Life 404: Success Not Found

Chapter 8: The Permanent Face Filter

The mirror in Freza’s boarding house room was his most honest arch-nemesis. This morning, it displayed the figure of a twenty-five-year-old man with eye bags large enough to store spare change, dull skin from consuming far too much phone screen radiation, and a giant zit on the tip of his nose that looked like a volcano primed to erupt at any moment.

"I’m not ugly," Freza whispered to his own reflection. "I’m just low on the budget for a glow-up. I’m a diamond still covered in sewer mud."

Ia tried to smile, but what appeared in the mirror was a desperate grimace that looked more like the symptoms of a minor stroke. After a string of failures—from being a "CEO of thin air" to being accused of cat exploitation—Freza’s self-confidence was at rock bottom, perhaps even boring through the Earth's crust. In a world obsessed with visuals, Freza felt like a broken pixel in the middle of a 4K resolution image.

Suddenly, his door was kicked open. Satya walked in with a beaming face, holding an elegant black box that stood in stark contrast to their grimy boarding house surroundings.

"Fre! Stop mourning your fate in front of the glass. I’ve got the solution to your existential crisis!" Satya exclaimed.

"What is it? A voucher for free plastic surgery in Korea? Or an iron mask so people don't have to look at my face anymore?" Freza asked cynically.

"More advanced than that. Meet: the 'Utopia-Lens 2.0'." Satya opened the box, revealing a pair of Augmented Reality (AR) glasses with a very thin design, looking almost like ordinary reading glasses. "This is a beta-test product from a tech company that wants to eliminate toxic beauty standards by... well, covering them up."

Freza took the glasses. "How does it work?"

"These glasses have sensors that connect wirelessly to your optic nerve. It has a real-time 'Beauty-Correction' algorithm. Once you put them on, everything you see will be filtered. Trash becomes flowers, cracked walls become aesthetic murals, and most importantly... everyone you see will turn into the most handsome or beautiful version of themselves according to your ideal standards. Including your own face if you look in the mirror."

Freza put the glasses on hesitantly.

Click.

The world suddenly changed. A faint hum echoed in his ears, followed by a flash of blue light. When his vision cleared, Freza gasped. His boarding house room, which usually smelled musty and was filled with piles of dirty laundry, now looked like a boutique hotel room in Paris. The moldy walls were now covered in luxurious velvet wallpaper. The stacks of instant noodles in the corner had turned into piles of leather-bound philosophy books.

And Satya? Satya, who usually looked like someone who had just woken up from a three-year nap, now looked like a top-tier men's fashion magazine model. His skin was flawless, his jawline sharp, and his holey t-shirt now looked like an expensive "distressed" designer piece worth millions.

"Crazy... Sat? You’re actually handsome, I swear," Freza whispered.

"I know," Satya’s voice (which was also filtered to be deeper and more masculine by the glasses) sounded incredibly authoritative. "Now try looking in the mirror."

Freza turned toward the mirror. He nearly fell backward. The figure staring back was no longer Freza, the dull, unemployed man. Standing there was a man with perfectly voluminous hair, sharp and mysterious eyes, and skin so clean he looked like a flawless computer render. The zit on his nose was gone, replaced by a perfectly proportional facial structure.

"This... this is me?" Freza touched his face. He felt his real skin was still rough and oily, but his eyes saw porcelain smoothness.

"That is your 'Maximum Potential, Fre. These glasses don’t change your physical body; they just change how you see the world. Perception is reality, right?"

Without wasting a second, Freza headed straight out of the boarding house. He wanted to feel what it was like to be a handsome man in a beautiful world.

Outside, the alleyway that was usually muddy and smelled of the gutter now looked like a romantic little street in Italy. The black sewer water had turned into a clear stream with a glitter effect. The people passing by—women in housecoats, vegetable vendors, motorcycle taxi drivers—all transformed into a collection of the most beautiful human beings Freza had ever seen. Everyone smiled at him (or at least, that’s what the filter displayed).

Freza walked toward the city park. There, he saw a girl sitting on a park bench, reading a book. The girl was... extraordinary. Her long hair flowed freely, she wore a white dress that billowed in the wind, and her face possessed a beauty that made Freza’s heart skip a beat. Her name, according to Freza's filter-triggered imagination, was Aurora.

"Hi," Freza greeted, trying to use a tone of voice he thought matched his handsome face.

The girl looked up. Her smile was so beautiful that Freza's glasses produced a tiny lens flare effect in the corner of his vision. She didn't answer, only nodding slowly.

"Do you like reading books too? I feel that in this digital world, holding paper is a poetic form of resistance," Freza said, uttering a pretentious line that would usually make him want to gag, but now felt perfectly fitting.

The girl remained silent, only swaying slightly from side to side. Freza interpreted this as being "mysterious and shy." For three hours, Freza sat beside her. He told her about his dreams, about how he felt the world was finally on his side, and about how he felt he had found his soulmate.

"You know, Aurora? You’re the best listener I’ve ever met. You never interrupt me, you never judge me. You’re perfect," Freza said sincerely.

The girl just stayed quiet, responding with head movements that seemed to signal agreement. Freza felt incredibly happy. He felt loved not for what he had, but because of a "soul connection" (which was actually just a long monologue he was having with himself).

However, that happiness began to be interrupted. The Utopia-Lens battery was running low. A red warning flashed in the top right corner: "BATTERY LOW: 5%. REALITY-CHECK INITIATED."

"No, not now!" Freza muttered in a panic. He tried to find a charging cable in his pocket, but he hadn't brought one.

The glasses' display began to flicker. The beauty filter started to glitch.

Aurora’s face suddenly vibrated. Her porcelain skin cracked, revealing a cold gray texture underneath. Her white dress vanished, replaced by a rusted metal surface. Her long hair turned into dangling black cables.

"Aurora?" Freza stood up, taking a step back.

Zzap!

The glasses died completely. Freza took them off with trembling hands.

The beautiful world collapsed in an instant. The romantic park returned to a barren field full of plastic trash and the smell of cat urine. The clear stream became a clogged gutter again. And Aurora...

Freza stared at the park bench. There was no beautiful girl. Instead, there was only an old, leaning power pole with a few strands of an old wig caught in the wires (perhaps leftover from a film prop or a discarded toy). The book Aurora had been reading turned out to be nothing more than a discarded instant noodle box wedged between the metal slats of the pole.

Freza stood frozen. He had just declared his love, poured his heart out, and almost tried to kiss a power pole wearing a wig.

"Fre? What are you doing here?"

Satya appeared, this time back in his original form: a man in a grimy t-shirt scratching his stomach. Behind him, several people in the park stared at Freza while laughing and whispering.

"Hey, is that the guy who was talking to the power pole earlier?" "Yeah, he must be crazy. He was even touching the cables. He's lucky he didn't get electrocuted."

Freza felt like he wanted to vanish from the face of the earth. His shame was far greater than the time he slipped on a banana peel. He realized that for the last three hours, he had been a free show for the people in the park as "The Madman in Love with Electric Infrastructure."

"Sat... your glasses... Aurora..." Freza stammered.

Satya looked at the power pole, then at the glasses in Freza's hand. "Oh, the glasses died? Sorry, Fre. I forgot to mention that the 'Beauty-Correction' algorithm is sometimes too aggressive. It’ll look for the nearest object to project your ideal figure onto if it can’t find a real human nearby."

"So I was baring my soul to a power pole?"

"Well, at least the power pole won't leak your secrets on T*****r, right?" Satya tried to comfort him.

Freza walked home with heavy steps. Upon arriving at his room, he threw the Utopia-Lens into the trash bin. He stood once more before his honest bathroom mirror.

He stared at his own face. Still dull. Still had a zit. Still had eye bags.

"I am ugly," Freza muttered. "But at least I'm real. I'm not a power pole with a filter on it."

He realized how terrifying it would be if he kept wearing those glasses. He would live in a beautiful lie, loving things that didn't exist, and losing the ability to see reality—which, however bitter—was the only place where he was actually alive.

Technology had given him an instant heaven, but that heaven was just a digital overlay covering a hell that he actually needed to fix, not hide.

Freza grabbed a bar of face soap (which was actually just a tiny sliver of a bar) and began washing his face. He felt the cold water touch his skin. It stung, but it was real.

"Tomorrow I’m buying real face wash," Freza said to his reflection. "Not to look handsome like in those glasses, but so I don't feel like trash every time I look in the mirror."

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door.

"Fre! Open up! I’ve got a new idea!" Satya’s voice rang out again.

"What now, Sat?" Freza asked weakly as he opened the door.

"I found info on a new app called 'Real-Life Block.' It makes it so you can't see people you hate in the real world. They just turn into black pixelated boxes. You want to try it?"

Freza looked at Satya, then looked at the power pole visible from his room window.

"Sat, get out," Freza said softly but firmly.

"Why? This is great for your mental health, Fre! You won't have to see the landlady's face or your ex anymore!"

"I’d rather see an angry landlady holding a broom than see a world full of black boxes," Freza answered decisively. "Now go. I want to sleep."

After Satya left, Freza lay back down on his mattress. He stared at the moldy ceiling of his room. This time, he didn't imagine the mold as an aesthetic mural. He saw it as mold that needed to be cleaned tomorrow morning.

The status quo had returned: Freza was still poor, still unemployed, and still confused by his "below-average" face, but for the first time in a long while, he felt his eyes were truly open.

The world might not be pretty, but at least he didn't have to worry about his battery dying just to see the truth. Even if that truth took the form of an old, leaning power pole on the side of the road.

Freza closed his eyes, and in that darkness, he didn't see Aurora. He only saw himself, who despite being a mess, still had the courage to face tomorrow without any filter at all.