TBT: Bird Girl (Working Title 4.1)
By Avital Balwit
On this Turkey Day, it seems right to bring back our Working Title Bird Girl, a dystopian future tale of government surveillance and AI run amok.
In a city running on digital currency and gig economies, scooter-tracker Sasha just makes ends meet, before a routine job bears unexpected consequences. Between the automated phone systems, food trucks, and bustling coffeeshops, Sasha’s world is frighteningly not all that different from our own. But with subtle nods to an omnipresent strongman and truthful prose, Avital Balwit constructs a dystopian narrative for a digitized present.
“The seeds of the world that Balwit foretells are already planted in our lives, and like every great storyteller, she directs our attention to this living center, where the intolerable has become normal, and indignity has melted into resignation.”
—Shoshana Zuboff, from the afterward
“Avital Balwit builds a convincing world within the limited space of a short story, following the threads of our world to their perhaps-not-inevitable-if-we-can-help-it conclusions”-—Allison Kade, from the introduction
Excerpt:
“It was August, and the days came damp and hot. The morning air shone so that you knew the afternoon would swelter. Sasha had AC, but kept her windows open anyways to let in the mild nights. It was 8 a.m. and time to close them. A faint buzz caught her attention, “11:48 p.m., Selby Street and 10th, 547XD1IY,” less than a mile away. She clicked accept and checked the map again. It looked like she’d be off-roading. She found her hiking boots in the closet and set out.
The job worked with her hours. She could do it early in the morning, or she could do it in the middle of the night. The light made it easier, but sometimes she needed to trespass. She’d get the ping—time stamp, last map location, ID number. The reward was a flat $200. So if she found the scooter in thirty minutes, it was good money. But sometimes it took eight hours.
Selby was leaf-lined and quiet. It bordered a forest that separated the university from the train line. A rare State car or scooter would whip past, but otherwise it had few passersby. Near 10th, Selby curved, and the slim gravel shoulder fell away to a ravine. Blackberry and ferns beneath birch and hickory. The scooter’s last recorded destination was at the corner, but she couldn’t see it up or down the street. She tried ringing it. Nothing. Only distant cars and the faint buzz of cicadas. It had probably long died. . . .”
Purchase directly from Weightless Books, Amazon, and Kobo.
Avital Balwit is a writer from Portland, Oregon. She has short stories forthcoming in Lilith Magazine, Prairie Fire, and the Multispecies Cities anthology from Worldweaver Press. She won The Atlantic’s 2020 poetry contest. Her illustrated children’s book on octopus cognition will be published by Pop Up UK in Spring 2021. Avital is a Rhodes scholar studying political philosophy.