known better than to attempt the track in trainers. The wet soaked through my socks.
A serviceman picked his way towards me. I recognised him by his hair – albino white and wild. He was in trouble. His vest tick-tocked , tick-tocked , useless in this maze, and he wove from one side of the track to the other, unable to plan his line. How easily he might have stumbled off between the trees. The river ran behind them, sluggish and slow-moving; it made no sound.
Dad’s blinded servicemen didn’t often come this way into town. Their goggled, low-resolution blindsight handled the box-like architectures of the housing estate much more easily. The ambiguous and busy undergrowth of the track tended to confuse them. Here, they’d have been better served by a stick, a dog, a sense of hearing.
The white-haired man walked with a defensive, mechanical stiffness. I recognised it. I recognised him . We approached each other. In army boots he overcame the uneven ground. My presence confused him. When I veered left, he veered right, straight towards me. I skipped to one side to avoid him. He stopped and turned to me. The sun glittered off his goggles and winked in the lens of the camera mounted on his left earpiece. His chest chattered monotonously as he stood, perfectly still, the machine at his hip repeating, in regular pulses, the scene before him. Boy against foliage.
I said, ‘Good afternoon.’
His face showed no recognition. His hand worked at his fly and his erection slid into the light, hard and white and as long as a dagger.
EIGHT
‘W hat do you do, Conrad?’
We are sitting, Hanna and I, against the upturned hulk of a fishing boat, staring at the waves.
‘I work for an AR company.’
The contrast between Hanna’s life of muscular simplicity and my day job could hardly be greater. Hanna planes and scrapes, drills and sands. I spend my days stroking glass panels, bringing images to life against their printed target. This is what AR stands for: Augmented Reality. ‘We turn newspapers and magazines into rich media. Every newspaper photograph becomes its own TV channel . . .’
The ocean has piled the shingle steeply, and even on a day as calm as this, the waves churn and plunge with a terrible violence. No way could you ever swim in this. The pebble bank is very high, and where we’re sat, half way down its stepped incline, we have no view of the desert expanse at our back. Even the tops of the lighthouses are hidden. We are trapped between the pebble wall and the roaring sea.
‘Basically,’ I tell her, ‘it’s advertising. It’s about laying an advertising layer over the physical world.’
‘Is it difficult?’
‘Not especially. Mathematically it can mess with your head but intellectually it’s on a par with casting a ghost onto a sheet of glass. An old stage trick.’ The core of our AR business is a billboard system. Image recognition software running on a smartphone or a pair of web-enabled spectacles sews moving pictures over a static target. Someone walking past an ad for the latest movie will see the hoarding spring to life, screening its trailer.
‘And everyone can see your ghosts?’
‘Anyone stood behind some web-enabled glass. It’s all a bit art-student at the moment, but there’s a lot of commercial interest.’
Hanna thinks about this. She says, ‘But it’s all the wrong way round. People are having to go out of their way to see your advertising.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’re having to put on funny glasses, or raise a phone to their faces. Who goes to that much trouble just to see an advert?’
‘At the moment, yes, you’re right.’ I pick up a pebble and throw it into the sea. ‘But web-enabled glasses look like they’ll be flying off the shelves next year. It’s only a matter of time before the web becomes wearable, just another form of clothing between you and the world.’ Biting the bullet, I describe the future as my employers see it: a giant mall overlaid
A serviceman picked his way towards me. I recognised him by his hair – albino white and wild. He was in trouble. His vest tick-tocked , tick-tocked , useless in this maze, and he wove from one side of the track to the other, unable to plan his line. How easily he might have stumbled off between the trees. The river ran behind them, sluggish and slow-moving; it made no sound.
Dad’s blinded servicemen didn’t often come this way into town. Their goggled, low-resolution blindsight handled the box-like architectures of the housing estate much more easily. The ambiguous and busy undergrowth of the track tended to confuse them. Here, they’d have been better served by a stick, a dog, a sense of hearing.
The white-haired man walked with a defensive, mechanical stiffness. I recognised it. I recognised him . We approached each other. In army boots he overcame the uneven ground. My presence confused him. When I veered left, he veered right, straight towards me. I skipped to one side to avoid him. He stopped and turned to me. The sun glittered off his goggles and winked in the lens of the camera mounted on his left earpiece. His chest chattered monotonously as he stood, perfectly still, the machine at his hip repeating, in regular pulses, the scene before him. Boy against foliage.
I said, ‘Good afternoon.’
His face showed no recognition. His hand worked at his fly and his erection slid into the light, hard and white and as long as a dagger.
EIGHT
‘W hat do you do, Conrad?’
We are sitting, Hanna and I, against the upturned hulk of a fishing boat, staring at the waves.
‘I work for an AR company.’
The contrast between Hanna’s life of muscular simplicity and my day job could hardly be greater. Hanna planes and scrapes, drills and sands. I spend my days stroking glass panels, bringing images to life against their printed target. This is what AR stands for: Augmented Reality. ‘We turn newspapers and magazines into rich media. Every newspaper photograph becomes its own TV channel . . .’
The ocean has piled the shingle steeply, and even on a day as calm as this, the waves churn and plunge with a terrible violence. No way could you ever swim in this. The pebble bank is very high, and where we’re sat, half way down its stepped incline, we have no view of the desert expanse at our back. Even the tops of the lighthouses are hidden. We are trapped between the pebble wall and the roaring sea.
‘Basically,’ I tell her, ‘it’s advertising. It’s about laying an advertising layer over the physical world.’
‘Is it difficult?’
‘Not especially. Mathematically it can mess with your head but intellectually it’s on a par with casting a ghost onto a sheet of glass. An old stage trick.’ The core of our AR business is a billboard system. Image recognition software running on a smartphone or a pair of web-enabled spectacles sews moving pictures over a static target. Someone walking past an ad for the latest movie will see the hoarding spring to life, screening its trailer.
‘And everyone can see your ghosts?’
‘Anyone stood behind some web-enabled glass. It’s all a bit art-student at the moment, but there’s a lot of commercial interest.’
Hanna thinks about this. She says, ‘But it’s all the wrong way round. People are having to go out of their way to see your advertising.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’re having to put on funny glasses, or raise a phone to their faces. Who goes to that much trouble just to see an advert?’
‘At the moment, yes, you’re right.’ I pick up a pebble and throw it into the sea. ‘But web-enabled glasses look like they’ll be flying off the shelves next year. It’s only a matter of time before the web becomes wearable, just another form of clothing between you and the world.’ Biting the bullet, I describe the future as my employers see it: a giant mall overlaid
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