The Elevator Anthology – Part V
The queue stretched three blocks. I’d been in 2035 for six hours and still didn’t understand what they were waiting for.
A shop. Perfect You in chrome lettering above glass doors that reflected the crowd back at themselves—hundreds of people in sleeping bags and folding chairs, clutching numbered tickets, faces illuminated by phone screens. The desperate patience of pilgrims.
In 2085, we queued for water rations during the droughts. For vaccine boosters during the respiratory plagues. For relocation permits when the coasts finally went under. We didn’t queue for clothing.
I moved closer. A woman near the front—fortysomething, well-dressed by contemporary standards—was explaining to a journalist why she’d been camping for three days.
“No, it’s not just clothes,” she was saying, her voice trembling with religious fervour. “It’s yourself. Your best self. Your real self.”
The journalist nodded as if this made perfect sense.
I’d miscalculated. When I’d designed the temporal displacement field—not an accident, whatever the review board would eventually conclude—I’d assumed this decade would be defined by its obvious catastrophes. Climate tipping points. Democratic collapse. The beginning of the resource wars. I’d come prepared to document the machinery of societal failure.
Instead, I found this.
The store opened at nine. I watched from across the street as the doors slid apart and the crowd surged forward in surprisingly orderly fashion, tickets clutched like winning lottery numbers. They filtered through security scanners, bag checks, the usual retail theatre. Then they reached the lifts.
All glass. Six of them, running up the side of the five-storey building like transparent veins. I could see everything.
A man entered the first lift alone. Middle-aged, slightly overweight, wearing a suit that had seen better days. The doors closed. For a moment, nothing. Then a blue light swept down from the ceiling—slow, methodical, clinical. A body scan. He stood perfectly still, arms slightly raised. Practised.
When the light finished, a screen inside the lift flickered to life. I couldn’t see what it displayed, but I saw his face. Hunger and wonder.
The lift chimed—bright, cheerful, like a gameshow announcing a winner.
When the doors opened on the first floor, he practically ran out.
I watched for two hours. The pattern repeated. Different people, same ritual. The scan, the screen, that expression, the chimes. They emerged transformed—their manner urgent, focused. Like addicts promised a fix.
I needed to understand the mechanism.
The ground floor had public screens—advertising, I assumed. Huge displays showing what I first took for models in various outfits. But the faces kept changing. Morphing. I moved closer.
Customers.
A woman walked past one of the screens, glanced at it, stopped dead. Her face stared back. Her exact face. The body was different—taller, slimmer, immaculate posture. The outfit was exquisite. She stood transfixed for a full minute before rushing toward the lift.
Another screen. Another customer. Another flawless reflection.
I looked at the screen nearest me. My own face didn’t appear. The display cycled through generic advertisements—contemporary fashion from brands I vaguely recognised from archival research. Dior. Gucci. Prada.
I hadn’t ridden the lift.
Over the next week, I mapped the progression.
The first-timers were easy to spot. They moved through the store with dazed euphoria, touching fabrics, holding garments up to themselves, constantly checking the screens. Every mannequin wore their face. Every reflection showed their potential. They bought carefully at first—a dress, a jacket, sensible purchases that quickly became less sensible as they realised they could sign up for store credit. The Perfect You Gold Card, offered at every till, approved in seconds.
They always left smiling.
The regulars came daily. I recognised them by their deteriorating appearances and increasing desperation. A man I’d seen on day one, well-dressed then, returned on day four in the same clothes, unwashed. He spent two hours on the second floor staring at a mannequin wearing his face before a security guard gently escorted him out. No money left. He stood outside afterwards, face pressed against the glass, watching the screens.
By day six, I saw him three streets over, still in that same suit. Filthy now. Sitting against a wall with a cardboard sign asking for change. He wasn’t looking at passersby. He was looking at a public screen mounted on the corner building—one of hundreds that lined the streets, embedded in bus shelters, glowing from shop windows. All showing the same rotating gallery of flawless selves.
His face appeared. Immaculate suit, styled hair, radiant smile. He reached toward it.
A woman dropped a coin in his cup without looking at him. He didn’t notice.
The screens were everywhere. I’d thought them localised to the shopping district. They weren’t. They spread through the city like a rash. Even in the alleys behind the retail blocks, where people who’d once been customers now huddled in doorways, the screens glowed, mounted on walls, impossible to avoid.
I watched a woman—thirty, maybe younger, hard to tell under the grime—standing at the mouth of an alley. She wore clothes that might have been expensive once. Now they hung off a frame that suggested she hadn’t eaten properly in weeks. A man approached her. Transaction. She nodded, followed him. Her eyes stayed on the screen above them.
Her face. Her flawless face. Wearing Valentino.
When she came back a quarter of an hour later, she stood in front of that screen for another ten minutes, just staring.
On day eight, I tried to intervene.
A young man, early twenties, was preparing to enter the lift. I’d been watching him queue for hours—first-timer, excited, kept checking his phone where he’d obviously screenshotted other people’s “perfect self” photos. Contemporary aspirational marketing, I suppose.
“Don’t,” I said, stepping in front of him.
He looked at me with the polite confusion of someone interrupted mid-ritual.
“It’s not what you think. The scan, the images—they’re designed to create compulsion. You won’t be able to stop buying. You’ll ruin yourself.”
He smiled. “That’s the point, though, isn’t it? To want to be better?”
“You’ll end up—” I gestured vaguely toward the street, toward the people sleeping rough three blocks over. “Like them.”
“They just didn’t manage their credit properly.” He stepped around me. “I’ll be fine.”
The lift doors closed. The blue light swept down. The screen flickered to life.
His face transformed into wonder.
The chimes sang.
I started documenting. Proper scientific observation, though I had no equipment beyond a basic phone I’d acquired on arrival. Notebook. Pen. Archaic methods for archaic times.
I checked my notepad:
- init exposure → psych dependency (immediate)
- return: 24-48 hrs
- collapse: 2-3 wks (financial → physical)
The screens maintain it. Even after the money’s gone. They just keep looking. No one stops. No one recovers.
Contemporary psychology would call it “aspirational identity disorder,” though that term wouldn’t be coined for another few years, if my memory of the history served. By 2040, it would be classified as a public health crisis. By 2050, regulated but never eliminated. By 2085, the algorithms were so sophisticated we didn’t even notice we were being manipulated anymore.
Or maybe we did notice. Maybe that was worse.
On day twelve, they announced the sale.
Fifty percent off everything. One day only. Doors open at 6am.
The queue formed at midnight. By dawn, it stretched seven blocks, wound around corners, disappeared into side streets. Thousands of people. Some I recognised—regulars, faces gaunt, clothes shabby, clutching the last of their credit. Others were new. Fresh victims drawn by the promise of discount perfection.
The crowd pressed against barriers that security had erected overnight. The energy was different from the usual patient desperation. Feverish. Volatile.
I positioned myself near the entrance, notepad ready, observing. Scientific distance becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
That’s when I heard them.
“Are you excited, darling?”
A woman’s voice, bright and warm. I turned.
Mother and daughter, standing just ahead of me in the crush. The girl was young—sixteen, maybe. Dark hair, nervous smile, clutching her mother’s arm. The mother was elegant, well-dressed, clearly a regular since opening day.
“I can’t believe I’m finally old enough,” the girl said. Her voice trembled.
“Well, sixteen is very grown-up. And I wanted your first time to be special.” The mother reached into her handbag, pulled out a small envelope. Gold embossed. “For you.”
The girl opened it. Her face lit up.
“Your very own Perfect You Gold Card,” the mother said. “Pre-approved. Five thousand pound credit limit to start.”
“Mum—”
“You’ll pay it off. Everyone does. And you deserve to see yourself properly. Your real self. The person you’re meant to be.”
Ice settled in my stomach.
The girl—Scarlett, I heard the mother call her—stared at the gold card like it was a key to heaven. “Do you think I’ll look good? In the clothes, I mean?”
“Darling, you’ll look perfect.”
The doors opened.
The crowd surged. I tried to hold my position, but the pressure was immense—bodies pressing forward with single-minded determination. Security shouted instructions that no one heeded. The barriers buckled.
I saw Scarlett and her mother swept toward the lifts. The girl’s face showed excitement and fear in equal measure. First time. The ultimate rite of passage in 2035, apparently. The moment you discovered your flawless self.
Scientific objectivity collapsing into something more human. Horror at watching it begin—the first scan, the first addiction, the first step toward the streets and the screens and the slow dissolution.
I pushed through the crowd.
“Wait—” I reached for Scarlett’s arm.
She turned, startled. “What?”
“Don’t go in the lift. Please. The scanning, the images—they’re designed to make you—”
“Let go of my daughter.” The mother’s voice, sharp.
“You don’t understand. I’ve been watching. The people who go in, they can’t stop. They spend everything. They end up—”
“She’s sixteen,” the mother snapped. “It’s her right to see herself properly.”
The crowd pressed harder. Someone shoved past me. I lost my grip on Scarlett’s arm.
“I’m trying to help—”
“We don’t need help from some—” The mother looked me up and down, taking in my unfashionable clothes, my absence from the screens around us. “Some nobody.”
Another surge. I was being pushed sideways, away from them. I saw Scarlett’s face over the heads of the crowd—uncertain now, looking back at me.
“Please—” I reached out again.
The crowd stampeded.
An elbow caught me. A shoulder. Multiple bodies converging. I stumbled, tried to keep my footing, failed. The momentum carried me forward, through the doors, past security who were too overwhelmed to notice one more person in the chaos.
Into the lift.
The doors closed.
I spun round, slammed my palm against them. “No—wait—”
The blue light descended.
I pressed myself against the doors, trying to escape it, but the lift was small and the light was thorough. It swept across my shoulders, down my spine, over my legs. Clinical. Methodical. Cataloguing every imperfection.
A screen flickered to life in front of me.
“Please review and accept terms and conditions to continue.”
Text scrolled. Legal language. Dense paragraphs about data usage, image rights, biometric processing. Scrolling too fast to read properly. At the bottom, a button: ACCEPT.
I didn’t touch it.
The text scrolled faster. The button pulsed.
“Please accept terms and conditions to continue.”
My hand trembled. I could hear the crowd outside, the chaos, Scarlett somewhere in the building seeing her flawless self for the first time. I needed to get out. Needed to find her. Needed to—
I pressed the button.
The screen went black.
Then: my face.
My face, but taller. Cheekbones sharper. Skin flawless. Hair styled in a way I’d never managed. The body I’d had at twenty-five, before the long hours in the lab, before the stress, before time did what time does.
Flawless.
The outfit materialised on the screen-me. Silk blouse in deep emerald. Tailored trousers that made my legs look endless. Shoes—those heels, stilettos, it would be unthinkable in 2085 for women to put themselves through that torture—that somehow looked comfortable on this version of me.
I stared.
That’s what I could look like. That’s who I could be. That’s—
The lift chimed.
Bright. Cheerful. Celebratory.
The doors opened onto the first floor.
I stepped out into Perfect You, and every mannequin wore my face.
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