The monitors had been available for eleven years. The early ones were inaccurate, they could tell you that someone was thinking of you but not who. The later versions were more specific. Peil had been doing monitor-dependency counseling for six years, which meant she had been doing it since the second generation of devices. Most of her clients had come to her from the third generation forward, when the specificity improved and the checking accelerated with it.
Today's client was twenty-six and had been checking her device approximately forty times before the session began. Not that Peil was counting. She was counting.
The pattern was familiar. The device gave information that had never been available before, and the mind, having received it once, could not agree on the right interval for receiving it again. The client wanted to know she was being thought of. This was not pathological in itself. The difficulty was that knowing once did not satisfy; it only established that satisfaction was possible, which made the next interval feel like deprivation.
Peil asked her what she was looking for when she checked. The client said she was looking for the signal from a specific person. Someone she was trying to stop caring about.
"Does seeing his signal help with that?" Peil asked.
The client looked at the device without touching it. "No, " she said.
They sat with that for a moment.
After the client left, Peil sat quietly before her next appointment. She had been checking her own monitor more than usual in the past month. She had not yet decided whether this warranted attention. She had not yet brought it to anyone.