Sycamore

by Craig A. Falconer

  Stacy didn’t say anything and seconds later they were mobbed by dozens of attractive girls and a handful of well-dressed boys. Everyone looked like a movie star; UnBlemish made people glow while it cleared up their skin. They were all saying “Hey, Kurt!” as if they knew him and most were wishing him a happy birthday. A rudimentary queue formed organically, trapping Kurt and Stacy as his fans took turns to stand beside him while their friends took snapshots for their Forest profiles. The world had gone insane and Kurt was at its centre.

  The final straw came when a girl ran up and kissed him on the lips. It was too much. “Jesus Christ!” he shouted. “Can none of you see that I’m with someone?”

  A police officer on patrol across the street heard the commotion and walked over. “Are these people bothering you, Mr Jacobs?”

  “As a matter of fact they are,” said Kurt. “But I don’t want to make a scene. Just make sure there are no crowds milling about when we’re inside the restaurant.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Stacy was amazed at the tone Kurt took with the police officer and even more so by the deference that was returned. The humble officer held off the beautiful crowd so that Kurt and Stacy could enter the restaurant. She held and squeezed his hand, proud of him for turning his nose up to the adoring masses and flattered that he had told them he was with her.

  Kurt looked at Stacy and suddenly noticed things about her that he had never seen before. The RealU-enhanced girls in the crowd made him appreciate each of Stacy’s out-of-place hairs, the randomness of her light freckles, her two chipped nails.

  She was beautiful — without question — but she was also real and flawed and vulnerable. No... not but. Stacy was so beautiful to Kurt precisely because she was real. In an age of attainable perfection, there was something enchanting about her lack of it.

  They walked into the restaurant’s doorway. Kurt opened the door and Stacy kissed him on the cheek before walking through. His heart sped up. It might have been the wind, but he was sure he heard a smooth whisper in his ear as he stepped in behind her.

  “Lexington.”

  11

  The restaurant brimmed with society types pleased to have Kurt in their company; however new his money may have been, his power was real.

  A young waiter led Kurt and Stacy past several queuing businessmen and over to a corner booth. “How is this, Mr Jacobs?”

  Kurt looked at Stacy. She nodded. “It should be fine,” he said.

  “Excellent.” The waiter helped them into their chairs, Kurt first. “And what would we like to drink this evening?”

  “Lexington Blue,” said Kurt after a second’s thought. “Actually, make that a Junior Blue. I’m driving.”

  “Of course, sir. And for the lady?”

  “Red wine, please. Real stuff.” The waiter smiled and hurried away. Stacy faced Kurt. “Why do you drink that garbage?”

  He looked in her unreadable eyes and then inside himself for an answer. There was none. “I don’t know,” he eventually admitted.

  “Is it because they advertise it so hard?”

  “Probably,” he said, realising now that even an acute awareness of how advertising worked didn’t protect him from its effects. “Lexington are the most aggressive advertisers out there. The day after we met, there was a billboard with a shot of you in the rain from my Lenses and underneath the picture it said “I only do dudes who do Lexington.” That’s the level they’re on. The Seed knows when your heart rate is elevated and who you were looking at when it went up. Corporations like Lexington purchase and use that information to link positive feelings with their products.”

  Stacy was unsurprised to learn of Lexington’s advertising tactics but pounced on something Kurt said. “Why would your heart rate go up when you were looking at me?” she asked, leaning slightly forward.

  The waiter’s impossibly quick return saved Kurt the trouble of an answer. Under orders to ignore his other diners’ needs to attend to the restaurant’s superstar guest, the waiter placed their drinks on the table and tried to stop himself from smiling like a fool at the fact that he was serving the Kurt Jacobs. “I’ll give you a few minutes,” he said.

  “Okay. But when you come back, can I have a taller glass?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  The waiter left again and Kurt noticed the odd look on Stacy’s face as she watched him walk away. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I just thought this was meant to be a posh place.”

  “It is.”

  “Then why is everyone in shabby clothes and why is the waiter wearing jeans?”

  Kurt gasped slowly and quietly as he understood what Stacy was seeing. He looked at their fellow diners in awestruck appreciation of just how effective the technology behind RealU was. “As far as any of these people know, the rest of them are in expensive suits and elegant dresses.”

  She laughed at how ridiculous it all sounded. “There’s no way RealU can be that good.”

  “Trust me. You know that girl outside who ran up and kissed me? What did she look like?”

  “Uh, I didn’t really see. She looked pretty heavy, though.”

  “She looked like a supermodel through my Lenses. The whole crowd did. It’s weird not knowing how people actually look.”

  “You should see the people in here. Seriously.”

  Kurt was intrigued. “What about her over there? She seems too attractive to be real.” He nodded towards a young woman sitting opposite a man he recognised from some mindless movie. “What does she really look like?”

  “I don’t want to sound like a bitch,” Stacy qualified, “but have you ever seen Shallow Hal?”

  Kurt chortled loudly enough to draw the entire restaurant’s attention. Only then did Stacy notice how quiet it was. Couples and business partners were looking across tables at each other and writing into their hands. She knew about Glancing — The Seed’s eye-contact dependent method of efficient communication — but hadn’t really seen it in action. The surrealism reached its peak when a waiter approached a couple and silently took their order.

  “Why are the waiters taking orders by Glances?”

  “It must be easier,” Kurt shrugged. “They don’t have to write the order down because the customer is writing it for them. I think our waiter didn’t want to disrespect me, though. That’s why he was speaking. It does seem stupid to Glance when someone is right in front of you but I see it everywhere. Do you know what I’ve always really hated? People who text while they drive. I bet drivers Glance with their passengers. It’s like they think the mundanity of their own life is important enough to justify putting other people’s in danger. I mean, really, what are they even saying?”

  “I don’t know about Glance but I know what the texters are saying,” said Stacy. “They’re saying “I'm on the way home, darling, where I'll sit next to you in front of the viewing wall while I text someone else.””

  “Probably.” Kurt let out the half-laugh of a man reacting to something that was funny and sad at the same time.

  Stacy then paid keen attention as a doting young woman sent a rushed Glance to her partner and smiled while awaiting his reply. “What about everyone else, though? Why don’t they just talk to each other?” she asked, disbelieving of what was happening. Something about it seemed so detached. There was eye contact, at least, but Stacy hated the thought that the person she was talking to might be simultaneously checking sports results or reading messages from someone else.

  Kurt looked around the silent room, still wondering what the rest of the diners looked like beneath their veils. He couldn’t explain the lack of conversation, either. “I honestly don’t know.”

  The starstruck waiter returned with Kurt’s glass and stopped beside the table. “Are we ready to order, sir?”

  “You didn’t give us any menus,” said Stacy.

  The waiter looked equally confused. “Your menu is on the table, ma’am,” he replied, still too excited by Kurt’s pr
esence to notice that there was no social information beside Stacy’s head.

  She laughed awkwardly. “No, it’s really not.”

  “The menus are on the table,” Kurt explained. He turned to the waiter. “She’s not wearing any Lenses.”

  “No Lenses?!” The waiter dropped Kurt’s tall glass. It smashed on the tastefully tiled floor. The noise captured the attention of the restaurant’s other patrons once more and they quickly realised what was going on. They looked at Stacy through judgemental eyes and whispered under their collective breath, stale with caviar and overpriced gin. There was a Sycamore virgin in their midst.

  When Kurt pulled his eyes away from the broken glass to talk to Stacy his vision was blocked by a pop-up: “Extreme emotions detected. Apply Reader?* *Applying Reader will incur a $120 charge.”

  He didn’t know what kind of app Reader was or since when it had been available, but at $120 for a single use it had to be good. He clicked yes and an information box immediately appeared next to Stacy’s head, on the opposite side from where Forest data was usually displayed. The box listed a series of emotions and the extent to which she was experiencing them.

  Embarrassment: 98.

  Impatience: 96.

  Anger: 91.

  The list went on. All sorts of coloured arrows and annotations covered Stacy’s face. Everything changed too quickly for Kurt to make much sense of it. The annotations moved with her gaze and the emotional intensity figures changed with every twitch of her nose and lips. Reader seemed to be detecting ordinarily imperceptible facial movements and running them through whatever bizarre formula someone at Sycamore had come up with.

  Kurt had seen enough. He tapped his hand to kill Reader and spoke to Stacy in a low voice. “Screw this. Fancy going back to mine and ordering something in?”

  She nodded with an uncharacteristic lack of verve and walked towards the door. Kurt grabbed the young waiter’s arm as he passed and looked in his eyes to compose a Glance: “You’re fired.”

  ~

  The police officer from earlier was still outside the restaurant and had done an admirable job of dispersing the crowd. Kurt mumbled his thanks as he hurried to catch up with Stacy.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I shouldn’t have taken you somewhere like that with those kind of people.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Why don’t we go to the cinema or something before we go back to Longhampton? It is your birthday, after all.”

  A night at the cinema with Stacy sounded perfect and the megaplex was only a few minutes from the restaurant. Kurt indicated his desire by smiling and holding out his hand. Stacy took it and together they walked.

  It was still early but the world was quiet enough for Kurt to hear two heartbeats as they approached the cinema. On arrival his mood soured. “Great.”

  Stacy looked up and saw the sign: CLOSED FOR REFURB. SYCAPLEX OPENS TUESDAY.

  “Longhampton it is then?” she said.

  “Longhampton it is.”

  They turned around and walked back towards the restaurant and ultimately the car. Kurt caught sight of a small group of teenagers in the distance and zoomed in to see what they were wearing. His augmented vision relayed the same few outfits he had seen a thousand times that day. The girls were made-up like dolls and their would-be suitors looked equally post-produced.

  “RealU is genius,” he suddenly said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I hate it... but it’s a brilliant business model. Sycamore makes money from girls wanting to look good for boys and from boys wanting to know what to wear and say to impress the girls. I think the only thing that amazes me more than the tech is that girls are prepared to spend so much money on makeup and keep reapplying it everyday. But then I know they already did that before RealU, so I guess I just don’t get the whole idea.”

  “The pressure on girls to look good is ridiculous,” said Stacy. She pointed to an old-fashioned static billboard across the street from the cinema. “See?” It was an ad for women’s perfume featuring a top-heavy stickfigure of a model, airbrushed almost beyond human recognition.

  “I don’t know whether they’re saying that if I buy that perfume I’ll be as attractive as her,” she continued, “or that I’ll never be as attractive as her but if I buy the perfume then at least I can smell like her. Can you imagine looking at stuff like that everyday, everywhere you go, and, instead of lusting over the women like men are supposed to, feeling like you have to compare yourself to them?”

  Kurt shook his head. He couldn’t imagine, and with that understanding came the deeper realisation that advertising — capitalism’s purest expression and only native art form — had done more to attack human dignity than 120 million microchips could ever dream of.

  “Do you think real people will get fatter now that they can pay to be thin?” Stacy asked, redirecting the topic.

  “Probably. Everyone who can afford to is already making themselves look perfect. Real fitness is worthless in a world as shallow as this one.”

  “Yeah, it’s messed up. People spend fortunes buying new clothes and haircuts for the characters they see themselves as but stumble around reality looking like lonely cavemen.”

  Kurt stopped walking to consider her statement. “It really is exactly like that,” he realised. “This whole thing is like someone went back in time and gave a caveman some piece of technology he wasn’t ready for. Like a gun when he was getting along fine with a spear.”

  “This is more like an atomic bomb,” Stacy thought aloud. They were walking along the street very slowly; hardly moving and often stopping.

  “Right! And I’m the idiot who set it in motion by telling them they could do it. Amos talks about Bell and Baird but I feel more like Einstein.”

  “At least you’ll always have your modesty.”

  “No, but really,” said Kurt. “I mean when he signed that letter encouraging Roosevelt to build the bomb. Politics is always using science for its own ends. That bomb was supposed to end the war on fascism but they used it to declare war on communism.”

  “And this is like that?”

  Kurt nodded with intensity. “Amos is a corporate lion and a political snake. His kind always call the shots and they always call them wrong. In the decades after the war, politics asked science to develop the technology required to explore the solar system. Science developed that technology and politics used it to plant a flag on the moon. We think we’re doing something good but then the people who hold real power come in and ruin it.”

  A painfully high-pitched ringing filled Kurt’s ears as Stacy replied, drowning out her words. He winced. The announcement told him that the first ever SycaLotto draw would take place in 60 seconds. The draw results would be displayed in the sky for 30 seconds thereafter, during which time any winners had to click through the claims process to remain entitled to their prize. These rules had been made clear in advance and the tiny claims window ensured that no subscribers could miss the draw.

  “Forget all that,” said Kurt. “Things are about to get pretty weird.”

  No sooner had he said the words than people began spilling out into the street from homes, restaurants and vehicles. Traffic came to a total and immediate halt.

  “What’s going on?”

  “There’s a lottery in the sky,” Kurt explained, only appreciating the insanity of the idea when he heard himself say it out loud. “And the winner can only claim their prize in the 30 seconds after the draw. Amos said the draws can come at any time during the day, so no one can afford to take their Lenses out.”

  The SycaLotto was the acceptable face of Sycamore-induced gambling addiction, which chiefly affected the same young male consumers who were most relentlessly targeted by adult placements. Rigged blackjack and roulette games took more money from teenage boys than most of them would ever earn thanks to liberal credit-extension policies, and it surprised and disappointed Kurt to see the variety of desperate players the lottery had attracted.
Something he had once seen on TV held the mass irrationality of lottery players up as a symptom of an economic system on the brink of implosion. If that show had been right then the world was surely about to go boom, he thought, for this street in one of the city’s most affluent areas was teeming with rabid gamblers.

  The countdown in the sky reached zero and an irritating voice blabbered away in Kurt’s ears. “And now it’s time for the first ever Mega Money SycaLotto! S… Y… C… A… MORE MORE MORE!!! S… Y… C… A… MORE MORE MORE!!!! S… Y… C…

  Kurt muted his in-earphones partly to avoid hearing another word about the stupid lottery but more so he could hear what Stacy was about to say. He had to lean in close to make out her words over the people in the street who had joined in with the SycaLotto chant.

  “It’s like they’re looking up to their god,” she said.

  “We’re talking about money,” he replied. “They are.”

  “You think money is these people’s god?”

  “In every meaningful sense.” Kurt led Stacy away from the rabble and towards his car. “I hate the damn lottery. Even if I didn’t have this infinite credit, I wouldn’t play. What’s the point? Money is a game that’s not worth winning. I mean really, is that all life is about? Praying for a lottery win? And for what, digits on a screen? To hell with that. I’d rather have nothing than be a slave to money.”

  “It’s easy for you to say that when you get everything you want, no questions asked. All you have to do is click your fingers and the world falls on a plate in your lap. What do you know about having nothing?”

  “Easy for me to say now, maybe, but I’ve been saying the same thing forever. And don’t talk to me like I’ve just appeared on this planet. I had nothing when I was a kid — no fancy toys, no friends, no money. It’s almost funny when you think about it... suddenly 40 million nobodies want to be my friend and there are infinite zeroes at the end of my balance. Guess what, though?”