Review: Lonely Receiver
CONGRATULATIONS, YOU'VE PURCHASED LIFE
Finally, a phone that touches you back...
With PHYLO's next-generation matter rendering, we've made smartphones into people. The new Life-Partner-Operating-System recognises the individual wants and needs of a user.
These Life Partners bond to you for life. They don't ask any questions and will love you unconditionally. It's your perfect match and weaved into your personality with only you in mind.
A true to life digital being who's better than real - they're yours.
.... What could possibly go wrong?
Catrin created the perfect lover for herself using her phone. She fed it data, personal information and watched as a human body slowly materialised in her apartment, assembling itself out of thin air; bones, tendons, internal organs, skin knitting together before her eyes.
Rhion was flawless: physically, mentally and emotionally. Totally loving and supportive, always there when Catrin needed her.
It couldn't last.
Catrin wanted perfection, and because Rhion was created from technology, she was able to match those impossible expectations... but therein lay the flaw. Being more than human, Rhion can be in thousands of virtual places on the internet simultaneously.
She was in love with Catrin. But she was also in love with several hundred other people.
The 'perfect' lover had one imperfection: perfection is not human.
One night they argued. In an instant, Rhion vanished. Literally.
The phone that created her died. No signal can be established. Rhion is gone. There is no way for Catrin to find her.
Technological attempts at contact offer no solution. Catrin is bereft, lost, desperate. Obsession takes a hold of her. She attempts to rebuild a normal life, make relationships with real people, but the ghost of Rhion haunts her, invading her perceptions, poisoning reality. A shadowy spectre taunts her with the remote possibility of reconciliation... if only she can fight her way through the chaos of confusion that her life has shattered into.
The days go by and her fixation deepens. She neglects herself, loses time, loses touch with reality, wanders into dangerous avenues in her search for Rhion. No price is too great to reclaim what she has lost. She will sacrifice anything.
Lonely Receiver by writer Zac Thompson and artist Jen Hickman is a high-tech psychological thriller that explores the extreme outskirts of emotional loss and monomania. It also illuminates the core questions of romantic love itself. Does a person really need a partner to have completeness? Does devotion confer the right to possess? Is perfect love attainable or just a poetic illusion?
The story takes place in a near future real world and a surreal, hedonistic virtual space ('The Garden'), both of them distorted – equally – by Catrin's disintegrating sanity. Hickman illustrates this with power and sensitivity, rendering the beautiful, the ugly and the terrifying all with the same vibrant touch.
Unlike the protagonist herself, I felt ambiguous about her predicament. On the one hand here is a person acting out of sheer, reasonless selfishness: she desires Rhion as an addict craves her next fix; not for the value of the person as a whole but simply to satisfy the agonising longing. On the other hand, her suffering is something which – to a much lesser extent – many people will connect with. The cruelty of unrequited adoration is the bitterest pill. Rejection is world-shattering, leaving the victim desolate and hopeless.
Catrin's quest quickly takes her far past the point of no return. Like a modern Orpheus, she descends through shadows and nightmares, diving for the deepest reaches of existence to find her Eurydice. But when she can go no further, will she find that which she so desperately seeks?
Or something else?
your eye in mine
my eye in yours
we drink you at dawn
I drink me at dusk
we within weaved hours
I lift each other lightly
never // always
alone // alone
Zak Webber
Twitter - @sfcomicartist / Instagram - @sfcomicartist
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