Social historians looking back at the middle of 21C will perhaps puzzle at the predominance of starkly non-expressive faces in images or video captured in public places. As surveillance saturation increased from the early 2010s onwards, fuelled by ever granular taxing methods and notional terrorism threats, the general populace evolved means of reducing their biometric footprint. Gait modification trusses were at first home-brewed and then Chinese mass produced. After hoodies were outlawed grass roots lecture sessions on how to fool facial recognition software grew in popularity, and sign language jumped the gap from prosthesis to de facto language. Stegging became a part of life; we all now ostensibly fulfil the criteria of optimal citizenry but our visible surfaces are merely a veneer of adherence to an increasingly arbitrary and hard to follow set of state-mandated behavioural norms.
Late in the 30s the government lost patience with an increasingly wily public and on January 1st 2040 the Non-optional Monitoring Garb bill was passed by the incumbent coalition. Stripped of its weasel verbiage and hand ringing justification it meant that anyone over the age of fourteen was medically fitted with a permanently derma-bonded synthetic skin. The Skin, as it swiftly became known, could impose any number of centrally controlled directives and what were euphemistically called suggestions. The well planned PR drive that coincided with passing of the NMG bill heavily publicised the ostensible benefits of such a solution: medical monitoring became the norm (but let’s forget that waiting lists didn’t get any shorter), voting was instantly polled via willed electro-dermal response, and crowd control measure could be imposed with flocking algorithms (no crush injuries… allegedly). The reality of course was different: mandatory curfews, realtime polygraphic feedback, house arrest with dietary modifiers, tingle impellers (so called below-pain-threshold behaviour suggestives), and of course there was the inevitable commercial wrapper. It didn’t take long for the Ministry of Justice to realise that a sizeable chunk of the hallucinogenically large budget deficit could be offset by selling their captive audience. Spam took on a completely different spin when it delivered via the form of the blood sugar mod that forced a need for certain endorphin based soft drinks and we suspected that a pandemic of excruciating photophobic migraine (and its subsequent not-cheap remedy) was the result of similar electrochemical tinkering.
The grass roots response to Skin didn’t take long to manifest. The Cutters broadcast their first Cut on Facebook on April 1st 2040. Sofia Bibi became the dissenter’s heroine overnight. Rejecting analgesia and chewing nearly all the way through a wooden spoon handle in her agony, Sofia endured the ministrations of a hacked car assembly line robot as it systematically and precisely sliced through the Skin (and blithely her own hide) and shucked her like a bloody pea. She lived for four days and died coddled in a rough shawl of homemade wool. Her last, croaked words created a slogan for all future Cutters, “It’s just skin deep, fuckers”.
Gabriel was part of the East London Cutter cell. The Cutting tech has happily plateaued at a level that means the pain is manageable and survival is (mostly) guaranteed, but the equipment is deliberately hobbled to ensure that post-operative healing is imperfect. Cutters want the scarring, it is sign that process was endured – in a world were almost all sensation, feeling, pain, suffering could be mediated and ameliorated by the Skin, it has become critical to the Cutter movement that participants suffer for their emancipation. The white heat pain of the industrial laser scarifying the base level skin is like a re-birth to the Cutters, self harm elevated to near-transcendence. There is a practical downside to Cutting though; as Skin offered an almost perfect protection against the elements, clothing became relegated to decorative function, semi-disposable over-garments of questionable EPZ provenance only partially masking the faux skin tones (five taupe-through-chocolate shades) of the semi-matt appearance of Skin. Post-Cutting, nudity became an issue again; proper clothing became a badge of honour amongst the Cutter cells, with countless cottage industry producing, initially at least, crude hand woven clothing that nourished a tactility need but offered little in the way of nuanced tailoring. The holey, ragged aesthetic satisfied some Cutters who riffed off historical post-apocalyptical fantasies but for most they looked to the deeper past for inspiration.
The first Cutter shuttle loom in London was built 2045 by Gabriel’s Southern cell; operating out of a basement in a disused Nandos in Camberwell, this heaving contraption looked like a Heath Robinson sketch crossed with a miltech medical robot. The first cloth to come off the loom was a gleaming copper fabric, painstaking warped from hand-unravelled electrical cable. The Cutters had learned that the chance of a successful Cutting was greatly enhanced by first offlining the Skin before the operation. As all Skin was netlinked in numerous ways, it made a lot of sense to EM shield the patient. This first cloth-of-gold from the loom formed the basis for a crude but effective Faraday cage that festooned the Nandos basement with a NASAed bling.