“Please, calm down, Casandra,” said Dr Kazmi. “And explain things to me one more time.”

“Yesterday, I got the new ePhone 3.5 XL Genius Photo Matic Duo Enhanced handset. It’s the most modern, up-to-date phone on the market.”

“Yes, yes, I understood that part perfectly well. It’s the issues that you’ve been experiencing with the camera function that’s left me a little confused.”

“That makes two of us. It’s been an absolute nightmare. Whenever I take a selfie, the results are utterly horrible. I look completely deformed.”

“But that’s probably no more than a techincal matter, due to the angle or lighting, or whether you were striking a particularly good pose or not. I don’t think it’s anything to get upset about.”

“But I’ve taken literally hundreds of selfies, and all of them have made me look like a creature from the deep. Take a look if you don’t believe me.” She took the phone out of her Dolce and Gabbana handbag and handed it to Kazmi. “You just need to swipe right.”

While in his late fifties and a self-confessed technophobe, Kazmi had two grown-up daughters and knew how to scroll through photographs on a mobile device. What he wasn’t prepared for was the truly bizarre nature of the pictures themselves. The distortion of Casandra’s facial features, the way her eyes appeared squinty, misaligned, almost demonic, her skin discoloured, her lips twisted into an ugly grimace, made it look as if the photographs had been tampered with, as if someone had edited them to play a cruel practical joke on her.

He looked up from the phone. “How odd. It must be some kind of malfunction with the device itself. Have you contacted customer support?”

“Of course. I took the phone straight back to the store. They ran some checks. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. I made such a fuss, though, they gave me a replacement handset. But the results are exactly the same.”

“I—I see. Well, I don’t really know what to say. Maybe it’s a case of trial and error. And you’ll just have to get used to the new camera function.”

Kazmi saw three other clients before the end of the day—a recovering sex addict, an unrepentant bulimic, and an octogenarian kleptomaniac with a mild personality disorder—and although each session was productive, he felt distant and preoccupied throughout. He couldn’t seem to get the images captured on Casandra Gossett-Maxwell’s phone out of his mind.

On the train home that evening, he took a seat in a busy carriage and began to discreetly people-watch. Observation had always been key to his methodology as a therapist. He paid close attention to a client’s body language and mannerisms, regardless of whether it was that all-important first session, or twenty or more sessions down the line, and it always provided certain indicators—not always red flags or causes for concern—but specific nuances nonetheless, which gave him a better insight into how their minds worked more than any in-depth questioning or standard psychological probing.

Almost immediately, he was drawn to an animated conversation between a young couple sitting directly opposite him.

“Let me see,” said the woman, trying to wrest a mobile phone from, presumably, her boyfriend’s hand.

“No, no, they’re terrible. Believe me. We look hideous.”

“What? They can’t be that bad. Let me see.”

He reluctantly gave in and handed her the phone.

“Oh-my-God!” She chuckled as she scrolled through the images. “You weren’t kidding. How on earth did the pictures come out like this? My eyes look evil. I’ve got loads of lines and wrinkles on my face. And—and your skin is green.”

“Beats me.” The boyfriend shrugged. “Must be the light or something. Or maybe the camera don’t work so good if you jerk it around.”

“No, no, it can’t be that. This is the new 3.5 XL. It’s supposed to have the most advanced camera feature ever. The sensors should compensate for any sudden movements. This looks more like a photoshop job. Like the pictures have been put through some app or filter to make us look as battered up as possible.”

This struck Kazmi as almost suspiciously coincidental. Not just because two people were questioning the quality and integrity of photos taken with the same model of phone as Casandra Gossett-Maxwell, but that they’d come to the same conclusion he had in his office earlier.

Kazmi tried to dismiss the coincidence from his mind. But as he looked around the carriage, he couldn’t help but notice that each and every commuter was staring into their phones, all furtive and fidgety, with a vacant, gormless expression on their faces—eyes wide, tongues poking out of side of their mouths, brows furrowed, features twisted, almost pained—just like the pictures Casandra had showed him during their session.

Kazmi arrived home a little after seven o’clock. Ever since his wife died four years ago, he didn’t tend to eat too much in the evenings. Switching on the radio, he made himself a plate of cheese and biscuits, and poured himself his regulation glass of pinot noir. He used these little time-served rituals in life to empty his mind of all thoughts, to just sit and eat and be for a few minutes before he began to focus his mind on tomorrow’s clients.

This evening, however, the headline feature of a news bulletin immediately grabbed his attention.

“Breaking news from the tech world. ePhone has been inundated with complaints regarding the camera function on the latest iteration of its flagship 3.5 series design. Hundreds of users have allegedly reported that the pictures produced by the camera are ‘distorted.’ As yet, the tech giant hasn’t made an official statement. But it appears that many outlets stocking the latest phone are offering customers a replacement handset if they experience any issues, whether camera-related or not.”

Kazmi swallowed a piece of cheese and cracker and washed it down with a small, reserved sip of wine. He thought back to the dangerously constipated faces he’d seen on the train earlier, and how people had become so reliant on their mobile devices in general, almost as if they couldn’t do without them. Like most of his generation, Kazmi had never understood this obsession with phones, with constantly texting or talking to family or friends. Before the mobile phone’s advent and popular proliferation, people would never have dreamed of being engaged in such a rolling form of inconsequential discourse. Similarly, he’d struggled with the concept of the now ubiquitous selfie, why people wanted to document their every move, instead of simply enjoying a moment to the full.

Kazmi washed up his plate and glass and walked through to his study. He had all of this week’s files laid out on his desk. But rather than read over notes in preparation for tomorrow, he found himself in a slightly irritated and distracted mood.

Picking up the phone, he called Shaun Fox, a highly renowned therapist in his field. Kazmi wanted to ask for not only his professional opinion on the phone phenomenon, but whether anyone under his care had experienced similar issues.

“Certainly. I’ve seen more and more phone-related cases since way before the latest iteration of the 3.5 XL came out.”

“You have?”

“Yes. At present, seven or eight regular clients have developed what I can only describe as a morbid mono-mania regarding photographs taken on their devices. At first, they thought there was a techincal problem with the phone’s camera function. But the more pictures they took of themselves, the worse the problems became.”

“And when you say ‘worse,’ you mean the photographs were progressively more distorted.”

“Exactly. And they weren’t deluding themselves, or seeing something that simply wasn’t there. I’ve viewed any number of photographs myself, and the way the client’s facial features had been depicted was completely inexplicable. There was even a feature on the news this evening.”

“Yes, I heard the same report. It’s the oddest thing. I don’t think I’ve ever heard quite the like of it before.”

Kazmi could never remember how he finished the phone call with Fox. By this point, his mind was working in overdrive.

Switching on his PC, he opened an internet session and typed: problems with new ePhone 3.5 XL camera function. To his amazement, he found dozens of matches at the top of the search listings, in the main, blogs and forums dedicated to the issue. Clicking in and out of different pages, he scrolled through hundreds of pictures, photographic evidence attesting to the depth of the problem, hundreds of different faces distorted almost out of all human recognition, like monstrous misrepresentations found in low-budget horror movies. He read some of the testimonials and analysis from industry experts. Everything from the white glare of the screen, the radiofrequency radiation emitted from every mobile device, and more fanciful conspiracy theories involving the Chinese phone giant Huawei were blamed.

This was a thing, an actual thing in modern life, only Kazmi had been too wrapped up in his own little cocoon world to notice.

Next morning, he found his two daughters sitting at the breakfast bar, drinking coffee and talking amongst themselves. They both had high-powered jobs in the city and often left the house long before Kazmi had even stirred. Glad to be able to spend a little time with them, even if it was only a few stolen moments over a rushed espresso, he shuffled towards the breakfast bar and wished them a good morning.

“Oh,” he said, noticing the new mobile phone in his youngest daughter Surma’s hand. “What phone is that?”

“Hi, Dad. It’s the new ePhone 3.5-something-or-other. Work updated our handsets last week.”

“And there’s something wrong with the camera function?”

“Yeah, there is, actually. How did you know that?” Surma shared a quick, confused glance with her sister Dania.

“I heard something on the news and one of my clients has got rather worked up about the problem. Is it something you’ve only just noticed?”

“Erm, not sure, really. I don’t tend to take many photos with my work phone. But we all went out for a meal last night. It was Paul from HR’s birthday. His fortieth. I guess I just grabbed the phone closest to hand and took a few pics.”

“And all of them turned out terribly?” asked Kazmi.

“Yeah. Take a look.”

Kazmi scrolled through the pictures, what, at first glance, appeared to be a standard office party scene: work colleagues sat around a big table in a restaurant, empty plates, glasses, bottles of wine. But when he honed in on each face, the features were just as distorted and misrepresented as any of the pictures he saw on Casandra’s phone and viewed on the internet last night. It didn’t make sense. These weren’t people captured in a bad light or from an odd angle, or caught unawares for that matter, these were relaxed individuals in a well-lit environment actively posing for the camera.

“Weird, eh?” said Surma. “I think there must be some major defect with the camera function. It wouldn’t surprise me if all the latest iterations are recalled.”

After both girls had left the house, Kazmi showered, changed, and made his way down to the station. As he waited on the platform for the next train into the city, he noticed that every single person within his field of vision was staring at their phones. Like yesterday, their eyes were glued to the screens and faces bathed in an odd sanitised light that gave their skin a sickly green pallor. Kazmi had to look and look again. It was as if he could visibly see their facial features deteriorate right before his eyes. This wasn’t photographic evidence captured on a camera phone, but a real-time process he could chart as and when it was actually happening.

Kazmi’s first scheduled client of the morning cancelled at the last minute.

“Oh, I see,” he said to his secretary Jeane. “And did Mr James give a reason for the cancellation?”

“Yes, he did, actually. He said he was having problems with his mobile phone and that he had to take it back to the store where he’d bought it.”

“I see. Thank you.”

With an hour to spare, Kazmi switched on his PC and revisited a few of the forums he’d perused last night. Although only a relatively short time had elapsed—a matter of hours—there were hundreds of new posts, detailed anecdotal accounts about issues with the new ePhone, and hundreds of new pieces of photographic evidence. Not knowing quite what compelled him—he’d never posted anything online before, he didn’t have any social media accounts, full-stop—he started to type into one of the comment boxes:

I’m a therapist working out of London. One of my clients has experienced problems with the camera function on their phone. While this is probably due to a technical issue, I can’t help but think that our increasingly excessive reliance on our mobile devices, the way we use them at any given free moment is incredibly unhealthy for both our mental and physical health. Imagine if there is no technical issue, after all. Imagine if the camera is merely taking faithful shots of the way your physical appearance has deteriorated for the simple fact that you’ve become addicted to using the device so often.

Kazmi didn’t think anything more about the post. It was—or so he assumed—anonymous and something he felt that he simply had to get off his chest.

He saw three clients before lunch—a critically acclaimed novelist suffering from writers’ block, a transitioning transexual plagued with doubts regarding full gender reassignment, and a suburban housewife struggling to get over an addiction to prescription painkillers. All were lively and productive sessions, but all ended on a worrying note, certainly from Kazmi’s point of view: All three clients mentioned problems with their mobile phones.

“If I can’t fire off a few selfies to my besties,” said the transexual, “they worry themselves to death about me. But the pictures on my new phone aren’t coming out right at all. I don’t know if it’s just me, that I’m so anxious and preoccupied about the procedure that I can’t even hold a camera phone properly, or if the whole world has simply gone to shit around me and I haven’t even noticed.”

Towards the end of the day, when Kazmi was gathering up his papers and putting them into his briefcase, Jeane called through from reception.

“Dr Kazmi, Casandra Gossett-Maxwell has just called into the practice. She wonders if she might have a quick chat with you.”

“She’s here now, you mean, in person?”

“Yes, that’s correct. She seems a little, erm…upset, but promises to take up no more than five minutes of your time.”

“Of course, send her in.”

When Casandra entered the room, Kazmi had to do a double-take. Over the course of their professional relationship, she had become such a familiar face, he barely noticed her physical appearance anymore. Always fashionably dressed, her hair shiny and make-up immaculate (if a little on the heavy side for someone of Kazmi’s more conservative tastes), she exuded a carefree youthful attractiveness that he soon learned was only skin deep. Now, however, she looked prematurely aged, haggard, even though she was to all intents and purposes the same person in the same stylish clothes. It was almost as if she had been subjected to the kind of accelerated ageing processes you see in science-fiction films.

“Doctor, I really am at my wit’s end now.” She didn’t even say hello; she simply slumped down in the visitor’s chair and began to unburden herself. “Yesterday evening, I uploaded a few of my selfies, the ones I showed you during our last session, to my social media accounts. I just wanted to reach out to my followers to see if anyone had experienced the same problem.”

“And what happened? Did you get the kind of response you were looking for?”

“No. Far from it. All I got was the most disgusting trolling and abuse. I can’t understand why people have to be so nasty. They called me a spoilt little rich girl. They said that that’s how I looked in real-life—twisted and ugly—because all I do all day is stare at my phone.”

Kazmi managed to calm her down – not that it was a quick or painless process.

“Unfortunately, social media can be a very toxic environment. You have to be careful about how much of yourself you reveal to strangers online. Don’t take any of it to heart. These people clearly have serious issues, as does anyone who derives pleasure from being so cruel to another person.”

When he got home, Kazmi resolved to put all thoughts of ePhones and camera functions out of his mind for the rest of evening. He heated-up some homemade curry that his daughters had left out for him, prepared for tomorrow’s sessions in his study, went up to bed, and read for an hour or so before falling asleep.

Next morning, he got to the practice much earlier than usual, so early, in fact, that Jeanne had yet to arrive. Just as he was double-checking his schedule and getting his case notes into order, two firm knocks sounded against his office door. Fully expecting Jeane to enter the room and ask if he wanted his usual filtered coffee, he said ‘Come in’ and continued to skim through his files. Only when he lifted his head, he didn’t see Jeanne’s familiar face, but a smartly dressed man of middle age, with a neat salt-and-pepper side-parting to his hair, standing in the doorway.

“Sorry to disturb you, Dr Kazmi.” He flashed a big white-toothed smile and edged a little further into the room. “There was no one at the main reception desk. I saw your name on the door and really need to speak to you. It’s a matter of utmost importance.”

“I see. And who are you, exactly? Have you been referred to me by your GP?”

“No, no, this isn’t a medical visit. My name is Jonathan Hamiliton. I’m a senior executive of ePhone U.K. Mind if I sit down?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he pulled out the visitor’s chair and took a seat. “To come straight to the point, you made some rather unfortunate and misguided comments on an open discussion forum yesterday morning. In light of your position—a renowned specialist in the psychological field—your words could be classified as libellous and damage the reputation of our company.”

“What? But I only made some generalisations, and had no idea that my comments would be directly attributable to me.”

“Come now, Doctor, please, you know that none of our online activities are private these days. And if you had in fact wanted to post on the forum in question anonymously, you did, quite frankly, an appalling job. You signed in via your professional Google account linked to your practice. Now, every single person who views your post—current total 15,398 users—will think that you’re expressing a verified medical opinion on our product.

“Not only were your comments ill-judged, but you have no scientific evidence to back your claims—nor would you be able to obtain that evidence. It would take an unprecedented study of phone-user habits over a decade or more to provide the kind of scientific heft required to justify your words. And that just isn’t going to happen any time soon.

“More troublingly, some of our users have experienced recent problems with the camera function on our new ePhone 3.5 XL Genius Photo Matic Duo Enhanced model. As a result, we’ve had to replace handsets and recall certain batches from our wholesalers. An expensive undertaking, you no doubt understand. The last thing we need, therefore, is any more negativity surrounding the company.

“To avoid any potential legal action, therefore, we politely request that you remove your comments from the forum in question and write a short retraction. Nothing major. ‘I withdraw my statements regarding cellular phone use…there is no scientific evidence to back my claims…apologies if my comments caused any distress or misunderstandings…et cetera.

“Hopefully, you’ll agree that this is the quickest and most expedient way to resolve the matter. We don’t want to take legal action. And you don’t want to be involved in proceedings of this nature. We’re a big corporation with unlimited funds. You’re the little guy. And all that David and Goliath stuff is so last century.

“Besides, like I said earlier, there’s no concrete link between any mobile device and the kind of physical deterioration you mentioned in your post. Since the dawn of time, people have had their vices and addictions: smoking, gambling, drinking, the taking of illicit substances. We live in a highly polluted city with a huge population. Many people eat poorly and don’t exercise. Global warming or any number of other modern problems could be contributory factors in our general physical decline.”

“But—but my daughters use your devices.”

“You daughters. My daughters. Anybody’s daughters. The mobile phone is an indispensable fact of life now, Doctor. Even if—incredibly unlikely as it is—a study was published tomorrow that linked the devices to any kind of serious illness: cancer, brain tumours, seizures, strokes—people would still use them. They’d be lost without their 3.5s. At the tip of your finger, you have access to the whole wide world. You can buy things through your phone. You can turn your heating on. You can listen to music, watch films, catch up with friends and the latest news headlines. Every single person’s personal life experience is streamlined and enhanced by a mobile device.

“But we don’t want to come across as heavy-handed. As a gesture of goodwill, we’re prepared to gift you a brand-new ePhone 3.5 XL Genius Photo Matic Duo Enhanced handset of your own.”

“What? But I’ve already got a perfectly adequate phone, thank you very much.”

“But nothing like the 3.5, I assure you. If you can give me two minutes of your time, I’ll showcase its capabilities. You won’t regret it. And you won’t believe how you ever got through life without one.”

Neil Randall is a novelist and short story writer. His latest books, The Professional Mourner (Dark Winter Press) and The Belgrade School Shootings (Alien Buddha Press) were released in May of this year. His shorter fiction and poetry have been published in the U.K., U.S., India, Australia, and Canada. Further news and samples of his work can be viewed at: https://narandall.blogspot.com/, including links to his new online review show Randall Reads…where the author reviews a book each week that made a big impression on him, and help shaped him as a writer.