The Dartmouth Speculative Fiction Project paired eight faculty-members at Dartmouth College with eight veteran speculative fiction authors. Through design activities, panels, symposia and a mountain lodge retreat, they collaboratively imagined worlds that interrogate the future humanity is heading towards. These stories can be found in the anthology, Android in the Archives: Research, Creative Collaboration and our Speculative Futures (lightspeedmagazine.com/android), soon to be published by MIT Press in 2027.
Asha is eight pages into the book before the words disappear.
There are still hundreds of pages before the end of the book, so they must have had a record of the length of the volume, but lost the text. It’s a common experience in this library, to encounter fragments of things, to have to make educated assumptions about what once was. She’s an explorer in a world that has nothing new to explore. Everything has already been fully carved up, every molecule cataloged and appraised. The text was ostensibly about the history of Jaffna, which started when a piece of Northern Sri Lanka was given to a blind musician. She can guess at what comes next: The land passes hands, borders shifts, gods and demons shape the city into something with a heartbeat. She wonders what those timeless beings thought, when that heart stopped beating.
Asha gets an alert that visitors have arrived, so she straightens her linen uniform and returns outside. She stands slightly to the right of the white concrete library, close enough that any wandering tourists will recognize her as a helpful representative of Semper Technologies, far enough that she doesn’t disrupt their pictures. Time moves languidly, most days. A couple of visitors here and there, if she’s lucky. In their absence, she spends her time studying this particular structure, tracing and retracing the scalloped arches and bulbous domes in her head. As with all else she experiences in this world, Asha carves each detail into her memory. There is nothing that she is willing to forget.
She watches a couple—white, middle-aged, floppy straw hats—mill about the foliage. The woman taps away at her phone, taking a barrage of pictures. The man dons a navy-blue baseball cap, studying the statue of Saraswati with slight bewilderment on his face. He’s thinking something along the lines of surely no one needs so many arms.
As she waits for the visitors to approach, she dreams of Jaffna as it used to be: painted with brighter hues, the soft hum of passing conversation, of people sprawled across different axes of the city, following their own patterns of life. It’s a vision that returns to her again and again.
A few years before she started working at Semper, they tried using AI to generate clusters of people inside the library, the steps in front of restaurants, all the places where the people of a community would usually gather. The feature was cut due to staffing shortages and low engagement from tourists. Some days she sees no people at all.
The woman waves at her.
Asha places a sugary smile onto her face and approaches them. “Hi!” she says. “I’m Asha, and I’m a tour guide from Semper Technologies. I hope you’re enjoying the Alterverse and our model of Jaffna today!”
The woman smiles gently and places a hand on her partner’s shoulder. “Oh, it’s incredible. We love South Asia . . . all the history, the nature,” she murmurs. “It’s such a shame.”
Asha nods. It’s the most common feedback she hears from visitors: such a shame.
“How old’s this building?” the man asks, gesturing broadly at the space in front of them.
“Ah, well, that’s actually a more complicated story than it seems,” she responds. “The Jaffna Public Library was originally built in 1933, and it housed hundreds of thousands of one-of-a-kind manuscripts and artifacts. It, along with all of the literature and heritage inside, was burnt down in 1981, prior to the official start of the Sri Lankan Civil War. A reconstructed version of the library opened in 2003. The building you see before you is the closest representation we could model before Sri Lanka was x-ed in 2105.”
“It’s a shame that we can’t see the original.” The woman sighs. “It must’ve been beautiful.”
Asha simply nods. In an era where whole countries are scratched off the map, few people remember the type of human brutality that occurred in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They’ve gone numb to the smaller violences: the burned libraries. That’s why she was here: to bear witness and grieve. Asha believed that it all mattered. This city had been the capital of a conquered kingdom, the battleground of a civil war, an outpost for European colonists. Sometime between that fire in 1981 and the final flood in 2105, it had all been swept away.
“Thank you for talking to us,” the man says. “We’re on our way to Thailand now!”
• • • •
Asha has a pulsing headache by the time she logs off, which she attempts to stave off with two bitter pills. She takes her headset off the desk and shoves it into a drawer. It’s a pretty sleek design: The heavy, gray goggles include eye tracking and audio engineering, interpreting intended movement much like legs receive neural signals from the brain. It still feels heavy, in a strange way, and she feels better when it’s out of sight. Minutes later, she’s taking a car through the streets of Des Moines. Her mouth is covered with a paisley handkerchief, a weak effort to ward off smog. The digital world contains clear blue skies, palm trees that stretch past her line of sight. It’s no wonder she flees into it, escaping from a world covered in a haze of soot, and filled with the discord of overpopulation. Living in a landlocked city in the United States is not something she’ll ever take for granted, though, not when the real Jaffna is swimming ten feet under the ocean.
The car drives itself. She has an awkward amount of time before she reaches her destination, so she calls Tomu. Her best friend’s holographic image appears before her as he picks up. He’s swimming in a ratty blue sweater, his face a warm brown a couple shades lighter than her own. The wall behind him is covered in graphite sketches: the contour of a shifting coastline labelled with angles, a close-up rendering of the scales of a fish. They are eerily precise: resembling blueprints or maps more than artwork. He smiles at her and sets aside whatever he is working on. There’s a tension to his shoulders that is strange on him but has grown more regular in the past few weeks.
“Rough day?” she asks.
He shrugs, then snaps his notebook shut. “No visitors,” he responds. “It feels like I had a little too much time to think.”
Asha winces. She knows how deeply Tomu cares for their work. His ancestors came from Tuvalu: the first nation to be x-ed out, the first nation to be digitized. Like Asha, Semper is all that ties Tomu to his past. It’s been a long time since digital-twin technology was considered novel. Much like the physical places, tourist interest in Tuvalu and Sri Lanka has eroded over time. People like them, the descendants of these lost places, often can’t afford the time or technology to enter the Alterverse in the first place. It’s why they both work at Semper. It’s why Tomu’s sketchbook is filled with still images of the island, why Asha pictures the white facades of the library every night before she fades to sleep.
“Did you find anything new?” she asks.
He perks up at that. Unlike her, Tomu isn’t tied to a particular building or geographic location. He tends to guide individuals around the island, and adventure on his own when no one is logged on. “Caught a type of eel I haven’t seen before.” He stretches his palms out, clearly exaggerating the size of it. “It was yellow, and spotted, and certainly extinct by now.”
Asha laughs. “That sounds terrifying, actually. I will never in a million years understand your fondness for eels.”
Normally, Tomu would roll his eyes or tease her about how she pores over every book in a giant library, but instead he just sighs. “It’s hard to be in there sometimes,” he admits, “surrounded by all of the things that we never got a chance to see or know. It gets harder each time to get lost in the dream and wake up to this.”
Asha swallows hard. It’s a bitter pill that the most meaningful parts of their lives are completely tied to something that isn’t real.
“It’s almost like we’ve been severed from something critical,” she whispers, thinking aloud, “something we were never supposed to lose.”
Tomu lets out a harsh exhale. “I, um, heard a rumor from one of the guys that works in Samoa,” he says, “that they’re going to be shut down. That Semper is going to scale down most of the Alterverse, actually.”
Asha’s heart stops for a moment. “They can’t do that. Why would they ever do that?”
“There are only a few places that still generate traffic. You know that.”
“But that’s—not—the point? The primary mission statement was always to keep an archive, to have a chance to hold on to these places.”
“It’s just a rumor for now, but . . .” She recognizes the sorrow in Tomu’s eyes. According to his intuition, it’s a grounded rumor. “I just wanted you to be ready for the possibility.”
She nods. Her anger swells.
• • • •
Her mother is visibly smaller. She lays horizontally across her bed, thin oxygen tubes snaking across her body and into her nose. It’s the best facility that Asha can afford: relatively low tech, but sanitary and regularly staffed.
When Asha was in primary school, her mother, Reema, taught her the story of Atlantis, an enormous island, populated by the mightiest of men. The Atlanteans were proud, and believed they could take from those around them without consequence. Eventually, the gods turned their backs on them, and they, along with their mighty island, disappeared beneath the waves.
Asha asked her mother if that was what happened to Sri Lanka, to her grandparents. Did they take too much? Were they too proud?
Her mother’s face looked like a statue’s, creased with endless rage. “No, Asha,” she whispered. “But others did, and someone had to pay for it.”
There really was no need to go back to Atlantis, to the allegories of Plato, to prove her point. By the time Asha was born, fifteen countries had met a similar fate. Most were small island nations, with little chance of fending off the rising sea: Tuvalu was first, of course, then Grenada, the Maldives. Some were larger countries in South and Southeast Asia: Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Indonesia.
They weren’t claimed all at once, of course. It wasn’t one moment or tide that took Sri Lanka from a place to a myth. It was years of erosion, of the sea taking victims, of flaring heat waves and mosquitoes and skin cancer. It only seemed sudden in retrospect.
Losing her mother felt similar. One moment, Reema was pulling Asha from town to town and teaching her everything she knew about the world; the next she was like this: immobilized and with lungs too damaged to breathe on their own.
Reema’s eyes are attentive as Asha recounts her day. Her mother insists on hearing about Jaffna in painstaking detail: every word she reads in the library, the signage on each empty storefront.
Asha examines every piece of the small room: She fusses over her mother’s pillows, examines the digital chart by her bed.
“Your oxygen dosage is higher this week,” she notes. “How do you feel? Is it getting . . . ” She isn’t sure how to end the sentence, to ask precisely what she wants to know.
Her mother just shakes her head. “It’s a progression, Asha. I don’t want you to worry.”
As if Asha could do anything else.
They talk about Jaffna a bit more, about the silly tourists and the things she learned. Reema had left Sri Lanka when she was in her teens, when it was clear that no part of the country would be habitable for much longer. Her own parents chose to stay. When Semper launched the Alterverse, Reema was skeptical, but enamored by the idea of being able to see and touch her home once more. Asha could see how happy her mother was to have a small piece of her childhood back. The two of them explored the city together, and Reema pointed out the streets and buildings she recalled. It was a return for both of them, to a type of connection they had grieved long before. There was a free trial when the product launched, but it soon switched to an expensive subscription that they couldn’t afford. That had been a huge incentive to take the job. Asha had tried to let Reema into the world using her employee pass, but biometric gating and authorization prevented it. Asha asked if they could have a guest pass for a tour, but got a polite but firm no, because then we’d have to give everyone one. Looking at her mother now, Asha regrets not pushing back harder. Wasn’t that the point of all this? To let people inhabit memories of places they could no longer go, preserve the last vestiges of the lives their children never got to lead?
• • • •
When Tuvalu sank, cartographers created new versions of the Cartesian world map with the dot representing the small island nation removed for accuracy. A few years later, they created another one. Then another. It became a new normal, for pieces of the world to be erased in their entirety, as if a child was arbitrarily drawing Xs across a coloring book of the world.
The idea of a digital nation began with Tuvalu. A group of historians and developers created a rudimentary simulation of the whole island: a lifelike model of every shoreline, animal, and cultural record. Once it became clear that the sinking of Tuvalu was not an isolated event, that more countries and peoples would want some way of experiencing their land once it was gone, Semper Technologies acquired a clone of Tuvalu’s digital twin. They went on to create virtual representations of the most environmentally vulnerable countries. It was a massive undertaking, and the company grew exponentially. They connected each of the digital nations in a platform called the Alterverse, which allowed users to move between different twins. It was an extremely profitable digital graveyard.
Asha followed every piece of news about the digitization of Sri Lanka with great interest, so it felt like a dream when she received her job offer from Semper. She and Tomu met in the digital world before the real one, just over four years ago at a Semper orientation event for new guides. The company picked one of the most cherished settings of the old world—an empty white conference room—and crammed dozens of jittery recruits into it. This was before most of them had gotten comfortable with the technology. As a result, most of their avatars had a stilted broken-puppet quality. Asha couldn’t help but stare at the spotless table in front of her, the ironed navy pantsuit of the women lecturing them on Semper’s rules and regulations from the front of the room. She tried to concentrate, but something about the clean lines, the shuttered look to everyone’s gaze threw her off-balance. It’s not real, she told herself. It’s not real. She’d had panic attacks before, in her real body, and wasn’t interested in finding out what it would feel like in her fake one.
“Hey,” the boy sitting next to her whispered. She hadn’t seen him when they’d first arrived, too focused on her own nerves. He was the first person to truly look at her, and there was a kindness in his eyes that calmed her down. “It’s easier if you pretend like this is a dream, that it’s something your brain has experienced before.” She nodded and muttered her thanks. The advice quickly eased her panic.
• • • •
Asha sits down in front of the TV as soon as she gets back to her apartment. It’s a one bedroom with a shabby kitchen and a living room filled with found furniture. There was a time where it seemed homey to her—a symbol of her independence, her ability to fend for herself. On days like today, it feels like the walls have tightened up, like they’re gradually closing in on her.
She shifts between different shows on her favorite streaming service, until she lands on the news. She turns up the volume to hear the end of the AI-generated anchorwoman’s sentence: uninhabitable by the year 2330. They’re talking about Italy’s mainland, which, despite its proximity to the ocean, was able to avoid being destroyed for so long due to high investment in terraforming and artificial flood banks. Asha leans back and lets the stories wash over her: increased investment in the colonization of Mars and the Asteroid belt, Fortune 500 companies still refusing to eliminate their use of fossil fuels, tidbits of celebrity gossip. She feels her brain go numb, as if it’s opened a loop, asking what else what else what else, without processing any of the answers.
• • • •
The next few days of work wash over Asha. No one visits, and the boredom lends itself to a prickly, dissatisfied feeling she cannot shake. She sits on the steps of the library, ventures in to thumb through manuscripts with careful hands.
A week later, she wakes up to the sound of pattering rain outside her window, the rush of traffic underneath the windowsill. Asha eats a breakfast of dried fruit and granola, sets her headset on her desk, and runs a piece of cloth over its crevices to remove any dust that had settled there during the night. She enters her login information and closes her eyes, expecting to be in Jaffna upon opening them. Moments later, she feels the breath of air conditioning, a cold surface behind her shoulder blades. Something is wrong.
Asha opens her eyes to a white conference room, walls emblazoned with the Semper logo. She’s sitting in a chair tucked under an oblong table. In front of her is a woman with short brown hair and wearing a white pantsuit. She recognizes her as the head of HR, but can’t quite recall her name.
“Hi, Asha.” The woman cocks her head and smiles at her. “How are you doing today?”
She keeps trying to think of her name: Pam? Beatrice? It’s certainly something she should know.
“I’m—good?” She can’t quite stamp out the nerves in her voice. “A bit confused about why I’m here.”
The woman nods, eyes wide with sympathy. “I can imagine. I’m going to cut right to the chase. You’re a great guide—such positive reviews, and I know that our guests appreciate you. Unfortunately, Semper is in a bit of a . . . transitional state in our journey of growth, and we will not be continuing our deployment of digital Sri Lanka. It’s happening to all the twins in that region of the Alterverse, really.”
Asha has to hold back bile: She’s not sure whether it’s in her real body, or this one. She feels herself switching gears, entering autopilot. “That’s . . . difficult to hear,” she says. “What’s going to happen to them?” There’s an unspoken what’s going to happen to me that she lets linger.
“Well, you’ve certainly noticed that tourist interest in our twins has been quite reduced over the last couple of years. Our board wants to create worlds that are more . . . engaging, ones that take people where they want to go. Instead of visiting a sunken country, you’re immersed in a story, a trip to another planet, an excursion under the sea.” The woman realizes that Asha isn’t going to say anything and keeps rambling. “You’re a great guide, and we want to keep you on as we move forward! Even though Sri Lanka is going to be shelved, you’ve got a long future ahead of you in the Alterverse.”
Asha feels her breaths grow shallow, a faint buzzing in her head. Perhaps it’s the sound of her world ending. “Why can’t you just keep them open?” she asks, not successfully masking the quiver in her voice.
“Oh, well, we’re already losing money on database storage and hosting,” the woman says, “and more importantly, we want it to be clear to our consumers that we are pushing towards the future, not the past.” The woman pushes herself away from the desk and walks towards the door. She pulls it open. “Now, I’ll let you get back to work. Jaffna will be open for the next two days, and then we’ll start your onboarding for your new role.”
Asha feels her legs move towards the door as though she’s sleepwalking. She pauses for a moment. Only two days left.
“My mother.” The words are out of her mouth before she’s thought them through. “She’s . . . dying. Soon. All she wants is a chance to see Sri Lanka again, to say goodbye.”
The woman takes longer to respond this time. She doesn’t have a pre-scripted answer for this one. “I’m afraid that it’s still against policy.”
Asha walks through the door and into Jaffna.
White concrete, books through the window, a faint breeze.
She rips her headset off and throws herself toward the dustbin next to the desk before she vomits.
• • • •
Tomu finds her before she finds him. They make their way to the fire escape outside her apartment. The silence between them is suffocating. Between the redness of his eyes, and the trembling of her fingers, they both understand that they have a loss in common. Their lives have split open, their world sentenced to rot.
“We have to do something,” she whispers.
“How do we . . .” His voice is fuzzy, barely audible. “What could we possibly do?”
Asha had thought that between the two of them, they had experienced every possible type of grief.
“I’ve never felt this powerless,” she tells him.
“Have I ever told you the story of the Eel and the Flounder?” he asks.
“I don’t think so,” she says.
He tilts his head towards the sky, his eyes fixate on the wispy gray clouds. “A long, long, time ago, there were two friends, one an Eel, the other a Flounder. They were both strong and brash. One day, they found a large rock and started arguing over who was the strongest and could carry it best. As they started fighting, the Flounder was pinned beneath the stone. The Flounder freed itself and chased the Eel throughout the ocean, until the Eel was hit hard in the stomach and began vomiting. Eventually, the Eel had vomited so much that the Eel was able to hide in a hole and escape the rage of the Flounder. After the Flounder died, the Eel threw the stone into the air, which broke into the eight islands of Tuvalu. Each island had a flat body like the Flounder, and the islands had palm trees that looked like the thinned body of the Eel.” Tomu finally looks away from the sky and looks at her. “When the land described by that story was lost, the Alterverse was supposed to be our way of preserving its meaning.”
His voice finally shatters, as they both collapse towards the wall, towards each other.
The founding myths of Sri Lanka were similar: steeped in betrayal and violence and endless sacrifice for a place, for a way of being. It was sacrilege, what this world had done to their oldest gods.
Asha thinks of the figure on the news, talking about sending tourists to the sky as the world burns. Their society had severed itself from the past, choosing to let it repeat in an infinite, desolate loop. They were burning their library, their archive of who they were at this moment in time, and Asha didn’t think it was something that they could ever recover from.
“We have to do something.” she says once more.
• • • •
On her last day, Asha is determined to take in as much of Jaffna as she can. She takes circuitous paths: around the edge of the town, scanning every spine on every bookshelf in the library.
After hours of research, she and Tomu found a plug-in that could record a first-person experience of a digital twin. The description said it could evade detection, and Jaffna is so close to decommission that security measures are less concentrated here than elsewhere in the Alterverse, but she knows it’s only a matter of time until some alarm is triggered and she is disconnected and let go. She’s surprised she’s been able to remain for as long as she has.
Asha runs through the plan again: As soon as she is disconnected, she will encrypt the recording and send copies to Tomu, her mother, and a secure storage account. Once the data is safe, they’ll start looking for someone to reconstruct the data from the recordings and make an open-source version of their ancestral worlds. She doesn’t want to think about the uncertainty of it all, the danger that might lie in front of them. There’s a chance that they won’t be able to recreate Jaffna, or that it will be a low-quality facsimile without Semper’s resources.
She wants to experience the Jaffna she has known, for as long as she still can. She ventures farther and farther from the city. The palm trees grow denser and denser until she only sees thin strips of blue through the fronds. She can hear the steady tide of the ocean, salty air snaking through her nostrils.
She could be the last person to ever feel the heartbeat of this city. She wonders what her ancestors must have felt, as they watched the library burn. It must’ve felt like their world was ending, that their descendants would be permanently cut off from the most sacred pieces of who they were. It must be the same way her mother felt when she saw the footage of a churning ocean, where Sri Lanka once was. They found a way to recreate, to keep an ember alive. In a moment, everything will be gone, but she will do the same.
Based on research by Irving Affiliate Faculty
Dartmouth College
irving.dartmouth.edu/about/people/faculty-and-research-affiliates
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