Invisible Networks #17: Secret Settings

Lying in bed, you almost drop your holophone, scrabbling for the finger-sized device. You manage to catch it, but in an awkward manner that makes your hand smear a random pattern of touch inputs into the hologram's display. Fortunately you didn't seem to clutz-dial a random person, so you go back to browsing.

On the HoloTome app it takes you a good five minutes to notice a new icon on the top navigation bar. A broken gear, cracked through the middle. You tap it out of curiosity, thinking its a new tab from an update. It appears to be a settings page with various toggles.

• See posts hidden for heretical content.
• Enable three-dimensional post feed.
• Include nearest nexus of magic in location tagging.
• Prioritize posts from a soulmate you'll never meet.
• Enable automatic predictive-text posting.
• Display likes received from the fae.
• Infinite Cat Pictures (Beta)

Curious but not wanting to be overloaded, you enable the top setting. It seems to take effect immediately, as you see a new post feed represented through a padlocked book. The most recent post is from five years ago, from an account you don't recognize.

"I've been investigating this extra settings menu for two weeks now, but I can't make sense of any of the implementation. From what I can tell through my best attempts at decompiling, this menu and its listed functions simply don't exist in the code. The World Government is completely secular and hasn't restricted religious practice outside of where it breaks normal law, so I don't know what could be considered heresy. Maybe it's simply a holdover from a subcontractor in the original creation of HoloTome. 3D feed is rather amazing and manages to solve every complaint I have with the normal UI, so I hope that functionality is shipped to the normal settings soon. The rest seem to be goofs, possibly on standby as upcoming April Fool's gaffs. They're all close to functional. The nexus of magic stuff is likely a planned fantasy novel tie-in, since my test posts get tagged with a location I can't find in any map or archive. Whatever AI model they use for the soulmates post practically passes as a real person, predictive-text posting does write in your voice but just not always what you'd want to say. The 'likes from fae' option appears to simply give you post notifications at random, and it's rather quite annoying if left on. At least Infinite Cat Pictures is marked as an alpha build, since holy shit it took like three hours for me to clear my holophone's RAM after I enabled it. Fortunately I should have more data to report on this soon, since the HoloTome devs contacted me and they're going to allow me to travel to their dev facility and interview the lead developer of these secret options."

You tap the profile picture next to the post to see if there's anything more from that user. As you discover that the account has been inactive ever since that post, you begin to hear faint noise of a government enforcement vehicle pulling up on the curb outside of your apartment.