George Lockett

George lives in the heart of the London Megahive. By day, he produces propaganda for a technology megacorporation. By night, he writes.

Lies About Your Better Self

I watched Amanda eat. Some celebrity chef had launched a high-end restaurant by her office, so she and some ad agency colleagues had gone to check out the opening.

Her food was amazing. She had this tic where she clenched the muscles up where her jaw met her ears. She only did that when she was eating something really good, like she was fighting to keep the flavor in her mouth.

I clicked my trackball, pausing the footage and freezing Amanda with a perfectly-balanced forkful of something green and frondy halfway to her mouth, already composing the caption in my head. People came to this job thinking they’d get a deeper appreciation of life, vicariously experiencing what they’d never have. They learned fast.

I strobed through Amanda’s afternoon. She had a campaign photoshoot, her first time at the helm of a major project. I swiped off stills and marked out clips of Amanda directing the models. She kept tucking her hair behind her ears — she did that when hiding nerves — but she looked authoritative, a natural. People would eat this up. Behind-the-scenes posts from Amanda’s job always got strong Attention Capture, especially when models were involved.

I grabbed my picks and assembled a photo collage, a few video montages for the weekly “Look Back”, and some hashtagged text-under-photo posts, then dropped them into the queue for publishing. Some clients insisted on approving everything we posted to their social feeds, but Amanda trusted us.

I was closing up when a fresh dataload hit my inbox. Every dataload was a melange of the unstructured digital detritus we crap out every day. Social posts, location data, streaming tracks, cat videos; everything we cram into our faces to make our existence a little more bearable. The YouPlus app on Amanda’s phone slurped up all of that for us. Like most YouPlus clients, she also wore a LifeCam, which grabbed stills and video at irregular intervals based on situationally-aware algorithms. A couple of times a day, I received a voyeur’s wet dream, a barely-filtered glimpse into the lives of half a dozen in-crowd clients.

At first, it was thrilling; deep access to the lives of people so far beyond me in the social pecking order –people who could afford to pay YouPlus more than my annual salary each month to optimize their online self-image.

The thrill faded fast. Seeing how the other half lived threw my life into sharper relief, and their obsession with sculpting the perfect online persona — not professionally, but to their friends — made me despair. The only thing that kept me here was Amanda.

The dataload was marked “high priority”. I was officially off the clock, but Amanda paid premium, and Zed would give me another chewing out if I sat on this until morning. I flicked through the material. It looked routine, not worth fast-tracking, until— There. Harvey, down on one knee, holding up a glittering rock big enough to brain a four-year-old. Video from Amanda’s POV, plus a side view from Harvey’s phone, carefully placed to capture the moment from a flattering angle.

I grinned. This had been a long time coming. I’d watched Harvey through Amanda’s lens long enough to have spotted the signs weeks ago, and I’d been looking forward to watching her kick the asshole to the curb. The worst of their fights, his gaslighting and psych-out manipulation never made the feeds, but, even in the narrative, their relationship had been up and down all year; it just needed a catalyst to get her to drop the bastard. I skipped over his speech, looking for the moneyshot.

She said yes.

I sat there, mouth open. Why would she say yes? She finally had the chance to be shot of him, a perfect trigger to kick out the man who made her so unhappy, and she said yes?

Amanda was the only one who still gave me hope. She was real, even through the repackaged self of the social media lens; there was a vulnerability at her heart that let me feel, deep down, that we weren’t that different. She wasn’t like the others, the Fauxialites who’d do anything for their dopamine hit of attention. They might as well have been another species. Homo Narcissus. That was why Amanda’s narrative worked so well — it had a real person at its heart. The Amanda I knew would never have said yes.

I hovered my hand over the trackball, flexing my fingers, thinking; waiting. I had more than enough material stored up. Ball and screen blurred as I pulled up half a dozen old dataloads, searching for the right pieces.

I could fix this.