If you prefer audio, find the podcast version here: https://thecyberdelicpodcast.buzzsprout.com/

The following is a short story by renowned sci-fi author Alastair Reynolds, commissioned by Auki Labs. It is the third short story published on our Medium about the future of AR.

The recent announcement of Apple’s Vision Pro headset has brought renewed attention to humanity’s future with augmented reality. Spatial computing is an incredibly powerful concept, and we’ve long argued that it represents the future of human communication — but there is a dark side to augmented reality that is important to discuss: privacy.

Visual positioning, which is the dominant way of anchoring AR content, is reliant on comparing camera feeds to a central database of what the world looks like. Put plainly — it’s based on a transaction where you tell a vendor what you’re looking at and they tell you where you are.

Alastair Reynolds’ “End User” is a chilling reminder, if one could call a vision of the future that, of why it is important for us as a society to reject surveillance capitalism and think critically about how AR will be delivered to us. We should never allow corporations to see through our eyes.

-Nils Pihl, CEO Auki Labs

Doug Phale was nearly back at his apartment when the drone came down, lowering onto his balcony with a white package fixed to its belly. After a moment it rose again, the delivery completed. Doug watched it speed away into the gathering haze of early evening, its green and red LEDs soon lost in the background lights of other drones, office windows and construction cranes.

A homeless man sprung at Doug as he neared the steps to the communal entrance.

‘Try these, fella. Try these!’

The man thrust a thin, shrink-wrapped package into Doug’s face.

Doug got a whiff of poverty as he pushed past, grateful that he had already fished out his key pass and had no need to linger on the doorstep. He shut the door behind him, moving back into the cool and gloom of the lobby, eyeing the vagrant until some cops moved him on.

Doug went up to the apartment, let himself in. The rooms were quiet, Martha not yet home from her office.

That suited Doug.

He slid open the balcony door and scooped up the package. It was a flat white box, about fifteen centimetres on a side. Nothing was written on it: no delivery address or return information.

‘The Gaugs?’ Doug mused aloud.

It was true that they advertised fast delivery, but in an era of corporate over-promising the rapidity of the process was still surprising. It was no more than forty-five minutes since Doug had opened the app and completed the ridiculously simple online application. In the time since he had done nothing except go to a coffee shop, tinker listlessly with his CV, and then pick up a stick of bread.

He rattled the box. It felt empty, curiously contentless, like a shipment of high-grade vacuum.

Doug had needed to provide only one piece of information for the delivery of his own pair of Gaugs: just a reference for a drop-off point. It could have been anywhere in the city, but he had opted for his balcony because he knew the three word positioning code off by heart.

Sucker. Downgrade. Regret.

Doug returned indoors, parked himself at the kitchen table, and tore open the flimsy cardboard packaging.

It was the Gaugs.

They were secured by a pair of cardboard flaps, folded up from an inner tray made from the same cardboard as the rest of it. Nothing else was in the box: no documentation, no warranty, no safety information, and no charging lead.

Just a pair of ordinary-looking glasses.

Doug extracted them from the flaps, inspecting them while they were still — practically — box-fresh, almost untouched by human hands.

They felt disposable. Doug had anticipated something heavier, something clearly and obviously jammed with intricate high technology.

Not so.

The Gaugs looked in no way remarkable. There was no branding on them, no logo.

He slipped off his own glasses and put on the Gaugs.

They slipped down his nose, but only for an instant. With a faint insect buzz, the glasses adjusted to his facial contours. He waggled his head, the Gaugs staying fixed.

The view through them was nothing special, though.

‘Not much use if these don’t come with prescription lenses,’ he said aloud, ready to put the Gaugs back in the box. They would never fit over his old glasses, and his old glasses were too small to wear over the Gaugs.

Something began.

As he looked around his blurred surroundings, boxes appeared over items of interest in his apartment. The bread stick, the wastebasket, their couch, the TV, the Felix-the-cat wall-clock his mother had bought him when he moved in with Martha. As his involuntary attention snapped to these items, they lurched into temporary focus.

Finally the Gaugs had him look out the window to a series of increasingly distant, dusk-lit objects.

A message flashed up:

<>

Everything sharpened. Everything became, in some tiny but perceptible fashion, brighter, more actively present. Doug understood: the lenses weren’t just correcting the usual defects of vision, they were compensating for age-related degeneration, amplifying the intensity photons before they hit his retinae, and performing subtle colour-balance readjustment.

He was once more seeing the world through a child’s eyes, unfiltered by time and decay.

Doug looked down at his old glasses, rendered stark by the new lenses. The history of wear on them was embarrassingly obvious: the chipped metallic coating, the scuffed lenses, and the greasy residue around the nose pads. Small wonder his last few interviews had led to nothing, if he had been wearing those. He might as well have gone in with clown shoes.

Doug swept the old glasses into the trash.

*

Doug spent the next hour just wandering around the apartment marvelling at the freakish newness of everything. It was if he had moved in somewhere more upscale, but with exactly the same layout as the old place. He spent twenty minutes staring at the fridge door, its coloured plastic letters suddenly empowered with new, luminous significance, as if they had been coloured in by monks.

He moved the letters around until they spelled NEW DOUG.

He loitered on his balcony, staring out across a city transformed, swept clean. It was as if a microscopic layer of soot had been pressure-washed off every surface, including the sky. The cars below were improbably shiny under the streetlights, like cars in commercials. A distant speckle of police and ambulance lights where the pedestrian bridge crossed the weir looked like something from the James Webb telescope; some far-off galactic marvel of stellar birth and death. Doug guessed that they were extracting a floater from the river, where they tended to ram up against the weir.

Doug ventured to the bathroom mirror. He checked out his reflection. The Gaugs were not dissimilar in style to his own glasses, but they suited him rather better. They framed his face, shaving off a few years.

Temporarily exhausted by all this brilliant newness, Doug needed to sit down for a few minutes. It was overwhelming!

Another message popped up:

<>

Doug stayed in the chair, but waggled his head a bit. After a minute or so of that, the message faded out.

Doug glanced at the Felix-the-cat wall-clock.

The Gaugs painted a glowing clock over Felix, telling the same time. Actually it was a few minutes faster, because Felix was running slow. This new glowing clock then shrank itself down and scuttled up into Doug’s upper right visual field.

Under the new glowing clock was a set of six digits:

00:00:00

Doug had no idea what that was all about, but he imagined it would become clear in time.

*

Martha came home at eight thirty. They pottered around and discussed job applications and dinner plans. Doug made no mention of the Gaugs, thinking it would only be a matter of time before Martha detected the difference in him, but she was either faking him out or had failed to notice the change.

Doug had already disposed of the packaging by then, tipping the scraps of white cardboard into the basket on top of his old glasses.

They had a glass of wine each and she asked him how his updated CV was coming on.

Doug made a noncommittal sound.

Eventually he went out to fetch a Chinese. He took out the trash at the same time: collection day was tomorrow. It was only a few blocks to their usual Chinese so he walked rather than having it delivered, feeling a new spring in his stride. The evening was pleasant, the sky a shimmering burnt orange. He caught his reflection a few times as he passed shop fronts, surprised at his confident, go-get-it bearing.

In the Chinese Doug chose their usual favourites from the menu and produced his nearly maxed-out card. As he made to tap it, the Gaugs dropped a box around the part where his name was embossed.

<>

‘Wait, what?’ he mouthed.

As he returned to the apartment, the spring in his stride was a bit less bouncy.

Martha had settled into one of her weird, brittle moods. Playful, but slightly arch, as if she was in on some private joke. He glanced at the wine bottle, wondering how much she had drunk while he was out.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Who’s “New Doug”?’ she asked, cocking her h