You arrive to work late. Normally this would be a fireable offense – your third infraction, just one too far – but the security and surveillance systems have been offline the past few days, downloading some massive system update no one can properly explain to you and your higher-ups (or, more usually, their chatclone agents) refuse to even be curious about, so you assume no one will notice. Maybe once it’s done downloading whatever this is, the office will finally get around to giving you the nicer accommodations they’ve been promising for the past year. You doubt it. The higher-ups have their virtual offices and even some basic true holograms already. No need to get the whole office in on it. Just a waste of money to provide you with anything other than the slightly above market mixed reality glasses and projectors your cubicle already comes with.
Your job isn’t difficult, which is why they feel comfortable paying you minimum, which at this point is somewhere in the neighborhood of forty dollars an hour. Not that dollars are good for much anymore. And this is after about ten years of the government making fighting inflation their big goal. Forty will get you a very basic sandwich at one of the local joints.
They pay you to generate asset libraries for 3D modeling. Image generation is constantly evolving, and the standard of what is acceptable for textured virtual environments climbs every day as the resolution ceiling of both VR and basic brain interface tech rises. In some of the more experimental spaces, “lifelike” isn’t good enough anymore. People want their brains pumped with the kinds of surreal colossal imaginaries that no one a century ago could’ve dreamed up. They want virtual dinner parties set in the midst of cosmic greatness, with themselves and their colleagues represented as impressive five-dimensional manifolds. That sort of nonsense. You are one of several hundred in your department alone, scrambling to keep up with demand so your parent company can keep the price of their texture packs up high where they want it.
When you started twelve years ago – an unusual sentence in the modern day, job security being what it is – you would generate simpler things. Metal textures with inbuilt adaptive lighting overlays, compatible with the latest resource engines. Variations on the sky, seamless textures that could wrap around with other asset libraries to avoid the impression of repetition – an important graphics trick to save bandwidth which had been used for more than a century now in 3D modeling. These kinds of skybox textures were your specialty – you knew just the right training algorithms to apply to the learning model, and would tweak a list of around two thousand prompts to generate exactly the right effect. With the right set of tricks, you could generate textures as low resolution as ancient 4K that could still achieve the effect of photorealism if the right variable overlays were applied on the software end. If people were comfortable with still clouds, it could be lowered even more. These kinds of memory-saving techniques were crucial in the development of full photorealistic VR spaces for commercial sale and home use, where only a decent Forkbeard signal would be needed for an entirely wireless setup.
Now your job is different. As the assets you’re expected to generate become less typical, the problems become less fun. You’re not expected to save memory anymore, to solve for corner cutting. These assets are for people who can afford things like discreet full Forkbeard routers right next to their houses, or even resonant cables in their walls. You are working on the bleeding edge of resolution now, and pretty much whatever you make will have some sort of application somewhere, so your creativity is no longer required.
That’s why you channel your energy elsewhere, of course. Every day you print off one 8x11” sheet of your favorite segment of your favorite image from that shift. You’re technically not even supposed to be using the paper printer – it’s much cheaper now to just 3D print onto slim tiles than it is to use the old inkjet technology, which is only kept around for certain legal paperwork reasons – but you file a discreet printing request, away from the prying eyes of the bosses, and bring the ink-saturated paper home to your one-bedroom apartment in the heart of the city.
Silicon Valley in 2197 CE, the turn of the century. Some of these apartment buildings are a hundred years old. Most anything older than that has either been bulldozed or preserved like a museum piece. You could draw the totally opaque curtains and duct tape them down to the wall and light from the dazzle outside would still get in. Most comes from the outskirts, the tourist district in the east where your office is – that place you commute from each night on a packed bus, leaving the light behind like Orpheus. From your window, almost wall-sized in an overeager imitation of the apartments of the wealthy – one of many smokescreens designed to keep you from worrying about rats and mold – you can just about see the drone swarm advertisements that dance in the sky and all around the holographic billboards that almost, almost, block the view of the autonomous highways just beyond, the delta of a vehicle river pouring in from the rest of California. It is never night here. New York is fuming.
You focus your attention away from the outside world and on your walls, which are coated in these generated pictures. It is a collage, a half-finished puzzle. You look for a spot to place your newest one.
Your job, you have decided, is to weave a world out of this nonsense, to make something logical from it. Slowly it is coming together. On one end is Heaven, the other Hell, and in the middle is the World – your big window letting the dream-lights through from that never-ending cyberpunk party. It’s the model Bosch used for his Garden, only reversed, because Hell is on your left now. You like to imagine it sequentially – maybe the world before was Hell, and Heaven awaits in the future. Probably not. But that would be pretty cool.
Some of the images are rotated. Many overlap. It’s not a visually appealing array. You’d be fired in an instant if you tried to turn in this low-res, inefficient product. Some are smeary or folded from being crammed into your bag when you rushed out of work. But you like it. It gives you something to do, some meaning to wring from this new assignment. Something to distract you from the weird weather patterns being reported, and the layoffs, and whatever is going on with all the systems at work.
On the dusty screen of the television in the corner, a throwback cathode unit fully equipped for Forkbeard that you got in a trade with a coworker, a speech from the Pope plays on the local news. You gesture it to mute and cut her words short. The mild shifting light is fine, compliments your work even, but the noise is getting to be too much. It distracts you from the noise outside, the World, which is what you want to be focused on. That will help you finalize the placement of your newest image. You fasten it just to the left of the window, at an angle, intersecting with another piece in a way that almost forms the image of a dog. Maybe it’s a demon. Or a soul being tortured. You suppose it’s up to the viewer.
It’s getting late. Easy to forget the passage of time with so much going on outside and so little going on in your own life. The city center is a place for isolation, for being crammed in with millions of other people all lost in their own heads. It’s been like that as long as you can remember, as long as anyone you know can remember. Not that you know a lot of people. It’s a circle, like everything.
You leave the TV on and settle in on the mattress in the corner, letting the lights from inside and outside compete for the attention of the small part of your brain still perceiving them from behind your eyelids, and as you drift off, you think about the people still looking up at your skies.