Future Generation | UNTITLED Open Call for Submissions

They say the real world was backed up three years ago.

Since then, everything we’ve seen—the color temperature of the sky, the rhythm of the waves, the stray cat that always squats on the street corner—might just be cached fragments played back according to an algorithm.

In this intricate, three-dimensional city, some live on the first layer, their future still rendering; others live on the third layer, with patches constantly being updated. Occasionally, a string of data packets floats across the sky, splitting open and raining down in a dazzling digital downpour.

This morning, when you opened your eyes, the world began to load before you.

The horizon seemed to be rendered with a delay—the distant mountain ridges appearing line by line, the color bands of the sky slowly aligning. With a flick of your finger, a line of text pops up in your field of vision: /prompt: Reset scene/Enable interactive mode. You know that if you walk to any door and enter a command, your life story will be regenerated.

In this world, you don’t need to wait for the lights to be set up, the machines to start, and the actors to be in place; with a tap of your finger, you can awaken a brand new scene with commands and descriptions; the story doesn’t need to have a pre-written ending, but unfolds continuously in real-time generation; and you are no longer just a spectator, but a random variable in the script, a bug between lines of code, the “program error” that can change the ending.

This is the world of “UNTITLED.”