Users by Colin Winnette

Author:Colin Winnette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

A popular history of the company would later report that in these days, “their capital was exceeded only by their luck.” Not long after Miles and Lily birthed the idea of the Egg, the company struck gold a second time when they were approached by a medical hardware lab developing hyperresponsive casts for patients with paralyzed limbs. These were bionic sleeves that, when properly calibrated to the wearer, could reproduce the basic tasks of a functioning limb. In practice, they were crude but effective. For the company, it was the most promising technology they’d seen so far.

Instead of investing in the lab, as they were being asked to do, the company had swallowed it, purchasing its hardware, data, and research teams outright, and putting all of it to work on the development of a self-contained unit they could pair with their proprietary headsets. There was an initial protest purge, the result of which was a thirty percent loss of new employees, most of whom returned to the medical field. The company’s executives referred to this period as “tailoring” (getting the fit right), and afterward Miles and Lily were returned to the software side of the company, leaving what was left of the lab’s team to deliver on their concept.

Nearly a year of research, adaptation, and enormous expense led to a single, successful prototype: a self-contained pod that would someday, maybe, hopefully, be a fixture in the average person’s living room. More important, the pod could do almost exactly what Miles and Lily had imagined. It could manipulate and respond to a user’s whole body, all at once, in “perfect dystopian harmony,” as Lily described it.

After the success of the first unit, they made two dozen more. Twenty were not-so-randomly distributed among beta testers, half of whom were directly or indirectly tied to investors; two went to executive leads on the project; and, to their surprise, Miles and Lily were each provided an Egg of their own.

The company talked about the Eggs as if they were being given to Miles and Lily as rewards for years of hard work, like exorbitantly expensive commemorative plaques, but the underlying message was that Miles and Lily would need to become intimately familiar with the new hardware’s functionality so that they could start brainstorming ideas for the future of the company’s OEs.

Arguably, OEs were no longer necessary, as their primary function could now be fulfilled by interactions among the users themselves. But as the landscape of the industry had shifted and grown, the company had discovered another source of potential value in the development of OEs as marketable IP.

Smaller companies with no hope of overtaking them were eager to exploit syndication rights, sequels, reboots, expanded worlds—anything to attach themselves to the bigger fish and cling for dear life. Unexpectedly, and via one of the most circuitous routes imaginable, the company had found itself in the larger, semi-legitimate entertainment studio position it had once hoped to hold. (A bit of discarded copy from the company’s second profitable year had referred to them as “The Netflix of experience.

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