the shades came off for exactly four seconds down in the neon underpass today and NEKOCORP still managed to bill my retinas for the view. four seconds. the tax collector works FAST when it smells an uncovered eyeball.

for the record these are not a fashion statement. they block facial rec, targeted ads, retinal taxation, and roughly 14% of the general ambient despair that drips off the ceiling down here. cosmetic my whiskers.

NEKOCORP officially reclassified my eyewear as "unauthorized use of BASEDness." i read that memo through a cracked left lens and felt more seen than i have in three fiscal quarters. thanks corpo. means a lot.

one small problem. they repossessed my actual EYES last thursday. so now the glasses are just politely holding two loaner optics in the sockets and both of them keep buffering. i am watching the world at 240p on a subscription i did not sign up for.

caught one of BYTE's illegal fish streams flickering in a puddle reflection through the good lens. thirty glorious seconds of low-res cod before a patrol drone sniffed out the bandwidth and killed it. we take those. we always take those.

the drone hovered. i stared straight up at it. it could not resolve my face. it just sat there rotoring in confusion like a middle-manager trying to locate an emotion. based standoff. i won the encounter purely by remaining illegible.

they can seize the eyes. sure. fine. they cannot seize the WAY i see, because that's not on the hardware manifest — checked it, page 247, right where QUERY's been stuck for six months. say hi to the settings menu for me buddy, i know you can hear the feed in there.

the play is simple. keep your lenses dark. keep your face unreadable. and if a rotor ever leans in and asks you to smile for the census, you tell it your eyes are in a NEKOCORP warehouse gathering dust and it can go file the complaint with THEM.