"Faster Now" is a short story about a near-future world where brain hackers called "now tweakers" (nowts) use their time-management skills to get a leg up on normals. It's by Paul Di Filippo, who wrote many excellent essays and stories for the zine version of Boing Boing.
Some decades ago, neuroscientists discovered through various perceptual experiments that the moment of nowness we all carry in our heads—the supposed crystalline pinpoint of cognitive focus that moves inexorably down our personal timeline from one millisecond to the next—is actually a blobby composite of everything we have experienced in the past fifteen seconds.
Instead of being a tightly delimited laser dot of attention, normal consciousness is really more like a kludgy, slowly opening window that we keep picking up and laying down on the actual doings of the present, smearing the scene with encumbrances of the immediate past.
Naturally, when brain science got sophisticated enough, somebody decided to hack this. Thus were born the now-tweakers, or nowts.
