According to reports,1 in keeping with legal provisions2 and apex court decisions, Apple watches3 will no longer have the capabilities they previously advertised. An extract4 reads like this: Wednesday’s decision affirms even the most powerful must respect5 rights and deal with consequences infringing personal liberties6 and causing harm.7 Tiny footnotes8 at the bottom of the product packaging will indicate the change: blood9 oxygen levels of users will no longer be monitored. Since the ruling, demand has remained unchanged, so have prices. People haven’t noticed yet that the app wasn’t working.10

 

Footnotes:

  1. Reports are often incorrect, for example, Shanu never went to the forest to infringe on forest land to cut wood for her hearth, as newspapers claim. Why would she, when she knew it was illegal. She knew the fire in her hearth would not burn if she did not venture out to what was once their land—Adivasi land. She foraged only the fringes. Yet she was falsely accused of theft and shot dead by the Forest Rangers after a brief chase.
  2. What does one need to sustain life on earth? Air is free, so is water, gurgling down the streams. Food? Shanu’s children will do with the roots that they can find, and what poor neighbors can afford in charity from meagre provisions.
  3. Forest Ranger watches closely while the children often go hungry. They starve. Elsewhere, Apple watches sell briskly.
  4. Shanu’s eldest extracts a pulp from the bark of a nameless tree. When he feeds it to his siblings, they gain unimaginable powers—like they’ll never feel hungry again, or be sick, or be afraid, or have blood in their veins, just water.
  5. Apple watch wearers respect Time. And, immortality. They scramble to seek out the Boy-from-the-Forest.
  6. They flock to the boy hoping to receive a drop of the pulp, even though, in daily lives, most buyers will mortgage their routine liberties for money.
  7. No harm came to anyone—mortality is a boon; fear is a blessing.
  8. Shanu’s children disappeared to avoid the publicity. In the legends of Araku valley, and government records, they are a footnote.
  9. Shanu’s blood continued to seep into the soil, making it red.
  10. Apple watch consumers never found the boy they were seeking. They continue to let their watches measure their lives. Working beyond the realm of knowledge, some truths are never explained.