Per-Martin rolls his shoulders, swings his arms to relieve the stiffness, joins the parade to the communal washrooms. His guild leader is already speaking, quietly but urgently, their voice seeming to originate somewhere inside his head. This is a good thing: while all guilds work to maintain paradise, paradise also thrives on healthy competition and secrecy between guilds. The men who share his dorm are all around the same age as him, but there’s no telling which guilds they might be working for. Even if you found out, there’s no guarantee that they’d be working for the same guild a week later—defections and trade-overs are common, a crucial part of the market dynamics that keeps paradise optimal. It’s only reasonable, Per-Martin reminds himself, that paradise asks much of its residents.
Per-Martin heads to the refectory for breakfast, tuned in to his guild leader’s pep-talk: today, the Vildsvin guild has missions to the south of the city, down near the sea. Per-Martin has been specially selected, his leader reminds him: he’s a veteran, his profile well-tagged with indicators of loyalty and trust! This is a chance to win big for the Vildsvin, win big for himself! He shovels food mindlessly into his mouth, his attention on the maps and statistics that blossom before his eyes. He barely notices his fellow guild-members as they seek alliances and useful rumours in the guild’s chat-channel, which scrolls along the edge of his peripheral vision.
Per-Martin eats silently, staring into the middle distance, speaking to no one, in a room full of men doing exactly the same thing.
#
Between bites of weinerbröd, Gunilla Hassim-Eriksson reviews her agenda for the afternoon. It is dominated by the latest of a series of consultation sessions in support of the ongoing restructuring of her asset portfolio—an incredibly tedious process, which her expert systems nonetheless refuse to handle without her regular input. The responsibility of autonomy weighs heavily on mornings such as this—which is probably why the day is free of work for the Company.
“Cutting me some slack today, Josefin?” she asks, before blowing to cool her coffee.
“Yes, ma’am.” Gunilla’s secretarial persona is quiet, deferential, and knows Gunilla better than she knows herself. “The restructuring session presents a 76% chance of cognitive exhaustion, based on previous sessions.”
“No kidding,” Gunilla mutters. “A whole hour? They should be paying me for that amount of time, for god’s sake.”
“Yes, ma’am. So I checked with Ozy, and they informed me that the Company can do without you today.”
Ozy is the intelligence around which the Company revolves. Gunilla secretly suspects that Ozymandius has no real need of its human proxies at all, but nonetheless admires the system’s grasp of human psychology. If we’re all feeling useful, we’re not getting in the way of its work… and if that means she gets a clear morning to get her head straight before a restructuring session, well, lucky her.
“Ozy also suggested, ma’am, that today might be well spent down by the shoreline.”
“Did they, indeed?” Gunilla looks up from her coffee, toward the patio doors.
#
Outside the dormitory block, the city is full of marvels: the beautiful people of Malmö throng its clean and orderly streets, and the sun smiles down on them all from a clear blue sky. Per-Martin doesn’t have time to luxuriate in the affordances of paradise, of course: as a guildsman and jägare, it’s his responsibility to keep it this way. He wonders, sometimes, where they’re all rushing to—they can’t all be guildspeople, surely? But idle reflection is a luxury that neither he nor paradise can afford, and he hurries himself along, following the itinerary mapped out by his masters in the guild. His coastlands mission means taking the train—a rare privilege which will earn Per-Martin bragging rights on the guild’s chat-channels later in the day.
Near the station, something is strange: spaces left and right of the main entrance are blurred in Per-Martin’s vision, the people there indistinct and obscure. There is noise—shouting, chanting?—but this too is blurred, garbled, like the sound of a full washroom with one’s head in the bath. There are no police, of course—paradise has no need of police!—but a bundle of Subscriber Experience Assistants from city hall, recognisable by their colourful gilets and the smiley-face icons that hover above their heads, are trying to move the blurred sections of crowd away from the station, and toward a Subscriber Experience Support van waiting not far away.
Per-Martin waits for the blockage to clear with all the patience he can muster, standing among a small knot of others waiting to enter the station and continue their missions. He doesn’t notice the small blob of distortion that separates from the larger one, until suddenly distortion is almost all he can see, and someone is shaking him by his shoulders, shouting in his ear. A few words come through, distorted only by the speaker’s urgency—“leave the game”, he thinks he hears them say—before the underwater effect comes back twice as strong, and he stumbles backward into his fellow guildspersons, dizzy and confused, the unfamiliar taste of panic and fear in his mouth.
But now there are SEAs all around him, helping him up. He’s no longer being shaken. The distorted person is laying on the ground a few meters away. Per-Martin isn’t sure what just happened to him. His guild leader is speaking directly to him now: inter-guild sabotage, they say, or at least an attempt at it. Probably the Varg Guild—suits their style, and they’ve long had beef with the Vildsvin!
But they’ve tipped their hand too soon, haven’t they? And now the SEAs have cleared the station entrance, and Per-Martin is free to go—so go, go, GO!
A little later, sat on the train heading south from the city, Per-Martin tries to reconstruct what just happened, but the details are slipping away. The guild anthem is building volume and intensity, as it always does when a mission begins; instructions and reminders pop up, preparing him for the day ahead. What happened back at the station? Just guild politics, it seems: the chat-channel is full of people discussing the Varg clan and their blundered powerplay. Per-Martin reads, but doesn’t contribute; he’s never liked that part of the game, anyway.
Finally clear of the city, the train rolls through a landscape so perfect Per-Martin can barely believe that he’s allowed to live in it. He hums along to the guild anthem as the string sections swell and thicken, and gazes out at the paradise he is privileged to protect and maintain.
#
Gunilla’s house sits a little north of Västra Tommarp. When the weather is right, and the Öresund is low enough, she can see from her garden deck how the houses of the village poke out of the water to the right of the church tower, which is slowly leaning toward them as its foundations sink into the soaked, sandy soil. The land in the foreground is scrubby, the wild grasses and bramble thickets yellow and tinder-dry from drought.
“You may wish to switch your contacts to zoom mode, ma’am,” Josefin suggests. “Ozy reports that the blooms are spectacular.”
Gunilla follows Josefin’s advice, zooming and then panning her vision along the shoreline. Ozy’s report is quite correct. Some combination of tide and temperature has resulted in an algal blanket that lies just beneath the surface of the water, as far as the eye can see: a rich and fantastic seascape of vivid greens and blues and purples, rippling gently, all a-sparkle with the fierce sunlight.
It is a beautiful, powerful vista. Gunilla blinks a few still shots and loops of video for her collection.
Gunilla appreciates this view, this location that comes as a privilege of her position, because of the way it confronts her with the reality of the situation, and thus the urgency of the work of the Company. She knows other shareholders sometimes like to slip into the gameframes and idealised fantasies popular with subscribers. Sometimes it can all be a bit too much, they tell her. The game-frames represent the possibilities the Company is working toward, albeit much simplified so as to appeal to the undereducated interests of the subscribers; why not escape into that world for a few hours?
She smiles and sympathises with them. Later, she uses her managerial access to annotate their Company records, recommending against further advancement. It would be unfair to burden them with greater responsibilities, if they’re already unable to cope with the true state of things.
“Rearrange that restructuring session, Josefin,” she says. Her portfolio desperately needs addressing, but an opportunity like the blooms is too important to miss, and she decides to make the sacrifice.
“Session rescheduled, ma’am,” Josefin confirms.
“Good,” says Gunilla, and begins walking toward the shoreline. “I’ll be triple-O for the afternoon, so don’t bother me again until tomorrow.” She blinks away the interface before Josefin has time to reply.
#
At the station near the coast, Per-Martin collects his hunter’s kit from a guild kiosk, shrugs on the bulky backpack, and heads out into the sunshine. Drop-pins bounce brightly in the sky to the south, indicating places where his skills are needed. Few hunters have gotten off his train, and none are heading the same way as him, but that suits Per-Martin just fine: he’s not into co-op or PVP, and his guild leader knows it. The sweet, lonely high of the hunt, wandering in paradise—that’s always been enough for him.
He nears the shoreline, where seabirds wheel and call, and his mission is finally revealed: someone’s been scattering things down here—Varg Clan again, most likely!— dumping important yet secret treasures which must be collected and returned to the Vildsvin kiosk at the station. Per-Martin wonders, briefly, why anyone would scatter valuable treasures along the shore, where they might be washed away or lost? If it was him, he’d stash them somewhere safe… but there must be some good reason for it, a secret that he’s not allowed to know. And if it means he gets to spend the day down here, walking the beaches alone, racking up points for his guild and himself… he’s got no reason to complain, has he?
As he draws near to the shore, his vision fills with the bright small dots that indicate treasures waiting to be rescued—hundreds of them! He unclips the picker from the backpack, whistles the melody of the guild anthem as it surges from the landscape around him, and begins his work.
#
Gunilla’s meditation on the algal blooms is interrupted by a subscriber passing by. He’s somewhere in his mid-fifties at a guess—though it can be hard to tell with subscribers, who tend to ugliness and premature ageing, despite all the opportunities they’re given to take care of themselves. This man is stooped under one of the large collection baskets that free-tier subscribers are issued when they’re sent out of the city. He is moving purposefully along the beach, totally unaware of her, methodically grabbing pieces of plastic and polystyrene from the scum at the water’s edge with his picker, then dropping them over his shoulder into the basket.
He’ll be deep in one of the game-frames that free-tier subscribers prefer, Gunilla knows: guild politics, gamified productivity. It’s all but impossible to get them to do anything without incentives—as if the implants they’ve all been fitted with aren’t incentive enough! All that functionality, full sensory overlay in sight and sound and even smell, plus all the tools you could ever need to understand the world and optimise your behaviour toward improving it… and it turns out that, given the choice in a free and efficient market, the vast majority would rather inhabit a fantasy that makes those decisions for them.
Opinions on the free-tier subscribers differ among shareholders in the Company. The bleeding hearts of the left worry that their permanent immersion in a digital paradise has made free-tier players into something approaching indentured labour. Meanwhile, the barons of the right mutter that there are too many of them for the Company to support, and that the competition dynamics should be cranked up in order to thin the herd a bit.
Gunilla thinks of herself as a centrist, but somewhat to the left: she regrets the necessity of game-frames and the free-tier model, but knows that most subscribers at that end of the business simply don’t have the capacity to cope with the strange beauty of the planet as it undergoes its slow remediation. What harm can it do, then, to have them believe they already inhabit the paradise that the Company is patiently working to deliver? The alternative is all too obvious, as seen in the behaviour of the refuseniks who shun the offer of implants: there was another demonstration at the station in Malmö this morning, apparently.
Gunilla knows that most people just aren’t equipped, emotionally or intellectually, to handle the truth of the world. Ozy quickly identifies those who are, elevates them to shareholder status, where they can shoulder the burden of managing a world that was almost ruined forever by the selfishness of the herd. That the herd can’t appreciate the sacrifices made on their behalf is tragic, Gunilla supposes—but you don’t become a shareholder because you want to be appreciated. You do it because the Company needs you, and the subscribers need the Company.
As the man continues his lonely mission along the beach, Gunilla looks out again over the water, where the afternoon sun tints the blooms into deeper, darker hues. She reflects that she is privileged to have a job she can believe in, rather than being caught up in a fantasy of purpose and agency managed by computers.
#
SOURCE SCENARIO: “HUMAN PLUS”
It's 2080 in the Öresund region. One corporation owns all the technology on which society depends; there is no other company, nor nation states. A previous generation of technocratic elites decamped to colonise Mars leaving room for a young generation of techno-elite, very much like the old. Climate change coupled with other deeds of neglect of the environment have left nature largely destroyed.
The majority of people—”the masses”—get their basic needs met by some sort of universal basic income. Most people spend their days in an immersive digital experience of a more pleasant world, which has been designed and is maintained by the ruling corporation. Subscriptions for this experience are paid for by doing various odd jobs in the “real” world, for example, collecting plastic scrap from the environment. The elite, on the other hand, primarily work digitally, offering their input into the AI systems that manage and monitor most of the social, political and economic systems. After spending decades in the immersive digital realm, most people simply cannot function in the real world; the lives they’ve created in the digital sphere are the “original” experience of living, feeling and encountering the world. Meanwhile, the elite pride themselves on their capacity to work digitally but enjoy their leisure in the physical environment, despite the fact that it's mostly polluted, volatile and unpredictable. For them, the authenticity and ability to live in the physical world (with the help of AI) proves their superiority to “the masses.”
