Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (18 page)

When he eventually made it round the store, Kurt was impressed by the checkout system. He had expected to have to scan the items as normal before swiping his Seed over another scanner. Instead, a Transition Manager instructed him to look at a red dot where the cash register used to sit. This engaged the checkout process. Kurt was then asked to look at each item’s barcode while moving it from basket to bag. There was no need to scan his Seed or press any buttons to confirm payment; the Lenses told The Seed what had been purchased and the appropriate amounted was debited automatically.

This Tasmart was an Express store, which happily meant that Kurt didn’t have to put up with any queues for seeding like those still being reported in larger stores across the country. On arriving back home he had lunch and returned to his luxurious bedroom to watch some more TV, as he still thought of it.

In the evening his Forest profile told him that there were 61,102,670 members. Amos’s weekend target had been smashed, and this before the government started subsidising seeding for welfare recipients in preparation for CrimePrev. Kurt didn’t want to hear anything else about Sycamore so he avoided the SycaNews and SycaStore, preferring to fall asleep midway through a game of chess with an AI opponent even Randy would have struggled against.

He yawned himself awake on Monday morning to an unwelcome sound. “Self improvement has never been easier,” shrieked an impossibly excited female voice inside his ears. “Check out Real-U for free now!”

Kurt’s eyes had only been open for a few seconds and he was already being bombarded with advertising. The Lenses must have reported being flooded with light, he thought, then informed The Seed so that the ad could be delivered while he was still in bed. The front page of the SycaStore was devoted to the mysterious RealU, which was free of charge and already top of the charts. “
Be the you you deserve to be,
” it proclaimed. He was interested.

Inside RealU there was a section for each area of the body and one for fashion. Kurt clicked on Height and rolled his eyes at the slogan:
“Let your height match your ambition with Real-U.
” The clinically simple interface displayed Kurt’s current height. A clickable arrow lay either side of the number. Dollar values were present under the arrows, indicating that an extra inch in height would cost $180 per month. The changes would be visible to all Lens-wearers at all times.

There was a stated limit of four inches so Kurt clicked the upwards arrow four times to reach his new height then clicked Continue. An image of Kurt appeared in full-screen. The image then duplicated itself and the Kurt in the new version slowly grew by four inches. “Wow,” said the woman inside his ears, “you look awesome!” She then recommended a two-week six-pack — “perfect for the beach!” — but he declined.

He moved into the Weight section, finding that the weight-loss message was geared towards women even on his Seed: “
Eat like a queen and look like a princess with Real-U!
” He skipped over that. Before clicking the Facial Features button he paused to guess at the section’s slogan. “Spend away your ugliness with RealU,” he imagined. Or, maybe, “Get down from the ugly tree and climb up the Sycamore.” To Kurt’s moderate surprise, the actual tagline was somewhat more subtle: “
Be the artist, be the canvas, be the RealU.
”

The first adjustable variable in this section was skin pigmentation, an inclusion approved by the Universal Skincare Foundation who encouraged consumers to “
Fight skin cancer with RealU!
” More mundane skincare options were also available, including all kinds of makeup and a feature called UnBlemish which promised to fully cleanse problem skin for just $7 per day.

Then Kurt noticed the highlighted field where consumers could enter their maximum budget. RealU promised to deliver the best available face by making calculations based on the precise traits that test subjects had found most attractive in members of the opposite sex. When a consumer entered a budget and clicked FixMe, RealU would ration that budget using various formulae involving their cheekbones, nose, eye separation, brow protrusion and 22 other variables.

Kurt didn’t want to know what FixMe would do to him so instead played around with the individual variables. Facial changes seemed expensive compared to height alterations, presumably because of the difficulty involved in reflecting such subtle and intricate alterations. The incremental nose-straightening and ear-shrinking would be instantly familiar to anyone who had ever created their own character in a video game and Kurt was concerned by that thought, realising that the real world was becoming a game with real people as its characters. He knew that RealU couldn’t possibly work as well as promised, though, and no one would put up with poor functionality.

Kurt returned his face to normal then dressed quickly and set off towards HQ to visit Amos, who had been fairly candid thus far. RealU seemed like too much of a departure from Sycamore’s general focus to have been his idea and Kurt wanted to give him a chance to explain before getting too angry. After blowing it with Stacy and with the kids in their last week at school, he had nothing better to do, anyway.

Longhampton’s streets were quiet and the gate which protected its inhabitants from the proles opened without event. But as he neared the Quartermile and the volume of pedestrians increased, Kurt noticed something bizarre: dozens of them were wearing yellow espadrilles.

He left his car for the valet and took a proper look at the passing herds. A lot of women seemed to have the same red bag and an unusual number of men were wearing cream scarves. RealU had to be involved.

During the elevator ride to Amos’s floor Kurt clicked into the previously unexplored Fashion section and found his answer. The espadrilles were available for free as an introductory gift and the bags and scarves were on the Daily Hot List. Trends had never been easier to follow.

“Hotshot, what a nice surprise!” Amos jumped up from his sofa and greeted Kurt on his way over from the elevator. “I like a man who treats Sundays like Thursdays. Terrance and Communications Colin usually work seven days but only because I make them. You just show up! Now, is it just me, or did you get taller?” Amos laughed as he looked up at Kurt.

“What are we doing?” said Kurt.

“Talking like a couple of old friends, what else?”

“No, I mean with this avatar garbage. Virtual reality was never part of the deal. We were supposed to
augment
reality — make it better. When people start looking like characters in the real world, well, what the hell
is
the real world? Life isn’t a game.”

“It’s just a bit of fun, Kurt. You seem to be making the most of it.”

“I was experimenting. Anyway, this isn’t harmless fun and you know it. This is you taking reductionist advertising to its base limit and making people pay to virtually correct the problems they’ve been convinced that they have.”

Amos looked at Kurt in that annoying way he did when he wanted to present helplessness. “I honestly don’t know what you want from me here. Extremists have been complaining for years about how the advertising industry makes people insecure and upset by presenting perfect models and unattainable beauty. Now I make perfection attainable and I’m the bad guy?”

“That’s like saying it’s okay to sell children junk food as long as you sell them insulin when they get diabetes! This isn’t the advertising industry cleaning up its mess, this is you exploiting the harm it’s already done and making everything worse. You’re reinforcing the idea that looks are all that matter.”

“Why did you like Kate?”

“What?”

“Pinewood. That night before the contest... why didn’t you like the fat girl who was doing her makeup?”

Kurt said nothing.

“Because you’re as shallow as everyone else,” Amos answered for him. “You don’t even know Kate yet she still got your heart going, as per that pop-up you told me about. I’m confused as to how this all squares up. And see that writing on your t-shirt? It’s upside-down when
you
look at it because it’s meant for everyone else. There’s probably a logo on your jeans’ back pocket, too, and you’re not seeing that. We all dress up and wear masks, Kurt; shallowness isn’t something that other people do.”

“Stop trying to distract me. This isn’t about shallowness. RealU is beyond shallow. It’s beneath shallow. It’s vacuous. I’m honestly disappointed in you. Why would you offer something like this?”

“People want it,” Amos shrugged.

“People are idiots, though. That doesn’t mean you should encourage them.”

“Sometimes I don’t get you, hotshot. One minute you say you care about the worker bees and the next you’re dismissing them as idiots. Which is it?”

“Both. Humans are weak and pliable, with coexistent capacities for brilliance and nothingness. Decades of inanity have set us back but you’re making it even worse. Happy Pigs is one thing but this is real lowest-common-denominator stuff. Wherever we differ on method, both of us can surely agree that The Seed was supposed to make people better. So what is this?”

“The ultimate equaliser,” said Amos. “RealU is a pure expression of will. It’s realer than real. What people look like without RealU is the result of a genetic lottery... this is who they really are. Can’t you see it? The Seed makes people more of themselves. When someone gets drunk, their real self comes out. When someone gets rich, their real self comes out. So when someone gets a Seed that let’s them become whoever they want, you better believe they’re going to become it.”

“Whose idea was RealU?”

“Communications Colin,” Amos answered flatly. “He said that Forest communications reflect a society obsessed with surface appearances. Who knew? Every group has their own desires: old women want to look younger, young girls want to look older. The usual story.”

Kurt immediately thought of Sabrina and her upcoming 10
^th
birthday. Her Sycamore account would turn from Sapling to Full and she would be able to spend money in the SycaStore. No doubt her friends would be using RealU and she would be pressured into following suit. He hadn’t read through the details so didn’t know whether the service would be open to under-18s. “Can kids use this?”

“Mostly,” Amos nodded, “but there are still laws to work out that prevent us from extending credit to minors, so at the moment most of them can’t change much. It’s shocking how the government treats them as second class citizens.”

“They’re children… of course they shouldn’t get credit! Not that it’s really credit, anyway. What you gave
me
is credit, what everyone else gets is debt. And even ignoring everything else, think how stupid a user will feel when they spend all this money to look good then the person they’re with takes their Lenses out and sees beyond the avatar. It’s so pointless.”

“Tell me, Kurt, when did you last take out
your
Lenses?”

Kurt responded with humble silence.

“As I thought. Once you’ve seen the light it’s difficult to go back to being blind. I honestly don’t know why you’re so upset about this fun little app.”

“Maybe I thought you were better than this? Maybe I thought that somewhere in the back of your head you actually meant what you said about progress? I guess I was wrong since all you seem to be doing is creating sick new ways to extract revenue from vulnerable people. Is this the capitalism of the future, selling people virtual solutions to their real insecurities?”

Amos considered the question. “21
^st
century capitalism is an exciting thing; not quite post-scarcity, but good practice for when we get there. As a new outlet for existing wants and needs, RealU is unique. People don’t really need much any more, you see, so it’s tricky. They’ll always have sex drives and greed so most of what we do will play safely to those. The cam shows have been doing ridiculous business on the sex side and human greed will sell the SycaLotto once it launches. Everyone is going to play.”

It was the first Kurt had heard of a lottery. “How much will it cost?”

“$3 per draw. It will be subscription based with an undefined number of draws per day. Jackpots will vary but will always be irresistibly tempting. You know how it is: people like money. The prize for the first draw is $50,000,000 and we’ll see where it goes from there. We expect around fifty million players to begin with.”

“So each draw rakes in three times what you’re paying out?”

Amos couldn’t miss Kurt’s contempt. “What exactly is it that you have against profit?”

“It’s all you ever think about. It’s all anyone ever thinks about! Everything is driven by profit. There was already profit-driven healthcare, profit-driven education, profit-driven prisons, and obviously now we’ve added profit-driven surveillance. Profit is the worst driver in the world yet people accept this as a natural state of affairs because they were born into it. We’ve had this system for a few hundred years but it might as well have been around forever. That’s why your buddies in the profit-driven government are waging so many profit-driven wars.”

“And breathe, hotshot! It’s just a goddamn lottery.”

“No, it’s just one more way for you to milk people for every last cent and trick them into debt.” Kurt looked out of the window at all the ants in yellow shoes and sighed. “Why is it that every time I come here to complain about something, you just give me more things to be annoyed at? It’s like a pattern. I go home and I try to forget. Then something comes up in my vista or fills my ears with news of your latest scheme to ruin the world. So I come down to ask what’s going on, but before I can even finish telling you how annoyed I am you start telling me all these new ideas you have that are just as bad!”

“I didn’t ask you to come here, Kurt. Go home to your mansion. Enjoy your life. If the news pisses you off so much then stop watching it. Christ, take the damn Lenses out if it’s that bad.”

For the first time, Kurt seriously considered that he might. He had given the world The Seed and there was little he could do from his position to influence its future uses. Torturing himself over events beyond his control was helping no one and the progress of Sycamore’s development teams would surely slow down soon, anyway.