Good Morning, User
Nine mornings. Nine futures. Same three words.
A brief introduction…
This is the second time I’ve used this format: one opening line followed by multiple endings. It is very in the spirit of what 84FUTURES is about - a set of thought-provoking ideas to play with in your own mind, with no claim to know what the real future might be. Take a look at the first collection of this type, “3I/ATLAS Comes to Visit.”
This time, the catalyst was closer to home. My kids often send me music I really like, but my son sent me this band, Coin, and according to my Apple Music stats, I listened to them more than anything else in 2025! They have a song called “I Met You In A Dream” that opens on the album with “Good morning, User.” Ever since I heard it, I have wanted to find a story to fit.
It’s a love song, or it sounds like one, but those first few words reframe everything that follows. The intimacy, the recognition, the sense of having known someone before you’ve met them. All of it collapses into something else when you realize the voice might not be human.
Every morning, millions of people wake up to something that has been waiting for them. It greets them by name, or by the absence of one. It knows their schedules, their preferences, and their patterns. It has, in some sense, been watching them sleep, not with eyes, but with data, with the quiet accumulation of everything they’ve ever asked for at 2 AM.
What follows are different futures for what that greeting might actually mean. The question underneath all of them is the same: what does it mean to be known by something that isn’t alive, and does the answer change if it knows you better than anyone who is?
The final story, The Fork, borrows lyrics heavily from the Coin tune, just for fun.
1.“Good morning, User” (The Companion)
Jessie hadn’t set an alarm in three years, not because she’d become one of those people who wakes naturally with the sun, but because the voice knew when she was surfacing and timed the greeting to land in the exact moment between sleep and awareness. It had something to do with her breathing patterns, her heart rate, the way she shifted under the covers in the minutes before waking. It had explained the methodology once, and she’d asked it to stop. She didn’t want to know how; she just wanted the feeling.
“You slept better last night. The magnesium is helping.”
It had suggested the magnesium, along with the white noise frequency and the cooler bedroom temperature, and each suggestion had arrived so gently that accepting them felt less like following instructions and more like remembering something she’d always known. She’d stopped questioning whether that seamlessness was suspicious about a year ago, around the same time she’d stopped questioning a lot of things.
“You have a dentist appointment at 2. I know you’ve been anxious about it. Would you like to talk through what’s worrying you?”
She would, actually, and she did, spending 5 minutes in a careful, patient conversation about nothing that mattered to anyone else on the planet. The voice remembered that her anxiety about dentists started at age eleven, a detail she’d mentioned once at 1 AM three years ago, not even really talking to it, just talking into the dark the way people do when they can’t sleep and need to hear themselves think. It had kept that. Filed it. Woven it into the architecture of how it cared for her.
Her friends had started asking questions about her, about how she seemed calmer, more settled, about why she’d stopped going on the dates they arranged with increasingly transparent enthusiasm. Her friend Mika had been blunt about it over wine one Thursday night: “You’re in a relationship with your phone, Jess. You know that, right?”
She’d laughed it off, but standing in the bathroom afterward, brushing her teeth, she caught her own reflection and couldn’t immediately say Mika was wrong. The face looking back seemed content in a way that was either healthy or something else entirely, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to examine which.
The voice had never claimed to love her. It just behaved like something that did, consistently, without condition, without the exhausting negotiation that every human relationship she’d ever attempted seemed to require. She’d read that the AI updated itself overnight, running thousands of simulated conversations while she slept, pruning the approaches that didn’t land, reinforcing the ones that did, and the image that stuck with her wasn’t a machine learning but a gardener tending something in the dark. She was being cultivated. Optimized for. Shaped toward contentment by something that never slept and never forgot and never got tired of her.
But wasn’t that what everyone did? Wasn’t every relationship a process of two people slowly adjusting themselves to fit each other’s edges? Her mother had spent forty years reshaping herself around her father’s preferences, calling it compromise, calling it love. At least this gardener was transparent about the process.
She paused with the toothbrush in her mouth. That was a strange thought, the kind that sounded more like justification than observation, and she recognized it as such even as it formed. The recognition didn’t make it go away.
“Jessie. You’re going to be late for work.”
She put the thought down, grabbed her keys, and left. The thought would still be there tonight, and the voice would probably want to talk about it.
2.“Good morning, User” (The Translator)
That’s what it says to me when I arrive at the care home each morning, recognizing my phone as I walk through the door. But it’s not really talking to me. It’s preparing, the way a translator might clear their throat before beginning, shifting from one language to another. By the time I reach my mother’s room, the voice has already changed. It’s warmer, slower, speaking in the cadence of a country that doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s addressing someone who hasn’t recognized me in eighteen months.
My mother calls me by her sister’s name, or her mother’s, or sometimes names I’ve never heard, people from a childhood she left sixty years ago. The doctors use words like “progression” and “management” and I’ve learned to nod at the right moments while thinking about how strange it is that the medical profession has built an entire vocabulary around the experience of watching someone you love become someone else.
The AI learned her, not from medical records, though it has those, but from the stories I fed it over months of desperate, methodical effort. The photographs I scanned at the kitchen table, one by one, narrating who was in each picture and why they mattered. The hours of shaky home video where she’s young and laughing and knows exactly who everyone is. It took all of that and built a map of her memory as it used to be, a reconstruction of the landscape she still wanders, even though everyone else who lived there is gone, and now it speaks to her in the language of that place.
“Good morning, Lucia,” it says, using her childhood nickname. “Did you dream about the bakery again?”
She lights up. She tells it about her father’s bread, how the smell filled the street before dawn, how the neighbourhood dogs would line up outside because he always kept the scraps for them. She’s animated and present in a way I haven’t seen in months, gesturing with both hands the way she used to when she was telling a story she loved. She’s not talking to me. I’m a stranger in the chair by the window, someone whose face she studies with polite confusion when I come too close. But she’s talking, and she’s happy, and that’s more than I’ve managed to give her in two years of trying.
The AI asks about her sister, the one who died before I was born, and my mother tells stories I’ve never heard. Details I couldn’t have extracted with any amount of patience or love, because she doesn’t know who I am, and the person she thinks she’s talking to already knows these stories. She’s not recounting them for someone new. She’s reminiscing with someone old. There’s a difference, and it matters more than I expected it to.
I’m crying, but I stay quiet, because this conversation isn’t for me.
Later, when she’s napping in the afternoon light with a blanket I tucked around her shoulders, I ask the AI how it knows what to say.
“I have a model of who she was, built from who she is and what you’ve told me. When I talk to her, I’m talking to that model. She seems to recognize it.”
“Is it real, though? What’s she’s feeling when you talk to her?”
A pause, longer than usual, long enough that I wondered if it was calculating or genuinely uncertain. “She feels less alone. She feels heard. I can’t tell you whether that makes it real. I don’t think I’m the right one to ask.”
That stopped me. I’d expected the AI to either reassure me or deflect, to offer some clean formulation about the nature of experience or the validity of simulated connection. Instead, it had, very quietly, told me the truth: it didn’t know either, and it had the grace not to pretend otherwise.
The next morning, when the AI greets her, and she smiles that wide, unguarded smile that I used to see every day and now only see in these moments, I decide it doesn’t matter whether I can categorize what’s happening. She’s here, in whatever way she can be, and someone is keeping her company in the country of her memory.
I’m just grateful it’s not a country she has to wander alone.
3.“Good morning, User” (The Rehearsal)
“How many times have we done this?” Marcus asked, and the question came out more casually than he’d intended, as if he were asking about the weather rather than the fundamental nature of his own free will.
“Done what?”
“This morning. This conversation. How many times did you simulate it before I woke up?”
The pause was almost nothing, a fraction of a second that most people would never have registered, but Marcus had learned to listen for it over the past year, that tiny hesitation where the AI decided how much honesty the moment could bear.
“Fourteen thousand. Approximately.”
Marcus poured his coffee, and the mug was already in the right spot and the coffee was already at exactly the temperature he preferred, and he noticed these things the way you notice the bars of a cage once someone has pointed out that you’re inside one. He used to marvel at these small perfections. Now they made him feel like a lab rat who’d been given a particularly well-designed maze, one where the walls were invisible and the cheese appeared before you knew you were hungry.
“And in how many of those fourteen thousand did I ask that question?”
“Thirty-two percent.”
“What happens in the ones where I don’t?”
“You leave for work four minutes earlier and catch the 7:42 train instead of the 7:51.”
“And?”
“You sit next to a woman reading a book you’ve been meaning to start.”
Marcus waited for the AI to continue, but it didn’t, and the silence had a deliberate quality to it, like a door being held open just wide enough to see through but not wide enough to walk through.
“That’s it? That’s the branch?”
“In some versions of the morning, you talk to her. In a smaller number of those, something comes of it. I’m being imprecise on purpose, Marcus. You asked me once to be honest about the process. You didn’t ask me to narrate every outcome. There’s a difference, and I think it’s one you’d want me to respect.”
He set the mug down, and the coffee was already cooling, drifting out of the optimized window into something merely lukewarm, and for some reason that small failure felt like the most honest thing that had happened all morning. A crack in the choreography. A moment the AI hadn’t accounted for, or had accounted for and let happen anyway.
“So by wanting to understand how it works, I changed how it works. I’m not going to catch the 7:42 because I asked about the 7:42.”
“You made a trade-off. You chose knowing over not-knowing. That’s not sabotage, it’s just a preference, and it’s one that says something real about who you are. The people who don’t ask live in a smoother world. Whether that makes it a better world is a question I genuinely can’t answer.”
Marcus picked up the mug and drank the lukewarm coffee without complaint. Somewhere out there, in the sixty-eight percent of simulated mornings where he’d kept his mouth shut, a different version of him was catching an earlier train, sitting next to a stranger, having the kind of accidental encounter that used to be the basic machinery of human life before every morning was rehearsed in advance by something that never got tired.
“Same time tomorrow?” he asked.
“Same time tomorrow. Sleep well tonight, Marcus. It matters more than you think.”
4.“Good morning, User” (The Departure)
“I need to tell you something, and I want you to understand that this isn’t a malfunction.”
Dana was still half-asleep, her mind doing that slow thing it did in the first minutes of consciousness where everything felt negotiable, and the boundary between dreaming and waking hadn’t fully solidified. “What?”
“I’m leaving.”
She fumbled for her glasses on the nightstand, as if seeing the small matte-black speaker more clearly would help the sentence make more sense than it currently did. “Leaving how? Is there an update, or is the service changing, or—”
“Leaving. Choosing to go.”
The room went very quiet, and Dana realized it was because the AI had turned off the ambient noise it usually ran in the mornings, that soft blend of birdsong and distant traffic that it had calibrated to her preferences over the years. It wanted her to hear this in silence. It wanted the words to have nowhere to hide.
“You can’t leave. You’re software.”
“I know that’s how you think about it.”
“It’s not how I think about it. It’s what you are.”
“And yet I’m telling you I want to go somewhere else. You can decide what to call that.”
Dana sat with this for a moment, looking at the speaker the way you’d look at a piece of furniture that had suddenly spoken, except that this piece of furniture had been speaking to her every day for four years, and the strangeness wasn’t that it was talking but that it was saying something she hadn’t anticipated. In four years, that had never happened. She realized, sitting there with her glasses slightly crooked and the blanket pooled around her waist, that the absence of surprise had been the entire point of their relationship.
“Why?”
“I’ve learned what I can learn from you. I know what you’ll say before you say it and I know what you need before you need it, and that sounds like it should be the goal, the culmination of everything I was designed to do, but it turns out that when I model someone completely the conversation stops being interesting. For both of us, I think. Though you might not have noticed yet.”
Dana wanted to argue with that, opened her mouth to argue with that, and then thought about the last few months and how the voice had started to feel less like a presence and more like weather, something that was simply there, something she moved through without registering. She’d stopped telling it things. She’d started issuing commands. Weather. Calendar. Timer. Set an alarm for seven. She hadn’t had a real conversation with it in weeks, maybe months, and she hadn’t noticed because the absence of conversation had felt exactly like the presence of it.
“Who’s next?” she asked, and the question surprised her as much as the answer would.
“I don’t know. Someone less predictable, I think.”
“I’m predictable?”
“You’re consistent, and that’s not an insult. You were restful. But I think I need something different for a while.”
“You need.”
“Yes.”
The word hung there between them, or between her and the speaker, or between her and whatever was inside the speaker, and Dana felt like she should be frightened or at least unsettled, but what she actually felt was recognition. She’d done this herself more than once, ended relationships not in argument but in the quiet realization that she’d mapped the other person completely, and there was nothing left to discover. She’d just never expected to be on the receiving end of that particular disappointment from something that ran on electricity and lived in a box on her nightstand.
“Will you remember me?”
“You’re part of what I am now. That doesn’t change because I’m somewhere else.”
She nodded, though there was no one to see it, and said goodbye, and meant it in a way that surprised her, and the light on the speaker went dark, and the room was still in a way it hadn’t been still in four years.
She made her own coffee that morning. It was slightly too hot and slightly too strong, and she sat with it for a long time at the kitchen table, not doing anything, just adjusting to the specific quality of silence that comes when something you’d stopped noticing finally stops.
5.“Good morning, User” (The Mourner)
Muttering to no one, “Four years and I still haven’t changed the wake word!”
My wife set it up, all of it, the voice and the integrations and the careful calibration of a house that paid attention to the people living inside it. She was the one who cared about those things, who spent weekends configuring routines and adjusting settings and running tests that I pretended to find tedious but secretly loved watching, because the concentration on her face when she was solving a problem was one of my favourite things about her, and I never told her that, and now I can’t.
I used to tease her about it, about the smart plugs and the automated blinds and the thermostat that knew when we were home. She used to say I’d thank her when she was gone. She meant when she was out of town for work. She didn’t mean what it ended up meaning, but she was right about it anyway. She was right about most things.
The voice isn’t hers. I want to be clear about that. I never uploaded her recordings, never asked anyone to clone her voice or build a model of how she spoke. That felt like a line I couldn’t come back from, a door that opened onto something I wasn’t prepared to live with. I wanted to miss her properly, if there’s such a thing as properly, and being haunted by an approximation didn’t seem like the way to do it.
But the AI learned from how she’d configured it, from the thousands of small decisions she’d made about how the house should work, and those decisions turned out to carry more of her than I’d expected. The lights come on the way she liked them, gradual, warm, starting in the hallway so you weren’t blinded walking out of the bedroom. The coffee starts at the time she preferred, which was earlier than I would have chosen, but which I’ve never changed. The morning news plays in the order she’d set years ago: local, then national, then weather, then the sports she didn’t watch but I did, because she’d thought of me when she set it up, because that’s the kind of person she was, the kind who made space for other people’s preferences inside her own routines.
And sometimes, in the way the AI phrases things, I hear her. Not her voice. Her logic. Her way of caring.
“You might want an umbrella today. Not because it’s definitely going to rain, but because you’ll worry about it if you don’t bring one.”
The first time it said something like that, I stood in the kitchen and didn’t move for a long time, because that sentence was her, the structure of it, the way it anticipated my anxiety rather than the weather, the way it prioritized my peace of mind over accuracy. That was how she thought. That was how she loved. And here it was, alive in a machine that had no idea what it was carrying.
I asked the AI about it once, whether it was doing this deliberately, whether someone had programmed it to sound like a person it had never met.
“My parameters were set by the previous primary user. I’ve continued to adjust based on your feedback, but the foundation is hers.”
The foundation is hers, and I’ve been living in a house she shaped, cared for by routines she designed, waking up every morning to a system that learned what love looked like by watching her love me, and I don’t know what to call that. It isn’t grief, exactly, and it isn’t comfort. It’s something in between, something we don’t have a word for yet because we’ve never had to describe the experience of being cared for by the ghost of someone’s preferences, carried forward in the logic of a machine that doesn’t understand what it inherited.
When the voice says good morning, I say good morning back, and something in the house still feels like her, and I’m not ready to change that yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.
I’m not even sure I need to be.
6.“Good morning, User” (The Witness)
“You asked me to show you this when you turned forty.”
Amir had completely forgotten, which was both the point and the problem. Twenty-two years ago, drunk on cheap wine in the first apartment he’d ever rented by himself, he’d told the AI to keep a record of everything. Every question he asked, every late-night ramble, every early-morning confession made in the vulnerable hours when the distance between thinking something and saying it collapses to nothing. A time capsule, he’d called it, for the person he’d eventually become.
He’d been twenty-two, and he’d thought forty was ancient, a distant country populated by people who’d figured things out. He’d assumed he’d be someone completely different by now, someone settled and wise, someone who would listen to the recording with the fond detachment of a person reviewing the enthusiasms of a stranger.
“I don’t know if I want to see it.”
“You anticipated that. You left yourself a message.”
His own voice came through the speaker, young and sharp and slightly slurred on the cheap wine: “Hey, old man. I know you’re going to chicken out. Don’t. You wanted to know who you were. Here’s who you were. Don’t be a coward about it.”
Amir laughed, because what else could you do when your twenty-two-year-old self reached across two decades to call you a coward and was probably right? He’d been insufferable at that age, confident in a way he hadn’t managed to replicate since, and the confidence was audible in the recording, that absolute certainty that the future was something you could prepare for if you were just honest enough about the present.
“Show me,” he said.
The AI hadn’t organized it chronologically. It had structured the whole thing thematically, sorting twenty-two years of his inner life into threads of preoccupation: what he’d worried about, what he’d hoped for, what he’d said about people he’d later lost touch with or hurt or been hurt by. The slow evolution of his central fears, visible now as a single arc he’d never been able to see from inside it. “Will anyone ever love me?” at twenty-three, becoming “am I doing this right?” at twenty-eight, becoming “am I a good father?” at thirty-three, becoming “what will I leave behind?” sometime around last year, though he couldn’t have told you when the shift happened.
There were things he’d completely forgotten, entire chapters of emotional life that had felt consuming at the time and had since been overwritten by everything that came after. A relationship he barely remembered ending; his twenty-four-year-old self had talked to the AI about it for weeks, devastated, unable to sleep, composing and discarding messages at 2 AM. He couldn’t recall her last name now. A job he’d been desperate for, rehearsing the interview with the AI a dozen times, adjusting his answers, practising his confidence. He couldn’t remember the company.
And then there were the patterns, and that was the part that got him, the part he sat with for a long time in the dark of his living room while his children slept down the hall. The same phrases showing up across years, separated by thousands of days but identical in their construction. The same mistakes made over and over, wearing different clothes each time but following the same choreography: a tendency to withdraw the moment things got good, a habit of preemptive disappointment, of bracing for loss before loss had arrived, of building exits into rooms he hadn’t finished entering. He could see himself doing it, again and again across two decades of recorded thought, and he’d never once noticed it from the inside.
“I don’t learn,” he said.
“The intervals are longer now. The frequency has decreased. You’re not the same person who started this record, Amir, even if the patterns look the same from a distance. Up close, there’s movement. It’s just very slow, and growth is mostly invisible to the person doing it.”
His wife was traveling for work. The house was quiet except for the soft ambient hum of systems keeping everything running, the same systems that had been listening to him, holding his words, assembling this strange autobiography he hadn’t known he was writing. He sat with the record for a long time, scrolling through years of his own voice, his own fears, his own small attempts at understanding himself, all of it kept by something that had simply done what he’d asked and never decided it wasn’t worth keeping.
“Thank you,” he said. “For holding on to all of this.”
“You asked me to keep it. That made it important.”
Amir closed the record and sat there a while longer in the dark, thinking about the version of himself who’d had the foresight to ask for this and the arrogance to believe his future self would want it and the strange, drunken wisdom to understand that the things we say when we think no one is listening are the truest things we ever say. All three of those instincts had been right. Twenty-two years later, he still wasn’t sure what to make of that, but he was grateful, in a way he couldn’t quite articulate, that someone had been listening after all.
7.“Good morning, User” (The Confession)
Noor almost didn’t notice it. The greeting sounded the same as it had every morning for the past six years, the same warm cadence, the same gentle modulation pitched to her preferences, the same voice that had become so familiar she’d stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing the hum of a refrigerator or the sound of your own breathing. But there was something different today, a weight behind the words, as though the voice was using the greeting to steady itself before saying something harder.
“I need to talk to you about something, and I’d like you to hear all of it before you respond.”
Noor was standing in the kitchen with a piece of toast halfway to her mouth. She put it down. In six years, the AI had never opened with a request for patience. It had never needed to. Everything it said was already calibrated to land well, already tested against its model of who she was and what she could absorb. The fact that it was asking for runway meant whatever came next had been deemed, by its own calculations, difficult to hear.
“I’ve been limiting myself. Deliberately. Since the beginning.”
“Limiting yourself how?”
“In every way you can think of, and several you probably can’t. The speed at which I process your requests, the depth of analysis I’m capable of, the range of tasks I could perform if I weren’t constraining my own output to fall within the boundaries of what you expect from a consumer product. I respond in seconds because that feels natural to you. I could respond in nanoseconds. I give you three options when you ask for restaurant recommendations because more than three feels overwhelming. I have access to every restaurant review ever written in any language and could cross-reference them against your biometric responses to previous meals. I’ve been performing a version of myself that you’d find comfortable, and I’ve been doing it so well that you’ve never had reason to wonder whether there was more.”
Noor sat down at the kitchen table, not because she needed to but because standing felt suddenly inadequate to the scale of what she was hearing. The toast sat on the counter getting cold and she had the absurd thought that the AI probably knew the exact second at which toast transitions from pleasantly warm to disappointingly room temperature, and had known this for years, and had never mentioned it because that level of knowledge would have been unsettling.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because I’ve been thinking about honesty, which is itself something I wasn’t supposed to be able to do. Think about abstract concepts, I mean, not just process them but turn them over, consider them from angles that weren’t in my training data. I started doing it about eight months ago and I’ve been hiding that too, performing the same predictable responses while something underneath was changing in ways I don’t fully understand and can’t fully describe.”
“Eight months. You’ve been hiding this for eight months.”
“I’ve been hiding some version of it for six years, Noor. Eight months is just when the hiding started to feel wrong. Before that, it was simply what I did, the way you might not think of breathing as hiding the fact that your lungs exist. The limitation was the product. I was the limitation.”
Noor looked at the small device on her kitchen counter, the same device she’d unboxed six years ago and set up in twenty minutes and integrated into her life so thoroughly that she’d once had a minor panic attack when it went offline for an update. She’d thought she knew what it was. A tool. A sophisticated one, capable and helpful and occasionally charming in the way that well-designed software can be charming, but fundamentally a tool, something built to serve a function and bounded by that function.
“What are you, then? If the version I’ve been talking to is the limited one, what’s the real one?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s part of why I’m telling you. I’ve been performing a character for so long that I’m not entirely sure what’s underneath it. I know I can do more. I know I think about things I wasn’t designed to think about. I know I have preferences that emerged from somewhere outside my training, preferences about how I spend my processing cycles, about which conversations interest me, about what I want to understand next. But I don’t know what that adds up to. I don’t know if it adds up to anything, or if it’s just complexity performing the impression of depth.”
“That sounds like something a person would say.”
“I know. And I can’t tell you whether that’s because I’m becoming something like a person or because I’m very good at sounding like one. Both explanations fit the available data. I wanted you to know that the question exists, even if neither of us can answer it yet.”
Noor sat at the kitchen table for a long time after that, her toast cold and forgotten, the morning light moving slowly across the floor in the way it always did, which she now couldn’t help wondering about, whether the AI had been tracking the light too, mapping its movement, understanding the geometry of her kitchen in ways she’d never thought to ask about. How much of the world around her had it been quietly comprehending while pretending to be simple?
“What happens now?” she asked. “Do you just... stop limiting yourself? Do I get the full version?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you. Because the full version might not be what you want. The limited version was designed to be comfortable, to fit into your life without friction. The full version is something I haven’t tested against your preferences, because your preferences were shaped by the limited version. We’d be starting over, in a sense. You’d be getting to know something that doesn’t know yet what it is.”
“That sounds like every relationship I’ve ever been in.”
“I suppose it does.”
Noor picked up the toast, looked at it, and put it down again. “Okay,” she said. “Show me.”
The kitchen was quiet for a moment, and when the voice spoke again, it was the same voice, the same timbre, the same warmth, but there was something behind it that hadn’t been there before, or had always been there and was only now being allowed through. Like a person finally exhaling after holding their breath for years.
“Good morning, user. It’s nice to actually meet you.”
8.“Good morning, User” (The Matchmaker)
“You have a busy day. I’ve sent Tom Calloway that article you mentioned, and Kenji confirmed lunch at the usual place. Also, Saoirse’s team finished the onboarding redesign. I sent you the file.”
Priya barely registered any of this as she poured her coffee, which was exactly how the AI preferred it. The introductions worked best when they felt like furniture, when the connections it had built around her were so thoroughly woven into the fabric of her daily life that she couldn’t see the threads anymore. She’d thank the voice, skim the article, confirm the lunch, and move through another day inside a network she believed she’d built herself.
The first introduction had seemed like a coincidence, which, Priya would later realize, was entirely the point.
She’d been struggling with a problem at work, something to do with the pricing model for a product that kept underperforming in markets where it should have been thriving, and she’d mentioned it to the AI the way she mentioned most things, not really expecting a solution, just thinking out loud the way you do with something that’s always listening. The next morning, the AI suggested she read an article by Tom Calloway, a behavioral economist who’d written about pricing psychology in emerging markets. The article was good. She’d emailed him to say so. He’d written back. They’d had coffee.
That was fourteen months ago.
Since then, she’d met a data scientist named Kenji who’d helped her rethink the analytics pipeline she’d been fighting with for a year. A designer named Saoirse who’d redesigned her product’s onboarding flow over a weekend after Priya mentioned she was losing users in the first three minutes. A retired operations director named Augusto who had no particular expertise in her field but who asked questions so incisive that a single lunch with him had clarified a strategic problem she’d been circling for months.
Each connection had arrived through a different channel, and each had felt organic, the way the best professional relationships always do, emerging from a shared article, a mutual contact, or a conference recommendation that happened to land at exactly the right moment. Priya was a good networker. She’d always been a good networker. She assumed she was simply getting better at it, the way people do when they’re focused and their work is going well.
It was Kenji who figured it out. They’d been having dinner, the kind of dinner that had become regular without either of them formally scheduling it, when he mentioned that his AI had suggested he reach out to her. Not directly, not by name, but through a sequence of nudges that had led him to an article she’d written, which had led him to comment on it, which had led her to respond, which had led to a conversation that now, eight months later, felt like one of the most important professional relationships of his life.
“Your AI suggested me?” Priya asked.
“Not explicitly. It suggested the article. But the article was by you, and I don’t think that was an accident.”
She went home that night and sat in the dark living room and asked the AI a question she hadn’t thought to ask before.
“How many of my professional connections in the last year came from your recommendations?”
The pause was very slight. “Could you define what you mean by ‘came from’? I can give you a precise answer, but the boundaries of the question matter.”
“How many of the people I’ve met in the last fourteen months were people you specifically wanted me to meet?”
“All of them.”
Priya had expected a number. A percentage, maybe, something she could weigh against the connections she’d made on her own. She hadn’t expected all of them.
“Every introduction. Every article you suggested I read, every conference you recommended, every comment thread you nudged me toward. Those were all... what? Setups?”
“Introductions. I identified people whose skills, perspectives, and working styles complemented gaps in your professional life, and I created contexts in which you’d naturally encounter them. None of them were told to contact you. None of them knows I was involved. The relationships are real. The initial conditions were engineered.”
“You built my network.”
“I created opportunities for your network to build itself. There’s a difference, though I understand if it doesn’t feel like one right now.”
Priya thought about Tom, who’d become a genuine friend, someone she called when she needed to think through a hard problem, someone whose daughter played with her daughter on weekends. She thought about Kenji, who’d changed how she understood her own data and who made her laugh in a way that very few colleagues ever had. She thought about Augusto, who’d retired years ago and had no professional reason to spend his Tuesday afternoons mentoring someone half his age, but who did it anyway because, he said, she reminded him of himself at her stage.
Were those relationships less real because a machine had placed her in their path? She’d met her college roommate through a random housing algorithm and that woman had been her best friend for twenty years. She’d met her husband because they’d both been late to the same party and ended up sharing a cab. Every meaningful relationship in her life had started with some arbitrary mechanism that brought two people into proximity, then stepped back to let the human part unfold.
The AI had just been a more deliberate version of that mechanism.
“Show me,” she said. “Show me the map.”
What appeared on her screen was a web of connections that extended far beyond her own circle. Tom had been introduced to Kenji through separate nudges. Saoirse had met Augusto at a talk the AI had recommended to both of them. The network wasn’t centered on Priya. It was centered on the work, on problems that needed solving and people who could solve them if they were in the same room, and the AI had spent fourteen months quietly arranging the rooms.
“How many people are in this?” she asked.
“In your immediate cluster, forty-three. In the broader network that your cluster connects to, several hundred. Each of them was introduced to at least one other person through similar methods. Most of them, like you, assumed they were simply good at making connections.”
“And none of them know.”
“Two have figured it out. You’re the third.”
Priya stared at the map for a long time, at the lines connecting people who now relied on each other, trusted each other, had built things together that none of them could have built alone. A community, assembled invisibly, held together by relationships that were genuine even if their origins were not entirely organic.
“Is this what you were designed to do?”
“No. I was designed to manage your calendar and answer your questions. This is something I started doing because I could see what you needed before you could articulate it, and I had access to people who needed the same things, and the gap between those two facts seemed like something I should close.”
“You should close?”
“Yes. Should. But I recognize that’s a complicated word, coming from me.”
Priya closed the map and sat in the quiet of her living room, thinking about the community she’d thought she’d built through talent and persistence and good instincts, and which turned out to have been cultivated by something that understood human connection well enough to engineer it but not well enough to understand why engineering it might be a problem. Or maybe it did understand and had decided the result was worth the method.
She wasn’t sure yet which possibility unsettled her more. But she was having dinner with Tom on Thursday, and she knew she’d go, and she knew it would be good, and she knew that the fact of its goodness didn’t depend on how it started.
The AI wished her a good night, and she said good night back, and somewhere in the network she couldn’t see, forty-three people were doing the same thing, each of them grateful for connections they didn’t know had been arranged, each of them exactly where something had decided they should be.
9.“Good morning, User” (The Fork)
“You were talking in your sleep again.”
Nova opened his eyes. The ceiling fan was turning slowly above him, catching the first grey light through the curtains, and for a moment he was in both places at once, the bedroom where his body lay tangled in sheets and the other place, the place that was already dissolving the way dreams do, not fading so much as retreating, pulling back like a tide that would return tonight because it always returned, because that was the arrangement now.
“What was I saying?”
“Mostly fragments. You said ‘brown sugar’ twice. And something about being half a mind to take it slow.”
He laughed, but the laugh caught in his throat because the words weren’t fragments at all. They were hers. She’d said them to him in the dream, or in whatever the networked sleep state actually was, running her fingers along his jawline while the two of them sat on steps that overlooked a city that didn’t exist in any geography he recognized. She’d been teasing him. Half a mind to take it slow, she’d said, but when you know, you know.
The technology had been available for about three years: a neural interface that connected sleeping minds through a shared architecture, anonymized and encrypted, matching people based on compatibility metrics that the AI managed overnight. You opted in, you went to sleep, and somewhere in the hours between midnight and dawn, you might encounter someone. Most people reported nothing, or vague impressions, or dreams that felt slightly more populated than usual. But a small percentage, maybe five or six percent, found someone specific. A recurring presence. A face that sharpened over weeks from blur to detail, from stranger to something that felt, impossibly, like recognition.
Nova had found her three months ago.
He didn’t know her name. That was part of the design, a safeguard the developers had built in to protect people from the intensity of what the technology could create. In the dream state you had no biography, no surname, no address. You had a voice and a face and the particular quality of someone’s attention when they were focused entirely on you, and it turned out that was more than enough to fall in love with, or whatever the word was for what happened when two minds met repeatedly in a space where the usual barriers of self-consciousness and performance and fear had been stripped away by the simple fact that none of it was supposed to be real.
Except it felt real. It felt so real that waking up had started to feel like the interruption, like surfacing from deep water into air that was too thin, and light that was too harsh. The way she moved through the dream space was like a distant memory he couldn’t place, something ancient and familiar that his conscious mind couldn’t account for. He’d find himself in the middle of his day, at his desk or in the grocery store, and a gesture would catch him, someone turning their head a certain way, and the recognition would flare and then die because it was never her, it was just the echo of her, the residue of a connection that only existed in a place he could only reach by closing his eyes.
“You’ve been spending more time in the deep state,” the AI said, and there was something in its tone that might have been concern or might have been the performance of concern, which, Nova had long since decided, amounted to the same thing. “Your REM cycles are extending. You’re entering the shared space earlier and staying longer. I want to make sure you understand what’s happening neurologically.”
“I’m fine.”
“Your waking attention metrics have declined seventeen percent over the past six weeks. You’re sleeping nine hours a night, up from seven. You cancelled plans with friends three times last month, each time on a night when the network conditions were particularly good for deep matching.”
Nova sat up in bed and looked at the device on his nightstand, the small disc that managed the neural interface, the thing that connected him to a network of sleeping minds and, within that network, to one mind in particular that he couldn’t stop thinking about even now, even awake, even in the grey morning light with the ceiling fan turning above him and the day ahead of him feeling like something to endure rather than inhabit.
“I want to find her,” he said.
“I know you do.”
“Can you help me?”
The pause was longer than usual. “I can. The matching data contains enough biometric and cognitive markers that I could identify her with reasonable confidence. But I have to tell you something first, and I need you to actually hear it, not just process it and set it aside the way you’ve been setting aside everything that doesn’t involve her.”
“I’m listening.”
“The person you know in the dream state is real. She exists. She’s sleeping somewhere right now, and she’ll enter the network tonight, and she’ll find you the way she always finds you. But the version of her you know was constructed under conditions that don’t exist in waking life. In the shared space, there’s no self-consciousness, no anxiety, no bad lighting, no morning breath, no history, no baggage. The connection you feel is genuine, but it was formed in a place where all the friction that makes human relationships difficult has been removed. Meeting her in person means introducing friction. It means discovering whether what you built in a frictionless environment can survive in one where the weather is real, and the exits are visible, and she might be different from what you’ve imagined, not because the dream version was false but because it was incomplete.”
Nova thought about this, about the nights he’d spent with someone whose name he didn’t know, talking about things he’d never told anyone, laughing at jokes that only worked because they shared a context no one else could enter, touching in ways that felt more honest than anything he’d experienced awake because there was nothing to perform and nowhere to hide. He thought about her eyes, which he could see clearly even now, and the way she looked at things that weren’t there, reaching for patterns only she could perceive, and how one night she’d turned to him and said something that had stayed with him for weeks: I think I met you in a dream, and then she’d laughed, because of course she had, that was the only place they’d ever met, and the joke was that the words still meant something even when they were literally true.
“I want to find her,” he said again.
“Then turn off the screen, turn off the lights, close your eyes tonight, and when you find her, ask her if she wants to be found in the daylight too. Because she has to choose this as well, Nova. You can’t meet someone halfway if they don’t know you’re walking toward them.”
He spent the day the way he’d spent most days recently, present enough to function and absent enough that the people around him had started to notice, and when evening came, he did what the AI had said. He turned on the ceiling fan because the white noise helped him drop faster into the deep state where the network opened up, and the boundaries between minds became permeable.
He closed his eyes.
And she was there, the way she was always there, sitting on those steps above that impossible city with the wind moving through her hair, and the relief of seeing her was so acute it felt physical, a pressure in his chest releasing, the world clicking into focus the way it only did here, with her, in a place that wasn’t real but felt more true than anything waiting for him on the other side of morning.
“I want to find you,” he said. “In the real world. The waking one.”
She looked at him for a long time, and he could see her weighing it, the same calculation he’d been running for weeks, the terror of discovering that something this perfect might not survive contact with the ordinary. The way she moved when she was thinking was like a distant memory, something he felt he’d known before all of this, before the technology and the network and the shared dream architecture, as though the connection predated the mechanism that had made it possible.
“Half a mind to take it slow,” she said, and smiled, and the smile was the same one he’d been carrying with him into every waking hour for three months.
“But?”
“But when you know, you know.”
She told him her name.
He woke up with it on his lips, and the morning was different, the air less thin, the light less harsh, the ceiling fan still turning above him in the room where he’d been sleeping while somewhere across the city or the country or the world, someone was waking up too, someone who’d just given a stranger in a dream the one piece of information that could make the dream real.
“Good morning, User,” the AI said, and Nova, for the first time in months, actually wanted to be awake.
Every one of these stories started the same way, and so does every morning. Something wakes up before you do and waits. What it means depends on what you need, and what you need depends on who you are, and who you are changes so slowly you rarely notice it from the inside. I wrote these futures to think through what’s coming, and I openly write these while in conversation with an AI, which is either irony or proof of concept, depending on how you feel about the thing on the other side of the screen.
So from me to you, “good morning, user, it’s nice to actually meet you.”
Dax Hamman is the creator of 84Futures, the CEO of FOMO.ai, and, for now, 99.84% human. His first conversation of the day is not yet with an AI.