start complaining about wanting their money. Thus, each individual could have experienced a different amount of time skippage.

star trek - Warning regarding forward saucer section in Nemesis?

In Star Trek: Nemesis , just before the Enterprise rams into the Scimitar, Picard sends a text message from his captain's chair arm pad to Troi — who is manning the helm in lieu of the crewman who was just blown out through what was once the view screen — indicating that she should put full impulse on standby. (Literally, if you watch the scene closely, Troi's console prefaces the order with "TXT MSG" !) My question is: Did Picard also somehow warn crew members in the forward saucer section about what was about to happen? The ramming of the Scimitar was a heat of the moment decision. Considering that he also resorted to calling the auto-destruct sequence shortly after (which ended up being offline), he probably was of the mindset that any losses would be acceptable in order to hault Shinzon's march to Earth. Still, I'm curious. Answer The original script indicates that he called for the crew to " brace for impact ". Whether that call (or the comma...

star wars - What "exactly" happens when someone turns to the Dark Side?

When I saw the original Star Wars saga as a kid, the concept of the Dark Side imprinted in me was quite simple. You did a bad thing, so you're a bad person so you go to the Dark Side and keep doing bad things. Now, obviously this doesn't hold true in reality. In my mind it is perfectly reasonable for Luke to kill the Emperor and Vader and then just flee the Death Star and rejoin the Alliance. After all they are at war, those are enemy officers that have captured him and are taunting him by threatening with death of all loved ones and the whole operation was intended to kill the Emperor anyway. The same would hold true for Anakin. He could have killed Mace Windu to save the Chancellor and Padme but that doesn't mean he's going to then go mad and kill all Jedis including children. It doesn't add up from a merely psychological point of view. He had a set of objectives and that made him want to keep the Chancellor alive (quite valid by the way, Mace Windu is quite clums...