"The memories that remain are about the moments in life that meant something. The rest is just forgotten."
Gordon, The Seven Obsessions of Blaise Bordot (2013)
It is 2036. Robert lives on the ninth floor of a new block in Elephant and Castle, roughly where the Heygate estate used to stand. It is a sunshine kind of day. The coffee has brewed itself, exactly to his taste; the machine has spent three years learning it. The flat smells of nothing in particular. He sits at his desk. His emails are written and sent, overnight, in a voice that sounds more like Robert than Robert himself. The desk, the chair, the precise angle of the vase on the shelf copied from an AI-generated off-the-shelf rental package: all of it chosen and arranged by a system that has studied his preferences rather more carefully than he ever has. Pan slowly across the room and nothing catches the eye. Everything works. It is quite sublime. It is perfect.
But then you start to think about it more deeply. When it comes to perfection, don't we always crave the imperfect? We are human; we make mistakes; the mistakes make us who we are. Once everything has been sorted out for us, this AI future becomes a little dystopian. Worse, it is boring. Robert is the same as everyone else in the building, sitting at their desks that day. Emails written. Styled chair. Styled vase. Styled life. What a bore. Where is the friction, the mismatched furniture, the hand-painted picture hung slightly too high? The scene is forgettable because it is repeatable.
I wrote about this once without knowing it. In my novel, a boy comes home early from school for a dental appointment and finds his mother in disarray. She normally keeps the perfect house; of his parents he says, "Their roles were defined to perfection and never varied." That afternoon there is music playing, glasses lying around, the kitchen a mess. "One thing I did notice," he says, "was that for the first time she had a personality." By evening she is back to normal. The food is on the table. His father notices nothing.
That is what the styled life costs. Not our comfort. Our personality.
This future might produce the perfect cookie-cutter design, email, meal or photograph, but it lacks the unfathomable sparkle of whoever was behind it. Plasticated abundance without flavour. A bland peach. A dull sci-fi film. An insipid crème brûlée. It gives nothing away about who made it. Effort used to be a signal of skill, of passion, of an idea someone stayed up far too late researching. That signal has gone quiet. And someone, somewhere, is selling Robert the quiet. It isn't free.
I should come clean before you notice. I use AI every day. There is a photographer on my brand's Instagram called Baz. He isn't real; neither are the models he shoots. The tights they wear very much are.
To be honest, I enjoy Baz. He is my creation. I control him and get him to photograph his models the way I want them. Like Caravaggio, I own the content of each shoot, bringing a humanity into focus that might seem odd at first. At least I am happy to think I do, like an orchestral conductor or a film director using the skills he has to hand. Baz is a lot cheaper to employ as well. There you go, I've sold my soul too. The inevitable is inevitabling. We are all going to become gods of worlds whilst other gods control our own. At the very least, under this future social construct, we can get creative about it by enhancing the prompts.
What is left, then? We are still human bodies in that room. The machine can make a picture of us, and I have just admitted it makes rather good ones. But it cannot stand where we stand. It is our physicality that rises above the mediocrity. How we see. How we move. What we choose to wear. The entrance we choose to make. Wrestling has always known this; the gear announces the character before a word is spoken.
That vision was never really about futurists or cyberpunk kids. It is about the ordinary bloke whose life changes so radically that it becomes, simultaneously, smooth and bland.
For me, blending in was never an option. I always had a flair of sorts. Picture me in the office, wearing that charity shop tie from a different era. Mismatched socks. Cardigans with buttons from my mother's sewing box. Away from work, I chose difficult journeys, Ethiopia, the Trans-Siberian Railway, over two weeks baking on an insipid beach under a harsh, superficial sun.
That sun has always belonged to Camus for me: the white glare on the beach outside Algiers in L'Étranger, so relentless that Meursault ends up blaming it at his trial. Things simply happen to him under it. Robert lives in the same existential weather, only air-conditioned. Sartre would say existence comes before essence; nobody is handed a self, we have to make one. Some of us start with a tie.
We choose to be seen in whatever we do. In the future I am describing, we will have to keep choosing it, against a system built to make the choice unnecessary.
Neon City
The Neon City Renegades are a group of wrestlers who arrive one day to compete in Neon City. The city has been optimised to smooth out everything, including those who choose to wear their identity. It never fights them. It processes them. Approved camera angles. Tape marks on the canvas. A voice from the speakers: the narrative has already stabilised.
Then it replaces them. By the end of the first story, four silhouettes stand in the ring wearing the Renegades' shapes. Same height. Same stance. No faces. The crowd cheers on cue.
Blitz Vector, the speed fighter, keeps a strip of dirty tape; worn, grubby, nothing like the clean Blitz the city plays on its monitors. When Caravaggio painted the Madonna di Loreto, it was the pilgrims' filthy feet people complained about. At the end, Blitz steps deliberately into shadow, out of reach of the cameras. The lights hesitate. For the first time, the city has no idea which version to show.
It is no coincidence that I invented a city that erases people. My biggest fear in life is to be erased after I die. No memory. No legacy. No story.
This is the turn my journey has taken; it is why I make what I make. BillingtonPix exists for those who refuse to be forgettable. I follow wrestling and wrestling cosplayers because they think like me. Which is funny, given that wrestling is scripted. Everyone in the building knows the finish is booked. Nobody books the look.
Robert again
Back in the flat, Robert eats his bland peach. His day is pre-ordained. His emails are written. His week is locked in. Not what he wears, though. That is still his, if only he will take it.
He opens the wardrobe door and stares at the rails. Bland, corporate suits. No thanks. He crosses to the chest of drawers and pulls out a pair of wrestling tights: bright, vivid colours, bold pattern. Boots tame the spandex; a plain black jacket seals the look.
He returns to his laptop and replies to his last email. To his boss. It's a resignation. He writes it himself. AI switched off.
In the lift down, the camera that has wished him good morning every day for three years takes a moment longer than usual.
Robert and his photographer, Baz, are AI-made. The Blitz Vector tights are real.