Insight

The tickets were worth it, he thought, even though he hadn't actually paid for tickets - World Series viewings came with his purchase of the AugmentedMLB package - he was grandfathered in the moment he'd forgotten to cancel his subscription after last season.

The only thing that wasn't quite on the money was the smell - it smelled like an airport, not a baseball stadium - but he'd read a newslet somewhere that Major League Baseball was already rolling out smell in their newest receivers. Gordon had thought, reading that snippet, that he wasn't sure how much the people at home wanted to smell the people at a game.

That's how it worked - fans' transmitters picked up the ambient smell and sent it back on to you electronically, and the receiver wrapped around your face would emit a matching cloud of scent. Sure, you could jump to any viewpoint you wanted, allowing you to smell-surf and smelly-vesdrop, but at the time Gordon didn't think the upgrade was worth it, and thought it a bit gimmicky as well. Smell wasn't going to help the umpires during instant replay.

Gordon couldn't see the faces of anyone else at the game (for privacy reasons all the receivers scrambled identifiable facial features) but he could hear what they said. The man whose transmitter he had up currently happened to be a die-hard Tigers fan, and very tall.

"Almost there boys, just two more innings," the fan said.

The home plate umpire had just rung up Avisail Garcia, Detroit's 29-year-old Venezuelan phenom, on a check swing to end the top half of the seventh inning. Did it matter? Garcia had two home runs in the game already, and the Giants trailed by six runs as it stood, 11 to 5.

The tall Detroit fan stood in section 121 of AT&T Park, just back and to the left of home plate. The fans around him were all getting up, the public address announcer was leading them all through the seventh inning stretch and a rendition of God Bless America that didn't even pretend at enthusiastic. These were fans who knew their fate, or at least had an idea of percentages. Not to mention the election - it was becoming clear that God had long ago blessed America, if ever, and then never again.