16 •Metro Magazine 195 | © ATOM
freedom from constraint. Monitored
by her colleague Byron (Clarence
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sport simulations: skydiving, rock
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reclines in a seat resembling a
dentist’s chair, a white, rubbery
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(‘paired’, like a Bluetooth device,
with Byron’s computer). Byron
drips thesoftware into her eye
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cornea. The screen dissolves
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a luxurious alpine chalet. We hear
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they rest on her legs. In these early
adventure sequences, segments
of POV footage mingle with more
conventional shots, montaged with the verve of tourism com
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reaction shots of her surveying her surroundings with calm
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antly stops her snowboard.
But a glitch in the code sends the simulation into a recur
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ing to herself, ‘It’s just code. It’s just code.’
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deliberately oppressive series of POV shots. Byron looms
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ampoule he’s holding, darkening the entire frame. We spend
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her legs, touches the prison uniform she now wears, and
inspects her cell as the camera tilts hesitantly up. As she
registers its smallness, the camera slowly dollies out so that
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tion trope of demonising technology and moving towardsa denouement in which the
protagonist concludes it must
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derstands the ritualistic pleasure
in the genre’s interface between
bodies, hardware and software.
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serum – so reminiscent of the
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tions between real and virtual worlds.
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fateful accident and rouse him from his coma, is at least
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nology – whether they be developers, vendors or consumers
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who destroy their ‘real’ intimate relationships in the pursuit of
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protagonist’s crisis to explore the intersections of trauma, eth
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who lost his baby son to a rare genetic disease, has built
his entire life around seeking a cure. But when he stumbles
across a secret virus lab maintained by a creepy colleague,
he devastatingly ends up becoming patient zero.
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speculative TV series!K@BJ ,HQQNQ LV VHW LQ D QHDUIXWXUH LQ
which most people have a computer implant (known as a
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Whittaker) of having cheated on him, and obsessively combs
his – and their – digital memories for evidence. In one de
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a previous encounter on their respective grains (recalling
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his darkened, empty home, compulsively comparing it to the
same space during happier times. Of course, we humans will
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!K@BJ,HQQNQ’s point is that media technologies enable and8LI ÁPQ ̧W ZMVXYEPVIEPMX]
narrative, as well as its
international production history,
situates it within a cosmopolitan
strand of Australian genre
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concerned with national
identity than with exploring
broader philosophical and
ethical concerns.