Behind our irises (Company upgrade 1) | Database of Machine Vision in Art, Games and Narratives

Brief description

The narrator is being upgraded to consultant, signing a contract where she agrees to being installed with a "non-invasive" pill-form technology called WeUs. After swallowing, the pill deposits nanobots behind her eyes, connecting her to the firm's networks, ferrying data to and fro. We see glimpses of the control and surveillance throughout the short story, but this is the beginning of her experience with it.

At first she feels sick, before feeling better and more productive than ever. She is being controlled, and she later notices that she starts staying later at work, doing harder workouts, spending more time with her colleagues and forgetting things.

Pull Quotes

Every eye in our firm runs surveillance programs behind its pupil. Connected through the authenticated enterprise cloud network to the central servers of the Firm. Able to detect corporate theft, infraction, abuse of work assets and more. Much more. I knew about the eyes but I only noticed the holes in our necks, stabbed into the jugular, into the carotid artery in that unsurveilled split second when my black pupils blinked silver and then back to black as the company automatically upgraded me. In that fraction of a second, when all their restraints loosened, I tried to scream.