Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia)

by Craig A. Falconer

  Kurt stopped to think about that for the first time. “So Amos is a pawn?”

  “I wouldn’t call him a pawn. More like the queen. I reckon you’re the king — a figurehead with no real power. The queen is dangerous, but at the end of the day she’s still just a player in someone else’s game. Amos’s backers contrived an American Dream fairytale about a man and his idea coming from nothing. I don’t think people bought it but then you came along and it sort of came true. Even if someone else had invented the chip, someone like you was exactly what they needed.”

  After the day’s message in the sky, Kurt felt that Stacy’s analysis of his role made sense. “And now there’s a huge silhouette of my face in the clouds beside words I never said. Whatever I do, whatever I say, they’re always going to hold me up as the friendly young face of Sycamore.”

  “What’s the quote?” she asked.

  “Amos said change was inevitable and I said that progress wasn’t. In advertising land that translates into “Change is inevitable. Progress is Sycamore.” Even the font annoyed me.”

  Stacy smiled with a lot of teeth. “Why would you be annoyed by a font?”

  “I dunno. It was written in roundhand, you know, as if to signify some kind of sophistication. I’ve been noticing stuff like that since Professor Walker showed me an old article in New York magazine that said our generation “did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.” It’s so true. Suddenly it was 2005 and everything was white and round and smooth and the world got so good at writing nothing beautifully. It’s just like how politicians read their scripts without even knowing what they’re saying. Nothing means anything anymore. Everything is just presentation. Life is a giant spectacle.”

  She nodded in full agreement. “Right? Usually people think their generation is the only good one, but ours is the worst. Generation Y. Generation Me. Generation want-it-now-and-don’t-even-care-what-it-is… as long as it’s now.” Her tone was one of unbridled contempt. “The generation that lives on a social network and queued up to buy itself into slavery. Generation Sycamore.”

  “Generation Sycamore, that’s good. Don’t tell Amos though; he would use it!” Kurt was smiling. Being with Stacy cheered him up.

  “I know you said that you didn’t want to talk about all of this but you seem to be enjoying getting it off your chest. This is important stuff. What else is there?”

  “Nothing,” said Kurt, like a child. “I want to talk about something else.” He looked around the cold room for ideas. “You. Tell me about you and your family and where you grew up.”

  “We grew up here. Me and my brother.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “North. He moved after my parents died in a car crash last year. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “Snap.”

  “What?”

  “My parents are dead, too,” Kurt clarified.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Another car crash.”

  There was silence. Stacy stood up and wandered around. She paused at a door and looked to Kurt for permission. He nodded and she opened it. The hot tub in the middle of the floor caught her by surprise. “Wow. Why are we not through here?”

  Kurt followed her through and when he arrived she was standing by the waterbed.

  “It looks so soft.” She sat down on the bed and rubbed its surface.

  Kurt’s heart and every other part of his body screamed “sit down” but his head told him something else. Its warnings were too serious to ignore. “This is a mistake,” he said, forcing the words out. “We can’t do this.”

  Stacy widened her eyes and pulled her head back. “I never said we were going to—”

  “No,” he interrupted, “any of this. You shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe.”

  “Okay... now you’re starting to scare me. What’s going on?”

  “You said you want to see Sycamore die.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s kind of a big deal. It doesn’t matter that I don’t agree with what they’re doing any more than you do — in the public’s view I am Sycamore. We can’t be together like this.”

  “So I’m out of bounds, like a minister’s daughter? We’re not in high school, Kurt. Why are you so scared of what people might say?”

  “I don’t care what anyone says, it’s what Amos and his friends might do.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t even know. But if he knew I was spending my nights with someone who wanted Sycamore to fail and that she was asking me all sorts of questions… No. This can’t happen. We can’t happen. I know too much and now you know most of it. It’s one thing for me to kid myself that my life is still normal but I can’t drag you into this.” Kurt was rambling, realising his thoughts only as he spoke them. “I don’t know what I was thinking bringing you here. You have to leave. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  They walked to the car and drove to the corner. Both were too confused to feel any awkwardness in the silence. Stacy felt sorry for the position Kurt found himself in but more than a little annoyed at him for wasting her night. Kurt’s anger was directed equally at the circumstances and at himself for causing them.

  The car pulled up. Stacy scribbled something on a piece of paper and looked deeply into Kurt’s eyes. “Why do you never take your Lenses out even though you say you hate what’s happening?”

  “I can’t walk around blind,” he said, looking at her like she was from another world; some far-off fantasy land where people didn’t need to be online all the time. “What if someone tries to text me?”

  “You know, sometimes you sound just like everyone else.”

  Kurt wanted to say that he was nothing like everyone else but he didn’t feel like arguing. He turned his hands upwards to indicate as much and got out to open the passenger door.

  “At least you’ve got more manners,” Stacy smiled as she stepped out. She pecked Kurt on the cheek and handed him the note before leaving. “My address. If you ever feel like manning up and taking your Lenses out, you know where I’ll be.”

  9

  The waterbed was too comfortable. Kurt barely moved between dropping Stacy at her corner on Friday night and going out to find the nearest Tasmart on Sunday afternoon upon hearing that the Seed-aisles were finally up and running.

  More people recognised him than before. Pairs of shoppers took turns to stand beside Kurt for pictures, one snapshotting the other and swiping across their photo before switching positions. He was a new celebrity but Kurt already appreciated how annoying it was to be bothered by strangers. They didn’t even want to talk to him — it was all about getting a photo with the most popular man in the world for their Forest profiles.

  Kurt didn’t know that most of the people in the Tasmart were sharing their experience of meeting him via the TransVista feature Amos had demonstrated back at the pre-launch press event. Living vicariously through the eyes of others was sufficiently irresistible to ensure that TransVista had taken off immediately but Kurt had too little contact with typical street-level consumers to get a feel for how his Seed was being used by the masses. Given the ever-increasing popularity of Happy Pigs and the lookalike cam shows, this was probably for the best.

  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 amount 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 arrivin
g 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 alarming 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. “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 lowe
st-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 10th 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.”