Life in the little Norrland town where she’d grown up had been simple: she’d known everyone, and she and the other kids—all thirteen of them—had plenty of access to wild spaces. But her parents wanted the prestige that came with a place down south, where knowledge workers could do their jobs outside almost all year round. So when her mother landed a job wrangling spreadsheets for some Skåne kommun, that was that. Signe’s entire life to date was packed into a disappointingly small number of boxes, she was made to say goodbye to her friends. Now here she was, the only kid with a Norrland accent, surrounded by bougie dorks trying to sound like they’d been raised by pig-farmers in a shack in Österlen. So cringe.

And then there were the implants. They weren’t so common in the north, but down here they were basically mandatory. Most kids had theirs put in during the final years of grundskolan; Signe’s went in this summer, at sixteen years of age, before starting gymnasiet. They had been warned that late implants could take a while to settle—something to do with the conflict between neural regrowth and hormonal imbalance in puberty, blah blah blah. Signe didn’t think anything was wrong with her implant, technically speaking: she could see and hear age-appropriate content, find weather information and exercise guidance, access state and kommun services, all while remaining present and in-the-moment. But she didn’t like the nagging way it would suggest she go for a run, or speak to some group of kids who were probably laughing at her clothes or accent whenever her back was turned. Plus it seemed weird to her how everyone looked down on people who were “techie”, but everyone had this technology inside their heads.

It probably wouldn’t last much longer, but the migraine routine meant Signe had an escape hatch from assemblies— which were just like the styrelse meetings, but for three hundred teenagers instead of a dozen recently-retired old people. It had never occurred to Signe to be ashamed of her body before she left the north. Now she was ashamed of it constantly, as well as fascinated and repulsed by the bodies of others.

“It’s just part of growing up, hedgehog,” her mother would say—but then her mother was 172cm of lean muscle, a prize-winning cross-country skier in her childhood. Signe thought of herself as being basically her father, but with boobs: dark of hair, pale of skin, oblong of body. At least she could borrow his old clothes.

#

Halfway up the stairs—it was an old block, without elevators— she heard the lock rattle behind a neighbour’s door. The nameplate said K Karlsson, but Signe couldn’t recall having met a Karlsson yet—which was odd, given that during their first weeks here, their own door had hardly been closed due to the constant flow of their new neighbours dropping in to meet the newcomers. Reluctantly, she blinked up a map of the house on her implants, overlaid with encounter data for the last six months: only the Karlsson residence was resolutely black, among a rainbow of coloured compatibility ratings and Braintree profile pictures. She paused, curious. Who was this person who didn’t want to be known?

The door opened, and Signe’s first thought was OMG, it’s a troll. Average height, but stooped, the forward slump of their shoulders obvious even under their baggy, shapeless andrahandsaff.r clothes; an uncombed cloud of frizzy hair that obscured most of their face; big round glasses, like that guy in that band from like a million years ago her dad liked, the one that still toured every year using holograms. Glasses! No-one wore glasses any more; they were inconvenient for sports, and ugly besides. Most folk got their eyesight fixed when they were wired for the Implants.

The glasses, and the face behind them, turned to face Signe. The lenses had a mirror finish, smudged with fingerprints.

“Gettin’ a good look, man?” drawled the owner of the glasses.

“Yes. Ah—I mean, no, sorry,” said Signe, now looking very intently at her shoes. “I’m not a man,” she added.

Karlsson snorted. “I can see that, man. No more a man than me. I call everyone man, don’t sweat it.”

“Don’t people get offended?”

“Sure they do. But they don’t talk to us screenies anyway, except when they drop by the apartment to suggest maybe we’d like to live somewhere else, among our own kind.” That snort again. “Like there’s many of ‘our kind’ left.”

“What’s a screenie?” Signe asked. She’d heard the term at a few styrelse meetings, said in that way that adults had of saying a word that they all knew, but didn’t want to discuss in front of young ears.

“You got implants, yeah? Eyes wired and fixed?”

“Sure,” said Signe, in a tone meant to indicate she wasn’t too happy about it.

“Well, we don’t.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me, my sambo. He don’t come out much, man. Can’t stand the stigma, people staring at him in the stores while he’s trying to look up prices on his spex. He’s a sensitive soul, y’know? Me, I’m a crabby old bitch—I don’t care what people think.”

“What do they think?”

The snort, once more. “Freaks, is what. Spex rather than ‘plants? Don’t spray on the lycra, leap around at all the meetings? Rather talk to foreigners than proper Swedes? Screenies. Digital hippies, you ever hear of that? That’s us, Man.”

“You talk to foreigners? How?”

Karlsson leaned forward and stage-whispered. “On the internet, man.”

This old woman was pulling Signe’s leg. “There’s no such thing as the internet, not any more. It was all switched off back when I was a baby. We didn’t need it any more, not once we had the…”

“… the ‘plants, right?” Karlsson finished her thought for her. “Yeah, sure. The ‘plants are great, if you want to be a good little citizen. Great if you want to be told where to go, who to make friends with, how many star-jumps to do while you talk to them. Great if you think we’ve got nothing to learn from anyone who isn’t already like us. You like all the meetings, man, the aerobics and stuff?”

Signe hesitated briefly, before saying “No, I hate it.” It felt scary to say it—but also liberating, somehow.

“Wondered why you weren’t leaping about at gymnasiet with the others. Well, good for you, man. Enjoy some time to yourself. Me, I gotta get to the store while it’s quiet. They don’t deliver to people without ‘plants, you know that? Untrustworthy, apparently. Like they used to treat people without a personnummer back in the day.”

What the hell is a personnummer, wondered Signe, as Karlsson shambled past her and started down the stairs.

“Hey, wait a second,” said Signe. “The internet.”

Karlsson stopped, turned around, looked at her. “What about it, man?”

Signe screwed up her courage, and took the leap. “Can you show it to me?”

A grin dawned beneath the smudged glasses. “Can you keep a secret?”

#

Winter came hard and early, which meant fewer mass meetings—the truly hardcore did their sets and intervals in the snow, but most clocked as much gym time as possible, and joined whichever walk-meets were most pertinent to their job, home and social graph. Signe’s parents—distressed by her migraines, her rejection of regular exercise, and her struggle to adapt to the new town—were relieved when she started taking regular walks, bundling up in an old down jacket of her father’s before heading out to meet her friends.

Little did they realise that those friends were not classmates or neighbouring teenagers, but the screenies from two floors down. Signe’s walk was a loop around the block, carefully reusing tracks others had cut into the snow before her, then back in by a different entrance. From there, it was down to the basement, where Kitta Karlsson—and, sometimes, her sambo Marcus—were waiting for her coded knock at the door of the laundry room. There, under the dull rumble of the tumble drier, they introduced Signe to the internet, via a pair of old but lovingly maintained touch-screen tablets and a little black uplink box which, Kitta explained, connected to that older, wider network which lurked beneath the sanitised spaces that the ‘plants provided.

“The suits and breadheads in the big companies, the politicians—they still need to know what’s going on outside Sweden. They get all this on their ‘plants, man, if they want it.”

“Is it illegal?” Signe had asked.

“Ain’t no law against it, not yet. But getting one of these”—she tapped the uplink—“that’s tricky. They don’t just show up on the regular catalogues, right? Either you get one through your biz or the government, or you find someone who’ll make you one secretly.”

“Can you tell me where I can get one?”

“No, man—because selling them without a license, that is illegal. You could get someone in a lot of trouble. Especially you being a kid. They don’t care so much about us fogeys—figure we’ll die soon enough. Unhealthy lifestyles, right? Screenies, pokin’ away at their screens…”

But oh, those screens! The resolution was terrible, ofcourse, and the bandwidth thin and unreliable. And there wasn’t much information there that you couldn’t find through your ‘plants—though you’d have to really dig for it, and explain to the system what you wanted it for. You might as well watch the latest movies or play the latest games on your ‘plants, too: the experience would be far smoother, and you’d avoid the social stigma.

What you couldn’t find on your ‘plants was a category of stuff that Kitta sometimes called “user-generated content”: writing, art, music and videos which either borrowed ideas from the big hits and did something weird with them, or which simply didn’t resemble the big hits at all. Some of it was charming, some of it was horrifying, some of it made no sense at all… but all of it was so different, so strange and new and unpredictable.

Beyond the content, its creators: all sorts of people from all over the world, from Sweden or South Carolina or Surinam or a thousand other places. Some of those places, it seemed, worked a lot like Sweden: people had ‘plants, but mostly stayed within the invisible boundaries of their country or city-state’s local culture, whether by choice or by law. But in other places, you could see any of this stuff anywhere, any time, by any technological means you preferred.

The anarchy and dissonance of “online”, as Kitta called it, came to fill a gap which had been growing in Signe for years, even before the move south. Within a few weeks, she had more friends—and more enemies—than she’d ever imagined she’d meet in her life, many of them in places she’d hardly even heard of. She would talk, argue, flirt and fight with them for hours, the tumble-drier roaring away, while Kitta and Marcus conducted their own quiet, shared life “online”, sat on the other side of the laundry room.

#

One evening, early in the spring, Signe’s parents were lingering awkwardly over the end of the family meal. Signe itched to get down to the laundry room and catch up with the world, but they kept making excuses to hang on: “quality family time”, cringey stuff like that.

“I need to get out for my walk,” Signe said.

Her father sighed, pushed crumbs around on his plate. Her mother rolled her eyes at him before turning to Signe. “About your walks, actually. I think I’d like to join you today.”

Signe tried not to panic. “Uh, my friends might think that was a bit, y’know, weird? Like, am I not allowed to go out without my mom?”

“Obviously you’re allowed to go out without your mom. You’ve been doing so for months. What sort of friends would ask that? Who are these friends, in fact?”

“Just some, uh, other people from the association.” Signe tried to avoid an outright lie.

“Who, exactly? We know everyone here now. But I don’t recall anyone saying their kids had been hanging out with you. More often, they ask why you haven’t been hanging out with their kids.”

Her father put down his fork with a clatter. “Oh, Ebba, just tell her,” he said. “I’m sorry, hedgehog. Your school and your doctor flagged your behaviour as indicative of social adaptive problems. They wanted to see the record of what you’d been up to, but they had to ask us for permission, because we’re legally responsible for you.”

“There’s a record of what I do? But how...” Of course: the ‘plants! Obvious in hindsight, and all the more painful for that. “And you gave them permission? To spy on me?”

“We gave them permission to access data that we saw first,” her mother replied. “And what we saw was very worrying. How long have you been spending time with those scr— I mean, with the Karlssons?”

“If you’ve seen the data, you already know. They’re good people.” She blinked at the tears, swallowed at the tightness in her throat. “They’re my friends. The only people here who didn’t want me to be just like them. Who let me be myself.”

“Oh, hedgehog, you’re still so young. You don’t even know what yourself could be—”

“Everyone would be much happier if they could decide for me, wouldn’t they?”

“We’d be happier if you were getting a fair picture of the possibilities.”

“You mean a picture that extends as far as the borders of Sweden? A picture of countless people in the same bloody exercise outfits, doing the same bloody thing, pretending that everyone’s just like them? The damned ‘plants— they’re meant to set us free, but it’s like being in a game you can never stop playing.” Signe banged her fist on the table. “There’s a whole world out there, mom, and we see almost nothing of it!”

“You’re right—there is, and we don’t,” her mother snapped. “We chose not to. You don’t remember, you weren’t yet born. The wars, the false identities, the lies and misinformation. You don’t know what the world was like.”

“You don’t know what it’s like now,” Signe shot back.

“I don’t want to know. And while I’m responsible for your upbringing, I don’t want you knowing either. When you’re legally an adult, you can make your own choices, if you must. But you won’t make them with the assistance of the Karlssons.”

“You can’t stop me talking to my neighbours!”

“They won’t be your neighbours any more.”

A rock settled in Signe’s stomach. “Mother, what have you done?”

“I’ve protected my daughter from extremists and perverts, that’s what I’ve done,” her mother shouted, fear and fury fighting to occupy her face, before getting up and leaving the room.

“She loves you, hedgehog,” her father said quietly. “She hopes that one day you’ll be grateful.”

“And you? Do you hope that too, dad?”

“I do, yeah.” He looked up at Signe, his face sadder than she’d ever seen it. “Though your mother’s more sure than I am that you will be.”

#

Signe spent a sleepless night in her room, the door locked behind her. Betrayal and loss, anger and regret: her head and her heart were a maelstrom. She stayed there the next morning, missing breakfast. She didn’t go to school, furiously blinking away the mounting insistence of her plants, ignoring her father’s quiet knocks on the door, her mother’s shouting. Eventually, the apartment was quiet, and she was alone with her thoughts.

Later that day, she heard vehicle doors slamming outside, unfamiliar voices in the gård. She opened her window, saw a van with its side door open, two police leading the Karlssons toward it.

“Kitta!” Signe shouted. “You can’t take them away, they haven’t done anything wrong! Kitta, I’m so sorry!” Kitta Karlsson looked up. “Don’t sweat it, man,” she called. “We knew there was a risk, but we did it anyway. Never had a kid of our own, you know? Wanted to pass something on to the next generation anyway. Kinda like Socrates, I guess—only these guys ain’t gonna make us drink hemlock. Right, guys?”

“I am not a guy,” said the policewoman handling Kitta. “Into the van, please.”

“Ok, ok—we’ll come quietly, copper. Hej, Signe,” Kitta called again. “You be good, ok? Make sure you get your regular walks in.”

A strange thing for Kitta to say, Signe thought, her vision blurred with tears, as Kitta and Marcus were pushed into the van, the doors were closed, and the police drove them away. She would never see them again.

#

Spring sprung fully, greening the neighbourhood. Signe started going to school again, but often than skipped assemblies and other communal activities: she’d found that no one could force her, not even her mother. Sure, it came with a big dose of social stigma, but she wasalready marked anyway. She had nothing left to lose but a sense of herself as someone different, an individual— and she could only lose that by joining in. She haunted her room a lot, but restlessness drove her out of the house as the weather improved. She wandered the neighbourhood alone, feeling every eye on her, but she came to quite like it, in a strange sort of way. She took busses into the city at weekends, trawling through andrahandsaffärar for shapeless clothes in dark, heavy fabrics, always looking out for others like her—for the other different ones. She knew they were out there, somewhere. But how to find them?

Returning home one evening, she passed between the miljörum and the bikeshed, just like she had before meeting the Karlssons down in the laundry room. She noticed something wrapped in black plastic tucked behind the hopper of snow-salt against the milj.rum wall, almost out of sight unless you were looking just right. On instinct, she tugged the package out, stuffed it under her coat, and took it up to her room to open it.

Inside was one of the Karlssons’ tablets, its cables and chargers, and the little black box of the internet uplink. And a torn off piece of paper, with a note in Kitta’s clumsy block capitals.

KEEP ON KLICKIN’, MAN. - K

#

SOURCE SCENARIO: “IN NATURE, NO GREED”

It’s 2050 in Skåne, and being present in the physical world is highly valued. The best jobs are those that maximise outdoor time and time spent physically together with other people. The longer the meeting, the better, especially if the meeting takes place outside and involves physical activity. There's a social stigma around overt or obvious uses of technology or “being online,” even as technology and connectivity are acknowledged as essential in this society. Political decisions are largely automated, and people rely on digital information about farming, weather patterns and the like. But using information technology is a discreet act, ideally done without others’ notice.

What matters most is human bodies, human senses and to be connected to nature. To get here, a lot of effort has been poured into unlearning the values of industrialisation: getting rid of the collective drive for efficiency, productivity and the humans-as-machines mental model, which had spread its tentacles into every aspect of modern life. Some argue there has been an overcorrection toward a Spartan valorisation of the physical body, which has given rise to a small counterculture of refuse-niks, and has driven an increasing curiosity among younger people over “the good old days.”