Every Version of You

by Grace Chan

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'Asks what it is to be human. Visceral, mind-bending and tender.' - Inga Simpson

In late twenty-first century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside a hyper-immersive, hyper-consumerist virtual reality called Gaia. They log on, go to work, socialise, and even eat in this digital utopia. Meanwhile their aging bodies lie suspended in pods inside cramped apartments. Across the city, in the abandoned 'real' world, Tao-Yi's mother remains stubbornly offline, preferring instead to indulge in memories of her life in Malaysia.
When a new technology is developed to permanently upload a human brain to Gaia, Tao-Yi must decide what is most important: a digital future, or an authentic past.
Never Let Me Go meets Black Mirror, with a dash of Murakami surrealism thrown in, this is speculative literary fiction at its best.

Release date: July 26, 2022

Publisher: Affirm Press

Print pages: 288

Sample

1

The sky’s all wrong tonight. Oversaturated blue, it pixelates at the horizon into streaky seawater, and is hole-punched by the sun sinking towards its bloated reflection. The tide beats against the shore. One, two, three up the sand. One, two, three, four – leaving a sine wave of foam.

Tao-Yi sits with her legs folded beneath her, rotating a nearly empty beer bottle in her hands. Long shadows drip from the sandstone formations around her. In this tucked-away cove, shielded by ruddy cliffs, she can’t see the others, but she can hear them laughing and shouting as they gather driftwood for a bonfire.

She has let Navin drag her here, a little out of obligation, but mostly out of habit. It’s just what happens every New Year’s Eve – Zach throws a party. It would feel wrong to miss it.

The bottle stays ice-cold against her palms, impervious to her body heat. She lifts the rim to her lips. The last gulp slices down her throat. The ocean ruffles like a silk skirt in a breeze, creased and opaque. She waits for the gust to roll into shore, to lift tendrils of hair from her neck, but it never comes – the air in Gaia is as stale as a subway tunnel.

A rustle of sand grass heralds Navin’s approach. He’s almost a stranger – tall and lean in his short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, black fringe falling choppily across his brow, a vulnerable smile. He holds out another bottle of beer.

‘It tastes like shit,’ she says, shaking her head.

‘It’s better than last year’s.’

She manages a smile, thinking of Zach’s experimental brew.

‘Come back,’ he insists, touching his fingers to her hairline. ‘Help us start the fire.’

Tao-Yi lets him pull her to her feet. She follows him out of the cove, skirting a cluster of boulders, and back along the shore. His shirt hangs loose on his frame, catching the bottom corners of his shoulder blades. She wants to touch those out-turned brackets, to assure herself of their realness.

Between the dunes and the sea, the others have filled a shallow pit with driftwood. There are a dozen or so capstone-educated twenty-somethings like herself and Navin, all sharp glances and witty repartee. Gen Virtual. They’re the lucky generation – born into motion, soaked with potential, cresting a wave of change.

Zach moves through the group easily, the others drawn to him like mosquitoes to shallow water. In an orange T-shirt and a knee-length sarong, he looks especially boyish. He leans over the driftwood, a lit match extended like a conductor’s baton between long brown fingers. The others whoop as flames blossom. There are no second attempts, if you follow the formula.

Tao-Yi summons her live interface. In the corner of her vision, a countdown glimmers neon: 9:00pm, 31 December 2087. 3 hours to go! A steady scroll of status updates overlays the beach scenery. Mostly snips, four-second video fragments dissolving as soon as she absorbs them into her attention: friends dancing at open-air concerts, go-karting under electronic fireworks, clinking stim shots to a backdrop of pounding beats.

Evelyn is walking over to her. Tao-Yi wills away the countdown and the snips. Tonight, her petite friend looks a little different. Although she’s wearing a pastel dress from her typical wardrobe, her dark brown hair is arranged in braids and her cheeks are decorated with gothic decals. It’s endearing, like a puppy trying to be edgy.

Evelyn bumps her hip against Tao-Yi’s. ‘Are you flash?’

‘I’m fine. Why?’

‘You just seem quiet.’

Tao-Yi wraps her hands around her elbows, feeling the symmetrical indentations behind the bony joints. ‘Yeah, I’m just a bit spent. Busy day at work.’

‘Oh yeah. Of course. You’re a hot shot Authenticity Consultant now.’ Evelyn drags the syllables out and chuckles.

The title still sounds weird to Tao-Yi’s ears, even though she’s been at her job for half a year. She’s still getting her head around moving from a marketing gig, manipulating people into buying more stuff, to a place like Tru U, guiding lost souls back towards their true selves.

‘People are just obsessed with their avatars. They want to make sure they look as unique as everyone else, you know.’

‘Usoo, Tao-Yi, don’t pretend to be a cynic. I know you’re really a softie underneath,’ Evelyn says. ‘Give it a few more months, and you’ll be spreading feel-good virus like your boss. What’s his name again? Andy? Gary?’

‘Griffin. Not even close.’

‘That’s right. You know what he said to me at that party you dragged me to last month? Wide eyes, straight face. You need to find your path.’

‘Oh, yeah. He spouts that about ten times a day. My brain just filters him out now.’

‘I told him I use Google Maps. He didn’t even crack a smile!’

Tao-Yi laughs. ‘He’s good at his job, though. Come in for an appointment?’

‘No thanks – you lot can stay away from my virtual bits.’

Tao-Yi laughs again and turns towards the fire. Evelyn’s gaze wanders to Zach and stays there. The bonfire’s glow warms his tanned complexion, illuminating his gleaming black eyes and expressive mouth.

For a while, Tao-Yi watches Evelyn watching him. Then she slips away.

~

About twenty paces from the bonfire, Tao-Yi finds a spot facing the water and sinks down onto the sand. On the horizon, the sun’s bleeding magenta into the ocean. A white speck has appeared at the zenith of the sky: the night’s first star. Slowly, more stars emerge, sprinkled evenly across the black in no constellations, and then a full moon, snow-white and perfectly round, suddenly there without any clear moment of becoming. She tips her head back, giddy and adrift. She can’t remember the last time she saw a real star.

She brings up the virtual interface and opens her address book. Her mother’s visage sits at the top of her favourites list: soft and unsmiling mouth, face perpetually angled to one side. Tao-Yi composes a brief message.

Ma. Happy New Year. I hope you’re doing something nice to celebrate?

She zings it off, and waits for the tick indicating a successful transmission.

Navin sits down next to her, propping his wrists on his knees. ‘Trying to run away from the party again?’

Tao-Yi disappears the message – sent, but unopened – and tries to smile at him. The inconstant light plays across his sharp nose and high cheekbones. She feels balanced now, the bonfire warming her on one side, Navin’s shoulder holding her on the other.

‘Just needed some downtime, my cyborg.’

‘Want another drink?’

‘Sure. Anything but beer.’

He unfolds and goes to the box next to the bonfire, which is stocked with drinks and mochi and ice cream. Someone has started a projection of a football match; Navin is pulled into the hubbub. The others are heckling Zach for placing a bad bet. When the banter intensifies, Evelyn loops her arm around Zach’s neck and whispers something in his ear. His head tips back in laughter, his collar-length hair mingling with hers. They break away from the group and race down to the ocean, catching the moonlight like twin sails, disappearing into a spray of water.

The sand is liquid against the soles of Tao-Yi’s feet. She wriggles her fingers into it, grabs a silky handful, holds it to her nose. She smells nothing, or maybe talcum powder. Somewhere in the pit of her memory, she knows of beaches soggy with saltwater and bird shit, gritty with broken shells, where sulphur and iodine fumes rise pungent from mounds of rotting seaweed.

Navin returns with two cans of mixed whisky.

‘It’s almost midnight,’ he says. ‘That was fast.’

‘The night, or the year?’

‘Both.’ He sits back down and clinks his can against hers. ‘What’s wrong?’

Tao-Yi can’t quite meet his earnest gaze. ‘Nothing.’

‘You used to love the beach.’

‘This isn’t the beach.’

Navin’s lips flatten into an em dash.

‘Sorry,’ she adds.

‘You’d rather to go to a plastic-littered dump and splash around in acid water?’

Tao-Yi pops the tab of her can. The surf roars inside her eardrums, like a bad soundtrack played distorted and fuzzy and out of sync. Everything heaves down on her: the rhythmic tide, the silky sand, the perfect bonfire, the sky dusted with stars like half-carat diamonds.

She takes a sip of whisky and nearly gags at the sourness.

Nausea surges from her belly. She sets down the can and lurches to her feet. Navin says something, but she doesn’t hear it. She stumbles away.

Tiny leaves scratch her bare legs as she stalks along the shore. She weaves between boulders, sinking ankle-deep into powder, swallowed by glorious darkness. Before long, she reaches the secluded cove. Is Navin following her? She pushes on, not looking back.

Another wave of nausea punches her in the gut. Sometimes there are glitches, but this doesn’t feel like a glitch.

Moonlight paints the world in monochrome. Black water laps against grey sand. Before the next surge of nausea can pummel her, she runs into the sea – plunging right in without thinking, the water rapidly taking her, to the knees, to the groin. The initial cold knocks the air out of her lungs. Then, within the space of a few breaths, the shock is gone. The water’s embrace is almost warm. The nausea’s gone, too.

She strides out further, gasping disjointed breaths, even though that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters – not her soaked clothes flapping about her body, not the water clasping her to the neck. The ocean floor leaves her feet. If she goes much further, she’ll probably smack into a blank zone.

She manages to swivel around so that she’s looking back towards the shore, treading water. The bonfire’s a small bauble of orange light. She can just make out the shapes of people capering around the flames. The full moon soars above shadowy cliffs. Further along the coast, there’s another bauble. Another bonfire; another New Year’s Eve party. She squints. Which one is her party? Has she swum out at a diagonal, perhaps, and spun around, disorientated?

A scream claws at her throat, but she wrestles it down. She can no longer feel her body. Only the weight of the water dragging at her clothes, her hair, reminds her of her contours. After a few shuddering breaths, the panic thins out.

‘Gaia,’ she thought-speaks. ‘Log me out.’

A pleasant voice resonates from all directions. ‘Please confirm that you would like to log out of Gaia, Tao-Yi Ling.’

‘Confirm log out.’

The moon vanishes. The stars blink out. The cliffs dissolve like pillars of salt. Where water pressed against every inch of her skin, there’s suddenly nothing, not even a puff of air.

Just before she disappears too, Tao-Yi hears a glad shout from the beach, voices raised in harmony: ‘Happy New Year!’

~

Her bones thicken. She drops, punching through layers of sand and earth, through the foundations of Gaia. Static roars in her ears. The smell of burning metal floods her nose. Her skin itches all over.

Everything fades.

When her senses return, she’s drowning in blue. Dulux Sea Note, selected with Navin from a wall of blues at an online lifestyle improvement service when they first moved in. Her eyes lock on a pink-sprinkled cartoon doughnut holding a banner: DONUT WORRY BE HAPPY. A sticker on the ceiling.

An anchor.

She’s lying in a vat of goo, only her face and her toes poking above the surface. Although the Neugel is warm, she’s cold to the core. Her rubbery shell has forgotten what movement is. A moment later, the pins and needles sear through every inch of her body. Moaning, she grips the edges of the Neupod and pulls herself into a sitting position.

The Neugel peels away from her skin, tiptoeing down her back, reshaping itself into something like water. Then, it sucks itself loudly down a hole in the bottom of the vat, taking with it a microscopic party of nutrients and excrement.

Soapy water gushes from the perimeter of the Neupod and washes over her, followed by a cascade of clear water and a long blast of heated air. Finally, two fluffy robotic arms unfold and wipe her body dry with tender strokes.

This is Tao-Yi’s favourite moment of each day: the liminal space just after waking from Gaia, her mind returning to itself, her limbs coming back into being.

‘Welcome back, Tao-Yi,’ says Sunny, the apartment AI.

One side of the Neupod retracts to let her slide down. There are two pods in the room. In the other lies Navin, cocooned in neuroconductive goo and green luminescence, his lips loose and parted half an inch.

She studies him. His head is as bald as a bowling ball, like hers. They shave meticulously, skimming every last hair off their scalps with laser blades. The Neugel needs a smooth interface to transmit electrical impulses to and from the brain. Suboptimal conduction can cause nausea, lagging, freezing, and drop-outs.

A frizzy beard decorates Navin’s jaw from ear to ear, cloaking his mouth. His complexion is wan, cheeks hollowed by illness. His body sags across the width of the Neupod. The paunch of stomach, glistening with gel, presses against the pod’s side.

The sight of him evokes a rush of love and sorrow.

She recalls his cautious sweetness, just moments before: his boyish eagerness to bring her drinks and make her comfortable, his tentative hope that she might be happy. Then, his bitterness at her displeasure.

He didn’t follow her. They’re skin to skin, but he’s a world away, toasting the turn of the year on a dark beach with perfect sand and a perfect tide.

2

April 2080.

Tao-Yi peeled her hat off her damp scalp and fanned her face. Melbourne’s mid-autumn stinker had not deterred the eager hordes of early adopters. A queue snaked from the La Trobe Street building, several blocks down Elizabeth Street, and turned the corner into a dusty, sun-baked Bourke Street Mall.

‘This makes no sense,’ she said, voice muffled by her air filter.

Navin’s eyes snapped away from the game he was playing on his ReVision. He looked weary. The augmented reality device glistened like a bloated leech against the dull skin of his temple. ‘What?’

‘Lining up in meatspace to get VR tech.’

‘It’s just a marketing ploy. Exclusive waitlist, brief sign-up window, synch the release worldwide, make everyone congregate physically. Cue tsunami of hashtags and V-logs.’

Air filter slung around his chin, Navin took a slurp of his blue heaven slushy and waggled it at her.

Tao-Yi waved him aside and retrieved a bottle of water from her backpack. The temperature flipped over from 39 to 40 degrees Celsius on her ReVision-enhanced sight. Underneath her thick jacket, hat and goggles, she was wilting faster than lettuce in a dehydrator.

Honestly, she wasn’t surprised by the turnout. The Gaia release was hyping up to be bigger than the 20th century’s PC revolution. Neuronetica-Somners had been testing their Massively Unified Simulated Reality Matrix for years. Their objective was to create a seamless world where all existing purposes of virtual reality – work, social life, leisure, travel – could be served in one place. Many of their smaller Unified Simulated Reality Matrices would be subsumed into Gaia. Competing VR companies would have little chance against such a monolith.

‘Have you already sold our NeuroSkins?’ Tao-Yi asked. Today’s release of Gaia and the Neupods would make the NeuroSkins instantly outdated, instantly useless. Gaia was too high-resolution to be transmitted by old technology.

Navin shook his head. ‘Resell value’s zilch. Guess they’re just going down the chute.’

‘Along with our Dandelion and Apple tech,’ she added. ‘You know they’ve both folded too?’

‘Usoo. I heard about Dandelion, but not Apple.’

‘A few V-loggers were saying that their worlds will persist in the underground, get copied and modded by fans.’ Digital fossils, one article had said, with infinite replicas.

‘That’s kinda mint.’

The queue inched forward. In front of them, a collagen-plumped white couple dragged their progeny along on pink-and-green elastic leashes. All three slack-jawed, glazed-eyed kids had X-shaped ReVisions stuck to their temples – probably beaming an immy cartoon into their visual and auditory centres. Behind them, a skinny teenager scoffed jam doughnuts from a paper bag, also completely engrossed in their ReVision. Every few seconds, the teenager emitted a series of machine-gun noises, body twitching convulsively, sugar-crusted right hand shaped into a pointer.

The smell of fresh doughnuts made Tao-Yi’s mouth water. A rare pigeon weaved through the forest of legs, snagged a fallen crumb and darted back into the shade.

Tao-Yi sorted through the notifications streaming across her ReVision, flicking most of them into the trash. There were a few buzzes about her class timetable, which she flagged for later. She was on mid-semester break from her capstone studies. She’d decided not to go up to Port Douglas for work this time. She was thinking of quitting the Great Escapes tour guide stuff anyway. Navin didn’t do well with her away.

She glanced up at him. His complexion was sallow, the pouches under his eyes shaded bruise-purple. ‘How are you holding up?’

‘I’m flash.’

‘Want me to fetch you a bite?’

‘I’ll be fine. I had a protein bar just before we left.’

‘You know we live in the 21st century, right? We have courier droids? Air-conditioners? We could’ve stayed out of this heatwave, macked out in our apartment—’

‘But they said delivery could take up to five days!’

‘Five days. So long. Such torture.’

He nudged her. Laughing, she tipped over dramatically, her boots scuffing the pavement.

‘You’re going to love Gaia,’ said Navin. ‘I wish you’d joined me for that degustation beta. We haven’t done anything for your twenty-first yet – I’ll take you there for your birthday dinner. They did this coconut-cherry bomb that was just … orgasmic.’

‘Huh. Don’t they just sprinkle it with stim code?’

‘No stim. That’s against regulation. Plus, it’s just crude. No – gustatory coding has gone wild in the past few years. Neuronetica’s at the top of the game. It’s better than real food.’

‘Better than choc-mint cookies?’

‘Better.’

‘Who are you?’

They turned the corner. Unlike Bourke Street Mall, the upkeep of Elizabeth Street had been neglected. Instead of a porous composite surface, ancient asphalt undulated like frozen lava, warped by decades of harsh sun. Violently orange rust coated the tram lines, gouging a wound down the middle of the road.

Navin slurped the melted dregs of his slushy and gave the empty cup to a passing recycling droid. His lips and tongue were stained blue. She wanted to tell him that the slushy was all sugar and fake colouring, no good for his recovery, but she held her tongue. He already knew it.

She laced her fingers through his, pressing their gloved palms together.

They passed two homeless women lying in front of a closed electronics shop. Unlike most people, both women had full heads of hair. One woman was gripping a daisy-chain of plastic bags as though her life depended on it. The other was wearing at least four flannel shirts. Neither woman wore a ReVision, or even smartglasses or smartwatches.

The government was subsidising 80 per cent of the cost of the Neupods. The technology minister had declared that access to Gaia was a basic right. Tao-Yi understood the principle of the stipend; it was, she had to admit, rather forward-thinking. Everything was going virtual. If you didn’t get in early – snap up some virtual property, plump up your crypto wallet with some savvy investments – you’d be left behind.

Tao-Yi looked at the women, who were now spraying a handheld fan with water from a spray bottle and holding it to each other’s faces. A few steps away from them, a thin man with olive-brown skin was selling plastic flowers from a roadside cart. He spoke in a foreign language to a small boy at his side. As he held out a biscuit to the boy, Tao-Yi saw that his right hand was missing three fingers.

These people would never get a Neupod. The stipend still left you four thousand dollars out of pocket. Eight grand, if you wanted two.

The thin man tilted his head, his dark eyes meeting hers, closing the space between them. He lowered his disfigured hand and tucked it behind his back. His skin was the same warm brown as her mother’s. She looked away uneasily.

~

When they finally walked through the revolving doors of Neuronetica-Somners and into a white-everything lobby, their ReVisions hummed warmly against their temples and shifted into a location-triggered program. A neon banner unfurled near the scalloped ceiling: Welcome to Your Future™!

A flock of impeccably trendy youths with shaved heads, scalp decals and teal overalls were swooping on the customers. She couldn’t tell if they were bots or avatars manipulated by real people. They were passing out door prizes and e-pamphlets among the crowd, showering them with smiles and ushering them through the gleaming lobby. Along with everyone else, Tao-Yi and Navin were herded down a corridor and into another hall with a geometric chandelier and a wall panorama of an ice-capped mountain range.

A teal-clad minion checked their order number and swooshed a couple of digital tickets at them. She pointed to the far end of the hall. ‘Station twelve.’

At station twelve, a slim man stood in front of stacks of white boxes a little larger than shoeboxes. He took their order number and IDs, then examined their digital tickets and vanished them. ‘I’m Manny. Thanks for signing up as early adopters, Sen and Ling. We’re so excited for you to experience the Neupod. The boxes are spatially compressed, but they’re heavy, so you’ll need a courier to carry them. Would you like to hire one of ours?’

‘No, we’ve got one.’ Tao-Yi took a metal cube from her backpack and pressed the power button. It unfolded into a lightweight frame hovering above magnetised wheels: a Mercury Wind, an older model, but it had served them well. Manny watched passively as the Mercury picked up two boxes from the nearest stack.

‘Assembly is straightforward and takes an average of six minutes,’ said Manny. ‘If you have any problems, interactive instructions are available via the Neuronetica-Somners portal. You can also contact Neuronetica-Somners customer support twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Please note that any virtual–neural connection errors as a result of disregarding our instructions will not be covered under Neuronetica-Somners warranty.’

‘Right,’ said Tao-Yi. ‘Thank you.’

As they walked towards the exit, the Mercury following close at their heels, the ReVision program ended. . .