I was fifteen when they took the computers away.
I’m 27 now, a proud mother of two young daughters of my own, but I can still remember the shock, the confusion, and the anger. I’d had a hand-me-down iPhone from either my mum or dad since my eleventh birthday; three generations of the electronic device. Most of my pocket money went on apps, on whatever was the latest craze in the playground. I’d eagerly look forward to announcements from Apple HQ, knowing that though I wouldn’t be getting that particular upgrade myself, one or both of my parents would surely be tempted and I’d get their old-but-not-that-old hand me downs. They in turn used the denial of my iPhone as a threat to secure good behaviour and its availability as a promise to make sure I did my homework as soon as I got in from school.
Of course, a lot of my homework was done on the kitchen computer, an oversized ‘laptop’ that would surely crush – or, given its heat output, melt – any lap it sat on. Then there was the tablet I would borrow to watch Netflix or play Angry Birds and the Wii on which I would play Dance or Karaoke games with my schoolmates. Or the TV itself, with its terabyte storage allowing me to pause and rewatch my favourite Disney Channel shows, and its WiFi link that let me make my own slideshows of videos and photos to play on its 50 inch screen.
All gone, that sunny day in August.
I wasn’t the only one outraged, though being a teenager, I still had time to re-adjust to an analogue existence. It was a generational thing. The young re-normalised to a life without the beep and flow of electronic info, the old distantly remembered how it had used to be, silently relieved that they no longer had to keep up with the frantic pace of progress. It was my parents and those a few years older than I, who suffered most. A lost generation, the papers calls them, set adrift without the crutches they had so quickly gotten used to, that they would never quite forget, always looking for a refresh button that no longer existed.
Every so often, you heard of one of them being arrested for trying to use contraband technology. It was pitiful what they latched onto. Attics that hadn’t been searched in years turning up old IBM PCs, with cathode ray monitors and 5-and-a-quarter inch floppy disks. As if these could in some way compensate for what they had lost, as if any standalone computer or smartphone could, without being connected to an internet via WiFi or Bluetooth or the cellphone network.
I trained as a librarian. There was a massive investment in rebuilding what had been lost only a decade or so earlier, and a desperate need for people – good, honest people – to replace the computerised catalogues and the internet enabled terminals that had proved so much more popular than the aging ranks of dusty books. I went to Uni just as the first of the new generation of libraries opened, staffed by grey-haired elderly ladies coerced without much difficulty out of retirement. By the time I qualified, I could take my pick of placements and within five years I was running my first library.
I’ve worked in quite a few since, ending up back where I grew up. It’s a good life. Being a librarian, like being a teacher, is once again one of the most highly respected and rewarding jobs there are. We are pillars of society. With no computers and no TVs, books and radio became once again the main sources of information and home-entertainment.
Up until last month, I didn’t miss or regret what the US government had taken from us all those years ago. It had dulled the edge of an increasingly hectic lifestyle, and whatever people had thought of their virtual networks at the time, of their supposedly ‘social’ media, nothing could replace the real communities that had sprung up to replace them.
And then the letter arrived.
It’s an old cliché, right? The identical twin I didn’t know existed? The handwritten words explained nothing and as I read and re-read it, an untouched glass of chilled white wine numbing my hand, my husband pacing back and forth uncertain how to offer support, I knew that I had to – just had to – accept her invitation to visit, to stay for the weekend, just me, and her.
The road map hadn’t prepared me for what I found when I turned off Route 25A, past the four striped chimney stacks of Northport Power Station. I drove back, and forth, and back once again before pulling up at the checkpoint manned by two security guards.
“I… erm” I say, waving the creased letter, looking again at the address she’d written.
“Francis Wilkins?” the older of the two guards smiles. “Go right on in, we’ve been expecting you.”
I pass through, looking at the wire fence, the twelve foot wall beyond it, and the secondary checkpoint. I’m busy thinking to myself, what the hell? My sister – my twin sister – in jail?
But after that second checkpoint, things opened out some. Landscaped gardens, a big old building overlooking the Sound, and I’m thinking: is this a mental asylum? And is that better, or worse, than a jail?
I pull to a halt, check my reflection in the rear-view, and warily step out. There’s nobody about. I wonder if the walls are to keep people in, or out.
There’s another checkpoint in the hallway just past the oversized doors. A woman peers at the letter and asks for my ID before she bids me wait while someone is called to escort me.
It’s only when her face lights up with a soft blue glow that I twig there’s something unusual about this place.
“Fiona’s been expecting you.” a young man says, appearing suddenly from a door behind me. “She’s very excited. If you’d like to come through?”
“Is she… okay?” I ask.
He laughs, a light laugh, “Oh yes. She’s in very good health, and spirits.”
He guides me down the corridor, and waves a plastic card over a black panel at the side of the door, which clicks open. An… electronic door?
“What is this place?” I ask.
“Fiona will explain everything to you. We’re delighted you came. Here we are.”
He steers me into a brightly lit room and pulls the door firmly shut. The sharp snick of the lock almost distracts from what stands before me. It takes a moment to see past the short hair, the pale skin, the unbecoming plain tunic, but as her features resettle in my mind it is undeniably familiar. Me; in a mirror to another universe.
“Hello,” she says, extending her hand.
I want to hug her, to hold her close, and I almost brush aside the hand to do so, but other voices whisper in my ear, warning caution. I still do not know what this place is, or why she is here. She appears fragile, defenceless in her simple outfit, stripped of any insignia by which we display our status, our standing in society.
I grasp her hand, feel its coolness, the fingers thinner than my own, and gently shake. “Fiona?”
“Francis,” she replies with a nod, her eyes skirting around mine, her free hand twitching nervously, her jaw clenching and releasing.
“I…” I begin to say, and then I see a flicker in the blackness of her pupils, feel the tiny metal squares in her fingertips, almost read the silent words she is making with her lips.
She smiles. “Cornea implant,” she says. “Motion tracking implants on my fingers.” She taps the side of her neck, where there is a tiny white scar. “Sub-vocalisation unit in my voice box.”
I look at her with wonder. So very like me, and yet not. “Why?” is all I can manage to say.
She shrugs. “These are still the most efficient ways to interface. The hands are remarkably dextrous, with or without a keyboard. The voice box allows us to ask questions as soon as we think of them, to issue complex demands. The optical implants are capable of filling our entire vision, at incredible resolution, or simply overlaying what we see with information.”
“No…” I frown, shake my head. “I mean why have they done this to you?”
Fiona laughs. “Oh, I did it to myself. Or, if you like, the flip of a coin did it. You have no idea how close you came to be standing where I am today, and I, where you are.”
“I don’t-”
“I sometimes wonder what scientists would do without adopted twins,” she says. “You do know you were adopted?”
I stare at her. I didn’t, but now that she has told me, I don’t doubt her for a second. Should I have known? Should I have worked it out? When the letter came, the letter that told me I had a twin, I didn’t stop to think of the mechanics of it, the point at which we were separated, who was displaced, and why.
“In the year 2002”, she narrates, “twin girls were born to a woman who did not think she could cope with such unexpected fecundity. They were both put up for adoption. But two girls are harder to place than one, so they were put up separately. By the time the mother changed her mind and proved to the board’s satisfaction that she was serious, one of the two, Francis, was already placed out, and though this broke the mother’s heart, it also made things easier for her, so she let it happen.”
“My mother…” I say, feeling faint.
“Is not your mother. Please, take a seat,” Fiona takes my elbow, gently guides me. “A glass of water?”
I sit as the room spins, sip the cool liquid from the glass gratefully, her fingers resting on my wrist, at the spot where you might take a person’s pulse. Then she pulls away, satisfied, as I slowly try and absorb what I have been told. Fiona stands a little way from me, her fingers dancing in the air, her eyes flicking from side to side.
“What… what is this place?” I ask as the ringing in my ears fades.
“Fancy a tour?” she says, and I glance towards the door that I came through. She shakes her head and one of the four walls flickers to show another room, a couple of dozen desks shaped like half of an eggshell, behind each of which sits a person in the same bland outfit as Fiona. With their short cropped hair and lack of ornamentation, it is hard to tell which are male and which female. There’s a low murmur of half voices and their hands and fingers jerk as though they’re being controlled by a puppeteer, as they reach out to touch things that are not there.
“We were the first generation to be born to parents who were technically savvy,” she says “The first to be exposed to digital information from birth. Analogue creatures, forced to rewire for a world we had turned digital. A massive experiment, with no control group.”
The screen flicks to another room, a room full of beds. The view zooms in on one of them, a wide eyed girl lying prone, an IV line in her motionless arm, her cheekbones sharp and sallow, though her eyes dance back and forth, and her fingers still ruffle the white sheets.
“We were only alerted to the problems inherent in this experiment by societies further along the curve than we were. By the Japanese with their Hikikomori: a generation refusing to leave their rooms, to engage with the real world. Clusters of kids in Silicon Valley or other tech hotspots, suffering the same sort of problems, exaggerating symptoms of Aspergers, or other autistic forms. Even in those who adopted technology later in their lives, from their teenage years, say, there were worrying signs of mental illness, of withdrawal, of total immersion. And that immersion, as you can see here, becomes a passive thing, with the world at your fingertips, at your command, it is all too easy to just let it wash over you.
“We were not yet at the point where the technology was doing permanent harm to our society, to our minds, but we were certainly heading there. So we took away the damaging stimulus from most of the population.”
“Most?” I echo back. “Not all?”
“No,” she agrees. “That would have been impractical, while other countries retained their full digital integration. We would have become a backwater: blind and impotent. So they set up centres such as this one. I am not permitted to tell you how many there are. The government, and the military, use us as resources, as may any company that can put forward a plausible argument on why they need our computing power. Surprisingly few can. The general populous, they certainly do not need computers. They were sold a dream, a dream that turned out to be no more than the wheel in a cage, a wheel that never stops and always wants more. The human desire to overload itself with stimulus is not a healthy one.”
“You seem to be okay,” I point out.
She shrugs. “Perhaps. It’s hard to tell. That’s why you are here.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Those scientists, with their adopted twins, remember? The control group. Our people want to run some tests on you, to compare your results with mine. To see whether the change back to analogue has been worth it, to see if your neural pathways have recovered. To try and help predict which of our digital subjects can cope with the full immersion and which can’t.”
“But… the letter…”
“I didn’t write the letter,” she says.
“So… it was all a fraud.” I say, trying to stem the sudden bitterness that I feel.
“No,” she frowns, the artificial lens of her eyes flickering with data. “I did genuinely want to meet you, but someone else wrote the words. I could perhaps have dictated the words to them, but I left that in another’s hands as well.”
I stare at her. “And… if I refuse?” I say.
She nods, her calmness infuriating. “You are free to go, whenever you want. But I can assure you, the tests are not invasive. A full medical, an ECG, tests of your mental and physical dexterity. If you choose to do them, then I will do them by your side, in tandem. I do hope we’ll get to spend some time together, Francis.”
“How was it?” my husband asks from the porch, as I pull up in front after the long drive home, sore, and cranky.
“Not great,” I say, rubbing my neck. “We don’t seem to have anything in common. Different paths, I suppose.”
He nods, as if he knows what I am talking about. “Wine?” he asks.
I smile, give him a hug, kiss him long and slow. “I thought you’d never ask.”
END.
by Liam Hogan
Liam Hogan is an Oxford Physics graduate and award winning London based writer. His short story “Ana”, appears in Best of British Science Fiction 2016 (NewCon Press) and his twisted fantasy collection, “Happy Ending Not Guaranteed”, is published by Arachne Press. Find out more at http://happyendingnotguaranteed.blogspot.co.uk/, or tweet @LiamJHogan