beauty confirmed otherwise
Her head gently lolled and touched the toilet seat rim and she recoiled with abrupt self awareness. The unthinkable lighting change was just around the corner. Five more minutes, and the stage lights change to flashing red, she thought. Stage, direction, off screen, she needed to move but found her limbs wanting, ass stuck to the smooth and shiny salmon pink tiles, soles slipping on her earlier tears and knees falling sideways against porcelain bars, as if her lower body was trying to escape her, trying to escape everywhere she was at once. Her mind jerked out of sync with reality and she thought she was in the red-lit room already, watching systems withdrawing against her will, the life, the prison, collapsing in against her, a body no longer recognising itself, its immune system hacking away at every bit of her. A body she’d built to get beyond just surviving. With every cell on a timer before it would start consuming its host, this sanctuary would soon turn abattoir, then a morgue, the toilet blossoming like fungal rot into a grim torture, and the dark red ceramics echoing her sobs back at her.
It must be four minutes, she thought. She tried again to push herself off the floor and her left foot slid away pathetically again. She only just about stopped herself from crying, thanks to an inner mental note on epidermal salinity that she’d made years ago pulling her away. She wished she’d forked out for the tear duct implants Rana G had, but it was one more acquisition on the long list of chasing perfection. The walls began to buzz, and it stopped her mind spinning in its tracks so hard she felt she might throw up again.
Earlier
Once again, the gentle buzz of the alarm perforated her fragile morning skull. She felt like she was about to slowly cry herself awake, then remembered her brand. Millions depended on her, for her utmost grace and composure. And she needed them to afford London Zone 8.
A dozen hidden cameras emerged from standby mode and blinked alive just in time to watch her. She pushed herself gingerly onto her elbow and arms, let her head swing to one side, her eye mask slipped off, and her negligee slid down languorously on one side from her shoulder to her upper arm then her elbow, with a studied carelessness. She knew the backlighting of the circular window on the far side would obscure the full show of nudity, leaving a just-about-PG-enough silhouette of her being for her to be able to hit the broader daytime market, at least in the netizen-states and corporal domains whose machines classified nipples by skin colour more than by outline. Gazing dreamily through her stray curls and pouting at a hidden cam she knew was in her wardrobe door, she slowly stretched her arms above her head and let a yawn take over her body, but only enough to create that high-fibre, GMO-free, organic cardboard authenticity you find on the side of the upmarket granola box. Never let real instinct get in the way of being photogenic, as her mentors used to say, but flirt enough with reality to maintain sanity. This was one of the few parts of the day where she could come close to some form of private relaxation, thanks to the odd juxtaposition of society’s fixation on careless mornings full of authentic, dozy grace, and the latent sexual potential of the female form just released from sleep. Between a boardroom, a machine intelligence, and several neuro-imprint focus groups, the image of the perfect woman waking up had been templated so that it could be used and marketed with. She toed the impossibly fine imaginary border between being adorably semi-conscious and somehow ready to pounce.
She swallowed and widened her eyes, taking in the room she spent her days in, living the life of contractually preordained, high-maintenance leisure. This morning’s routine was an “I’m grateful for every day” act: a choreography of subtle smiles, infrequent mewing, and serene brows that she’d perfected over years. With a look that belied a perfect eight and a half hours of sleep, she got the satin eye mask and sleep-time white-noise machine stocks frothing upward. With slightly glossy eyes she stared at the visible past, present and porno of her perfect life, and wondered briefly if she’d even show the faintest hint of her pearly whites. She decided against it, she’d done it 6 days ago, and her handlers – sorry, “talent management strategists” - told her in patronising tones that “smugness is out, looking-resolutely-to-the future is in”, and so she naturally adjusted. She got up and strode to the toilet, making sure to position herself in that auburn morning light perfectly for the cameras. She didn’t strike the poses, she gently slid into them, like well oiled cogs sliding across grooves smoothed by professionally nurtured narcissism. Even the way her head tilted fractionally less on the bathroom throne than it did in the bedroom illustrated just how perfectly effortless her waking up transition was, something the average Josefine could only aspire to. Maybe tomorrow she’d try a keen eyed look, filled with pantheress poise, prepared to take on the world. A world that her fans, her consumers, could only face from a long dark session on a grimy plastic toilet seat, but she could face it for them: with beauty, grace, and, most importantly, regular bowel movements.
The ambient forest canopy sounds drowned out the sound of the dying, perfectly pH-balanced stream below. She wiped and got up. Cameras cut this bit out, unless the demand-bots had struck an auto-contract with the toilet paper, urinary health or period product companies, but her terms only allowed for a limited number of minutes per week for that kind of work. Her implant informed her that this was not the case and so she dispensed with her occasional angelic sigh that made thrush meds look like post-confessionals. She had sold her image, her movement, and her selfhood, but she had kept some limits, though she could barely remember why – some outdated sense of personhood clung to her.
She began her best work: the daily amazement that somehow, the fifth time this week, the fiftieth time this quarter, her overnight skincare had worked. The cameras and sensors in her bathroom mirror were worth more than the rest of her flat combined. It wasn’t just that every motion was traced out in every marketable level of definition, from thumbnail to micro-pore analysis. There was a 4 dimensional image being built of her in real time, with astonishing accuracy, that would be sent off across the verse and remixed to optimal effect, saturating the minds of sleep-deprived housewives, clinging with one arm to their sanity and the other onto their spewing toddler, day-dreaming of more sanitary times, less baggy times.
She spent so much time perfecting this luminous act that she’d gone to the trouble of installing a retractable leaning bar in the wall just so her legs would ache less. She’d had to stop using it, since her handlers told her it stilted the joyful side-to-side movements of excitement viewers reacted to. She recalled perfect rows of white teeth inside frozen smiles tapping out a PR tune that went ‘remember, you’re selling a lifestyle, let us worry about the product’. They conveniently omitted the part where she was also the product. They blathered on and on till she grew nauseous and caved in. At least the inbuilt foam bath rug gave her soles some relief.
So began her first siren song of the morning. It wasn’t sailors that swooned, but metrics and needles in electronic dashboards, powered by the myriad, mute, melancholy, mind-numb scrollers living off her content and feeding on her amazement that once again, products she’d used for almost three months now, actually worked. She knew that it wasn’t enough to show that her face felt plump, dewy, silken. No, she had to embody the euphoria of the newly hopeful, the relief when the weight of self-loathing has been discharged and that mild change in your skin tone gives you a life-defining minute of self-love you never thought you’d see again, because you’d been stuck in the trenches of your wrinkles for so long you’d forgotten how to gaze up at the stars and think that maybe, just maybe, you might be beautiful. Yes, she knew better than anyone that skincare was not skin-deep.
A personal tragedy unfolded across the faces of most women, the entropic slide into irrelevance, battered from inside and out. Every morning she played that angelic trumpet and gave them a chance, giving them a longer and longer ladder to match the deepening pit their minds imagined in their wrinkles. All the other stories of their lives melted away in comparison to the endless war against aging skin. A healthcare executive in Neo-Boston just logged in to catch this show, and she’d carry the hope with her throughout the rest of her day. Cassie had spent weeks jumping from one hard-won vocational accomplishment to another, propelling herself higher and higher up the corporate ladder, but an off-hand comment from her most recent situationship, combined with turning 30, turned her from the ambitious young businesswoman back to an insecure teen crying inside, just for a few vulnerable seconds in the early morning. And those were all the seconds the algorithm needed to give her one hand filled with despair and a glimmer of hope with the other. She took both. Swipe to swipe, click to silent click, she bought the damned collagen and niacinamide mask because maybe, just maybe Jason was right, and the stress was showing on her face a lot more than before.
The siren song continued. Her face is the conductor’s stick directing the KPI orchestra. The mask is peeled: a set of strings sussurates in anticipation. Checks her cheeks, her forehead, and the absent crow’s feet: a rumbling bassline builds up in the data stream. Her eyes open and stretch in joyous amazement, and the brilliant whites unleash a clarion call of clicks that carry this post higher and higher into the algorithm. A beautiful, youthful smile seals the deal in the mind of the consumer. The movement resolves back to pose of her with the product bottle beaming right by her face, and the contract is fulfilled. It doesn’t matter which derma-conglomerate name is plastered on this quarter’s container, as long as she has it right there, centred in the frame of her immersive bathroom mirror. The ending seconds tick by as she holds it beams at herself for long enough to give the marketing gurus time to insert all the mandatory FDA-disclaimers, then she puts it down and struts off happily into the wings, before letting her face reset to human factory settings.
In a lightning fast pirouette she turns, lets the negligee fall off the floor and trades it for a loose-fitting band tee off the rack, and she’s back at the mirror, ready for act 2 – the gentle face cleanser. This one was a newer product pushed by the all-natural, eco-conscious, body-positive brands. This face wash will allegedly undo the undesirable side effects of their competitor’s cleanser (incidentally owned by the same group, but they don’t have to mention that, not until the antitrust busters start sweating down their neckties). She had crafted an act to match this one, starting with a frumpy-faced inspection. This lasts a second, lest anyone mindlessly scrolling can spot the obvious flaw in inspecting the flawless, or that any amount of frowning can generate the instant illusion of lines. This was then followed by a cautious but intensive application of a sickly dark green, foaming substance. For the eco-conscious, the more disgusting something looked, the more Mother Earth would kiss each of your individual pores into the size and texture she’d intended. She embodied that cautious, slightly-savvier-than-average-but-still-ultimately-gullible-and-insecure college educated femme that had dabbled with the idea of environmental activism in her teenage years but never got past smoking grade C downers underage and getting heated in bar stool debates. It ended with a quick rinse - this brand couldn’t afford the extra 3.5 seconds that high end, AAA goods got. Due to those time constraints, she moved straight to the after-wash pose: a quick silly face with puffed up cheeks and crossed eyes, followed by a gently self-mocking salad laugh. If the previous ad was a swan dive filled with grace, this was a rebellious little teen punk act for those who spent hours every day pretending to not care. Although screwing up her face felt unnatural given her years of work softening it, she reminded herself that pulling silly faces and still being palatable was a luxury reserved to those who’d had their “natural” beauty confirmed otherwise.
She stripped and stepped into the shower cubicle. The body product act never bought the same kind of adoring – note, desperate – audience, so it was a relatively relaxed and mundane act that veered dangerously close to authentic, were it not for her deeply trained self-composure. As the HA, ZO, SPF and other top shelf acronyms selected for her on that day were applied by almost unthinking hands, steamy video streams of foam that barely obscured body parts flowed from her room to the central networks, managed by semi-supervised autonomous video intelligences, directors with no chair and no ego, but armed with a meticulously backed-up knowledge of the most acutely promising and attractive facial angles a skincare advert could deliver, created entirely new product advertising campaigns on the fly, stitching together brilliant mosaics of hundreds of beautifully feminine creatures, including her, to produce the new promotional, attention-grabbing, executive-function-choking, wallet-busting campaigns that would ultimately feed, clothe and keep her under a roof. These fed to the higher up discriminator intelligences that selected from amongst thousands of new streams which one would fit best where, whilst brutally discarding most of the content to the cutting floor of the artificial intelligences archive folders. Moments of pristine beauty the average person could only dream would go and die an eternal death there, unless one of the most successful models suddenly died – or worse, their contracts ended - and the company needed to milk an extra 2.45 seconds of engagement with a besotted audience not quite ready to let go. The final products cascaded down to the networks, feeding the neurotically self-loathing masses.
When she was done with the microfibre towels and the hair mousse, she proceeded to brush her teeth, another semi-automatic routine. She hadn’t nailed a hustle with the dental care industry, so this was getting filed under her personal performances to reflect on. This wasn’t due to her teeth, oh no, they were as flawless as the rest of her. But every market sub-sector had its own peculiar competitiveness, and to her it felt like dental was somehow even more nepotistic than the rest. The fact that even she, someone paid-to-self-pamper into perfection, could not nail a perfect score on every single facet of appearance was possibly the most grounded thing about her situation. And, in the liminal moments between ad campaign drafts, yoga streams and showing off blenders that realigned your YearningSoulTM, these realizations flashed into her mind before quickly dissipating into the labyrinth of her self-rationalization.
She was glad she’d never been a hack. A few kids from her school had, selling their data to be manipulated and turned against them, for short-term contracts that dried up the second the pharma comp went bust, or when they were bought up by some tyre manufacturer who, mid-audit, realised what a sham operation was going on. “Tell us how the experience was, your words can be converted into reliable data” or “All we need is two daily selfies, at morning and at bedtime, and as many videos as you can manage: you could be our premium participant – all we need is a Real, Authentic Person” and more crap like that. As soon as the Data Veridity Authority properly inspected the hollow cosmetic shell corpo churning out those tinkered images and half-baked pore-analyses, they’d tear the C-suite limb from holographic limb in cyber courtrooms. It didn’t matter how amazing your digital enhancing was, you’d be a fool to try and game the Veridity system with old school means. Naturally, the cream of the execs didn’t suffer – several trillions in litigation was nothing when you had venture capital – but the dolls she knew – Ali, Paulie, Teerri, they had names, ones beyond the dark veil of algorithmic obscurity – they had never recovered. Not after investing time, body, soul and PII into sinking ships that dragged their unique online identities with them. Stringently enforced regulatory practice around the virtual world had created unities where before there had been divergent, duplicitous faces of the whole. It had been like the church anti-schisming over the dogma of the Trinity, except that this actually made sense. But that legislative change didn’t bring about the world-wide-webtopia promised, because every parasite eventually mutates and thrives. All that changed was who paid the actual bill. Normally, the bottom layer, people like her.
People like her, waiting in workout gear she’d tailored herself to, waiting for the automatic dispenser machines to combine the exact ratios of lion’s mane to hemp to flaxseed to psyllium to orange juice and every other obscure, rare ingredient. Whilst pulling off automatic poses and looks to the side, her eyes briefly caught the glimmer of granite-coloured pestle and mortar on her shelves. She bitterly recalled the trad-core trend sweeping markets a couple years ago, resurging every few decades like a strain of tuberculosis. She would be forever impressed by the irony of trying to get in touch with a fictional, rural past while weighing synthetic protein powder on an electronic scale whose manual’s first set-up instruction was “Select from the following options for gravitational field: Earth, Lunar, Martian or Custom”. Her flashback was interrupted by her implant reminding her that barely-concealed-contempt was sooo last year’s facial expression. If you embraced the system, you had to do it wholesale.
That’s why she had gone straight for the big dogs – the mega cosmetic pharmas (or at least what was left of them after the last big anti-trust fracture) and their “perfection labs”. Theirs was a parasitic model built to last. She knew they’d drain her of every bit of data, and it would be tightly controlled all the way from source to spout: from the ultra-controlled, 360-degree, read-only, open-to-every-government-inspector-and-their-mother body sensors, all the way to the final dashboard that the product manager for that financial quarter’s Vitamin C serum could jerk themselves off to with the vintage-fax-machine printout of their line manager’s annual appraisal. The key wasn’t in falsifying or manipulating data, nothing as crude, gauche and 21st century as that. The key was in controlling the test subjects till there was no way for the product to fail in testing. That’s how you got past Veridity. When your prize cows gave you everything from their genome to the detailed reading of their gut biome – consensually of course, debt-laden college grads knew their rights and how to barter them for better balances – you never had a problem. Of course that smoothie worked miracles that could soften wrinkles and heal your inner child; of course that acid peel mask cured your existential dread and lifted your eyelids; and of course that sleep-enhancing, perfume-spitting, dog-sitting, chakra-lining, HiFi-blasting, grocery-ordering, AI-powered mini-vacuum cleaner eased your stress lines and left you to do the important work of living your very best and authentic life. There was no room to actually fail.
She found herself mildly dissociating mid yoga-flow, somewhere between Warrior 2 and whatever it was they called the one where you balanced precariously and stupidly on one leg while reaching a trembling hand for the ceiling and holding the other leg perfectly horizontal. She hated yoga. She wasn’t streaming now of course, she was actually doing the extra workouts she’d committed to, rather than just recording them once and waving a pinky imploringly. She despised yoga. But to do it to the point where you could pull off a 30 minute live-stream that gave just the right amount of sweat to still be appealing to mass-media and nail every pose, you had to do it so regularly your sweat glands barely noticed, and to do that, you needed to push through hours of the stuff. She had promised millions this daily routine would give them that 0.7 waist-hip-ratio. Although she wondered what qualified as a promise, and how that varied by content exposure – at what level of engagement with the video does a view imply a commitment from the creator? Did they have to watch all the way to the end, thus meaning that she had looked several million people in the eye and meant it wholeheartedly? Or was it enough for her abs, thumbnail and tagline to suggest that she held all the answers to getting an hourglass figure? Well, in that case, she estimated, while switching sides, it may have been about a billion more people she stood to disappoint. But then again, was the magnitude of the promise smaller? Was a promise itself a variable with a density plot, spread across audience-space? What distribution would best describe it? She barely suppressed a mournful expression in downward dog, thinking back to carefree days engaging with such questions in maths and philosophy. In these moments of intense autopilot, she strayed perilously close to personhood, or what little she had of it left.
She’d kept the privacy of her sex life, although the lab coats and white suits kept offering the contract extension politely, delicately, and at precisely timed moments to ensure her follicular harmony was not disturbed by inopportune nagging. She’d agreed to the clause on partner restrictions and vetting. Too much variability. Toys were allowed, and these were all routinely checked to the highest standard of electronic and haptic care. She’d also opted to allow her neurological signals to be monitored during her only “private time”. At the time of e-signing this clause, that felt like a necessary defeat. That bonus was too tempting, she’d have been bumped down many millions if she hadn’t agreed to it. Her cycles and fertility had been packaged and sold off as part of the initial deal, but that was so commonplace she barely remembered. After all, break-throughs in giving people control over their hormones near the start of the 22nd century made their less enjoyable effects as predictable as rain clouds – you just stayed briefly indoors and put on a big jumper. Naturally, you had to be able to afford the jumper, the home, or the hormone-dispensers in the first place. That last one was not classed as a universal right, but if it was, she bet that most of the stuff she promoted would work a lot better. And, on some level, her audience must have known this, or at least they were made aware of this through the unique link made available to her full body data. The link that barely any of them used.
After all, was there any point discussing bodily autonomy and hormonal regimens with the mother-of-four working double shifts and holding onto the last vestiges of societally approved youth in a bid to maintain a dying ember of physical self-esteem? She shifted stances and suppressed a stray fart, remembering just in time the air sensor’s mid-workout scheduling. Did they have these kinds of talks in the neuro-imprint focus groups that were used to calibrate her bodily content factory? She breathed in and out to the rhythm of the new age saccharine pop getting her through the sun salutations. How did they pick the people for that? What was the difference between their answers and the spikes and crests showing on their CT-readouts? Her head hung down again in downward dog, one last time. Do they really sit the 60 year old with alopecia next to the lightly stoned teenage incel who was “selected because he’s a top 1% viewer of our brand content, albeit not a regular product user”? Nor an occasional one for that matter, she thought bitterly.
All these questions and more orbited her head – which was now touching the matt while in a deeply fulfilling child’s pose. They were temporary lumps in the batter of her life, and she mixed them into a more aesthetically pleasing, homogenous nothingness. She’d wondered if she could get a deal to be like one of the book-dolls, fawning semi-intellectually online over everything from new spaceport duty-free romances to non-fic hardbacks. She might actually be able to sneak in some of the stimulation she missed. This, however, conflicted with the anti-wrinkle and stress contracts. So, placid holograph mags, feelgood self-help guides and trite lunar romantic comedies full of infinitely hollow jest were de rigueur. Thank god that beauty standards had changed enough over the century that smile lines were graciously deemed acceptable. She heard rumours that Fayre B, another doll out in the zone 20 Birmingham burb, was getting lobo to cope. It made sense for her, given Fayre had a PhD in astrobiology, made lightly redundant by the last space-market bubble popping six months ago. At least she wasn’t one of those promised a ticket up.
She was just finishing and walking her hands back towards her feet, her head gently rolling from shoulder to shoulder, when it came, the buzz, this time cracking like whiplash through her reverie and the sanctuary of her routine. Within a second she realised it was the doorbell, and before she had a chance to ponder the possible parcel deliveries that might need signing, her implant flashed the truth inside her mind: ‘INSPECTION’.
She almost cursed, then remembered she might still be on sensors. She’d been prepared for this, and the implant prompted her with succinct, helpful notes appearing in her mind: ‘Omni sensor pipe deactivated; Agency notified of inspection stream-break; compensatory package agreed and locked in’. No financial worries there, she thought. Show’s over, but I still get paid. And that’s because the show wasn’t really over, it just temporarily switched audiences.
The implant cautioned: ‘5 min 44 until waiting penalties apply’. She straightened up, applied a neutral face, and then allowed the unofficially sanctioned act: the Innocent. Her handlers had discussed this in detailed, off-the-record meetings. Feigning just the right amount of naivety and dispelling any notion of arrogance or contempt would put any doll in good stead with an auditor. Bonus points if you’re a good host, and everything from tea sets to inhalables were available, there to be offered and refused, as part of the polite dance. Any Veridity auditor would lose their job over a hint of bribery or favours, and they came along with their own Machine-Auditor Drone (MAD) to keep them in check. The solution to humans with machines fabricating a post-truth reality was to have a sufficient number of humans in the loop, and dire consequences for the slightest sign of tampering. Add another layer of corroborating machines to keep humans in check and the woven knots of accountability looked a lot like the hair braiding special she did every other weekend, only harder to untangle.
She got a brief look in the long mirror on the way to the door, but that was more out of habit than anything else. She knew that the product was good: It was adapting and curling an errant hair strand on the side into gracefully playful messiness. She thanked her lucky stars Veridity hadn’t come at night, like Yuri A had enjoyed last month. Some terms were non-negotiable. Any time, any date, you answered. That stamp of reality was worth the discomfort – it made you bulletproof and it kept you in the black.
She stopped. She took a breath in front of the large, grey, reinforced front door. She’d never taken in its size before, how thick and impenetrable it seemed. Then she noticed the absence of that awareness. There was the briefest embryonic contemplation of her deliberate isolation from the world, but she nipped that in the bud, engaged her every sinew into a relaxed and welcoming stance, and slowly opened the door.
The warmth of her smile and the midday amber glow in her sanctuary of a flat radiated outward, and found their photons bouncing off a large, stocky man, about a few inches taller and much broader than her. As they gradually fed back into her calibrating eyes and mind, various parts of her assessed the picture. The first image that entered her mind was of an archaic, pre-Recoupling photograph of a construction worker chugging subpar coffee morosely in an early morning New York diner, before they were subsumed by the ocean. The deep-cut grooves and patchy, unkempt beard added to that, and she had to stop a small, automatic part of her brain going into cosmetic-diagnostic mode. Yes, she knew precisely what anti-photoageing products would have helped this person about 10 years ago. No, she didn’t think he was a likely target audience. It was immaterial, they had a job to do.
After her dermatologically-inclined hindbrain had its first say in perception, she processed eye contact. Sunken brown eyes looked back at her. Unlike Rana G, she’d never given much thought to facial profiling, since she lived and breathed the art of constructed appearance. But if she had, she’d have rated his eyes at 30 percent kind, 10 percent smart and 60 percent whatever else didn’t matter to her current situation, which included blitheness and the gentle ignorance of a man going through daily motions without ever thinking about his outward appearance. Appearances were what she worked with, daily, hourly, minutely, so she couldn’t stop her brain thinking like that. It’s more productive to note the posture and the tech stack he’s working with, she thought, and that Gauntlet on his wrist is definitely the current season’s Veridity standard issue terminal. Phornom, her geeky downstairs neighbour, had enthusiastically explained how much of a jump in tamper-detection this latest model had made, and he was adamant that the thing could hack and subdue a mid-grade security vault if the user knew what they were doing. It’s strange to think you’re briefly giving control of your home and life to a stranger, albeit a government-vetted one.
Right from behind him and over his shoulder floated a smooth egg shape of silvery metal, with two deep, dark grooves running around its horizontal rim and across its long side. It was about the size of his head. The grooves flashed and pulsed green three times. Standard outward physical greeting, again just the polite, redundant dance: her implant and her flat softs handled the actual handshakes in local virtual space.
The man introduced himself in a slightly gravelly voice, showing digital, physical and implant badge. She took all these in, the last one producing a small mental chirp of approval from her implant. The drone bobbed ever so peacefully near his shoulder, its perfect, metallic lustre a stark contrast to his bas relief face. She had to stop herself from thinking about a piece of science trivia about how scaling the Earth down till it fit in your hand would result in a sphere smoother than a billiard ball. Smiling, and still gently beaming, she confirmed her details. Then she gave the tiniest extra smile at the flashing, bobbing drone, and swept her hair strand behind her ear. Then eyes looked back at the man: the order of actions was important. I wonder if I ever overuse the classic moves, she reflected, I wonder how many dolls got taught the same act.
‘Is this a good time?’ came his post verification formality. She nodded and replied happily.
‘Oh yeah, sure, come in!’ and half-turned inside right before the first crisis point loomed in the shape of two dirt-caked boots.
“Ah,” she said quietly, lightly subduing the smile, repurposing the head tilt and doe eyes into a slightly more directed gaze. He looked right past this new attention vector, stepping slowly forward on heavy, tired feet towards the flat. She inflected her retreat into the flat with the slightest delay, balancing hospitable pliability against hygienic boundaries. This seemed to have no effect. She resumed course, mentally noting the automated cleaning schedule, and he plodded in after her. When her face turned away for a second, she granted herself a slight wince in time with the soft, rumbly crackle of street-level grit on polished wood behind her. Inside she was rolling her eyes and thinking: great, this one’s pretty oblivious, I’m wasted here, thank god the flat terminal is near the door-
And then, a couple steps into the flat itself, he closed the heavy door and asked:
‘You got one of those shoe-wrap machines?’ It came out like a flat tire at the very end of a winding road just as you pulled into the parking space: a grievous error, but one that could be pushed aside for a better, distant time. She was slightly taken aback, and before she could course-correct, he backed up a step, slowly resting his behind against the wall, waved her incoming response down, and pulled out a couple of shimmering elasticated bags. Are you kidding me, her tongue lashed out fruitlessly behind the bars of her smile, as she waited patiently. When his feet were secured, he straightened up and, with crinkling steps, said
‘Yeah you don’t want the crap outside in here, doll, not with the last heavy grit cloud we saw. Just a code orange, they said, but I’m on the tube a lot, and dead mice ain’t supposed to come in piles that big,’ he looked around, an alien out of place. The drone blended seamlessly, shiny surface gleaming warmly with the amber lights. ‘Where’s the frame?’
‘Just to you-’
He cut her off and passed her on the left:
‘-Ah, there’s the suckerfeed. Ok, standard,’ he stopped in front of a seemingly innocuous panel cut into the wall, with two open cylindrical holes coming half out of the wall. He scratched an ear, stopped dead still, then turned his upper body back towards her, ‘need access.’
I swear I was just about to come open it, she cursed inside, why are you acting like this? Never matter, she brushed her hair aside, keeping that placid, agreable look. At least he’s quick about it, maybe he likes to be done fast. So fast he forgets basic manners. She gets past him and inserts her full hand into the physical scanner cylinder going into the walled mount. Bio id done, she flashes acceptance on her implant, then pulls away, deliberately being the first to speak this time:
‘All yours,’ she smiles and pivots away relaxedly, ‘cuppa tea or?’ serving him up his next line.
He doesn’t say anything, just plugs his Gauntlet into the second cylindrical slot and smacks his lips three times, staring dumbly at the mount. His own implant was likely working through the activity logs, a long linear mess of dates and calls. He just stood there for twenty seconds, while she mourned her stillborn courtesy floating in the air, somewhere near the drone. She looked at it: its rim was now very faintly pulsing, a drone in standby, camera trained on the Veridity Auditor’s back, likely looking through him into the flat’s activity logs, cross-checking what his “eyes” looked through. She wondered what degree of software connection was permitted between the drone and the Gauntlet, or the DVA implant, when he broke his own trance:
‘Gonna check the … the externals, surface level’, it was more of a mutter than a statement, and it certainly wasn’t a request. His eyes darted left right while his hand pointed towards the bathroom.
‘Lavatory and ablution’, he muttered again and walked past her as she was once again just on the verge of directing him, silenced by his seemingly relentless capacity to be totally alone in a stranger’s home with them still in it. A strange state took over her: she had barely a script to hold onto, just the consistently optimistic hope that he was a get in, get it done and get out type, who dismissed pleasantries like he dismissed her directions, or existence. Yes, she could grasp a silver lining from that, but the rising irritation made it an increasingly slippery grip. It’s fine, it’s routine, it’ll be done in ten minutes and I’ll forget about it in an hour. What’s on my schedule in an hour? Oh yeah, meditation, that’ll be easy after-
She turned back towards the bathroom as she heard the toilet seat slam up and saw his silhouette standing legs apart in front of it, arms somewhere in front of himself. You’re not serious, she thought, he can’t- and his head is leaning back, great, my door is fucking open and he just wants to piss with the door open and standing? She felt another bilious wave of rage grow inside her when he suddenly slammed the seat back down, the zipper sound curiously absent. He turned around, head periodically tilting up and down and up and down, as he slowly trudged around the bathroom like a cheap cowboy flic protagonist with a tick, thumbs stuck through his front belt loops. Oh right, shit, he’s actually looking at the external specs: I’m an idiot, she chides herself. Her face never betrayed any of this internal conflict, and she resumed looking at the drone, which had silently floated to the corridor adjoining the living room, bathroom and bedroom, inspecting the inspector. I wish there were just two drones watching each other, she lamented, even though I know that’s not possible.
He finished leering through the bathroom, then strolled into the bedroom, with his heavy, staccato pace, head swinging like a suspicious rooster’s. At this point she did start walking towards him, intending to follow him in, then stopped halfway across the kitchen, pausing on tiptoes, then hesitantly pivoted towards the counter top, deciding to occupy herself with meal prepping. She could at least do that just on her implant, not needing any of the flat’s softs and sensors working with her, since they were offline during audits, and any attempt to restart them would require a whole re-do of the inspection. Veridity were annoyingly thorough like that. With her oculars she took in 1-2 cupboards and then opened the fridge, doing some very quick, back of the cortical napkin calculations and going back to her usual reflective inner monologue: she reckoned she could get away with the asparagus risotto she’d looked up and have the pH sensors take a mild blip in activity. It wasn’t the mandatory healthiness of the meals, but their bland inoffensiveness, that chipped daily at her appetite. She’d received so many mildly cautionary notices and reminders, sometimes beamed into her skull. She recalled when she went through a prolonged beetroot phase, and she had to convince Curation that it was an ingredient of significant cultural gastronomic significance just to be allowed to have one fucking lunar farmer’s market chutney. She wondered why her thoughts included cursing. Well, she reasoned she was lightly thrown off and on edge. She noted her cortisol levels and drew in a deep, relaxing sigh, before thinking back to chutneys and chickpeas and beans that weren’t always accompanied by a little gas-discretionary pill. She recalled having to explain the sudden cranberry juice bonanza she was going through and how they had to ringfence it from the private life policy stipulation as she made to close the fridge door and-
‘I have to check your fridge now’, came spoken in a flat tone from right next to her. Pale sunken eyes half an arm’s length away looked through her like she was barely registering as an object. Every time he looked at a device, reams of data flowed from the terminal to the Gauntlet to his inner eye, but a human being may as well have been a rough granite slab. It was only the sudden shock that kept her muted and decorously stiff in place. A second passed, and then another, she simply stared at him staring through her, hand gripping the fridge handle like it was the only point keeping her in that universe, nostrils flaring to keep a thundering heart pumping. A second more passed as she once again took in the craggy features, their sharpness and proximity, like a map held up too close, and she realised her eyeballs were lightly throbbing in their sockets. He blinked, focused his eyes to actually look at her, away from the data streams, and sighed.
‘Fridge. Please?’ He spoke that last bit as if it was a barely comprehensible word from High Continental, awkwardly falling off his tongue and tripping flat faced on his chipped teeth. He rolled his jaw and squinted: pleading on a dark, impatient background.
She finally snapped to, anxiously smiling and stepping furtively back from the fridge, gesturing profusely towards it in a manner devoid of all her usual elegance. What, the fuck am I doing, she cussed at herself, and how the fuck did he sneak up on me like that? Before she knew it, the thoughts daisy chained with others just beneath the surface: how quickly did he do the bedroom? What did he do in there? I want to check - no, that’s - the drone was there. The drone got it all, I can see it above his head, we’re good, we’re good, girl, just-
‘Nice fresh veggies, you got rooftop gardens here?’ he asked.
She blinked, and turned back, stunned again. Another second threatened to pass, but she split the time difference and sputtered out
‘Oh… oh no, haha, I wish we did, no I had to go to Canterbury dome to get those courgettes’, that was a lie and she knew it, and, apparently, so did he.
‘Oh, did you? Oh strange, I thought you cc’s got these all sent through to you on the daily,’ he said so casually, almost dismissively, absentmindedly killing her trite fabrication. Why had she lied? She had to dig in, for some reason only her subconscious could fathom.
‘Oh, oh yeah, haha, yeah that’s true, but sometimes if I feel like getting something extra I make a trip out of it!’ she was painfully aware of how undeniably twee and upper middle class that sounded, and she was about to grind her teeth to dust when he closed the fridge door, apparently satisfied with her courgettes, and made back for the terminal by the door. The drone floated behind him, ever the faithful, silent companion. Somehow blessed with better social skills too, she thought. She realised she was standing with her arms folded stiffly, and she couldn’t bear to unfold them, so she rocked back and forth and turned half away, but keeping just half an eye on him, as he worked the terminal again. It would all be over soon, she reminded herself.
Faced with a dropping heart rate, she tried to take more of his image in, and also to desperately try to understand why she lied about a damned courgette. Was it that she felt awkward that she could afford fresh groceries delivered? That the absurd luxury of her manicured life seemed even glitzier when this shade strolled in? Why was I so fixated on the damned shoes? He’s probably been dragging his tired feet across dozens of places today, on DVA pay, I think his drone’s mechanics get way more, and I’m so driven with rage that he took 3-4 admittedly, quite filthy steps in, I really need to get some perspective, girl. Also, how did I let him get so close to me? Am I that stuck in my own thoughts? I need to get out more, I-
‘Drone’s now doing its cross-check,’ he said, in what felt like an abundance of information, given the source.
‘Oh, ok, good,’ she nodded, and then went back to staring awkwardly away from him while only half turned. She noted he was dialling some stuff onto his Gauntlet, which was unusual, given that he could just implant-drive it. No matter, she thought, all done soon. Then she noticed that he had looked up from his Gauntlet to her, his head still facing down. When she looked back at him, eyes wide, he didn’t look away.
‘I forgot about the derma scan,’ and he whipped out a pen-like object, holding it up to the level of her face and approaching her all of a sudden. She almost backed away, then both of them stopped. Not a beat too late the MAD, still slotted into the terminal’s input cylinder, flashed amber and emitted a strong, bass hum, volume varying in direct proportion to her sense of wariness. He briefly looked back over his shoulder with his eyes narrowed, then grunted non-chalantly. He asked:
‘Sorry, may I?’ again, she thought, like courtesy was a foreign language. ‘It’s just a topical scan, I’m not hooking into your implant or anything.’ The MAD went quiet and green. She nodded, squared up to him, stuck her chin slightly forward and aimed to look through him. He waved the pen a few inches from her face, slowly tracing the air in front of her hairline, temples, nose, lips, chin, jaw, neck.
‘Stick your arm out, either one … please,’ she lifted her left arm up, and he waved the pen above it, staring through her and into a concise report of sub-dermal details. He seemed satisfied and stepped back, hooking the pen back into a side pocket. She remembered she could breathe in past her throat, and relaxed. Almost, almost, she thought, suppressing a mild shiver.
He was once again staring down at the machine on his arm. She glanced at the MAD, it seemed busy. They had another 13 minutes of her scheduled break, and she estimated she might get 10-11 minutes to herself. How destabilizing would it be to have another warm shower, she considered. No, that’s wasteful, and also, a bit rude. He’s a human being, just doing his job. Although, not that efficiently, if I’m any judge - he’s accessing the arm component manually again, buttoning away like an archaic sofweng, is he just incredibly old school? Anyway, the drone will be done–
Suddenly, the drone gave out a stronger pulse of white light, once, twice, then nothing. It hummed aggressively inside the cylinder, and then, abruptly, stopped.
She turned to look at it, then at the Veridity employee.
He looked away from his Gauntlet at the inactive MAD, and wondered slowly, licking his lips and shrugging his shoulders. To her, he seemed to be briefly back in the room, and not gazing at an infinite corneal parchment of code. He tapped the backend of the drone, although it was unclear to her why - not much info you can get from that. Was it some kind of weird, superstitious confirmation?
‘Yeap, it’s deactivated, not receiving, not transmitting’ and he let out a deep sigh, puffing his cheeks out, then turning to her, ‘I’m sorry, doll, I don’t know how long this’ll take, could be a few seconds, or maybe half an hour,’ she looked from man to drone and back and asked, with genuine ignorance in her brows this time
‘Does this happen often? I thought they were supposed to be pretty robust?’
‘Yeah, but engineering gets sloppy and no machine is perfect forever… ,’ he licked and smacked his lips, looking back from the dead drone to her, said:
‘You don’t mind me, I’ll sort this out,’ and he leaned against the wall, buttoning away, again, manually. She started to form a question in her mind, then realized she was done with this interaction and wanted to turn away, especially from anyone who used the word “doll” - that’s our word, she thought. She turned away, permitting herself to sigh and breathe deeply, and gaze mindlessly out of the main window on the other side. Perhaps, she mused, perhaps I’ll go out. That’s not like me, but maybe it’ll do me good to clear my head. Maybe check in on Yuri or Nelsun or Tabi, or even just wander the main down street aimlessly in my hazoot, that could be nice, to just get out-
Get out.
The train of her inner monologue crashed into a mountain of sudden, dreadful silence. Her body stiffened, her eyes widened, and yet she didn’t move a muscle.
The door. The door and I, her mind paced.
And in between: him.
And no drone, she realised.
The house - no, it’s inactive. Standard audit proc– it’s fucking dead to the world when the hood’s wide open, especially with that drone inside it!
Although her implant flashed warning signs of vitals going volatile throughout her body, she looked through them, through the room, through every inch of cruel space around her suddenly naked perception. She might as well have been naked. That thin layer of yoga sweat lashed at her skin like dry ice. Her guts felt on the edge of an abyss, and though she kept breathing, it was as if every part of her had narrowed itself, ready to shoot down a paper straw or a gun barrel.
Her mind also sharpened into a focus she’d never experienced before. A life spent going through meaningless motions and acts was blurry - this one pulsated into an overwhelming sense of reality, the here, the now, the if, dangling above the erect hairs on her neck. They were straining out, as if to sense his breath right from behind her.
She saw a vision of his thousand-yard stare as it appeared right next to her when she closed the fridge. Only this time, they turned slowly in, and they focused right on her, and she felt frozen.
No, he can’t. Because he’s not!
She had one saving grace, that all her daily meditating - courtesy of Nirva+TM - and her sudden awareness of every reflective surface in this glossy flat enabled her to be perfectly and confidently aware of every movement behind her. She maintained perfect composure, through the kind of willpower you honed through decades of climbing a brutal ladder by never revealing your real self.
If he switches to bio-scanner, then he’ll know I know. But what would he- that pen - he mentioned the implant hook-up - the Gauntlet! Did he hack the MAD? No training video ever showed them manually-
She heard the grit crunch between his boots and the plastic as he pivoted. A tabletop confirmed he was squared up to her, in an active stance.
Two meters behind me, that’s one simple lunge for his height, she estimated. And if - if, he gets that damned pen - where is it, near me, that’s my last witness gone. Can’t make his face, can’t see the pen, I can just-
Her eyes caught the briefest shiny object on the counter top - the blender top. I left it out - unwieldy, cylindrical base under a set of blades that would give forensics a good practice run for dental ID. A small part of her hung still and shocked by that last thought, and her inner monologue threatened to break loose and free again. Then she saw his left foot shuffle slightly backwards, now putting him in an active stance, and this triggered an immersive film of herself unleashing her inner gymnast, springing towards the counter, dodging his weight, grasping the base of the bladed component, pivoting to face him and squaring off and then - what?
Then many things - but you’re facing him, and fucking armed, she resolved. There’s spray and tasers in the bedroom so if I back up I’m even safer.
She thought she could see him lower his chin. Although that marble coffee table top couldn’t resolve enough to show the gaze in his eyes, she somehow felt them line up on her, just like in her brief vision. She took one, deep, breath, the deepest and most meaningful she’d ever felt.
The drone hummed alive. First a high pitch whine, then a soft hum, followed by a complex series of rebooting pulses and vibrations. He turned towards it, and her head turned over her shoulder, as if on strings.
‘Oh… well a routine shut-down,’ he remarks, casually, as he walks to the terminal, stares through it again, nods and turns away. The drone now gently pulls out from the cylinder, and floats back up to head height, a blue pulse indicating that it is satisfied, and neutral. The flat’s basic systems came back on, her implant showed, though she barely took note of it.
She made herself turn fully, as if she was moving furniture through sludge. He was taking off his shoe-wraps.
‘There may be some odd blip on the record, but hopefully they won’t care - it was barely a few seconds,’ and he looked at her, not through her, but right into her, and with a tiny smile that invaded her home more deeply than any probe, code or machine had done so far, said ‘sadly. Have a good day.’
Her face stayed perfectly still. He opened the door, stepped through and the MAD floated behind him. He left it open and trudged down the hallway.
There was a ringing in her ears, and she stared through the door, as if it wasn’t there. And it wasn’t, because it was open, and had to be shut. She didn’t know how, but she found herself slamming it shut, her hand pressed against its unrelenting surface. For a moment, the door and her hand were the only true components of reality, everything else, a hallucination done over with and forgotten.
The bathroom, a thought of that room flickered into her mind as if a whole new universe popped into existence, I should go and … use the bathroom.
She took one first step, then she almost fell into the second one, and then she bolted through the room and crashed down hard by the toilet rim, throwing the seat up so hard that it bounced back against her head and she cried and slammed it again with both her hands, holding it angrily against the wall as if she’d pinned someone by the neck and intended to break them. She then stopped, breathed, and threw up.
Some time later, the implant told her it was three minutes and forty seconds until she was expected to be back online and performing. Glossy coats and suits flash inside her mind, corpo grins and AI-voices beckoning her into the scorching sun. She had let it out too much … far too much. She had been herself for far too long and cannot go back. She is trying to build herself back up with the daily mundanity of routines she so regularly espouses:
Ok, I just - I just need five minutes to recompose, to meditate, do some box-breathing, apply a cold compress for the puffiness and reduce her body temperature with a cold shower, but no - fuck.
She can’t. She can’t get up from the tiles, those sterile, ceramic, two-dimensional grids holding her unwilling body up when she’d like nothing more than to fall through space and time and never stop, to just to be in freefall outside of the vacuum bag tightening itself around her head, her waist, her slim-fit thighs, her toned arms, and digging tightly into the crevices of her shaking brows and lips, her fluttering crow’s feet and her wheezing, gasping sobs of ‘shit, shit, fuck, fuuuck, fucking god-’. She lifts her red face up to see the body mirror, and glares spitefully at the dormant cameras in there, waiting to capture her again, starve her, drive her out, and kill her, if she should dare reveal this moment. There’s a pipeline somewhere, a feed that’s waiting to flow again, and she is expected to be back and feed it with her whole being, any minute now.
She had given her whole being right in those moments when he was behind her and she thought he would. Except he didn’t.
But, but the thought was there. It pierced through the burgeoning carcass of self doubt eating her:
‘The fucker knew what he was doing,’ she whispered quietly and resolutely to the deaf ears of her bathroom walls. The manual tweaks right before the drone went offline, the sudden skin scan, the creeping up to the fridge, the smile. She didn’t doubt the memory, her own implant had recorded everything her eyes had seen. But everyone knew that could be tampered with. Only she knew that she never had touched it, and that she wouldn’t even know how to fabricate that - or did she? No, she screamed inside, that’s stupid, I know what I saw, what I felt, for fuck’s sake, even if my brain doesn’t this fucking body knows!
And then her brain, used to marathons of intense thoughts following each other, hand in bloody hand, sprinted yet again through the fields of dread: he knew what it would do. He also knew that the unexpected shutdown means another inspection would have to come - no stone left unturned, anything could have happened in those seconds. But they don’t inspect what didn’t happen. They don’t care for what might have happened. For what I’m damn well certain was going on behind those vacant, twisted eyes. They won’t give a shit.
“ONE MINUTE FROM RESUMING ONLINE STATUS”, the implant flashed. She dismissed this, and let her body twitch and curl itself into the unfamiliar space between the toilet and the shower cubicle. Thank god for self-sterilising bathrooms, she thought, how did my grandmothers bear to have an emotional breakdown next to a toilet when you knew what went on right next to at eye level? Slowly but surely, her body ceased to listen, and it decided that her bank account could foot the bill it had been paying for years, even if just for an hour, or just a day.
She dismissed the timer counting the seconds down. Then she gave in to her darkest, most intimate desire, nurtured deep inside her over the years: she closed her eyes, and did absolutely nothing.