What is 23/7 about?
’23/7′ weaves together some of the themes of ‘Brave New World’ (apparent utopia), ‘1984’ (sinister regime) and ‘Fahrenheit 451’ (mass dumbing down), placing them in a modern context, where AI is embedded into daily life. All these classics continue to resonate, and all have enjoyed recent resurges in popularity, ‘1984’ especially.
The best seller ‘Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow’ indicates there is strong interest in examining how we continue to give meaning to our lives as technology continues its giddy development. It ends with the question: ‘What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?’ It is one of the biggest questions that we face, and ’23/7′ looks forward into this near future. It asks – if everything is done for us, what are we for? How do we structure society and give meaning to our lives, and how do we cope with self-interest and downright evil? It is told through the eyes of characters at each level of society, and love and treachery abound.
In terms of genre, ‘23/7’ is literary speculative fiction. As Margaret Atwood would say – there are no aliens: it could really happen. All the technology in the novel already exists, albeit sometimes in nascent form.
The blurb for 23/7:
When everything is done for you, what is there left to do? When everything about you is recorded and monitored, what are you allowed to do?
In 23/7, John and Sue are Standbys. What they are on standby for they don’t know. Sue seems happy, but John wants more than his statutory minimum of one hour’s surface time. Old memories keep bubbling up from how it was before.
Rachel is a Worker kept busy with made-up tasks. She can’t suppress her natural curiosity, which makes it hard to follow the Workers’ motto ‘move forward, don’t look back’.
The planet is recovering nicely from previous human excesses, there is lasting peace, and, thanks to the system, there is no hunger or poverty. Where should the Controllers take the world next? The sinister Ralph believes it is too risky to allow any freedoms and jealously seeks to protect his own privilege. The enigmatic Archie worries that we are fast becoming redundant and risk sleepwalking into our demise. In an attempt to get back to real life, he has set up a Colony.
A new class of Controllers will graduate soon. Martha has been mentored by Archie, and Ralph tries to take Nathan under his wing. Meanwhile, Rachel meets Max who has been billeted with John and Sue as part of his Controller training. Amidst love and treachery, the new and future Controllers rise as beacons of hope. But if the Colony is to be expanded and we are to get back to real life, will the new religion of Melior be enough to stop us reverting to our old ways?
23/7 ends with a precarious optimism. Will it be sustained in The Book of Melior?
23/7 is a cautionary tale from my time in business. It paints a world where we have outsourced the living of our daily lives to convenience and the technology that enables it, a world where artificial intelligence, social media, ultraprocessed food, gaming and augmented reality are embedded. Like a Margaret Atwood novel, it feels shiveringly recognisable.
Here is the Prologue from 23/7:
My great grandfather once told me, before he died, that when he travelled, he could never decide whether the train had left the station. Did the scenery move, and the train stay where it was? He must have passed on his love of travel. His son worked on the buses until they too disappeared.
I never took a train. They had long been abandoned before I came into existence. Perhaps it was the pictures he showed me of them that made me grapple with something very similar as a child. I was never convinced that I really moved. I was never sure that I met new people. To me, people I came across were composites of types I’d met before, cobbled together to give an illusion of diversity. Places were an amalgam of locations I’d already visited. By whatever means I was transported to these places, these hastily assembled reconfigurations of places I’d been to before, the journey was nothing more than a back projection. A back projection manipulated by stagehands to give an illusion of travelling – or a carefully edited green screen.
Stagehands? Editors? Who were these people? A psychologist would point out that each child believes that the world revolves around them. Have no regard for realism or practicality in this child’s world view! Of course, there were people rushing about organising scenery, making composite extras, editing – their job was to create the illusion. The child must be entertained; the transport must seem to move.
It turns out that my great grandfather was onto something, and I was not far wrong. Had it not been for my nose, I might never have realised. Curious when you think that noses are associated with smell and what I am primarily talking about here is another sense – sight. Yes, as long as I can remember, I have been conscious of being able to see the end of my nose in my field of vision. Maybe everyone can if they really look, but they’ve never noticed? Try it. For me, it’s always been there – a reassuring sense of self.
And when it ceased to be there, initially even I didn’t notice.
Immersion. Fulfilment. From Immersion, the gift of Fulfilment that gave purpose and kept the world in check, sealing the fate of humankind. Immersed, Fulfilment could transport you anywhere. Adventure. Ambition. Achievement. Status. Fear. Loathing. Sex. Any feeling. Any emotion. Any sensation – in any place at any time. And whilst everyone was transported away, so was I initially… Until that peripheral vision, that sense of self, that presence of my nose started to interfere with the perfect vision Immersion brought.
Suspension of disbelief. What a wonderful phrase. We’ve all experienced it. The feeling of timelessness, of being part of something else, of being part of the story. Haven’t we all also experienced the spoiler? The niggling voice in the head that gets in the way of complete suspension, that worries about a task not done, a problem that might surface tomorrow.
And so it was, bit by bit, with my nose. My Immersion should have delivered perfect suspension – complete Fulfilment from whatever experience I was part of… But the real world kept nibbling away, and started to drag me back from the experience, kept me aware that it was just an experience and that I also existed outside the experience.
But what do you do when you think you may be trapped in an experience that has been curated for you – and you have become aware of it? It’s not obvious, is it?
You could conclude that you are mad, in which case, you probably try to put it to one side, ignore it in other words. Not give in to the visions within. Or you might conclude that it’s a conspiracy. That someone or something is subjecting you to a forced out-of-body experience.
Either way, terrifying as it might be, you say nothing. And that is all I could do, until I was rescued and could piece together the story I bring to you now. I wasn’t in the Ark for long. Others were in it for years, maybe their whole life… but it’s over now.
Several of the characters’ names have been changed. There may no longer be any need to protect their identity, but old habits die hard.
JN