Tooth & Nail

Synopsis

In a tea room with misspelled signs and unfamiliar customs, Ryan and Violet interact with a robotic waiter, endure oppressive tunes from a nearby cellist and are watched by haunting, illusive doppelgängers. Blinded by their self-deception and admiration for British culture, the women never understand the tea room is AI generated. They double down on fitting into the absurd culture, even forcing themselves to eat rubber pastries. Meanwhile, the broken code rapidly learns from itself, accentuating AI’s flaws and biases: human fingers and eyeballs rest among the pastries, cultural figurines appear all over and eventually, the tea room becomes buried under its offerings of food and drink, covered with emblems and symbols that signify atrocities committed by British Imperialism. All of its decadence closes in on the women as Ryan makes a failed attempt to escape and Violet regrets interacting with the doppelgängers. They vanish into the broken code, forever immersed in a replica of a civilization they longed to embody.