Cirrus@Austlit

'In 2022, as AI-generated images began to populate our social media feeds, RnB artist SZA released Ghost in the Machine, in which she sings: ‘Robot got future, I don’t.’ The future and the present are uncomfortably close in Grace Chan’s Every Version of You, where the characters inhabit a world that is startingly familiar to ours. The protagonist, a young woman named Tao-Yi and her partner Navin live in Southbank, Melbourne, where the average outdoor temperature is too hot for prolonged exposure. Other than the climate, places such as Berwick, Townsville and Port Douglas are recognizable. Most people wear ‘Revisions’, AI-augmented interfaces which filter the world and provide useful information, including temperature, radiation, and airborne pollution levels. Characters consume ersatz food like Koffee and use robotic vacuum cleaners. Nursing homes employ droids to deal with old people. All these things build on current trajectories to create a mid-2100 era that feels too close to home, from technology to language use. Internet slang like ‘meatspace’, for example, has been adapted to become vernacular to describe the physical world as opposed to being in Gaia, where most of the characters in Every Version of You spend their time.' (Introduction)