We think we know everything about Cameron Walker. Tall, smart, pretty, infinitely malleable, once she/he/they got a contract with BlandCo. in 2054, everything was peaches and cream. That’s what they’ll say, anyways. The truth is, as always, so much more dire and awful than that. Here’s the truth; from the start Cameron Walker was abused, beaten, and starved. She was bound by an unbreakable contract made with demons from the very bowels of hell, one that said that everything they did or said would be monitored by the agents of BlandCo. The horrible tradition BlandCo. agents have of forcing all woman to become completely hairless, toothless, and wander through the streets naked started with Cameron Walker herself, and she did it because she had no other way of supporting herself in a world wracked by the loss of reality itself. To understand, we have to…
It’s at about this point that a voice in my head states, very loudly, “Tara, you know you have better things to do with your time than this.”
***
I’m Tara Anne Martinez, a freelance reporter of Dreamworld dealings. That’s my day job at least. My night job, the one that I’m truly passionate about, is Dreamworld culler. I suspect even the most demented follower on Fantasy Instagram or KARMoS’ forums doesn’t know what that is, which is just as well because our dealings are dubiously legal at the best of times. What we do is we find Dreamworlds that are broken, poisonous, or just plain unreal, then we destroy them. We do this because we believe that a world devoid of reality is a world destined to be consumed by the Infinite, and because we know that reality is a precious thing in this day and age. We also, unfortunately, do it because those who know what we are will pay whatever we demand of them in order to avoid losing all they have. I’m sure there’s someone out there who hasn’t taken a bribe to avoid destroying a Dreamworld, but I’m not that person. Even with state sponsored income, it’s nice to know that you can support yourself.
As of now, my work has taken me to the Dreamworld called Estellia, a place that, according to the person who runs it, is over a hundred years old and predates the existence of Fantasy Instagram by almost seventy years. In reality, the community is about five years old at this point, according to the info online, and was created entirely by a woman who calls herself “Cassandra the Luminous”. She is, in her own terms, the most boring person who exists with no right to fame, who nonetheless posts about Estellia and the events going on within it almost daily, events which, oddly, seem to involve a lot of famous people, real and otherwise. Her defense, naturally, is that none of what she talks about is real. Bullshit. If you believe in it, it may as well be real, there’s no one alive who doesn’t know that, and the only reason she claims otherwise is that if it was supposed to be real, people would expect her to prove that she has the kind of clout necessary to do all of what she claims to do.
Her community survives because it’s so obviously garbage that none of the people moderating the forums or enforcing the rules think’s it’s worth shutting down. Nobody, that is, who isn’t an Infinitelist. There’s not much in Infinitelism that could be called “central lore”. The idea was the Infinitelism would form the bedrock of all future religions, all the philosophy was for was to serve as a sort of rubric. Naturally, most people decided to forgo building their own religions, so now the philosophy became a sort of religion, with millions of followers worldwide, and like most religions, ninety percent of its followers know nothing about what it actually says, only that it says that one day the world will end so anything they do now doesn’t matter. If you do learn the lore, one of the first things you learn is that the woman who created Infinitelism was an avid storyteller, and one of her first ones was a story about four Nightmare races who fought over the souls of humans in a world made entirely out of human Dreams, and the only thing keeping that world real was a person called the Dreamer. Estellia, the community that Cassandra the Luminous runs, is said to have four classes of Nightmares who fight to gain control over human lands so they can spread fear far and wide, and only the will of the Dreamer, which is what Cassandra claims to be, keeps them from deteriorating into all-out warfare. Heck, she even goes so far as to claim it goes back to around the time the creator of Infinitelism would have been writing her first stories. In short, she won’t admit it, but she’s a corrupt Infinitelist, one who dreams of destroying a world she dislikes instead of building a world that she loves.
Unfortunately, I have no evidence of foul play. Not because she’s not doing something to undermine our current reality, or what’s left of it at least, but because she’s just not good at running a Dreamworld. The only eyeballs on Estellia are the people coming to see her obviously fake “interviews” with people like Johnathan Bland, Dexter Rowland, and Miranda Owens, the woman who went viral after it was rumored that Johnathan Bland was sleeping with her. Her most recent interview was with Cameron Walker, a person who, because of the circumstances of their creation, is a poster child for the abuses of the AI industry.
I know nothing about Cameron Walker. Nobody does. The person who modeled her was male, female, intersex, some form of transgender, or possibly non-binary. She/He/They became a model because they were broke, bored, desperate for fame, saw an opportunity to win big, or possibly dreamed of proving the world isn’t real. Depending on who you ask, they’re an aspiring tale of how anyone can make anything real, a tragic story about how fame can make you unreal, or a cautionary Aesop about how fame can blind you to what really matters. I’ve managed to get one post talking about how they had total control over the entire industry right before one claiming BlandCo. was basically using them in ways straight out of a bad porno. Cassandra’s take? They were never real to begin with, and apparently neither is anybody else.
I’ll be honest, but for the fact that Cassandra is using them to prop up a story designed from the get-go to be bad, I don’t care who Cameron Walker is. Nobody does. They’re nothing more than a blank slate, someone for people to use to prop up political thinking, and the only politics anybody has is, “Life sucks, better live it up while you still can.” That didn’t used to count as politics, and some are lucky enough to have enough hope that their political views mean something. I’m not one of them.
Still, I’m lucky enough to be one of the Infinitelists in the world who doesn’t think that reality is dead. Not yet. I’m not a mage, after all, because I don’t think the “inevitable”, as people call it, has happened yet. Our physics won’t die today, or tomorrow, and someday we’ll find a way to have a world real enough that facts and data matter. We haven’t had it in almost a century, but it took almost a thousand years for Europe to even remotely recover from the loss of the Roman empire, so of course it would take a long time for us to overcome the loss of reality as we thought we knew it. I think that researching Cameron’s life has given me some form of hope. Every piece I’ve read about Cameron puts her creation as being around 2054, somewhere around the time they remade World of Joy, a story infamous for butchering reality with AI models. I don’t think that was when she was actually made, but in a world where almost nothing matters, belief is important. Without a world we can believe in, especially one we know isn’t real, we’re nothing at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment