Seven Players

Cut! I always hear this word when I wake up from my “acting dream”—as we call our time on set—and come back to my true reality, panting loudly as if haunted by terror. I look around wildly. Familiar large windows covered with red curtains loom in the dim light. My room. Someone has just transported me here from the set. Again.

So it’s over. Fifteen minutes ago I took part in the first scene of Seven Players: Season 1. It’s the post-apocalyptic serial of the Emperial Metropolis—a production so big that it will gather around the screens all the inhabitants of the Seven Metropolises and perhaps also the poor people from the Outer Slums and the Underground District.

Of course, I don’t remember anything after waking up from an acting dream. Because I don’t perform normally, like a real actor in a film. The truth is ... I don’t even know what happens during my performance. When I’m supposed to act in a movie or a serial, I have to be sedated by special preparations—sleeping pills—and some quantum waves, so that the film coordinators can turn on an artificial consciousness hidden in a special nanochip in my brain. We call this consciousness the Movie Character. And when I find myself on set—not knowing when, sleeping—they activate the Character’s memories and thoughts with their highly advanced technologies I know nothing about. During filming, they send messages, orders, and various impulses to the nanochip in the form of quantum waves, forcing the Character to do everything that the script requires. I become a puppet on set, unaware of what I’m doing.

One could ask the question—what’s it all for? The reason is quite simple and clear. Everything featured in Emperial’s films is real and is broadcast live on TV and on screen. It’s a kind of reality show. Unconscious, we can follow the script without hesitation, whether we have to kill someone ourselves or ... get killed. What’s even more scary—not one viewer from the Seven Metropolises realizes it’s real.