Mary: Check your phone.

Your CHUMROLL is empty. You're not sure what this platform is. This implementation translates from voice to text and back, allowing hands-free text communication, which is nice.

Your brain races with implementations of that design that may be revolutionary, over-ear headphones that pick up speech with visors that overlay its text output, projections that display its windows, glasses with transparent screens that allow you to see through them.

Most interesting of all to you, poindexter, is that it resembles IRC. You suspect it may even be built atop IRC directly, using it like a backend for otherwise mundane communication.

You regretfully imagine a sysop watching each private message come in, doing whatever perverse things systems operators do when you can't see them, but they can see you.