UV (Part 2)

The doors opened with a pneumatic hiss as Trey allowed Suzan to lead the way into the restaurant.  The interior was filled with a soft amber light from the tinted windows and along rows of faux wood benches, diners perched on bar stools, their faces lambent with bluish radiance.  The customers sat on one side of the table, with their devices in the docking stations opposite.  Trey scanned the room for a waiter, hoping that it wasn’t a self-service restaurant; he thought that table service would lend the occasion a more romantic ambience.

At last a waitress approached them, a wide smile fixed across her symmetrical synthetic features.  Trey confirmed their reservation and watched the android glide ahead of them to a table near the window.  She gestured to their seats with a slight jerk of her wrist and indicated that they should dock their i-Life phones.  As they did so, Trey and Suzan’s phones burst into life and the words V-EAT MENU scrolled across them.  The waitress delivered her lines in synthesised tones:

“Hello, I’m Tweety, your host for this evening.  Today’s special is kelp vermicelli V-Chick Bun Ga Nuong, served with salted edamame beans and a finger lime dressing.  May I take your drinks order?”

Trey ordered a GM tomato juice for himself and kombucha for Suzan and the waitress left them to study the choices on offer.

Suzan lifted her right hand and read some figures from the digital device hidden beneath her sleeve.

“I need some protein to fulfil today’s nutri-needs, so I think I’ll treat my body to the cricket flour V-Prawn dumplings, with a side of kimchi,” she said.

Trey’s heart sank a little, as she’d chosen one of the most expensive dishes on the menu.  Although seaweed was plentiful, since the mortality event, all seafood had to be grown in laboratories, and prawns were more tricky to culture than chicken or beef.

“I’ll have the seitan dakkoti V-Chick skewers with kelp ramen,” he told Tweety, after Suzan had placed her order, and they settled down together to watch some hilarious Vlogs.  The laughed together at the slapstick videos of people making themselves vomit by eating disgusting Old World foods or setting things on fire with lenses and sun’s rays, though Trey couldn't resist stealing occasional glances of Suzan’s sublime profile.  Her cosmetically enhanced features were all gleaming neon; her nose was tiny, planed to a perfect point, and her lips were plump and glossy as GM cherries.  She was so perfect.  Trey decided that she could easily pass for an android.

Tweetie arrived with the steaming bowls of food.  Suzan's dumplings floated like pale jellyfish in a sea of fragrant broth and she had to chase them with her chopsticks.  Trey watched as she bit into one, her even white teeth revealing a bright pink centre of cultured prawn.  She offered a slippery parcel to Trey, holding it in a pincer grip, just out of his reach, and he made an exaggerated game of stealing it from her.

Trey had never seen the sea, but his own food resembled a rock pool; the green kelp noodles swam in a briny soup, with fronds of shredded spring onion and tiny starfish of GM carrot.  He lifted a skewer of white mock chicken to his mouth and the soft fake flesh yielded easily to him.

Suzan’s plump red lips were slick with juices and he reached to dab the grease from them with his napkin, wishing that he dared to kiss them instead, but she turned to look at the i-Life phone again, laughing at some Vlogger silently clowning around.  They hadn’t bothered with earphones, yet they had hardly exchanged a word, and all along the bench at which they sat, similar interactions were taking place: couples transfixed by their i-Life devices, holding them to text, or watching videos, distractedly eating, while ignoring their partners.

“Did you enjoy that?” Trey asked Suzan, as she pushed away her empty bowl, then checked her wrist device to count the calories.

“It was delicious, but I can’t afford a dessert,” she responded, while stroking a tiny hand over her concave, silver clad abdomen.

“In that case, I won’t either,” Trey said in a show of solidarity.  Though he’d done an hour of cross training before work that morning and would have liked one.  He flexed a bicep, in what he hoped was a subtle manoeuvre. “Must maintain the body beautiful.”

Trey deemed the evening such a success that he suggested they see the latest art show, at a trendy gallery just a few stops along the Metro.  He’d heard Suzan discussing it with Beka at work, who was full of hyperbolic outrage at the exhibition’s crude art works.  Although Old World art wasn’t really his thing, he hoped taking her to an exhibition would make Suzan see him in new light.  He was often teased at work for being a sports fan and his colleagues seemed to think that tracking the scores of his virtual soccer teams every week was the limit of his intellect, though he was certain he was capable of understanding some dumb primitive sculptures.

POP SHOCK! The words were illuminated in pink digital letters above the gallery’s glass doors.  Trey and Suzan stepped inside and downloaded tickets from one of the machines in the gleaming white box office.  The exhibition space was separated from them by a red glass partition and Trey felt some trepidation as he scanned his device to make the screens part.

They walked from light to darkness; white cube to indigo unknown.  The first surprise was a cacophony of hushed voices, all speaking diverse languages.  There was an echo of indistinguishable announcements, music, feedback and chatter, which made Trey remember his trip to Paris on the Sub-Channel Railway.  It delivered all the hubbub of an international railway station, only the noise was muffled, so that the effect was not a din, but a confusing assemblage of sounds.  The second surprise was the source of the babble - in the centre of the room stood a tall tower.  It was breathtaking, seeming to blot out the ceiling above them.  All around people stood in wonder, smiling with delight or perplexed by what they saw.

Suzan reached for Trey’s hand and he gazed down into her green eyes, refulgent in the eerie glow of the tower’s pulsating lights.  He was suddenly struck by a sense of recognition.

“They’re like old fashioned i-Life devices - only really huge and totally cumbersome!”

They giggled together at the thought of people trying to carry these things.

The tower was made from radios.  At the base, their ancient faces were decorated with sunbursts and dials; these were large and made from glossy wood, polished to a soft lustre.  They were all different; unique combinations of knobs and buttons, dials and numbers.  Higher up the boxes were cheap silver plastic, smaller and more alike. They glowed gold, or blinked red and blue in the purple room, uttering obscure languages and arcane phrases.

They walked into the next room, which was glaringly white, and there found a woman seated on the floor, with her back towards the wall.  She was naked and pregnant with a television set; a TV screen where her bulging stomach should be.  Her skin was pinky-cream leather, greying with age, faded like over-chewed bubble gum.  Trey felt a wave of nausea as he regarded her, realising with horror that she might made from animal skins.  Her arms hung limply from her shoulders and her legs were splayed, impossibly contorted, like flaccid uncooked sausages.  The fuzz of pubic hair was shocking to him, as he’d only seen women with perfectly smooth and hairless genitals, cosmetically trimmed and bleached to resemble something no more sexual than an earlobe.

Suzan’s eyes were wide with horror and she rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet as if wondering whether to run away.  The doll’s blank, eyeless face was featureless, apart from a mouth sealed shut by a layer of skin, and this mute, expressionless woman-object filled Suzan with outrage and disgust.  She looked at Trey who guessed her distress and gestured with his head towards the exit.

A few moments later, they stood on the pavement outside, breathless and lost for words.

Trey texted to Suzan: “EEK. Gross. Prototype AI?”

“IDK. Shocked-face emoji”

Trey laughed and switched to oral communication.

“Bio-hacks have come a long way since back in the day,” he said, lifting the sleeve of his UV suit to reveal a tiny biometric device embedded in the skin of his forearm.

(This is the product of week 4 of my writing course.  This time we had to include a description of an exhibition we'd seen.  The sculptures referred to are Babel by Cildo Meireles and Little TV Woman - The Last Woman Object by Nicola L, both at Tate Modern).