Debuted at the State Library of Victoria on 18 October 2022
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Wu Wen Shou was born in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China, in 2032.
Wen Shou’s ancestors celebrated a child’s first birthday with a ceremony giving the child a choice between abacus, book, calligraphy brush or cake. Wen Shou’s parents have instead, like most parents, opted to do a DNA reveal party for her first birthday. As her relatives gather around the screen they see that, based on a simple saliva sample, Wen Shou is deemed to be particularly good at math and has a high CQ, or creativity quotient. Her parents decide that she will be streamed into the online mathematics academy for her region at the age of two. Her DNA also shows that her optimal diet and fitness regime, based on her genetic blueprint, includes tennis so she will balance all that online schooling with bi-weekly tennis one of the many sports camps that are a mandatory part of school for fitness, and face-to-face socialisation. Facial recognition AI will sense Wen Shou’s moods and give her nudges at school for emotional regulation, but it’s proven harder to make that happen on the sports field and in particular in romantic relationships, with birth rate declining by double digits across the world since the 2023 Zoom Baby Bust.
As Wen Shou grows into an astonishingly balanced teen, her sights turn to vocation. She has a fully funded four years of education that she can access once she is 16 but these credits are no longer required to be bundled into university degrees as they were in the past. She is allowed to amortize those credits across her whole life. Because of this few people ever spend the allocation all at once, preferring to adopt a lifelong learning pace and save some educational units for crucial upskilling later if their industry enters a sunset phase.
Wen Shou has some tough choices ahead. Will she join a structured program that commits her to an apprenticeship combining schooling and education? Studies show this gives a 35% bump in the value of the portable credentials in her SkillsWallet. But she is young and impractical and the thought of all that eMoney is burning a hole in her digital wallet. To her parent’s dismay, she decides to do her first elective on applied mathematics for metaverse world building. Besides, it gives her more time for her tennis.
Fast forward to Wen Shou 20s and she has, as the elders say, “gone down the rabbit hole” on all things metaverse. These perpetual immersive virtual worlds have become a regular outlet for group exercise, concerts, gaming and conferences. Brands like Ferrari and Nike now sell more virtual goods in the metaverse than physical goods. Because of the many artists, fashionistas and celebrities who want to play and earn in the metaverse, her multiple decades of applied math have been in hot demand in a way that not even the algorithms predicted. She can work with abstract language and algorithms, self-analyze her computational thinking, and accurately model real-world solutions. In other words, she can actually figure out how to build the fantasy worlds the others are dreaming up.
Wen Shou (now mostly referred to her by her avatar name, Wanda) doesn’t have a traditional job in a creative agency factory like her parents’ generation did. She has joined, Mettamorph, a guild for people building the metaverse. Like the bar in Star Wars where you go to find a fighter pilot for your next crazy mission, Mettamorph attracts the top players in specialised fields as well as the up-and-coming talent and wing men you might want for your mission.
In short, they will help find, hire, onboard, pay, and manage team members, a huge boon when most companies are of made up of a small core team with 75-90% of activities outsourced for maximum flexibility.
Mettamorph invests in cutting edge research labs (once called universities) in part to ensure their people have the latest knowledge and skills for where the industry is headed. The investment is contingent on rotational apprenticeships and opportunities to film the research to turn in to online training. They are one of the highest valued companies in the world. Certainly, valued more as a platform for talent than when they were just a platform for sharing cat videos.