Challenge #01835-E011: The Caring Gap
Their world was games, and Facebook and selfies. Then they wound up in an emergency ward and discovered electric lives are no substitute for the real thing. -- Knitnan
[AN: You clearly have no understanding of modern connectivity. AKA: "You dang kids get off of your social media and get a real life!" ::shakes cane::]
Alice was technically a Cam Girl and technically a Gamer. In reality, that meant grinding assorted games for a pitiful income per game per hour, and taking selfies at least four times a day. In the eyes of a certain generation, she was lazy and vain.
The fact was, she was doing everything she could to raise enough to (a) keep alive, and (b) pay off the debt she owed for a degree she'd got for a job that had been shipped off to a different country. She ran a Patreon. She had an Etsy shop. She had a Ko-fi account. She spent every hour of every day scraping for pennies and doing whatever she could to get someone to pass her a couple of dollars.
She barely made it to the poverty line, lived on food stamps, and kept looking for what everyone else called "a real job". She had more friends online than she had friends in the neighbourhood. Especially considering that the entire population were practically vagrants and, much like Alice, scraping to make rent and eat at the same time.
Alice was lucky that the landlord came around for an inspection shortly after she collapsed from malnutrition. She was not lucky that the landlord decided that she could live without her phone or laptop and confiscated them in lieu of rent before calling the paramedics.
It took her a week into her recovery to beg the hospital to let her send out an emergency message to her followers. Twitter, Instagram, and her blog account were the three largest winners, so she used those to link to all the ones that earned her money.
The ambulance trip, the hospital stay, her medical care... all of it came to her in full force because no insurance company would cover her and she was red-taped out of ObamaCare. Her time on welfare ran out years ago. She had no means by which to pay for her bills and only the fabulously wealthy could declare themselves bankrupt.
So she appealed to her 'virtual' friends, and even got a message out to Facebook. Where her alleged real friends were.
In a way, all the ageing baby boomers were correct. Electric lives were no substitute for the real thing. Electric friends were nothing like the real ones.
The people she knew in meatspace never shifted a finger nor sent her a dollar. But the thousands of people who followed her shenanigans helped her pay for her bills and got her back on her feet. Or what passed for it in a world where a fraction of the people earned a majority of the income.
Her selfies were low rating amongst the followers who had used them as spank material, but the ones who actually cared kept donating whatever they had to spare.
There was even one among the Millennial poor who had enough legal expertise to get Alice her laptop and phone back from the landlord, and then declare the confiscation an act of theft. Since it was clearly removal of means, then it was a malicious act, and the landlord had to pay a fine.
Not that such a fine made much of an impact on the landlord. But it did mean that Alice could live rent-free for six months. More than enough time to get just that little bit ahead. Just enough to see a way out of the poverty pit that described Alice's life.
It was too bad about the taxes that sent her right back down to where she started. Below the poverty line.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / pruden]
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