BackgroundThe larp is very strongly inspired by the Black Mirror episode Hang the DJ and to a lesser extent the film The Lobster.
It is 2060 and you're the second generation of people entering the dating market in a world where social distancing is the norm – after all, it is the only solution to the ubiquitous infection which started in 2020. Fortunately, the supercomputers of the Department of Marriage are here to help you find your perfect partner from the safety of your own home. During Together Forever programme, a machine learning algorithm will set up a sequence of online relationships for you, of various durations and with a diverse selection of partners. This will give your cortical implant enough data about your personality and preferences -- sometimes things that even you don't know about yourself -- to enable the system to find your Forever Match. They will be the first and only person outside of your immediate family that you will get to ever meet in the flesh – more than that, they will become your permanent life companion. With a 99.5% success rate, Together Forever programme is your best and only chance at true marital bliss. |
You are all looking forward to this process, because it is the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to start a household of your own and share it with another human being. Meeting other people in person is extremely rare these days: kids grow up with their parents and siblings, of course, but all schooling, friendships, hobbies and eventually work is done online. In the past decades, automation has hugely progressed so there are only very few occasions where you need to interact in the flesh with another human being: e.g. a dentist or a plumber. In these situations, the service provider would enter your home in a Hazmat suit to perform their task, and the family would have to thoroughly decontaminate their flat afterwards (or the other way round, the patient would enter a sterilised surgery).
Humanity is by now very well accustomed to this way of life; the economy is thriving and all necessities as well as luxuries are readily available to be delivered by self-driving vehicles. Most working-age people work in remote white-collar jobs, a small minority – in the dangerous professions requiring human contact, while roughly a third live off UBI. People don’t in general leave their houses unless it is an emergency – everyone has exercise equipment at home and a big screen capable of displaying a variety of pleasant landscapes. Non-romantic relationships are not regulated in any way – people make friends and acquaintances through school, work or shared interests, and these friendships can be very strong despite the friends never having met other than in a video chat. However, in case of romantic relationships, which require physical contact in order to satisfy the sexual need, careful consideration needs to be made. For the safety of everyone, it needs to be absolutely certain that the partners are well-matched to each other and capable of spending the rest of their lives happily together, before the irreversible Cross-Immunisation Procedure can be performed and an in-person meeting is allowed to take place. CIP is usually a once-in-a-lifetime procedure and cannot be safely performed again for another partner. Meeting anyone who isn’t your parent, sibling or your CIP-partner can lead to your virus strains mutating together with potentially catastrophic consequences to you and contributing to the epidemic risk for the broader population. It is also forbidden by law; breaking it would lead to a long prison sentence and in case of repeat or aggravated offences – to Banishment. That means getting expelled from the safety of the cities to the Wilderness – an uncivilised land of Hazmat-clad half-savages who survive by hunting and gathering and die in droves from the constantly mutating virus - only for the sake of living with their true love rather than the partner chosen by the algorithm. |
Together Forever ProgrammeWhile of course it is not mandatory to enter the Together Forever match-making programme, most people choose to do it to avoid spending the rest of their lives first living with their parents and then in complete isolation. To enter the programme you are first given a cortical implant constantly observing your behaviour and capable of machine-learning your habits, needs, preferences and emotional patterns, which will eventually contribute to matching you with your perfect partner. You are then supposed to move out of your parents’ house to a bachelor(ette) pad provided for you for a year to stabilise your immune system and give you a period of time for self-discovery (and also to help the implant learn how you behave on when you’re on your own). Then the 2-year process of trial partner assignment begins.
The system will arrange for you a sequence of relationships with varying durations. You will be informed with an 8 hour notice when your new relationship is supposed to start and/or your existing relationship is supposed to end. You can optionally enquire about the duration of your current relationship, though many people prefer to stay oblivious of that. Relationship durations range from 12 hours to more than a year, and the number of relationships a person is assigned varies, with 3-6 being the most common number. |
When in an active relationship, you are expected to spend several hours every day video chatting with your partner, as well as engage in cybersex with regularity depending on the libido of the involved partners. You are also forbidden from video chatting any of your ex-partners unchaperoned for the duration of the programme (and this is enforced by the public video chat service), since this would cause a significant disruption of how your cortical implant interprets your emotional reaction to your current partner. You are in principle allowed to communicate with them over text chat, but this is seen as a taboo. To help you through this process, the Department of Marriage will provide you with access to psychological support groups and keep track of your mental wellbeing and compatibility with your current partner with comprehensive questionnaires.
By complying to these very reasonable guidelines, you demonstrate your commitment to the programme and your determination to provide the most precise data points to be used by the final matching algorithm. If you do not comply to these rules, you will be given a notice, then a warning, and – on a case-by-case basis, with the committee carefully considering extenuating circumstances – you might even permanently get expelled from the programme. Refusing to marry your final match also results in your expulsion from the programme. While this isn’t completely unprecedented, it causes significant social ostracism and of course prevents you from ever finding a partner. |