buggery | a glimpse at the future? (original fiction)

This isn't the story I was planning to post for this event, but while I was working on that one (which came to me mostly-whole and then fought me over the final hundred words) this one began ringing insistently in my ear.

Facial Expressions

2000:
"Lisa Jefferson Jenkins! What did you do?" Beth Jenkins exclaimed as her daughter slumped into their apartment.

Lisa stared sullenly back, uptilted chin asking, What's it look like?

Beth sighed. "Lisa, I said you couldn't get your lip pierced."

"It's my lip." Lisa slurred only slightly.

2025:
"'Someday, Lisa,' my mother told me when I was seventeen, 'you'll want a good, professional job. How will a hole in your face look during interviews?'"

"And you answered, 'Everybody's doing it, so they'll have to hire us anyway.'" The installer sounded distracted; stifling her nervous patter, Lisa forced a laugh.

"Guess you hear that often."

He nodded. "You want a labret mouthpiece?" He traced the old piercing.

"Hole's there already..."

He positioned her chin upward. Her department might be paying for this upgrade, but physically, the insertion of her new pers-phone mic and receiver hurt no less than her adolescent piercings.

2050:
"What's wrong with a standard install, Eli?" Lisa Jenkins prompted, an idle fingertip touching the nodules decorating her own ear, then the simpler marquis beneath her lip.

"Ga-da, Mom!" Elisabeth Jefferson Jenkins III curled her unmarred lip in disgust. "Letting my headcomm show on my face? That's compiled twentieth century."

just one cog in a