Can you see yourself in these glasses? They’re called mirrorshades. They’re antique; I found them via someone in Topeka at an estate sale. They’re not replicas, they’re actual mirrorshades. I think a cop wore them. Like thirty years ago.

I came over here because I wanted to tell you a story, so don’t get all excited. I do represent the agency, yes, but I just saw you here, and I thought, I should tell you this.

And no, I’m not drunk. Just tired. It’s the fourth day of tryouts, and we’ve interviewed hundreds of applicants.

So my story is about these glasses, right?

#

Tell Aden the glasses look stupid on his face, and he’ll call you an idiot. They’re retro-cool, and he likes them because no one else has a pair like this.

He’s a cool-hunter. Of sorts. He values unique. And he has an aesthetic about him that screams ‘you’ve never seen anything like this: I stand out and I like it and this ensemble is almost ugly it’s so unique and non-standard, and that’s okay because I know what I’m doing.’

It’s pretentious and loud and it does the job.

He meets Riki in Ann Arbor in Michigan, because yet another damn storm has swept out of the Arctic North. The jetstream has gone all wobbly, and cold air is being dumped down across the midwest. It’s negative twenty some degrees. Planes are grounded all over the place. Idiots are asking ‘what global warming?’ And people are shouting back that the jetstream wouldn’t be jacked if it wasn’t for good ole G.W.

So Chicago’s out of the question. The planes are useless. He’d rent a car, but no one will rent one to someone under twenty-one. And all the self-driving cars are already rented by passengers who’d rushed out of the train before him.

Aden’s paid for a sleeper on a train that was supposed to wind its way out across flyover country and get him to NYC…eventually. Because here in redneck-country trains are considered socialist plots and are barely tolerated, this one leaves at ass-o-clock in the morning and will take almost two days of travel to get to NYC.

And so it goes.

But that damn thing breaks down in Ann Arbor due to the cold. The passengers are all disgorged into the bitter air and told to find somewhere warm for three hours while engineers work on the train.

So Aden, shivering because his clothes, while stylish, are hardly suited for survival in the midwest in the heart of winter, finds himself in a warm coffeeshop. And he’s hunched over, hugging himself and shivering, the damn glasses all but frozen to his nose, when he looks up at the cashier.

“You’re beautiful,” he says to her, momentarily forgetting about the cold and the hassle and every little indignity of travel.

It’s a magical moment, the outlandishly-dressed Aden standing in the shop, his decorative and brightly colored plumage stark against the grays and earth tone jackets of the other customers bustling around the coffee shop. And in front of him, in a simple black t-shirt and khakis: Riki.

But he’s seeing what everyone else doesn’t.

Everyone else is wearing their glasses, their eyes seeing more than just what’s in front of them.

See the biker with the chains hanging out of his pocket and the skull tattoo? He’s got on a pair of Fibu glasses. And he’s seeing advertisements for half off coffee, and checking his email, which is laid up over his vision, and his eyes are flicking around. Because the glasses are filtering everything, and processing it, and overlaying extras. Like an old-time pilot with a heads up display showing him targets.

But the biker, he’s not just seeing advertising blinking and popping up. He’s seeing everything redefined. Processors in the glasses that have been monitoring his likes and dislikes for a year now are taking facial features and remapping them: tagging faces with different looks, adding here, subtracting there.

If you’ve paid, and you have the right sort of face, behind those glasses there is virtual makeup being applied. A constant filter on people’s faces.

That blonde in the corner? The round-faced one. She spent time remapping her virtual face to look more like Steph Watson’s. Just subtly enough. And as long as everyone’s broadcasting, receiving, watching, and playing along, it works.

It’s everywhere. Every seat has a pop up, every face a reputation score, every brand a coupon to try. Layer upon layer of information, crashing down like skeins of silk thrown loose in a hurricane to settle down around you.

Ones and zeros and zeros and ones and year by year it marched around and what’s in that space is not what’s out of that space.

And Aden’s out. The glasses don’t work. They’re half a century old. All they do is make the real world darker.

That’s it.

They’re absolutely useless.

Retro, but like, real retro. Not ‘it looks like retro but has chips and usefulness.’ These glasses can’t do anything other than sit on your face.

So Aden’s really looking at Kiri, and she’s staring at him, both of them like they’ve never seen another human face before.

They’re just…looking at each other.

#

She kept blushing. He’d turned up the charm, yes, indeed he had. He was captivated. And he’d gotten her to take him to a gastro-pub with a real fireplace crackling away. They sat near it, him to warm up, and he just kept staring at her.

“Usually it’s the retirees from the home up the street who come in and say that,” Kiri told him. “Or the ones who refuse to use any kind of augmented reality. They hate it. Too disorienting. Or people who have some kind of disability.”

With that said, she glanced somewhat nervously over at him, realizing that he would have to fit into one of those categories, wouldn’t he?

Aden hung a mosaic scarf on the back of his chair, the triangular patterns shifting in response to the color of the wood it was hanging on now, choosing bright colors further down the color wheel, complementing and highlighting the new tone. “It’s an inner ear thing,” Aden said. “I can’t process the information without getting dizzy.”

“I’m so sorry,” Kiri said.

But Aden smiled. “Why be sorry?” It had made him rich. It had led him here. It had allowed him to see her. He said as much, and she blushed.

She just started college, but was wondering if staying so close to home was a mistake. She’s smart, and ambitious, and graduated high school early and accelerated and lives at home.

He took her hand and let her lead him to a warm place at a friend’s where they could keep talking late into the night.

#

He was, as previously noted, a cool hunter.

To be more precise, he was a face hunter. Though, as he told Kiri, he and the handful of others in the trade called themselves ‘face huggers.’

She didn’t get it.

But that was okay, on the train ride back they locked themselves into each other’s orbits like a pair of blazing suns unable to escape each other.

#

What he did, he explained as they whipped between Pittsburgh and Philly, was study naked faces. Wearing contacts, or even glasses, that displayed real time information overlaying everything he saw made him dizzy due to some genetic condition.

So he wandered the world and really saw what he was looking at.

So all those faces, daubed with augmented reality camouflage, looked just like faces to him.

He saw the world for what it really was: upside down.

“The sort of face that takes the digital makeup is a plain face,” he said, somewhat absently. “Rounder, so all the markers get painted on. Flatter. Depth can be simulated by the processors. The average becomes a canvas, a canvas on which the software can do its magic.”

It used to be that they took a beautiful woman, an actress or a model, and then used airbrushes to remove the flaws. Plump bosoms. Smooth skin. Elongate the legs. Then came software tools, and models became little more than a base to then create digital perfection. They were dolls mapped to real humans.

Then it crept out of the pictures and into video, where expensive processing applied airbrushing in real time to moving, living breathing people. And it got better, and better.

Meanwhile, people are using devices to add virtual information to their real environment: maps, any contextual information, where your friends are, presents, games, business.

So you take the cosmetics companies, blowing their billions on trying to cake powders on faces, suddenly realizing almost everyone is seeing a world that doesn’t exist as part of their daily experience.

And you have digital makeup. Processors churning away, that thirty years ago would have been supercomputers and now fit in a speck, constantly taking the image of that person in front of you, and reinterpreting everything the receiver sees.

But it only works on faces within standard deviation.

Fall outside of that…and the software struggles. Can’t quite map your face to the projection.

It’s getting better all the time. But right now, a face hunter wants people with the faces that, a generation ago, would have blended into the background. Not been noticed.

People like Aden find a stunning canvas and turn them into walking sponsorship deals. Like a race car, brands will rush to get their designs virtually tattooed onto a person who stands out in the world.

And the only way to find that face is to walk around without the other realities hovering around, trying to obscure people’s faces and who they really are.

He’d dropped out of high school, unable to keep up with the skills needed to be…anything else but this. Aden was always hunting for faces. It didn’t make any sense to keep trying to pretend to be something else than he was.

#

The reality of their relationship foundered against the shores of high fashion in just days. Of course it did.

“How can you expect me to live in the middle of all that?” Kiri demanded from the other side of a table in a small cafe. They sat on the patio, which had curtains of hot air continuously blowing to make invisible thermal walls around them, keeping back the bitter cold.

“Of all what?”

“Those…people.”

“Those people are my friends,” Aden protested.

“They’re surrounded by made-up people. Beautiful people. Models. Aden, they stare at me.”

“They do not.”

“I fuzz at the edges. I know I do. They have to hold their heads still to let the software work. It’s embarrassing. I talked to your friend.”

“No, don’t,” Aden said, knowing where this was going.

“The doctor. He said he could help.”

“But…” he loved her the way she was. He wanted her to stay. “You don’t have to go to these things.”

“And I what? Be your little pretty apartment decoration that only you get to see? I have plans, Aden. I want to do things. See things. You can’t lock me away.”

She walked off through the curtain of warm air, hair kicked up, coat swirling.

#

“It’s not that I don’t want to stop you from doing something,” Aden whispered to her. “It’s that I’m wondering what comes next, after you do this?”

“Nothing will change,” she told him. “I promise.”

But he looked down at the tile floor when she said that, because he hated it when she lied to him.

It’ll cost money, he explained, to turn into something dead statistically average. And if she did it cheaply, then it wouldn’t be right.

If she was going to do this, he felt, she might as well do it well enough to become a part of his world. Do it right. Become a landscape any of his artist friends could apply their new algorithms and advanced digital processing to.

Let her become something amazing in the false world, then, as she was amazing in the real, now.

Aden made some calls. Leveraged some favors. Leveraged some of his existing portfolio’s royalties. Buried his face into Kiri’s hair and curled up with her, holding on to her like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood.

#

Here is Kiri’s face. They’ve immobilized her and positioned her face over the surgery machine, and it’s giving everyone live feed into the control center of the target.

The machine is a steel spider, six spindly arms poised, scalpels and other tools glinting in the sterile light of the small Brooklyn surgery. Everything gleams white. Sterile plastic. Stainless steel. Clear glass. The hum of bio-control fans and zap of ionized air.

Aden watches the monitors. They’re displaying mathematical renderings of Kiri, sucking the essence of her physicality back into themselves.

And then this virtual model of Kiri is examined by a million different subprocesses, rendering thousands of versions of her per second, testing them against the statistical averages of hundreds of millions of known public pictures of faces and the needs of digital cosmetic software.

What makes the best canvas?

That’s all the software cares about.

After ten minutes it offers Aden’s friend, the doctor, twenty permutations.

“Well? What do you think, Jason?” Aden asks.

Here is where the art comes in.

Jason’s in his fifties, but like many smart people, he’s never dismissed Aden’s age. He’s only picked up on Aden’s usefulness. Aden brings him clients that aren’t quite perfect…perfectly average.

Together they’ve built an empire.

Because Jason’s got a built-in ability to truly figure out what the most average is. A flick of the eye that is connected to some sort of inbuilt neurological ability honed by years of shaping faces and he’s picked out the best way forward on the machine’s list of choices.

Minutes later Kiri’s face is obscured by a whirl of fast movement from the articulated arms of the surgery machine, and blood begins to ooze from perfect lines in her face.

Aden found himself forced to leave the control room.

#

Aden borrowed a pair of glasses when he picked her up two days later. They made his head hurt, and everything felt herky-jerky and dizzying. He damned his brain, or inner ear, or whatever it was that made that slight disconnect between what he saw and what was projected onto his eyeballs, whatever it was that made them not quite match up.

They walked slowly along the sidewalk.

Halfway back to her small apartment, the one that her parents decided to pay for rather than allow her to live in some strange new boyfriend’s loft, he paused to throw up in a small patch of grass around a tree.

Kiri pretended not to notice.

#

It all comes apart, though, at Park 9.

They have no past. And they suddenly realize they have very little in common. He has little love of design, it’s just protective coloration for him. Lawyers wear conservative suits, Aden wears outrageous design.

And his love of unique, of out-of-place things, prevents him from loving this look. It’s a look that makes him fit in here. This isn’t like the midwest where he’s a peacock standing in the middle of cattle.

She has an ambition to go further he doesn’t have. She loves the brands and sponsors he orbits. He’s fallen into cool hunting because he can see things others can’t. There’s no drive behind it. But she knows the entire catalogue. She values it all more than he does.

But more fundamentally, deeper than all of that, because it doesn’t bug him too much, he sees her.

In a room full of broadcast realities, digital dragons sweeping around on the ceiling, distant lands visible just past the walls, he sees nothing. Nothing but the people.

He has left his glasses at home, and is looking directly at Kiri sadly.

“What are you staring at?” she demands.

“You,” he says.

#

Because sometimes love is that moment, Aden thinks. That spark when two people look across a room and wham, it’s over.

Neurologists say it’s quantifiable, that there are some people who just release the right chemicals. The ones that say: that person, who looks like that, who moves like that: that is the person we want to be around.

But it’s different now.

Yes, it should be a meeting of true minds. He understands that.

But it still feels like someone else is talking to him. Because he’d helped create someone else, back in that control room.

#

Outside of Park 9 he stands in the cold, shivering in his too-light jacket. He’s looking up the street at the intersection, and the lights cycling through red, yellow, and green.

Then he takes off the mirror shades and places them on the ledge and fades off.

Rumor has it, a while later, he’s gone back to school somewhere. Become obsessed with learning the code that powers augmented reality. Trying to increase the processing power so that reinterpretations of what you see is even smoother.

Rumor has it he’s made millions improving the algorithms. Always improving them. But never getting close enough to use them himself.

#

Which brings me back to these mirrorshades. They’re the same mirrorshades he left behind that night.

I don’t see anything through them, or through my eyes. I just see the same thing a newborn would. The glasses are no more than silvered pieces of glass. No datachips, no inline projectors to throw a world of data onto my eyeballs.

I kept them because I wanted to see the world as he saw it. Because I hated him for being such a shallow shit as to walk right out just because I’d changed my face.

You know I saw you, when you walked into this room. There among all the other wannabes. You stood out, you know that? Poise. Your hair. When you looked around, you did it with command.

It hurts me to say this, but you are stunning. That sharp jaw, those eyebrows. You are…something else.

Twenty years ago, everyone in this room would have stopped and seen it: instantly. That essence. You would have owned this whole place.

But now…

No one else can see it. They only see that other world.

You’re beautiful.

I’m sorry to say it.

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean born SF/F author and NYT bestseller who now lives in Ohio. He is the author of Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose, Halo: The Cole Protocol, and over forty short stories in various magazines and anthologies. His next novel, Arctic Rising, is due out sometime soon from Tor, and he’s working on his next book.