She was excited because—

She’d been discovered. By a scout for a television production. Movies, TV series, that shit was the last 1.0-based job field where there was still ample work for wetware. People (without jobs) who still had time to watch television didn’t want to see avatars being amorous. They wanted to see real people, with human emotions. Content providers were marshaled to replace every aspect of life, including watching TV, with something similar to television, offering series and films by the ton to keep people who were unemployed or marginally employed from having any thoughts at the end of a day of work or while standing for hours in line at the food bank. It didn’t work. You had to make decisions on those platforms, which few found themselves in any shape to do. So there was still television, kind of. With wonderful light entertainment. For all these various formats and series and programs, they needed, shall we say, performers. Lots of them. The viewers wanted to see new faces; it was enough to have to live with one’s own every day. There were about three million performers on virtual reality shows and movies on the island, all of whom had just one goal: prepare people for their futures. Create habits so that changes in reality wouldn’t attract attention. Just as the American dream had, through state-subsidized books and movies, been used to create a desire in people to consume and accept their roles in society, movies and shows like The Matrix, The Walking Dead, Terminator, and Big Brother had in the recent past prepared people for what the future held for them.

Almost all British reality shows were set in social housing blocks and concerned the foundering poor or gangs or teen mothers or sex slaves, so that anyone who had not yet landed there at the very bottom felt scared and kept quiet, and anyone already there saw themselves and were pacified. Nearly all scripted television series were set in the country and concerned happy, confident domestic servants, edifying country doctors and police officers, all of them roaming through Oxford because it still looked the way everyone wished England looked, the way England had for the majority of people never been—sophisticated, charming, eccentric. Nearly all movies were set after an apocalypse. There were always EMP bombs set off, which knocked out the power. There were always fires, financial meltdowns, plagues, and people who were very fit, running around, because they were so fit, and managed for that reason to escape the calamity.