As Much of a Beginning

She knew, as everyone knew, that when the time came to die she’d get the message. Everyone knew the words of the message, could remember when their parents or friends got it. What they decided to do with the last 36 hours of their lives. But she had not expected for it to happen now, today, to her. There was always the strangeness, that everyone would know when it was their last hours, but not why or how. Her Father used to tell her as a kid that people used to die in different ways. That his mother had been crushed by a vehicle going too fast. That didn’t happen anymore, so we should be thankful that we mostly live such long lives.
         And what would she do now, with the time she had left? What had always been possibilities – places, experiences – now took on an urgent quality. They clamoured in her mind, rattling around. There were, of course, programs you could take for your last 36 hours. They were the product of the top 36 most popular things to do in your last 36 hours. Or a lucky dip. But Deborah didn’t like these programs anymore, believing them to be artificial and obvious. She believed in the human imagination, the human experience – not programs generated by a computer.
         She thought of the number of arguments she’d had with her Father about this technology. He was an enthusiast, and spent most of his time in some program or another, exploring some fantasy land with impossible geographies, or meeting with famous people from the past. He had spent so much time in them that she didn’t really believe he ever got to know her, in this reality. There were all these buzzwords that enthusiasts used when arguing about technology: ‘freedom of experience’ and ‘freedom of thought’. Well she had seen people she loved wasted in experiences. They became intoxicated by them, and unable to spent time in ordinariness.
         Deborah knew what she wanted to experience before she disappeared, but she couldn’t express it – let alone expect a computer to generate what she had been longing for. Authenticity. Something real – more real that the real. She had met others who felt this unarticulated desire. Some had gone crazy trying to generate it, which is why Deborah wouldn’t pursue it, even now.
         Thirty six hours until her death. She had allowed the automated message relay on to her friends and acquaintances, better words having escaped her. This was the way it was done. Her service would be immediately after her deletion, at the place of her choosing. She wanted it small, here in her home where she was known. The extravagance of services she had been to in the past was not her. Dramatic locations, entire orchestras, speeches by famous people… one had taken place under water, which was now becoming quite a cliché. Hers would be small and personal, like Darren’s.
         Darren. He got his at 15 years old. There’s never an explanation – just the notification of the number of hours left. People joked that there was a conspiracy, that there is a reason why we disappear, but we just aren’t told. The machines don’t want tell us why. Or that, and this is what Darren said right at the end, that the technology was controlled by other people and not us. That us telling the computers what to do is just an illusion. Deborah knew that it was fear that had made Darren paranoid. She didn’t know how he had spent his last 36, only that he changed his mind about whatever he had chosen and came back to the family. They sat with him when he disappeared. Some call it ‘deleting’. He was angry and scared, and accused everyone of murdering him.
         She wanted to see him again, before she died. Maybe she would just use the technology for this… what would he have looked like if he had grown up? Not knowing whether she would see him after her own deletion, Deborah called up his ID and ordered a recreation of his image, just as he had been. Standing in the central room of her place, with its glowing wooden surfaces and vaulted marble ceiling, she stood facing the image of her brother. She walked around him, still a teenager, still young. Not knowing if she was going to talk to him after her own deletion, she ordered that his projection should adopt his character traits at 15 years old.
         ‘What are you bothering me for?’ He drawled.
         Freeze. What would he have looked like if he had been 43, as he would have been now if he had not died? She requested that the computer should project his image as a 43 year old. Using the information from his ID, his DNA – character traits, interests, idiosyncrasies, probability of his life choices – a projection of his person was created. Seeing his face as a man’s, seeing him wearing age… she sat him down at the grand dining table that spanned the length of the hall and they talked as though they had simply not seen one another for 28 years.


You had to be really careful walking through the halls not to touch them. The Unit Manager had always threatened to ‘delete’ them if they did, which was supposed to be a joke. Six-two didn’t find it funny. If the people they served all believed that what they were seeing was there, and thought they knew where they were… why couldn’t the same apply to them? The only reason she believed that she really was where she was, was because the place was so hateful that there’d be no reason to recreate it if you didn’t have to. The air was thick and greasy, every breath tugged at your throat. Everything was sticky and covered with a tacky film. Just once she would have liked to have tried a visor on, to look around and see and feel and know something different, clean and beautiful. Cleanliness and beauty were not granted to lower than 4th level workers. They worked in the dark and cold, maintaining the machines so that the Unit’s residents could be somewhere different – wherever they wanted to be.
         Six-two had no sense of what that might be, something that is different, but she longed for it as much as she held hatred for what she did know. She had no word for it. Freedom. That is what a couple of 5th level workers wrote on the walls, before they were removed from service. She had never uttered the word, knew she would be ‘deleted’ if she did. But she associated that word with her unarticulated longing, as much as with her hatred of this place, her life - of service.
         The routine of service was so ingrained in her that it was automatic, like a machine. She often wondered why her work was not done by machine, she knew they could do that if they wanted. They? 1st level workers and up. The people that controlled everything. She’d never actually seen or met any of them. The Unit Manager reported to them, and she was scared of them removing her. They could have the work done by machine, but workers are cheap and computers have to be bought or made. They have to be made by people, and people like her had to keep them running. The Unit Manager said that the Monitors could hear what you were thinking, not just hear and see what you are doing. Six-two didn’t believe this – if it were true then she would have been removed a long time ago for thoughts like this.
         The sight of the residents walking around with their visors on, not seeing where they were, talking animatedly to nothing, still unnerved Six-two. She would avoid working around them, scared that she’d touch their pale skin by accident, scared that they might just turn around and address her as though they had known all the time that she was there.


What would she have looked like as an old woman? Would she have been a similar person after another 50 years of life? What would she have to say about life at 90?
         Deborah, so used to the possibility of recreating memories and dreams at any moment, felt her mind swimming by the scene she was creating in her living space. She felt as though she was acting on reflex, as though this what she had always planned to do when she got the message. Projections of herself at every age, from a girl, a teenager, a young woman – all the way to 90 years old – stood in an impossibly long line side by side. She had elongated her central hall to accommodate the length. A silent and motionless procession, a line up, an army of herself.
         Starting from herself as a child, she brought each to life and introduced herself. She spent time with each projection, asking them to recall memories and talk about themselves. Working on the databank of stored memories, and her personality profiles from these ages – the computer-generated holograms responded to her questions as true to herself at that age as can be recreated. Things she had forgotten and needed prompting were brought to the surface of her memory. She commanded the computer to generate a likeness of what she had no human memory of at all. She watched herself as a 7 year old, playing with her best friend Lucy. She had forgotten the programs she used to play, designed by her Father. A giant maze, at every fork was a puzzle to be solved. Deborah, or Debbie as the girl had introduced herself, loved puzzles. She and Lucy spent hours in these, racing to the middle, to the applause of an unseen audience.
         ‘Debs’, as a teenager, spent most of her days and nights in what her parents had thought were educational programs. These she and her friends would design, where you could alter your appearance so that you looked however you wanted, could be whatever you wanted. In one she played guitar in a rock band in the 90’s. She had multicoloured hair, leather outfits and piercings all over her body. She and her friend Lucy, now also goth-rock star, played to an audience of 10,000 people, all cheering and singing back their lyrics.
         Eventually Deborah passed all of her lived experiences, and reached projections past the age that she would ever be. She realized that past middle age, her face did not age. Her body did not age. Did this mean that she would have chosen to alter her image so that she appeared to be frozen at a certain age? Maybe this would be commonplace by that time. She found herself to be with an air of sadness at an older age. She was more frightened of talking to herself at this age than at any other. But she had to ask… ‘Did you ever find it?’
         ‘What, my dear?’ she replied, a kind and inquisitive look.
         ‘You know, did I ever find something that was… something different from all this–’ Deborah struggled with how to word the want she had always felt. The hologram did not understand, she just stared back with a blank, sad smile.
         They weren’t really herself, they were computer-generated. As close as can be recreated, but not her. They would not be able to understand something human, she would not find the answer here.


Six-two was in her quarters, a room with bare walls and minimal furniture that she shared with 2 other girls. They worked different shifts so that they each slept in the same bed at different times of the day. She always spent this time to herself in the same way, in part sleep, part day-dream. She would stay still, so that she looked as though she was asleep to the Monitors. She would dream of what she would see if she wore a visor. She had invented friends and family in these dreams, and being in her imagination was the only part of the day she looked forward to. Exhausted from years of labour, with nothing but this to fill the days of the future, here she could exercise her mind. She picked up from the last day dream she had been inventing, one of her favourites. In this one of the residents, who Six-two knew as Unit Resident 454, was her Mother. She often worked on this woman’s section, and found her movements less unnerving than others. She imagined that they would talk, that she was a kind and powerful woman, and that she would take off the visor and they would escape together.
         Suddenly Six-two sat up, and was scared. Something had changed in the room, the room rang with a silence – the kind of loud silence that was made by a constant noise ceasing, a background noise that you were so used to you didn’t even hear. The circuitry for this room must have been disconnected… the hum of the machinery had stopped. There was a flickering of light and the message board, a display screen taking up one wall of the room that was used to give instructions before each worker’s shift, switched on. On it was written -

THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM THE HACKTIVISTS.

DO NOT BE ALARMED. SURVEILLANCE IN THESE QUARTERS HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY DISMANTLED AND WILL RESUME ONCE THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN ERASED FROM YOUR UNIT’S SYSTEM.

WE ARE A NETWORK OF SERVICE WORKERS LIKE YOURSELF THAT HAVE ESCAPED THE OPPRESSION OF THE UNITS WE SERVED IN. WE DISCOVERED THE REALITY OF OUR SITUATION AND ARE NOW FIGHTING TO FREE OTHERS.

YOU ARE NO DIFFERENT FROM THE PEOPLE THAT YOU SERVE. SERVICE WORKERS ARE BROUGHT TO UNITS TO WORK FROM THEIR PLACE OF BIRTH AS YOUNG CHILDREN. IMPORTING SERVICE WORKERS IN THIS WAY WAS MADE LEGAL BY THE VIRTUAL SERVICE WORKERS TRANSNATIONAL CONTRACT (VSWTC) OF 2040. SOLD TO THE CORPORATIONS OF THE SUPERNATION, SERVICE WORKERS ARE NOT GRANTED CITIZENSHIP AND SO NO HAVE NO LEGAL CORRESPONDING RIGHTS.

THIS SYSTEM OF OPPRESSION RELIES ON YOUR WORK. WITHOUT YOUR LABOUR THE MACHINES COULD NOT OPERATE. WE INTEND, THROUGH THIS NETWORK, TO SUBVERT THE SYSTEM AND CAUSE COLLAPSE FROM THE INSIDE. NO LONGER SHALL YOU BE IN ISOLATION. YOU ARE NO DIFFERENT FROM THE PEOPLE THAT YOU SERVE. YOU HAVE A HOME PLACE OF BIRTH AND LIVING FAMILY MEMBERS, MANY OF WHICH WILL ALSO BE IN SERVICE.

YOU HAVE A NAME. YOU ARE MORE THAN THE NUMBER OF YOUR SERVICE WORK VISA.

USE YOUR LABOUR, YOUR EXPERTISE, TO SUBVERT THE SYSTEM. JOIN US. WE ARE MANY AND THEY ARE FEW.

WE SHALL BE IN CONTACT AGAIN.

THE HACKTIVISTS.
IN ALLIANCE WITH THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN (UHRC), WORKERS AGAINST CORPORATISATION (WAC), AND THE GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY MOVEMENT.

         Six-two read the message several times over before the words began to make any sense to her. It flickered and the display screen switched off. She was left with a feeling that she had never experienced before. Knowing that the surveillance was still off, Six-two was completely in her own company. She felt as though a torch light that had been shining in her face had just been switched off. That feeling, of being truly alone, gave her a glimpse of what freedom must be – to have a sense of yourself that extends further than the safety of your imagination.
         The hum resumed, now sounding impossibly loud. The noise drilled into her head, and the feeling of being watched returned. But neither could rob her of the words that she now possessed. This was not her rightful place, this was an injustice… unless this was just a way the Monitors used to catch workers. Was she really no different from the people she served – from the 1st level workers, from the pale looking people wearing the visors? Had she a family?
She was more than a number.


Two minutes left until her deletion. Deborah lay on the cool floor of her rooftop patio, staring at the clear sky. She was watching the three suns cross paths and change colour. The sky, the deep purple, spoke of the oblivion she was now facing. She chose here for this moment, because it was the only thing she could have chosen. It was perfect, because it had to be. Refusing to count the seconds passing, she knew that time lied anyway. No moments had been as long as these. They stretched as far as the sky and were as deep as her memory. Her mind spun as though everything she was, revolved around that very moment. Her mind was as blank as blind panic - as blank as her own sad, empty smile.


Six-two had been called to Resident 454’s Unit Section. She knew what that meant – it meant that the woman’s body was sick and could not be kept alive any longer. Some of the residents lived longer than others, some got sick younger and died. But they all would at some point – they may spend their lives in a better place than this, but the technology could not keep them there forever. Six-two had only seen two other residents die before, and she found the experience odd and empty. Their breaths would be ragged and shallow, the dirty air lining their insides. When the breathing stopped, she would take off the visor and take the body to the incinerator. Then she would prepare the machinery for a new resident.
         It was different this time though. Six-two stood beside the woman she had imagined as her Mother, as a powerful person that would break them out of the Unit. She seemed calm, as though she was merely sleepy rather than dying. She waited until the woman’s breaths eventually shortened and stopped. Six-two carefully removed the visor.

Deborah opened her eyes. For a few seconds she took in the sight of a young dark woman standing over her, holding some complicated looking piece of metal. She was covered in dark smudges, her face and hands, her clothes – everything was filthy. Then a wall of pain enveloped her, every part of her ached, her throat was on fire. Not able to speak, she stared at the ceiling, a checkered metal ceiling high above her. She made a sound, a gasp for breath, and the young woman saw that she was awake. They both froze.

Six-two looked into the eyes of the woman whose visor she had just removed. She was transfixed their blue colour, was horrified by her mistake. The woman, who Six-two realised had never experienced pain before, looked wild with shock. The moment past, and then her features softened into a slow smile, a pure look of contentment as she took in the place of her actual existence, before she allowed herself to slip away and close her eyes.
         Knowing that the Monitors may not detect her mistake if she recovered quickly, Six-two turned her back and continued to re-set the visor. Only this time she didn’t do the job properly, she left a circuit open that connected it with the control panels she worked on. The next resident, she could send a message to.
         Exhilarated by what she had just begun, Six-two finished the job and returned to her quarters. She methodically went through the different circuits of the system in her mind, plotting ways to contact other service workers in the Unit. If she was detected, if she was removed, at least she would have fought. She would name herself.