“Hello, world. I’m Cassandra the Luminous, here today to introduce you all to the most famous celebrity of all time, Cameron Walker. Cameron, would you introduce yourself, please?”
“Why yes,
Cassandra. I’m Cameron Walker, someone you might know if you’ve been online
before. Maybe you haven’t seen me like this, but you have seen me.”
“Cameron, what
would you say to people who claim that you aren’t a real person?”
“Well, Cassandra,
I say people can change. We know that kids grow taller, adults grow shorter, and
life teaches us lots of interesting things. Who says a person can’t change
their name, gender, appearance, and personality and still be the same person. Does
a car become a different car if you change all of its parts?”
“Excellent
insight, as always. What do you think of your first trip to Estellia?”
“It’s lovely,
Cassandra. I especially love how all of the trees are green.”
“I believe that’s
all we have time for. Cameron, thank you for coming today.”
“You’re quite
welcome, Cassandra.”
***
“Is that really
all you can come up with, Cassie?” The voice of self-doubt asks. I ignore it.
This is only my first draft after all, and everyone knows that your first draft
of anything is terrible. Even the bots have to go through multiple drafts of
something to make it good. They’re also much faster than I am. A week of
thinking and planning over this interview, and all I have to show for it is a
few lines of text. I’m not good at this sort of thing. I could have a bot do
the work of writing Cameron’s dialogue, I suppose, but pride in my work as an
influencer demands that I do the work of writing this entire interview and more
importantly making it say something about me and the world in which I live.
I minimize the
word processor, and then open Fantasy Instagram. I can’t help but think that
it’s a little strange that out of all the companies that have been around since
the twenty-first century, Instagram is one of the survivors. Persnickety types
claim that Instagram isn’t the same as it was back then, having gone bankrupt
and been bought out twice since it was created, with the second time resulting
in a renaming to Fantasy Instagram as part of a rebranding deal. Those who used
the previous iteration of Instagram say that it’s not even close to the same
experience, since all you can do now is share pictures of worlds that you’ve
made with other people. I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t around a hundred years ago,
and the buyout occurred before I started doing social media.
I didn’t start
doing social media until I was twenty-five years old. I’d been on social media
long before then, and I’ve been writing stories about Estellia since I was ten,
but it took a long time for me to get bored and lonely enough to want to share
something with the world.
That something is
Estellia, a world that’s been around for decades, maybe even centuries. Nobody
quite knows who first created Estellia, since it only appeals to maybe a
thousand people worldwide, and over its history has had, by my rough
estimation, about a million fans total. That sounds like a lot until you learn
that people say it’s been around since 2008. According to some. Nobody knows
for sure, since nobody who keeps records well ever got involved with preserving
Estellia. Mostly because Estellia does something fantasy worlds are never
supposed to do and flat out admit that it isn’t real. It’s kept real entirely
by the will of its Dreamer, and most of the people who join fantasy worlds
don’t want to be the ones bringing them into existence, for reasons that don’t
make a lot of sense to me.
I’m not
complaining. Out of the thousand fans on Estellia’s Instagram page, I’m the one
who decided to become the Dreamer. There wasn’t an election, but nobody
complained because nobody else wanted the job. The only other people in power
at the moment are my friends Alex and Dexter, and some other people who want to
cosplay as Midnight Nightmares and torment the rest of the “humans” online, in
and outside of Estellia. I have my work cut out for me trying to rein them in,
especially since I can only ban them from Estellia, not the entire online
world.
Like all influencers,
I dream of making it big. I want to reach a large audience and make a lot of
money. Well, make any money at all. Like all noncitizens, I live off of a
monthly stipend in publicly owned housing. I oscillate between days when I
dream of being one of the few to become insanely rich, and just wishing I had
enough money to buy slightly fancy versions of the knockoff jewelry most of my friends
wear. That’s why I’m doing this interview, though when I went to check out if
any other interviews had been done with Cameron Walker, I surprisingly couldn’t
find anything. Cameron is the most famous person in the world after all.
Okay, that’s not
entirely true. Cameron is what the AI scientists call “A Blank Slate”, someone
who has perfect but utterly generic features that can be used as the basis for
more interesting people in their generation software. Cameron is famous because
they have a face that could pass for either masculine or feminine, and as such
you see them everywhere. If you’re just glancing you might not notice, but once
you start building human models for the people in your fantasy settings, you’ll
see their face everywhere. It’s gotten to the point where I once saw someone
with dark skin and a hooked nose and then promptly sent their picture to Alex
saying, “Look what they’ve done to Cameron.” She thought I was crazy, but it
turned out I was right when there was a giant scandal over it. Nice to know
that we’ll never quite fix racism.
“Maybe you could
make it as a model.” The voice of slight confidence tells me. “You’re pretty
enough and have a fairly basic face. A lot of people like brown hair and blue
eyes anyway.”
“Nice to know you
think I’m boring.” I tell it. What I don’t tell it is that there’s no way I’ll
ever be a model, not when so many younger women can’t make it. AI modeling is
such a desirable job these days that it’s not unheard of for women to shave
their heads to make it look like they work for a modelling studio, even though
people with less experience in the field of artificial creation than me will
tell you that only the poorest studios don’t let their women wear bald caps.
Unless they’re sick fucks like Johanthan Bland, who’s such a creepy fetishist
he even made his daughter shave her head. I hate living in a world where old
money reins supreme.
Argh, I can’t be
distracted by thoughts of evil elitists. I have to work on this interview.
Surely there’s someone who’s come up with something of a guideline. I’ve been
through several templates, but some part of me wants to be different,
interesting. Not because I have grand ideas, but to shut up the voice of
self-doubt that keeps insisting that I can’t make this work.
Nobody thinks
that what I’m doing is real, and Nobody but me cares. I’m Cassandra the
Luminous, Dreamer of the great and eternal Estellia. But nobody cares. It’s all
about immersion, about AI, and filtering your face and voice. If you want to be
famous, you need the help of a famous person, someone so famous no one
remembers who they are anymore. I’m sure my friends will hate me for selling
out, but I have to do something to be successful, not just for my sake, but for
the sake of Estellia itself. Nobody else wants to admit it, but our reputation
is terrible. We’re known as the land of Nightmares, endless darkness, and
bottomless cruelty. We’re not known for being the place of light and hope, even
though that’s a huge part of our mythos. One interview alone won’t be enough to
get famous or make Estellia the reality I know it could be if enough people
believed in it. But anything that could help us get there is necessary. I’m
tired of living in a world where nobody cares.
Lacking any inspiration,
I pull out a notebook nobody but me knows about. I’m the only person I know who
still writes with a pen and paper, but I like to remember that even someone as
boring as a piece of paper can turn into something wonderful with just a little
bit of pencil lead. I open it, seeing letters to someone who I know doesn’t
even exist. Cameron Walker. Time to write about the future that hasn’t yet
happened, in the hopes that I can make it work.
Dear Cameron,
I’ve done it.
I’ve made it to the top. I’m the best influencer in the world, and it’s all
thanks to you, Cameron. You’re the best friend a girl could ever hope to have,
and I’d be so grateful to work with you again.
Yours,
Cassandra
the Luminous
As I finish
writing, I slam the notebook shut. Every time I think I’ve sunk as far as I can
go, I find a new low. Writing to my imaginary friends isn’t even the lowest
thing I’ve done today. Well, Cameron Walker isn’t imaginary. They’re not real
either. Nobody knows who exactly they are. All we know is that BlandCo. INC, the
brainchild of the great Justin Bland, has held the license to their name,
image, and artificial personality since 2070. In the fifty years since then,
Cameron’s clothes, personality, gender and even their name (allegedly) have been
altered to match the products they sell, the only thing that hasn’t changed is the
fact that they’ve always been a bland, but ideal, human.
Even if they were
real, they wouldn’t like me, but that doesn’t stop me from writing to them
almost every day. Most of my letters are written to reassure myself, little
notes of promise that a future me will influence others so well that I can make
more than a hundred dollars a month, if I’m lucky. I know I don’t need more
than that, I have a room, my annual stipend, and a boyfriend who loves me, but
that doesn’t mean I don’t want more. Frankly, I’m not sure why I shouldn’t have
more. There are people who have more than me who aren’t even citizens, so why
shouldn’t I be allowed to aim high.
I scroll through
my Fantasy IG feed. It’s all pictures of people in front of stock backgrounds,
talking about their adventures in places you can’t visit no matter how much
money you have. Those who were unlucky enough to be alive in the 2040s, ‘30s
or, god forbid, the ‘20s, constantly complain about how the world has gone
downhill in the days since it became normalized for people to stop traveling
and just put up picks saying they have. Nobody my age thinks that. Even if
Climate Change is the new normal and work has become a thing of the past,
traveling in real life isn’t necessary anymore. Not when everybody has the
internet and editing can be done on a toaster. The only thing that the past had
over the present was that everyone was trapped in the same awful reality. We
don’t have to worry about that. Why worry about being trapped in reality when
everyone agrees that soon reality will disappear forever?
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