I’m not sure how to start. Such a simple thing, you’d think, to write a letter to your brother. But I’m not sure that this is going to be a letter, so much as a bunch of sentences in a pile, if you see what I mean? After years of my avatar handling everything, I realise I have no idea how to write a letter any more—not just how to form the letters on the page, but how to structure the thing, decide what I want to say.
It’s pretty grim, really, to be confronted with everything I’ve lost. My support worker tells me I shouldn’t worry, that it’s less important to write well than it is to write at all. The structures are there, he says, in our minds—at least for those who grew up before the fracture, who grew up reading and thinking for ourselves. It will be harder for the children of the digital, when they decide to cross the divide. If they ever do.
I’m supposed to avoid dwelling on difficulties that I can’t do anything about, so I’ll switch to updates. Dad’s been here a few weeks, now. His boat came in to Malmö a few days after I came over the divide, so I was over the worst of the withdrawal. But it was hard as hell to talk to him, he looks so old, now, so frail! I was wondering when he got like this, how he got like this... then I remembered I’ve not seen him in person for over twenty years. So there’s me, crying my eyes out in arrivals at the harbour, and Dad trying not to cry, and the Quebecois nurse who’d been looking after him trying (very professionally) to get me to sign the paperwork so she could get on with her job, and some stranger had to show me how to sign documents in the analogue world—I was amazed to find you have to remember passwords—and after it was all done I was so exhausted that Dad and I just sat like zombies in the arrivals hall for maybe three hours, watching people collect their luggage.
Was life always like this, so full of things to do, decisions to make? I’m sure it was—maybe more so than now—but it seems incredible to me. Watching analogues going about their business, wondering how they cope with… with everything. I feel like a snail that’s had its shell removed. I just want to crawl underneath something and hide, delegate everything and watch my avatar get it all done, racking up points and badges...
But now Dad’s here—for however long he’s got left—and I realise I’ve been hiding from everything for too long. My support worker says I have to learn not to keep score any more. How will I know whether I’m doing well at it, I asked him. “You won’t,” he said.
Serves me right for saying I didn’t want it sugar-coated, I suppose.
I’ll stop now, because this has taken me three hours to write, and my shoulders are stiff. Dad will wake soon, he’ll need help getting to the bathroom.
I’ll write again soon. All my love, Sam x
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Dear Michael;
Great to get your letter, thank you—and no need to apologise for typing it! You were always better at managing technology in your life; it’s your sister who always jumped in with both feet. Besides, I have to learn to live in the analogue world, and that means encountering people who use technology in a healthy way. It’s like dad used to say about being an alcoholic, I guess: the hard bit isn’t not drinking yourself, it’s forgiving other people for being able to drink and stop. I hope I’ll be able to reach a more reasonable relationship with technology, one like yours. But after twenty years of full immersion in the digital, I first have to learn to live without it. After that, well, we’ll see.
Dad’s doing ok, I think; it’s hard for me to tell. I refused to use the “health gateway” the Canadian healthcare systems provide—I really can’t do things digitally right now—so all I have is a folder full of printouts of his charts from the last five years, since they put in his cardioregulator. It’s one thing to read that he normally sleeps eighteen to twenty hours a day, but another thing to be confronted with a bed-bound, shrunken old man who actually sleeps eighteen to twenty hours a day, then wakes suddenly in discomfort, needing your help with the most basic and intimate things. He doesn’t complain, but I think it must be harder for him, that it’s me. Funny how life reverses our relationships, isn’t it? At the start, they have to help us eat and use the toilet; at the end, we have to help them.
The good news is that my stablecoins have finally cleared the fracture. The bad news is that, because so many of us are leaving the digital now—more every week, I’m told—the exchange rates are a mess. It looks like I’ll end up with a weekly budget of 250kWh, which will be barely enough to keep this apartment heated and cooled while also running dad’s life-support stuff! So the search for a smaller, more efficient place to live continues… but they’re much in demand, so it’ll be a long wait. In the meantime, there’s enough to keep us fed, and for some care support for dad that will let me get out of the house. I guess looking into that will be a job for this week! I keep thinking “oh, I’ll just set my avatar on that,” but no, I won’t. The habit is still there, but I’m determined to kill it.
The other good news: a plot came up sooner than expected at the allotments, and so I jumped on it straight away. The other bad news: I went to see it, and it’s been untended for a few years, just a huge mass of thorns and buddleia. So much for my hopes of easing myself in with some simple autumn crops!
Still, it will be good—so I’m telling myself. I’m keen to get going and growing, to work with my hands and body during the day… I still reach for haptics that aren’t there any more, blink for updates from my avatar. Sometimes I find I’ve been sat in the dark for hours, twitching, expecting the digital to unfold in front of me like it always did. It hurts less, now, happens less… but it’s still dozens of times an hour, and it still hurts. I miss it, Michael. I miss watching my avatar work the web, riding the connections. I miss feeling powerful and connected and fast.
Or, as my support worker puts it: I miss not having to think for myself.
It’s funny, in a way. Dad had a lucid day, and we were talking about it—you know, withdrawal, recovery, that sort of thing. He asked me what it was I used to do in the digital, what it was all for, what it was meant to achieve—and I realised I had no idea. All that energy and activity, all the transactions and comments and likes, our avatars speaking to other people’s avatars on our behalf… what was it for? It felt like everything, but I look back and it feels like nothing.
OK, I’m gonna finish there and put this in an envelope. I have to cycle into the city to get some stuff for dad tomorrow, so I might as well take the opportunity to use the physical post office while I’m there.
I’m already looking forward to your next letter! Don’t worry about having nothing to say, don’t hurry to reply. Receiving a real, physical thing from you is magic enough, honestly.
All my love, Sam x
#
Dear Michael;
Great to hear everyone’s doing so well. It’s strange to think of them as “your kids”—they’re as old now as you were when you had them! But I can’t think of them any other way. Dad says he feels the same about us, even now. I’ll be sixty next year, for god’s sake! But part of me still feels the same as I did when I was twenty-one, fresh out of university, ready to take on the world…
That feeling doesn’t last when I hit the allotment, I can tell you!
My support worker tells me I’m doing better than many returners, because I had the sense—and the money—to keep my body on a workout table while I was in the digital. They’re getting people coming back now who can barely stand… people in their thirties who’ve been sat in a wheelchair with a catheter for half their lives, gazing into the virtual. They can’t control their own bladders any more. Stupidly, I told Dad about this, and it upset him a lot. “Why would you want to end up like I am,” he asked, “fifty years too soon?” He didn’t mean me in particular, I know, but it clearly hurts him to think I’ve burned away twenty years doing something I can’t explain to myself, let alone to him.
And what hurts Dad hurts me… though my support worker says that’s a good sign, my empathy’s coming back. Is pain so important to life, I asked—rather harshly, if I’m honest. He replied that, as far as he can tell, it’s the main thing that gives our lives meaning. I asked if he was a Christian and he laughed and said no, but he feels about Christians the same way he feels about communists: they have the wrong answer, but they’re asking the right questions. He’s always saying things like that. Thinking philosophically feels like trying to plough a concrete field with a plastic spoon… but it always did, for me. You were the one who preferred to think things through before you came to conclusions. Time has proved you right on that, big brother!
Anyway, the allotment. I cleared the thorns and weeds quicker than expected, as there’s a “tool library”, where you can just borrow what you need for a day or two. (No cost, either, though you have to return them fully-charged, which seems fair enough.) They’re all dumb tools, too—no AI, no automation. I was right when I guessed allotments people would be way ahead on the analogue.
That has its downsides, mind you. My plot is at the end of a long row, up against what used to be the C-ring road—it’s just trams and bike-lanes now, which is nice. So I only have one direct neighbour, which I thought would make it easy to make friends. Not so much, it turns out! I mean, she’s perfectly polite—she told me about the tool library, for instance, and where to put things to be composted—but she’s always been an analogue from way back, before the fracture was even a theoretical concept. (I think she’s had her allotment for almost that long, too.)
I told her who I was, what I’d been—I think I have to, as part of my recovery, and my support worker agrees—and I was saying how hard it was to look after Dad and heat the house with just 250kWh a week, now winter’s on its way. “Most of us here have gotten by on half as much for many years now, love,” she replied, and walked away.
It’s horrifying, Michael, to realise that what you thought was your poverty still looks like wealth to your neighbours… to realise what a mess we let the analogue world become while we were playing our digital games.
All my love, Sam x
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Dear Michael;
You’re right, I wasn’t in a great place when I finished that last letter. What can I say? It’s been tough since I crossed the fracture, since Dad came… and I had forgotten how hard a Malmö winter can hit you. In the digital, it’s whatever weather you want it to be! But here it gets overcast in October and doesn’t really brighten again until March, as it’s just starting to do now. You must remember how I complained when I first moved here from Canada, all those years ago!
Curiously, now I can remember. Not everything, of course… but patches of memory keep reappearing, especially when I write by hand. These letters are helping, I think, plus the writing my support worker advised me to do. It’s as if choosing the words myself brings memories and thoughts to life—makes them real. My memories of the digital, meanwhile, feel increasingly like a dream sequence for a movie I never finished watching.
(My support worker says that meaning is never found, always made. I tell him he sounds like a mad monk. He says that’s the effect he’s aiming for. He’s a weird old boy, but I’ve grown to quite like him.)
Whether it’s memory or the weather, I’m feeling better now than I was. Maybe it’s the physical work, too? It’s easier to kneel and dig than when I started… but then the ground was near frozen when I started! But now I’ve got neat rows with seeds inside, waiting for the real warmth to arrive… if the yields are good, I may have enough extra to sell some at the market before midsummer.
There’s been a thaw with Saskia, too—my allotment-neighbour, who I wrote about last time? I doubt we’ll ever be best friends, but I think she respects me for working out there all winter, when even Saskia spent most of January at home. When she returned, she looked at my turned soil and the strings I’d pegged out for the rows, and said “You’ve made a good job of that, girl.” Since then, she’s started saying hello and goodbye, and we’ve even made each other tea a couple of times! It sounds silly—what am I, a four-year-old at a new school?! But it feels like progress, too.
Out here in the analogue, you don’t get to choose your neighbours, what you will and won’t see… and while you do have to choose how you’re going to be, you have to do it without any optimisation or advice. I don’t think I’ll ever be good at it, but I know I’m doing better than I was.
Dad’s doing well, too. I mean, he’s no better, and likely never will be any better, as I understand it. But he’s no worse… and now the days are lengthening, he’s brightening along with them. I wheeled him out onto the balcony for fika a few days ago, the first day it was warm enough not to worry it’d get to his lungs. He sipped his coffee and nibbled his bulle, and said “I could get used to this Scandinavian lifestyle”. Enjoy it while it lasts, I told him—we’ll be lucky to get a balcony of our own if we ever find a place to downsize into. He laughed. “We’ll be alright, girl, wherever we end up.”
Wherever, indeed! Though even the relocation doesn’t seem as impossible as it did last year. I mean, I have no idea how I’ll do it, or where we might end up! It’s going to mean some hard choices, I expect, for both of us. But I’m slowly coming to appreciate choices, somehow. I wouldn’t say I like them, exactly—I still find myself wanting to turn them over to that virtual me, watch her do it all on my behalf.
I sometimes wonder if she’s still there, on the other side. Do avatars remember us when we’re not there, like we remember them? Do they even exist when we’re not there, in a meaningful way?
My support worker says I’m getting better at sitting with questions that can’t be answered immediately. I asked him if he wanted to get a coffee sometime. “I can’t go for coffee with clients,” he said, “that would be professional misconduct.” Maybe I won’t be a client for much longer, I replied. “Maybe not,” he said, smiling. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
So I’m treating it as a sort of test. Maybe I’m not supposed to keep score any more, but it’s only human to set yourself goals, isn’t it?
All my love, Sam
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SOURCE SCENARIO: “FRACTURED FUTURE”
In 2045, Southern Sweden is a place of unprecedented transformation. Over the past two decades, the world has become increasingly divided into two completely discrete spheres of existence, the digital and the analogue—a binary which has long been present but has now reached its full fruition. These parallel worlds have their own cultures, values, social norms and even currencies. Every person present in the digital world has a digital twin, an AI avatar which realises all their potential. Humans are there, present with them, but their AI twins are playing the main part. Interactions between people happen between their AI twins, and are often transactional in nature. In the analogue world, values like caring, authenticity and trust hold sway and manual skills are paramount. But society has been fractured: some live their lives 100% in the analogue and others’ lives are 100% digital.
Recently, however, it became clear that this dichotomy is not sustainable for the planet nor its inhabitants. Technology has encroached too much upon the natural world. This has prompted an ongoing project of bridging the two worlds. Many people seek a balance between digital and analogue, with a trend to move wholly towards an analogue life. There is significant restoration of the natural environment and increased care taken to foster non-digital (and non-AI-mediated) social connections.
