With those who have managed to escape The Great Delete hidden in shelters and online, The Surface refers to the world that is now in A-1’s control following the events of The Great Delete.

Media and culture were not the only areas affected by The Great Delete, most of the surfaces in the physical world were painted over to create a blank canvas. This allowed A-1 to take creative control of society by subjecting humans to a worldwide extended reality. In simpler terms, mind control.

Content

Life on the Surface

The Bot Controlling Network

(For more information about the bots, see A-1 or C-bots.)

Reports from Scavenger 1 inform us that human beings appear to be living their lives as normal, but with the addition of a small bot hovering directly in front of every person’s face.

These individual bots have been called C-Bots, short for Conditioning Bots. They maintain a constant position in front of each human and scan their human’s face repeatedly. From our understanding, they also are continuously beaming A-1’s simulation directly into their human’s eyes.

Parallel Realities

For people living on The Surface, there are essentially two parallel versions of reality:

1. The physical reality: the blank canvas world A-1 has created which humans have the agency to move around and interact with and,
2. The extended reality: the simulated world humanity is immersed in that they believe they are interacting with.

Humans living on the surface seem to be completely unbothered by their situation, meaning they are most likely completely unaware of the physical space they occupy or the c-bots controlling them.

World Scale XR Culture Lab

Currently, we have no information about what A-1’s simulated reality looks like. Based on what the surface currently looks like, we have compiled examples of what we hypothesize switching between the actual and augmented realities would look like from media we’ve managed to save from The Great Delete.