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“My goodness! Stay cool.No offense.”
And that’s coming from Miss Touchy. Yasira bites back a retort. She’s too exhausted to argue.
Instead, she looks at the picture of the influencer her daughter is styling herself after.
“Who is that actually?”
“That’s Mila.”
“What can Mila do?” her mother asks. “Is she a singer? Athlete? Actress?”
Zara smiles.
“Nothing like that.”
In my day, Yasira thinks, you had to be good at something to be famous... but then she stops herself. That’s probably not true.
“You do realize that these pictures make you believe in an unattainable ideal of beauty?” she asks instead. “She doesn’t really look like that. First of all, she uses more makeup than the Joker. And secondly, they apply lots of Photoshop filters and...”
Zara laughs. She immediately sees through the fact that Yasira herself only has a very rudimentary understanding of what she’s saying.
“I just mean, this Mila isn’t really like that...”
“Of course she’s not real, Mom,” says Zara, “I know that. It’s not a secret. Only the most limited of Mila’s followers think she’s real. I mean, it’s even in her description that she’s an artificially generated person. For most of those who pretend she’s real, it’s just a game.”
Yasira sits up abruptly. “What are you saying?” she asks. Some neurons in her brain are vehemently pressing the elevator button.
“Well, Mila is a completely virtual character. Created on a computer.”
Yasira gets up and practically rips the phone out of the charging station. She swipes through Mila’s TikTok account.
“But... but... these aren’t just pictures. They’re videos. She dances, she sings, she does yoga, for fuck’s sake.”
Zara shrugs her shoulders.
“So,” asks Yasira, “there’s an actress who pretends to be a virtual influencer?”
Zara shakes her head. “Seriously, mom? No. There is no actress. There are no shooting locations. There is no filming. The videos are computer generated.”
“What? How does that work?”
Zara laughs. “How that works? I have no clue. But haven’t you ever heard of ChatGPT and all that?”
Of course she’s heard of it. But that’s text, isn’t it? And, as she’s heard, not very reliable either. Sometimes the results are astonishing, and at other times completely useless.
“And yeah, that kind of thing exists for images too—and now even for videos. The really good shit isn’t publicly accessible yet. But Mila’s creators have access to the best.”
Yasira sits there as if struck by lightning. The beginning ofBohemian Rhapsodyrings through her head.Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
“What’s wrong?” asks her daughter. “You’re really pale.”
“For a week now,” says Yasira, “we’ve been looking for the people in that damn video. And we can’t find anything. Not a single lead.” Yasira is almost afraid to utter her next thought, it seems so outrageous to her. She does it anyway. “What if it’s because these people don’t actually exist?”
“Huh?”
“No, no. That’s impossible. Lena is real. Was real. Ah... damn! I spoke to her father. With her teachers. Unless...”
She still holds her daughter’s phone in her hand and opens Lena Palmer’s Instagram account. It’s huge now. Gaining new followers every day. She shows her daughter the photos and videos of Lena.
