The alarm clock pro­jec­ted its car­di­oid wak­ing field over the bed. The sub­stance of his dream star­ted to fade away and crisp real­ity was pour­ing in…

“Damn it, not again, not when I’m dream­ing of her” he shouted, kick­ing away the clock’s antenna towards the wall. He closed his eyes, she was still there: soft and warm, sleep­ing in his arms and slowly fad­ing away.

He opened his eyes — she was gone.

⁂

She died two months ago — a traffic acci­dent they said, and he had almost bought it. But he had spot­ted some­thing on the advert­ise­ment for the next show she was sup­posed to run. He saw the designs he knew by heart — low qual­ity cop­ies of her ideas. He should know them, after all, he had helped her with the algorithms that ran them.

He reminded him­self of the import­ance of that very day, and he rose. Behind him, the bed sheets rolled and dis­ap­peared into the recyc­ling unit accom­pan­ied by the vora­cious sound of thou­sand of nano machines at work.

“Today,” he spoke to him­self, “today is revenge — pure, pre­cise math­em­at­ical revenge.”

He met her in a bar in Akur­eyri, on one of the few snowy days of the year. He had come with no spe­cific goal — and surely not look­ing for a woman — he sat at the bar next to her by chance. While he was wait­ing for his drink, he noticed the fine shad­ows she was cast­ing with the coaster she was cut­ting with a small sharp scis­sor. There was some­thing fractal and at the same time, deeply vis­ceral in her cut­work. He could almost feel the algorithms breath­ing behind those inter­weaved mov­ing patterns.

By morn­ing they were already pack­ing for Lon­don. Her name was Julia.

⁂

Today’s event was in the TATE Modern’s Tur­bine Room. Glow­ing bill­boards on the sides of the build­ing were shout­ing in bright orange: ‘Lon­don Cou­ture Fash­ion Week.’

He was late. He rushed in, flashed his ID card towards an immob­ile yet men­acing secur­ity guard shout­ing “I’m Oren, I’m… I’m with that equipment” — pointing towards the stage — “and I’m late!” and asked one of the use­less assist­ants to fetch him a double espresso. He then pro­ceeded back­stage to check the anten­nae and their delay lines.

⁂

This had all star­ted couple years ago: fash­ion houses equipped their out­lets with nano factor­ies — tens of thou­sands of nano machines at work. Mini­ature Jacquard looms that would knit, weave and sew any­thing accord­ing to rigour­ous pat­terns. Each night, author­ised shops would tune into a broad­cast and man­u­fac­ture the stocks needed.

Julia star­ted as a fash­ion pir­ate: she was illeg­ally tun­ing into such broad­casts and fab­ric­at­ing pir­ate cop­ies of vari­ous pop­u­lar and expens­ive gar­ments. One could eas­ily identify the cop­ies, as they had com­pres­sion arte­facts vis­ible on some del­ic­ate pat­terns and par­tic­u­larly along the seams.

It quickly became very fash­ion­able to wear such obvi­ously pir­ated clothes, and the fash­ion industry reacted by incor­por­at­ing inten­tional flaws — now called “designer artefacts” — into their col­lec­tions and char­ging even more for them.

This was a declar­a­tion of war.

Iron­ic­ally, the fash­ion pir­ates’ rep­licas were soon copied back into the ori­ginal col­lec­tion, upset­ting many of the pir­ates. They fought back by jam­ming and alter­ing the very broad­casts they were copy­ing, try­ing to buff out the syn­thetic arte­facts and etch instead vari­ous state­ments and poor designs on the ori­ginal clothing.

This was the birth of the fash­ion graffiti.

The fash­ion and enter­tain­ment indus­tries, while fight­ing the pir­ates and the fash­ion graf­fiti artists, needed a way mon­et­ize this. Many of the fash­ion houses began headhunt­ing and even star­ted to cut deals with sev­eral tal­en­ted graf­fiti artists stage per­form­ances of the new ‘haute couture.’

The day they met in Akur­eyri, she had just done such a graf­fiti, but her piece wasn’t just the mere “spray­ing” of some bizarre pat­tern into a broad­cast. She man­aged — in real­time — to decode, alter and re-​inject the sew­ing instruc­tions cre­at­ing an intric­ate and uniquely beau­ti­ful lace on a very expens­ive dress.

That night he was bewitched. They spent the whole night arguing on gen­er­at­ive algorithms, fractals and com­pres­sion tech­niques. He hadn’t had such fun with a girl in ages.

The next day they left for Lon­don to cut a deal with a fash­ion house, any big house.

⁂

Today’s Haute Cou­ture event was based on a very simple concept: a graf­fiti artist would manip­u­late the broad­cast live, on stage. The unique cre­ations would then be on the cat­walk in a mat­ter of tens of seconds.

This was sup­posed to be Julia’s show.

He fin­ished the hard­ware checks and pro­ceeded to inspect the seed data for his algorithms, doing the final adjust­ments for his vic­tim, who had just arrived. The con­tro­ver­sial Alex, a mediocre actor turned fash­ion designer and now — through his con­nec­tions in the industry — become the fash­ion graf­fiti sen­sa­tion of the year almost overnight.

With Julia’s designs.

Alex inter­me­di­ated Julia’s deal, had her run a pilot show. He had stole everything he could and dis­posed of her. But Alex didn’t know about the rela­tion­ship between Oren and Julia. Or, maybe he was too arrog­ant to believe that Oren would dare to do any­thing apart of his job, as broad­cast engineer.

And he was going to do his job, to imple­ment the so-​called Alex designs into the transcoders. He worked obsess­ively day and night to per­fect his algorithms, to avenge her with her own designs.

⁂

The show was approach­ing its glor­i­ous end, the lights faded and the spot­light focused on the cat­walk. After twelve bril­liant designs cre­ated live on the stage, Alex was going to reveal the orches­trated mas­ter­piece of the season.

Alex, wear­ing the ulti­mate cre­ation stepped out, onto the cat­walk. He made couple steps and the audi­ence was stilled.

The col­lar was the first thing, its pur­pose was to silence him. Then, the memory fibres in his white suit star­ted to react to his body heat: seams con­strict­ing, lace com­ing to life, pat­terns unfolding.

Shoulder blades rose behind him with a wet sound and then slowly fol­ded back like the wings of an impot­ent angel. Muscles star­ted slowly to extrude between seams, per­fect sym­met­rical red stains appeared on the white suit, a red Rorschach but­ter­fly try­ing to escape from his white cocoon.

The suit star­ted fold­ing him in angu­lar pat­terns, with a beau­ti­ful math­em­at­ical precision.

Then the pro­cess stopped, the end form was attained: a silent sculp­ture, ribs in blos­som, a bright red ori­gami flower, like a water lily rest­ing on a lake of bloody pink foam, still steaming.

And the silence ended.

⁂

After four months they found him hid­ing in Korea. Two Net­work agents escor­ted him to one of their facil­it­ies in Busan.

He sat in a room, alone at a table for at least two hours when two care­fully dressed men entered.

“You thought you could get away with that stunt, didn’t you?” one of them asked.

“Not in this world,” said the other.

Not any­more, he thought.

“In our cur­rent legal sys­tem, we have an aver­age of 27 exe­cu­tions per month,” star­ted the first one, then continued:

“But the pub­lic is quite bored of all the bloody medi­eval re-​enactments we do for them. We want you to put your stunt to good, pub­lic use. We want you to design the exe­cu­tions for the next sea­son, we even have sev­eral fash­ion houses invest­ing in the show, for the pilot one we chose to work with…”

He turned his head away and looked up through the win­dow, it was one of those rare snowy days.