2033—a Dystopian Short
In which it's 1984 again—same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
She waits for him there in her shadowy cube, light slanting through its blinds in noirish stripes, throwing lens flares off her unclad chrome parts, driving Elias wild even before the door irises shut.
I apologise in advance—Ian Patterson asked for the author’s annotated version—abandon every hope…
200 (OK)1
It’s a bright, cold day and—above its famous “Anything You Can Eat” logo—the Cornucopia Cafe’s calendar reads March 33rd.2
Under the Omniprinter hum,3 three patrons await—a White man (~40) in “Crew” overalls, a Black woman (~65) in ankle-length houndstooth-print dress, and an Asian man (~25) in see-through 2032 Sexolympics leisurewear.4
“Elias Thorne?” The Asian man and the Black woman stand.
The server sighs. “The Longveg5 special?” The two remain standing.
“The one with…” she squints at the chit with unaugmented eye, “…decaf and oat milk?”
204 (No Content)
“Once-in-a-millennium datestamp, Gemi!” Elias Thorne shouts from his Hvrlounger 7000.6.
“Reboot 1984, but swap Big Brother for AI. Under a thousand words,” he prompts, mightily impressed by his own creativity.
The response comes in 12.68 seconds and is, as ever, immaculate.
“Yass! Post.”
—To which newsletter?
“Thepenismightier.”7
—Title?
“The Engineer SEES you.”8
—Sent to your 8,675,309 subscribers.9
“Read it again, Gemi.”
—The avatar flickers in the corner of Elias Thorne’s AR visor: the perpetually winking Chiefexecutive, under his jaunty cowboy hat. Elias wordlessly mouths along:10
—Soylent is sustenance.
—Indifference is love.
—One is all.
...
302 (Found, Redirect)
According to Minitrue, Sexcrime stopped after Miniluv fulfilled the final order for a free Cumpanion for everyone, sometime in Q4 2031.
Elias Thorne is tarred with the last taboo—sexual relations with an unregistered Manchine.11
As scandalous as falling in love with a Chandala or a Bụi đời was in Prewoke Eastasia—so relieved my Indian-Vietnamese parents defected here.12
After pulling an all-nighter—in which he fucked two sexbots (hermaphrodite, straight) and got pegged by one human (she/her)—to stockpile enough reels for scheduled OF updates, Elias swaps out his transparent Sexolympics tracksuit for camo gear and heads on foot towards Darkzone-13.
As the sidewalks gradually turn grimy, his Rorschach boots fail to stamp out the intrusive thoughts.13
Since the Innercircle tracks every citizen for our safety, why allow Scramblesuits which still show up on their monitors, if only as cyphers?14
Since Platooncabs15 are free, why allow pedestrians with no digital footprints—who could only be up to no good?
Why allow districts to exist, where our NeuralinX16 mysteriously go offline?
Since every sexual deviancy is allowed, with sexbots modded in every shape and size,17 why stigmatise humes who choose to mod themselves with Replidroid parts?
I feel sick just thinking that slur—Cybhores—oh L1ndsay.18 I’m coming, my love.
I’m coming.
She waits for him there in her shadowy cube, light slanting through its blinds in noirish stripes,19 throwing lens flares off her unclad chrome parts, driving Elias wild even before the door irises shut.
He urgently presses his wrist chip to hers.
—Wait, what? Elli, no. That’s half your Feb tokens.20 I can’t-
—Shhh, not a word. Just strip. Now.
—Oh baby, you only want me for one thing.
—That’s not true. You have six ports. I want you for all of them.
Giggling like kids, they roll like thunder21 onto her squeaky Memofoam.22
Later.
—Elli, why do you risk everything to see me?
—A brilliant man once wrote, “if there’s hope, it must lie in the proles”. In your “swarming, disregarded masses”.
—We’re not proles, Elli. We’re Eaters. Hope does not lie in the Eaters. Eaters lie in our Lazyboys.23
402 (Payment Required)24
Elias Thorne checks her houndstooth OOTD25 in the obsidian crystal26 of her standard-issue two-way Maxxer-phone27 one final time.
Post.
2.1 seconds. Burning heart react from Elias Thorne. The one who’d pioneered the Megamind scalp-expansion implants.28 She blows him a kiss through the Telescream.29
Engagement check—2033:03:33:19:48.30
Elsewhere, a hammer sculpts a stubborn nasal bridge, over and over.31
404 (File not found)32
When his Substack story gets only four likes and one restack, plunging his relevance score to 42, Elias Thorne snaps. He runs, uncloaked. As soon as his NeuralinX browns out, he gouges the cable from behind his ear—the bright pain flaring behind his eyes a second too late to stay his hand. He’s used a paring knife.
An unpairing knife, he thinks. Then he thinks, that’s an original thought. Then he thinks, I can’t upload that Note.
And he lets his back slide down the grimy wall onto the grimy sidewalk in the grimy alley.
Then he thinks, I’ve sat in something. Then he thinks, I can’t get my pants laundered.
In the bottom corner of his AR display, the Partybros’33 slogans glitch and fade.
And Elias Thorne cries, Gemi.
THE END
Discuss easter eggs in the comments thread below!
This story is part of a campaign against AI-slop led by Ian Patterson — LINK.
Thanks for reading. Please share and restack. If quoting, do avoid spoilers.
For more of my work:
Not everyone knows “200” is HTTP Status Code for “OK”. This heading, for Scene 1, is my first easter egg for the nerds out there.
The famous opening line of 1984 is, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Our 2033 is also a world in which dates can be added to the calendar on the administrators’ whim — for performance metrics, or because 3-33 sounds kickass? No one knows. Let that sink in.
“Anything you can eat”, “Cornucopia Cafe” and “Omniprinter” — am I over-painting a world in which your food order is limited only by your imagination?
In my first draft of this story, I was thinking that a completely see-through outfit would be the logical endpoint of the trend in showing ever more skin — then I discovered that Kanye has already gone there. Yeezy — the test pilot for our collective futures.
Homaging Orwell’s penchant for portmanteaus — longevity + veganism, still trending in 2033.
Hover + lounger, also a nod to Wall-E.
Spacing is important, children.
A play on “Big Brother is Watching You”, obviously, but in 2033, our sinister head is a technocrat — a Musk-type who describes himself as an Engineer. “Watching” is also swapped out for an insincere “SEES” — as in the comforting reassurance that your struggles are acknowledged, that you matter. Snort.
The Call Jenny easter egg no one asked for.
In 1984 the Doublethink mantra was: “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; and Ignorance is Strength”. In 2033: all our delicious food is 3D-printed from Soylent; the paradoxical opposite of love isn’t hate, but Indifference; and the Chiefexecutive wants you to know that your sad and lonely self is All.
A bunch of portmanteaus — did you know Minitrue, for the Ministry of Truth, and Miniluv, for the Ministry of Love, are lifted directly from 1984? I find these eighty-year-old constructions made up by Orwell surprisingly modern.
In the old Indian caste system, a Chandala — offspring from a Brahmin woman and an untouchable man — is the lowest of the low. In post-war Vietnam, Bui Doi — literally “dust of life” — was applied to undesired children of local women and US soldiers. In this passage, I adopted Orwell’s division of the world into three blocks — Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia — in perpetual, stabilising, war.
Double-entendre here: firstly, Rorschach boots sound like Rorschach blots — referencing the right-wing psychopathic vigilante in Watchmen (who broke bones in bullet-time in Snyder’s absurdly tone-blind adaptation that Uno-reversed Moore’s takedown of superheroes); secondly, this is a callback to another famous line from 1984 in which Orwell describes a (fascistic) boot stamping on a (proletarian’s) face — forever.
Another double-entendre: Scramblesuits mess up surveillance cameras with their constantly shifting patterns that scramble information — the identity of the wearer — into randomness; and “Cypher” is also a character in the Matrix — suggesting that the answer to all of Sexolympian Elias’s intrusive questions is: the Engineer gives some defiant people the illusion that they can quietly rebel, but this is only a choreographed fiction.
Not even scifi — Tesla, Waymo and others have concrete plans for zones with only driverless cars continuously moving in platoon-formation lockstep to eliminate traffic jams, stoplights, and carparks. We lucky humes will one day be able to get anywhere, anytime, by hopping these ‘infinity trains’.
I couldn’t resist branding 2033’s neural plugins for everyone with “X” — yeah, why not give the world’s first trillionaire copyright over one measly letter in the alphabet?
The troubling endgame argument for sexbots: if there’s one for every extreme kink, will this eradicate sex crimes? Or do we end up feeding such monsters in private, stripping away their last shreds of human empathy, until the simulation is no longer enough?
Not just a hybrid machine-human name, L1ndsay is also an easter egg for the Bionic Woman, my first cyborg crush. Maybe I should’ve named her after my second infatuation: J3an-Luc.
Easter egg invoking Rachael from Blade Runner — the replicant who passed for human.
Tokens, the currency of LLMs, are the UBI for our post-cash society in 2033.
The Elton John easter egg no one asked for — “laughing like children… rolling like thunder under the covers” from I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues, a song I first heard in 1984 (together with Sexcrimes by the Eurythmics — written for the John Hurt-starring movie released that year).
Okay, this is getting crazy obscure. Memofoam is a simple portmanteau for a memory foam mattress. It is also, to me, a nod to Orwell’s Minitrue, which altered historical records to suit the political agenda of the day — treating memory as insubstantial as foam? Stahp.
The quote, directly lifted from 1984, lays all hope in the proletarian classes who are numerous enough to overthrow Orwell’s dictator. But in 2033, we 85% are Eaters, brain-numbed consumers, who won’t rise up from our Lazyboys against the 1% oligarchs. They've solved the control problem, with literal Deus Ex Machinae that trap us in frictionless dopamine loops. This is also another nod to the heavily-pacified (and heavy) future citizens in Wall-E.
Social media influencers get paid, but a heavy payment is also required of them.
Silver-fox fashionista-influencer Elias’s Outfit Of The Day is a triple entendre: the very prim and proper dress she wears at the Cornucopia contrasts with Sexolympian Elias’s nude tracksuit; her houndstooth is a type of camouflage which also echoes his later Scramblesuit; and lastly, it’s a pattern with an Orwellian history of appropriation and subversion — originating as a humble Scottish shepherd’s weave, it was co-opted by King Edward VIII to become a signature of the ultra-wealthy, only to be radically reclaimed by punk icon Vivienne Westwood in the seventies and eighties.
“Black Mirror” — I used ‘obsidian’ as a nod to this word also being favoured by AI writing generators — which makes me mad, since I love that word as much as I love em dashes.
I suggest that in 2033 the Orwellian Outercircle — influencers and creatives who are the only humans with any job left that machines can’t or won’t do — are categorised as Maxxers, and they're all named Elias Thorne of course.
Since today, “ballmaxxing” — injecting testicles with saline — is an actual thing, Megaminding cannot be far behind. Go big or get mogged, my fellow-kids.
In 1984, telescreens were two-way TV sets through which the Party fed mindless content to proles, while spying on them. In 2033, phones are the portable equivalents, but they’re not monitored by the authorities anymore. There’s no need, since we’re demanding from each other endless engagement. In dubbing them Telescreams, I had in mind Ellison’s seminal tale of rogue AI, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.
33:3:33 is the once-in-a-millennium datestamp Writer Elias was excited about. The timestamp checked by Diva Elias — 19:48 — is another nod to Orwell, who wrote the novel 1984 in the year 1948.
In 1984, the tyrant’s boot stamps on the people’s face, over and over. In 2033, we bring hammers to our own faces for maxximum engagement. Am I being too… on-the-nose?
Double-entendre: 404 — “file not found” — is of course our worst nightmare, and it describes what happens when Writer Elias rips out his NeuralinX; it’s also a nod to the third act of 1984, in which Winston is tortured in Room 101 until he betrays his lover Julia. As I've said, our 2033 overlords don’t need to apply terror — we’ve already been well-trained to comply. The very idea of rebellion is unthinkable.
You won’t believe this but I did not space out my footnotes to end on #33. My last Orwellian portmanteau, by mashing up 1984’s the Party and Big Brother, I came up with 2033’s Partybros. The future may be bleak, babies — as Vonnegut might say — but, goddamit, you got to have fun.
Oh man there are some REFERENCES in here. I don't think I caught them all, it's 3.30 here and I'm exhausted. I dug it though!
Oh hell yeah. This slaps. Cyberpunk as fuck.