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Emojis

The keyboard is the 2020s keyboard, twenty years older, plus a handful of pictures the city needed and did not have. Everyone knows them the way everyone knows a thumbs up; nobody explains one. They stand in for the word, in the word's place in the sentence, never beside it or tacked on the end. In message bubbles the six use their own drawn pictures; the old emoji characters stay wherever a picture cannot be shown.

• 🛸 the sky: the police drones ("🛸 on Myrtle" is a warning, not a sighting)
• 🤖 a delivery bot, a bot run
• 🧠 a mod: a body augmentation or replacement
• 📡 the mesh: the rooftop network, or off it
• 🧱 bricked: a dead phone, a dead chip, someone out cold
• 🛍️ a bag: product, a drop, the count

A person's emojis are a habit like their punctuation: their own few, used their own way (one closing every text, a run of 💀 as a laugh, 👀 alone when something is off, 👍 in place of yes, 💸 beside money). Older people keep to the old familiar few (🙂 😊 👍 ❤️ 🙏) and use them sparingly; nearly everyone uses some. It never changes mid-thread, and no two people on one phone share it.

An emoji works like a tone of voice: it tells the reader how to take the line it ends (a joke, a favour, being annoyed, being pleased), so it sits at the end of a text that has a feeling to show, and someone who uses them puts one on most texts that do. Only a bare fact with nothing in it goes without; one that does not match the words reads worse than none. People repeat their own few (two 😂 in a row, the same 🙏 every time) rather than reach for a new one, and never pick a picture of what the text is about (a 🏢 because it mentions a building, a 🤖 beside the word bots). With someone new, or on business, people send fewer. To the young a lone 👍 reads cold and 💀 or 😭 is a laugh; to the old 👍 is warm and 😂 is the laugh.

A reaction is not an emoji in a text: a tap on someone's bubble that sits on its corner. Everyone taps them, the people who hardly type an emoji included, because a reaction is a nod and not a word: 👍 for ok, yes or got it, 👎 for no or not that, ❤️ for thanks or glad, 😂 for a laugh, 😮 and 😢 for news, 🙏 for thanks or please (it ends a request, the way a beg does, or a thanks; never a plain statement), and from a contact 🫡 on an order they take (it will be done; nobody salutes their own order). A reaction answers and closes: a tap on a question is the answer to it, and nobody repeats in words what their tap already said: a 👍 is sent alone or with words that add something (a time, a catch), never with "ok" or "fine" or a second yes, and the emoji tapped never comes again in the words. Most texts get no reaction; nobody taps two in a row. People tap or type, rarely both: someone who types the answer does not tap as well, and older people type "ok" where the young tap. 🫡 is only ever tapped. In a text, an emoji ends a short line whose feeling it carries or stands in a word's place ("in that case 👍"); nobody tacks one onto the end of a long text of plans, and 💯 is an acknowledgment (definitely, totally).