The Space Between Faces
The atrium of Halcyon Dynamics breathes light. Not sunlight—nothing so ordinary—but a manufactured luminescence that pulses faintly with the rhythm of ambient music, gold and rose-white, spilling from the ceiling in sheets that seem to have weight, texture, like something you could reach up and touch. Claire Morgan stands near the back of the crowd with a glass of champagne she has no intention of drinking, and watches four hundred faces that are not, technically, faces at all.
Everyone here wears an overlay. Mirror 5.0, most of them—last year's model, still serviceable, still capable of scrubbing the small embarrassments of being human off a person's projected image. The effect is subtle if you don't know what you're looking for. Claire knows what she's looking for. She's spent three years writing about this industry, long enough to recognize the telltale smoothness at the corner of an overlaid mouth, the way exhaustion gets filtered into something that reads, to the naked eye and to the cameras, as serene contentment.
She dims her own overlay to fifteen percent—habit, professional distrust dressed up as journalistic integrity—and the room changes color slightly, loses some of…
