The Augmented Reality Day Planner

Sid woke up with the angry buzzing from his nightstand. Feeling around in the dark, he set down the silent cellphone and unplugged alarm clock. The AR glasses buzzed again, tiny gyroscopes shaking it noisily against painted wood, its lenses flashing. Groggily, he put on the glasses, wrinkling his nose to get them to the comfortable place high on the bridge of his nose. For a moment, he squinted in the darkness.

He held his hand out in front of his face, and flashed the hand gesture to activate the heads up display. A glowing tablet popped into existence, offering three icons bearing the time, date, and weather. He tugged on the bottom of the weather icon, and it rolled up with a flap-flap-flap, displaying a window onto the street outside. He tilted his head back, looking at the clouds; it was raining. He waved his hand and the display vanished, then flashed the hand-sign for "directory".

Glowing tablets representing his suite of apps lined up in his room. He tapped on one, his "Stiki" app, then closed the directory. A softly glowing note hung on his wall: "Buy eggs."

The Hall of Human Experience

Kingsley hauled himself up onto the ledge, and took a minute to catch his breath, surveying the fresh hell he'd stumbled into as the coppery taste began to leave his mouth. The zombie that had chased him stood on the edge of its balcony for a moment, its arm raised as it shouted. The piles of paper served to muffle everything, and the only audible sound were the stacks of green-bar paper slithering in streams where Kingsley had disturbed them. Apparently satisfied with its lecture, or resigned to its fate, the zombie let its hands drop, then it shuffled dumbly away.

Feeling comfortable and relaxed, Kingsley surveyed his surroundings. The zombie, the mysterious machines, and the hole he had entered from were all in a single structure at the far end of a courtyard, which was hemmed in with unremarkable mouldering buildings. Banners of continuous-feed paper fluttered from inward-facing balconies, and as he looked Kingsley could see eyes glowing orange in the gloom. Whatever the building was, it was staffed entirely by zombies.

Kingsley picked up a scrap of the paper and regarded it curiously. It was covered almost exclusively in easy-to-recognize Eblonian numbers, which Kingsley could not read but which he also suspected would not have been helpful anyway. A sheet full of numbers wasn't exactly a novel, after all. Pocketing the sheet, he decided that perhaps finding a new exit was his biggest priority. Zombies were naturally unpleasant, but the idea that they had been enslaved postmortem... he found the idea disquieting.