It was already late October and Vance Render had begun to feel cold air blowing off the Heath and in through the broken window of their parents’ kitchen. It had been rasterized at a soirée in the summer, but during the pleasant warmer months they had avoided the distraction of calling someone out to replace the glass. Now Render improvised a quick fix: an unread Creative Review, still in shrinkwrap, fit squarely over the opening, secured precariously by some crumpled Hello Fresh packing tape. Problem solved. Back to work.

Vance Render was a graphic designer. A very well informed graphic designer, recent graduate of the DAE master. That night they were impatiently trying to formulate an essay. A manifesto, actually. Confined to a self-initiated text box, their agitated mood felt entirely justified.

There is no market for critical graphic design, oxymoron.

Since returning to the island they had interned at a new-ludd studio (colour images verboten), and picked up what freelance scraps they could. The prospect of steady employment really did seem remote. It was not by choice that they lived in their parents’ empty place in Hampstead while everyone they knew with any integrity was south of the river. They had been offered a single regular gig, through a family friend. A junior designer position at Bevel Toggle Shrug, an agency whose portfolio served up sustainable beauty sub-brand extruded packs and thereabouts smart home sedation interface overlays.

Just then, staring gaussian at a list of half-finished sentences whose bold claims exceeded Render’s command of composition, a notification in the corner of the screen caught their eye. Invitation to interview ... Outernet Systems. They would never admit it to their co-conspirators, but that summer there had been more than one insomniac session at the kitchen table, scrolling If I Must Jobs in defeat. This particular ad, they now recalled, had disarmingly specified a graphic designer with critical disposition. They clicked through the message to the Outernet website. SaaS image enlargement algo ... immersive digital environments ... clients upload mock-ups ... genuine fractal processor ... proprietary content perfecter ... font good spotter with artisanal text engine... Momentarily, Render’s eyeballs took the form of two flawlessly sculpted yet virtually immaterial red spheres with soft, neuomorphic Xs subtly impressed into their very appealing surfaces. “This is correcting garbled image-to-text and retouching six-fingered hands.”

Outernet thrives at OVOM, a playce to incubate business.

Ogling OVOM gave the address of an industrial park at the arse end of HS2, down in the Surrey Hills. Two clicks of the trackpad and Render closed the laptop. Trudged up the concrete steps to the mezzanine. Put themselves to bed.

This is episode one of PNG in the EYE, a permissionless fiction set in a Dotcom Seance autonomous world. The episode included a beta version of Mirror’s Subscribe to Mint product.