I know what you’re going to say. That I got what I deserved. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Nothing like kicking someone when they’re down, eh? But here I am, dressed in all my mistakes. Huddling inside a house I don’t dare to leave.

I’m an early adopter. Mostly, that’s not a bad thing. I got nanite tattoos as soon as they came on the market. You control them with an app on your phone. And powered by your own body’s electricity, the nanites migrate wherever you want, glowing with bioluminescence like a firefly. So you can be whoever you want, whenever you want.

I’d plaster my face with dayglow butterflies at a rave. Go full tribal sleeves at a rougher bar. Turn them dormant for my corporate job—or better yet, keep them just under my clothes, a full-body irezumi suit that no one knew was there.

It was expensive, but I was young, had a good programming job, and paying off my student loans looked doable. Then the economy crashed, I lost my job, and I needed cash just to eat. When I was near rock-bottom, a friend told me about AdsUp!, the app that would pay to run ads on my skin. Why not let them even run in my sleep? More adtime up meant more money in the bank, right?

The ads triggered off the cloud of data surrounding each passerby in the street, on the subway, on the bus. Their search histories crowded my skin, even with the things that they might not have wanted people to know—what detergent they use, would they like some artisanal cheese, how about a super-pack of flavored condoms?

I got stares at first, but after the first week, no one even saw me anymore. They tuned me out. Just one more intrusive piece of advertisement in a world already saturated with it. Once in a while, some older person would stop and tell me how I was ruining my life.

Oh, it wasn’t ruined yet. Not by half.

You see, advertising doesn’t work if people ignore it or blacklist it. And AdsUp! went belly-up two years after I signed on with them. Low response rate, no way to measure engagement, some crap like that. I’d found a job by then, so I figured that wasn’t my problem.

Except . . . when they folded, hackers got ahold of their programming assets. And they started sending out messages to the network of adware assets.

They took over my skin, overriding my controls. The first wave was obviously teenagers—lots of dick jokes and some nasty harassment of a girl at their school.

They got caught.

The second wave was smarter, older, more sophisticated. Suddenly, my skin sprouted hate speech. Manifestoes. I was a living testament to other people’s prejudices and rage. Bomb threats. Racial slurs. I can’t go outside without my skin completely covered, for fear someone will think I believe this shit, and curb-stomp me. It’s an odd kind of modesty, I realize. Not religious at all. Try explaining that to a prospective employer, even on a vid call interview.

Yeah. The gig work I can get, programming this and that from home barely covers the bills. This isn’t a recognized disability; it’s not an expression of religious freedom. There’s nothing that protects me under the law.

It doesn’t hurt when the nanites move under my skin. I rarely know it’s happened, till I look in a mirror and see that someone’s painted a swastika over my face. I can’t do a damn thing about it, besides stay indoors. And you can forget about a social life. Dating. I don’t even answer the door when the delivery service brings my groceries. I wait for them to leave, crack open the door, and drag the packages inside.

As I sit here, taken in by a couple of my remaining friends out of charity, I’m a modern kind of leper. My face, my identity erased, subsumed to other people’s cancerous beliefs. I know that this isn’t the worst it could be. Honestly, what I fear most is the day that the hackers decide to monetize me once more, and sell my skin to some porn site.

You’re laughing now. You’re saying to yourself that I turned myself into a prostitute the day I sold my skin to AdsUp!

Maybe. But that was something I agreed to, willingly. None of the rest of this has been anything other than a violation. I’m not the only one who feels that way, either.

You didn’t know? There’s a whole community of us lepers. All shut-ins with nothing to do but scour the internet for clues and try to cobble together a cure. Oh yeah, we dream of that. The medical company that manufactured the nanites posted some hotfixes before they went under, sued into oblivion by the class-action suit, the residuals of which are what most of us live on. We all pry at the patch codes. Try to jailbreak their programming—so what if it violates the EULA of a defunct corporation? We’re just trying to hash out some new tweak that’ll work for a while.

Till it doesn’t anymore.

We’ve all tried medical extraction of the nanites, too—trouble is, the hackers got clever and made the little buggers self-replicating. So unless you get them all, they just reproduce, using your own body tissues for materials, till they’re back up to speed again. You’ve never been so hungry in your life as when you’re trying to eat faster than the nanites consume you, I assure you.

You want to know what gives me hope?

I’ve been working with the nanites on my own, not in collaboration with my fellow lepers. Changing their core processes. Teaching them. Getting them to form their own network.

Yeah, I know, AI research is dicey ethical business.

But in the end, I’d rather hear what they have to say than the rest of my common humanity.