That, Svante thinks to himself, and the numbness in my bloody legs. A quarter century since the accident that mangled his spinal cord, Svante no longer wakes up thinking he can still get out of bed without assistance—but he still sometimes finds it hard to accept. An ironic injury for a man who was in motion almost from the moment he was born; a cruel curse for a dancer. Freedom of movement means many things to many people, but few of them truly value this, the most fundamental movement of all.

“But don’t it always seem to go… ” he sings to himself quietly. Did that song change its meaning for Saint Joni as she aged? Ah, but she performed for as long as she could, didn’t she… wasn’t too proud to take help when it would let her do her work. If only she’d had the help we have now!

“Come on then, let’s go” Svante says aloud, and his exo unfolds itself in the far corner of the room, stalks toward the bed through the dust-motes dancing in the shafts of sunlight. “Busy day ahead, I assume?”

“Fairly busy,” the exo confirms, before it sits on the bed, and then opens itself in a motion that always makes Svante think of flowers unfurling. He slips in his legs, gets them settled, and the exo slowly rolls itself up his back, connecting itself together around him.

It had looked more like a cage than a flower, at first. It still looks like a cage to other people, sometimes. But it’s a part of him, now; he can no longer tell where his volition ends and its assistance begins. They’d said it would learn from him, and he’d thought they were overselling it: don’t promise me the moon on a stick, dammit, just give me something that will let me walk for myself! Years of generic assistive devices had lowered his expectations, to say the least.

But this thing? He stands and strikes a pose: a prima donna’s pointe, his arms an arc above his head. He smiles. The Bolshoi aren’t going to be asking for an audition any time soon... but it’s been a long time since he thought fame would be fun.

“Shall we do the usual routine this morning, Svante?” asks his exo, as he heads for the bathroom. “Maybe something more Sixties today,” he responds. “Let’s see what we can do with the early work of Joni Mitchell, eh?”

#

That afternoon, Svante finds Sonja at home, though not in the front room that also serves as the studio of her physiotherapy practice. Instead, he finds her sat in her kitchen, surrounded by half-made hors d’ouvres and plockmat, flicking through old photos.

“Svante, will you ever learn to knock?” she says, standing up to hug him . “No client should see their physio bawling her eyes out at 2pm in a filthy kitchen.”

“It was you who told me I never needed to knock, my dear. Besides, your secretary software said you were expecting me.”

“Smart-ass,” sniffs Sonja.

“The original, and the best,” Svante agrees. Sonja tells the kitchen to make Svante’s usual—Earl Grey, decaf, a spot of oatmilk—and sits down with a sigh.

“I thought I’d come to terms with him going.” She pinch-zooms a picture of Alarik in the holoframe on the kitchen table. “Now I have less than twenty-four hours before he crosses that bridge, and it’s like my heart has already left on an earlier train.”

Svante collects his tea from the drink-maker, sits, remains silent.

“But you have to let them go, don’t you,” she continues, somewhere between a question and a statement of fact. She looks up from the holo, tries a smile.

“Whatever is not yours, let go of it,” Svante intones solemnly.

“Remind me not to share Buddha's wisdom with you, Svante, if you’re going to throw it back at me when I’m at my lowest.”

“It helped me a lot, that line you taught me. But I know it’s not easy. I have no kids of my own, but my students sometimes come to fill a similar space in my heart.”

“I know you’ll miss him. Alarik will miss you, too… more than he will me, no doubt.”

“Nonsense! He may not be very demonstrative, but he loves you a lot. He’s said as much to me, many times over.”

“I know. He’s a good boy, really.”

“He’s a good man, Sonja. A young one, certainly, but a man nonetheless.”

“I know.” Sonja sniffs, dabs at her eyes with a tissue. “Not so grown-up that he can arrange his own farewell party, though.”

“In his defence, he did once throw a party without your help…”

“Ugh, don’t remind me.” Sonja laughs. “It took four layersof paint to cover the stains on that wall.”

“Can I help with anything?” Svante asks.

“No, no—you’re already on the hook as chaperone, I can’t ask more of you. Besides, I’m halfway done, I just need to get on with it.”

Svante has noticed that people often use a different voice with their software agents, just as they use different voices with people they know well. Svante speaks to his exo in imitation of an instructor who once tried to teach him modern jazz footwork, almost a lifetime ago: chiding, yet encouraging, as one might speak to a promising student. Sonja, meanwhile, speaks to her soft-sec like Svante’s father used to address the family dog: with affection, but also the expectation of utmost obedience.

“No physio drop-ins until midday tomorrow,” she says, firmly. The faint sound of a temple bell acknowledges her command. “Update the shop’s website, too; deliveries will have to wait until I can box them up, but regulars can collect as usual.”

Sonja’s market garden, among many others, is found down at the kolonilott at the edge of the village. At this time of year, as spring uncoils itself with amazing speed, she spends as much time there as she does in her physiotherapy studio, if not more.

“And personal calls, Sonja?” her soft-sec asks.

“Only from the close list.”

“Well, that’s me told,” laments Svante.

“You’re the only client who’s also on the close list, as well you know! Now get out of here, go teach your class—it’ll take you half an hour to get to the village hall, even if you put that exo of yours into overdrive! I’ll see you at seven when the party starts.”

#

At around nine that evening, Svante is sat in Sonja’s garden. Inside, Alarik’s leaving party is in full swing. Sonja’s staying with a friend in Ystad overnight; she’s left the house controls with Svante as a gesture of trust to Alarik and his friends. She could ask the house for a report, for live footage from the various cams and mics, get it streamed to wherever she was—but that’s not Sonja’s way. She doesn’t always enjoy trusting, Svante knows, but she still trusts more often than most.

Perhaps, he reflects, that’s why people trust her. He’d been planning to ask for a second referral when, months after his injury, he’d been assigned a freshly-minted physiotherapist, the ink on her diploma still wet—but after that first hour, he knew she’d do a great job.

That was before she even got into the whole Buddhist Thing.

“You gonna sit out here all night, Svante?” Alarik lowers himself gracefully onto the bench beside him. “I know neo-hyperpop isn’t your thing, but didn’t you once tell me that…”

“… anything with a rhythm can be danced to, yes. And my toes are tapping away out here, I assure you, despite my exo thinking it’s some sort of geriatric twitch that needs shutting down.”

“Apologies, Svante,” the exoskeleton began. “I had not—”

“I’m only joking, you silly machine.” Svante sniffs the air. “Have you been smoking, Alarik?”

“Yeah, a bit. You, ah… you don’t need to tell mum, though.”

“I think she has larger concerns right now, dear boy.”

The young man sighs, an echo of his mother earlier in the day. “Yeah, I know. She shouldn’t be scared, though. I’ll be fine.”

“There are many things we shouldn’t be,” Svante replies, “which we nonetheless are. A little fear has its merits, evolutionarily speaking. I should have perhaps been a little more afraid when I was thirty meters off the ground on that Malmö building site, eh?”

“I can’t imagine you were ever afraid of anything,” says Alarik.

Svante laughs, long and loud. “If only you knew! The stagefright used to make me vomit while I was waiting in the wings; they called me Sick-Bag Svante at dance school.”

“But you got over it, right?

“I don’t know that one ever gets over it, really. One just learns to use it as a sort of fuel. That’s how it has seemed to me, at any rate.”

Alarik nods, leans back, looks into the sky. The first stars are coming out.

“I’m a bit scared myself, Svante,” he says, quietly.

“I’d be more worried if you weren’t,” Svante replies.

“Now, go back in and dance with your friends! You’ll not be seeing them for a while.”

“Yeah, good call.” The young man stands, then leans down to hug the older man. “Thanks, Svante.” Svante watches him walk back to the house, and thinks back to their conversations over the last few years, during and after their classes together. Having previously paid little attention to dance—or, in the words of his mother, to any motion other than that between the refrigerator and the gaming chair—Alarik had quickly developed the skills of what might yet become a truly generational talent. Scholarships had been offered; touring positions proposed. But the boy—the man, Svante reminds himself—was as uncertain in his mind as he was certain in his movements.

He was not alone in that, either. A lot of people around his age, who had never known a world any different, had grown vocal—though, thankfully, not violent—in their dissatisfaction with what other countries (some in envy, some in contempt) called Techno-socialist Sweden. Citizen salaries, universal basic services, a planned economy that the old soviets would have envied, coupled with a social and political fluidity that would have horrified them… and all of it hard fought for, the possibilities of technology at scale liberated from the imperatives of accumulation, lashed instead to a new notion of what the state could be! Amazing how the revolutionary language of the late Twenties lay dormant in the memories, easily awakened… but to Alarik’s generation, it was just the way things were, no matter how much their history lessons tried to tell them what had changed.

“Would you rather go back to when it was all owned and operated by ketamine-addled Californians?” Svante had once asked, not entirely seriously.

“Of course not! That’s not the problem.”

“So what is?”

“It’s just…” Alarik searched for the right words. “It’s just that some things are too easy, I think.”

“There’s nothing to stop you managing your calendar using a pencil and paper, you know.”

“I don’t mean that stuff. I mean… like your exo, right? You can just ask it to download the steps to anything you want to learn, and it’ll just run you through them over and over again until you’ve learned them.”

“Need I remind you that without my exo I couldn’t even get myself out of bed to take a piss, dear boy, let alone dance?”

“I know, I know—and it’s great that it’s there for you. But it’s also there for people who don’t need it like you do. Remember when we went to see that school up in Stockholm, and they had those little girls dancing in exos? It’s like it’s becoming a short-cut, and I feel like we’re losingsomething through taking it. As if we’re just…

“… going through the motions?”

Alarik had laughed. “Yes, exactly. And I wonder—we wonder— what if that’s true not just in dance or the arts, but in everything we do?”

Svante had been unable to give a response that satisfied either of them. He’s still unable now.

#

The morning after the party, Svante returns to Sonja’s place. He arrives before her, so he sits on the front step to wait, confident that the exo will let him stand up with ease when he needs to. That was getting tricky even before the accident, he recalls with a smile. Soon Sonja appears, angling her old cargobike into the driveway.

“Our bold adventurer set forth as planned, then?” he asks, as she fits the lock.

“Yeah, he must be halfway to Malmö by now. He’ll be in Hamburg by lunchtime. I hardly even got a word in, there were so many of his friends at the busstop to see him off.”

“He’ll be fine, Sonja.”

“I know,” she says, and sits beside Svante on the step. “But will he come back?”

“I don’t know. But he’s more likely to come back now you’ve let him go.”

“You think so?”

“I do,” Svante says. “My parents did everything they could to stop me heading south back in the Noughties—listed every objection and risk, warned and threatened and cajoled. Of course, I went anyway… and for a long time all I could remember of home was people warning me not to follow my heart, how much they’d be hurt if I did. In the end, I stayed away for over a decade.”

“That wasn’t the only reason, surely?” “Certainly not, dear girl! After growing up in rural Skåne in the Nineties, for a queer boy who loved to dance, getting to Europe was like a jailbreak in more ways than one...”

“You old rogue!”

“Berlin in 2002, Sonja, can you imagine? The contemporary stuff, the big ballets, yes, but all the underground stuff too—Tresor, the Love Parade! So many memories! No money, of course, and no one would hire me to teachdance back then, which is why I started on the building sites…”

“Oh, Svante—what if he ends up digging ditches in Spain to keep himself fed?”

“He’ll be lucky to find work like that,” Svante snorts. “It’s all done by machines, just like it is here. And if he does, well, he’ll learn something of what it is he thinks is lacking, no? And besides—aren’t you always talking about the merits of physical labour, my dear?”

“That’s not the same thing, Svante, and you know it. My garden is my business, too.”

“Is it so different, though? You were just a physio for more than a decade before you realised that you needed that in your life.”

“Yeah, I guess. I need it right now, too.”

“So take it! I’ll clean up the aftermath of the party. Go pull weeds. Go sit in the sun when you’re done with pulling weeds. The world can wait.”

“The world can wait, Svante,” she whispers. “But can I?”

“You can, dear girl, and you will. Now go!”

So Sonja goes to her market garden, and Svante lets himself into the house, which smells of beer and teenagers (and very slightly of cigarettes), and he opens all the windows to let in the spring air. He instructs his exo to shape his movements into something between modern jazz and millennial acid techno, and soon he is dancing through the house, collecting glasses and empty plates and abandoned jackets, and remembering some blue eyes, bold yet bashful, that he first saw long ago, looking back at him across the dancefloor of a Berlin basement squat...

#

SOURCE SCENARIO: “AI SEEKS TO IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE”

In 2050 Skåne, the number of "office jobs" and the hours have radically decreased, and what work remains is felt to be purposeful. This settlement is underpinned by a combination of universal basic income and public-good services meeting people’s basic needs, meaning that work is undertaken for reasons of social status, dedication for the ‘common good’ as much as an extra income to finance leisures and the like. With a lot of time on their hands, people engage in their communities, spend time with friends and families and focus on their interests. Few call it free time anymore - it’s just time.

AI is largely off-stage, infrastructural: it defines and distributes the resources of the social settlement; determines optimal training or job assignments; sets and monitors the outcomes and "deliverables" on which compensation for employment is determined. It is also enrolled in the running of a "liquid democracy", in which professional politicians have disappeared, and deliberative councils or syndicates are engaged in a more direct form of governance. Laws have been passed abolishing the private ownership of AI models and data, and most softwares and programs are open source.

This gentle, wellness-focussed future Skåne nonetheless allows for dissent mostly related to the ubiquity of AI in people’s lives. Conflict management techniques are mainstreamed across society and a sort of gap-year programme aimed at giving young people first-hand experience of "alternative systems and cultures"has been established to make young people appreciate what they have.