Black, White, & Red

"Why did you put a lemming in your wedding?" "I've known him forever and he's been good to me." "It's still a little weird, with the guy from the store carrying him around in a cage and all." "I know, I wish we could've given him something formal to wear." "Yeah."

One of my cousins sat in the fourth pew on my family's side. He wore thick-framed, black eyeglasses that had almost a half-inch of solid frame on either side. As my anxious fiancé appeared in the doorway at the opposite end of the church, I stared intently at my cousin. He had this weird look on his face. The procession moved forward, and Ingmar's light blue denim shirt clashed with everything. A lot of people stopped looking at the bride and looked at him and the lemming who, incidentally, was adorned with a black satin ribbon around his torso with a corsage pinned at the top.

My cousin was reading an article that befit his oenophilic tastes on the transparent overlay that his iGlasses® afforded him. Using the chip installed in his wrist, he could control the degree of transparency (this had no effect on the actual color of the lenses on his glasses) with simple finger motions at the inside-end of his forearm. The gadget and the implant set him back quite significantly in the financial sense, but in human terms, he was easily the most advanced person in the building, if not the whole county. I had no idea that he even had this gadget, so I just thought he was spacing out.

I was supposed to say something to my fiancé but before I did so I motioned to Ingmar to let the lemming out of his cage so he could lineup next to the other members of the bridal party and, of course, to get Ingmar's atrocious shirt out of the picture. When he opened the door to the lemming cage, the little fellow scurried down the aisle and right out the front doors of the church. My cousin had identified the lemming and placed a Google GPS Tracker® on the little fellow. He inhaled, raised his eyebrows, opened his mouth and pointed towards the back of the church but decided not to say anything.

Others fainted and yelled, Ingmar bolted down the aisle after the lemming—cage door clanking back and forth. I told the minister to continue with the wedding, "He always does that." My fiancé was all flustered and had run her hand through her hair to relieve some pressure. This messed up her hair. My cousin went back to reading a review about a new red. He looked up and faded down the overlay's transparency, noticed that my wife-to-be had tossed her hair a bit, and he quickly faded up his overlay and requested a Yahoo! Replay® of how it had happened. The web service, which had been adapted pretty early on for this medium, informed him that the replay would cost $4.50 for retrieval and $0.30 per second (though he could proof the frames at 10 second intervals to get an idea). He wanted only 8 seconds so the site billed the charge to his personal account.

My cousin didn't carry a wallet because all of his identification, finances, and retail rewards cards were installed in the metacarpal chip implanted in his wrist. When he rode the subway, turnstiles clicked open for him as he approached because of the Yellowsock® data exchanged between him and the transit station. When he went to the store, they didn't ask him if he had a rewards card because the monitor had already detected this information. It was great.

The replay was great, he coveted my fiancé. I married her. We processed down the aisle and down the stairs of the church. Everyone was lined up like at a wedding. Ingmar was holding the lemming, whose flower-pin had pierced through the stem of a flower on the lawn at the edge of the grass. Lemmings have a tendency to cut corners because they're lazy and spatially perceptive. They also usually run on tundra, not concrete, so the little guy's judgment was all off. What an ironic twist!

On our honeymoon, my wife and I considered buying a pair of iGlasses® but decided to wait until we returned to our home country. In retrospect, I wish we would've bought them then and there.

I usually did everything I could to lead the mischief.