GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2022/23
EDWARD BARNFIELD
‘Digital Twins’
THEY OPENED THE COOL BANK ON A WARM WEDNESDAY IN MARCH. They smiled in shirt sleeves and made a photo opportunity out of calamity. If you look closely, you can see Alice, my sister and arguably the project’s architect, in the crowd behind the ribbon cutting, pensive in black. It’s the last image I have of her.
Heat Banks had been a thing for a while by then, public spaces made available for those who could no longer afford their energy bills. In Leicester, they turned the old public library over to chilly pensioners and retrofitted a couple of bankrupt fitness centres when that reached overcapacity. The library was good, because there were distractions, a sense of purpose in being there, but the council had to limit the programme when guests started stealing books for fuel.
Most people didn’t need Heat Banks, of course, in the same way they didn’t require food parcels or homeless shelters. Still, a growing number of my friends began to consolidate for the winter, bringing elderly relatives into their homes to split costs, or finding unlikely roommates to share their collective penury.
“It’s fine for the cold months, but what happens in the summer?” Alice had asked earlier, on one of my grudging visits back home. “You can’t huddle together for cool.”
She’d just been assigned to the project, a complex community challenge that the council hoped an algorithm could solve.
“All these houses,” she went on, “were thrown up for quick profit by lazy developers. No proper ventilation or insulation. Homes used to be a sanctuary and somewhere along the line they became an asset. That’s where the problems started. Now they’re just malfunctioning kitchen appliances, freezing us in the winter and baking us in the summer.”
My mother tutted. She didn’t like controversy at the dinner table, although it was rare for Alice to talk for as long or as loud in her presence. “Alice, maybe you should eat something?” she said, and then, to me, “Darling, finish what’s on your plate before taking more.”
Growing up, I didn’t interact much with Alice beyond inflexible July camping holidays and the enforced jollity of Christmas. She was six years younger than me and a strangely absent child. My parents worried about the amount of time she spent in her bedroom. I suppose they wanted me to help her.
Instead, I used my adolescence to conquer the world. Head girl, leader of the student council, fun-runner, and all-round volunteer. I think I wanted to show my folks how little support I needed so that they could devote all their worry to my sibling. Alice who wasn’t eating. Alice who saw a specialist because her language skills weren’t developing. Alice who feared bright lights and loud noises.
It was only in my teens I realised how underestimated she had been. My picture was in the local paper when the exam results came out, along with two other girls and a Kosovan refugee who’d only joined the class in the last term. I tore the page out and left it on my mother’s bedside, hoping that she’d frame it or at least pass comment.
“She won’t thank you for that,” said a shape in the corner. “Academic achievement physically pains her.”
Alice had become obsessed with computer games at that point, staying up all hours constructing imaginary civilisations or running fantasy factories. She would take cover in a corner, and the only way you’d know she was there would be the glow on her face. The mechanics of that type of play baffled me – logging on, putting in the hours. It was like wage labour without the compensations of salary and workplace gossip.
“She must be delighted by you,” I snipped back. “Your reports must be like a day spa.”
The next year, Alice took an accelerated learning programme and passed her GCSEs at 12. Her teachers were baffled that this unnoticed student – who had spent so long in the grey zone of pupils they could never remember at the end of the year – should have suddenly blossomed into an exam-conquering valedictorian. There was talk of sending her to college early. I never learned what Mum did with the press clipping about me.
If anything, Alice’s success made my parent’s obsession worse. Rather than a vulnerable child, a child in need of help, they found they had been growing something unusual, almost malevolent on the top floor of their house. When I called back home from university, a good proportion of the conversation would revolve around Alice and her needs – the tutors who’d given up, defeated, and the special computer that would consume two months of Dad’s salary. I didn’t mind. It was easier than fending off my mother’s inquiries about boyfriends and career plans.
“I hope you’re eating healthily,” she’d say, which was as close as she got to ‘I love you’.
It was hard to make sense of Alice beyond my parents’ reports. I was busy with my studies, and she would make a face if I ever suggested anything as basic as talking on the phone or emailing. I could never work out which social media platform to reach her on: they always had obscure names like ‘FriendFarm’ and she never used her own photos, just stills from Japanese animation. When I was home, I’d try to engage her with conversation about college life, but she’d just pull her baggy t-shirt over her knees and smile until I finished.
“You’re never coming back again, are you? To live, I mean,” she said at the end of one visit. “The harder you study, the further you can escape.”
She didn’t seem sad when she said it.
I wanted to protect my sister, but I suppose I also resented her. She had this way of making me feel conventional, predictable, even when I was setting out on my own. Everything I achieved felt very ordinary in comparison to her. My parents’ anecdotes were always Alice-based, telling their friends about the time she’d ordered boxes of dried noodles direct from China, the container too big to squeeze through our doorway, or how she’d learned Korean without telling anyone.
Even when she decided not to continue with education, to take an entry-level job with the local council, it felt like she was casting judgement. I had started at one of the big five consultancies by then, living in a one-bedroom London bedsit on the fast track to somewhere glamourous, but Alice was showing me what she could accomplish from the humblest position. No-one else was of that opinion, of course.
“She doesn’t have your ambition,” my mum would say. “You’re not as smart as Alice, but you work harder.”
Life threw us together during the summer of the long drought. My company had been doing a lot of work advising on ‘smart cities’, enabling technology companies to sell products to municipalities, or securing grants from absurd international bodies to fund data collection projects. It was glitzy, easy work, in an area where my youth and lack of experience didn’t seem an obstacle. No-one knew what they were doing, so why not trust the kids? We had a series of flash PowerPoints, and a tame Nobel scientist with wild hair who’d beam in for pitches. I’d become very used to the small luxuries of business class, the mini bottles of shampoo and body lotion, the complimentary breakfasts, and hotel lobby nightcaps.
“You’re from Leicester, aren’t you?” said Dave Ingram, my manager, one morning. “I knew it was somewhere up North.”
I almost laughed. After a nationwide study, Leicester had been chosen as the first urban hub for a citywide neural network. Leicester, my hometown, with all its aggressive ordinariness. The 13th most populous city in the United Kingdom, a confluence of major motorways, straight median for gross income and life expectancy. The dead centre of England, in more ways than one.
We had been advising one of their competitors on their bid but that didn’t seem to be an issue for Ingram. He’d secured a meeting with the council’s ICT Operations Department and was convinced that we’d soon become an essential partner for the project. I was to take the train up with the team the next day.
Reading the briefing notes, I could see why Leicester had been selected. The place had been a hive of unusual industry, fitting every possible traffic intersection and public building with smart sensors, and installing monitors in people’s homes that could check air quality and ground temperature. Every flicker of urban life was being recorded in real time and transcribed onto a giant database that hummed in a dark basement somewhere behind the clock tower. The most energy expended since they found a dead king in a carpark, according to the notes.
“Cities like this, they need something to replace the financial activity they’ve lost,” said Ajay, our analyst, as we walked from the station past shuttered Chinese takeaways and struggling vape shops. “In retail, the only outlets that survive are those that offer physical interaction. The high street is just barbers, tattoo artists and pawnbrokers. The odd coffee shop for the people who work around here. Everything else you can get on the internet.”
The contempt was unspoken, but real. Ajay had been called back from a five-month project in Abu Dhabi, where they were building an online gold brokerage, while Shannon, the project lead, had previously worked in Shanghai. To go from those places, where the future was being formed, to this rundown museum piece in the East Midlands felt like a demotion. I caught them both giving me sly looks as we walked past the ornamental fountain in front of the town hall. As for me, I had that strange sensation you get from looking in the mirror in your childhood bedroom. Everything was lived-in but unchanged.
My colleagues’ bemusement only intensified in the town hall reception area, with its cheap plastic chairs and buzzing fluorescent lights. Everything about this place – the coffee stains on the tie of Ted Alexander, Head of ICT Operations, and the earnest posters encouraging people to wash their hands – felt stale and hand-me-down.
“The real challenge we have is managing all the data the system produces,” said Ted by way of introduction. “I mean, it’s just a tsunami of information.”
Shannon smirked as we walked down the dirty-carpeted corridor. These were the kind of problems that bumped up hourly billing.
“We were so lucky to have someone on the team who understood all this,” he continued. “I mean, it’s real next generation stuff.”
When we reached the large white room at the end, it was possibly the first time I had seen my colleagues outmanoeuvred. Leicester City Council had invested in a vast bank of monitors that covered most of the east wall. Whatever they were connected to was powerful enough to not only manage all the information the sensors produced, but to create a faithful real-time recreation on screen.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Leicester’s digital twin.”
My employers had been selling the digital twin concept for a while, backed by the writings of our rented genius. The idea was to offer an indistinguishable virtual counterpoint for an office park or an airport, taking all the data and using it to run simulations for major decisions. If you wanted to build a new runway, for example, you’d place it on the digital twin first, to see what impact construction would have on daily traffic and understand which location would produce the best long-term results.
In truth, most of the prototypes we’d worked on were glitchy and slow, the networks clogging, the graphics crashing. Even with the involvement of the world’s computer giants, it felt like the finished product was years away. No-one had found a way to clone a whole neighbourhood yet, let alone a city. Yet here, in this plain white room in an unfashionable district, someone had achieved the impossible.
On the screens were true life representations of the city beyond these walls. One screen showed energy use, with purple pulses of light that clustered across a three-dimensional schema. Another showed traffic flows, with infinite dotted lines skirting a topographical map. There was even a little cartoon version, smiling heads bobbing past pastel-coloured buildings, that showed the movement of the people outside as accurately as any window
“How did you… how does this…” Shannon stammered.
“Yep. We’re very lucky. Emily does excellent work, so naturally we were delighted when Dave said that Charlotte was coming to see us, too,” said Ted, trying to be ingratiating. It was the second time he’d called me ‘Charlotte’. The first, I’d assumed he was talking about someone else.
“Sorry, Ted. Just to cut you off – my name’s not Charlotte, actually.”
“Oh, I know, I know. It’s just a departmental joke. We imagine there’s a whole house of you somewhere, women geniuses amazing us all. Emily Bronte built the digital twin, we said, and now we’ve got Charlotte Bronte coming onboard to advise us.”
“Sorry, who’s Emily Bronte?” said Ajay. I wasn’t sure whether he meant in this witticism or more generally in classic literature.
“I suppose that’s me,” said Alice.
Unnoticed again. I think she’d been in the room for a whole conversation, hidden behind a work screen. When she got up to greet us, I was shocked to see how tall she’d grown, how thin. Dyed black hair with a streak of crimson, along with a new-looking nose ring, embedded in still tender flesh. Mum must have loved that.
We exchanged greetings, Alice touching my elbow and deftly avoiding Shannon’s proffered hand, and then the men led us into the boardroom. What followed was two hours of painful inevitability. Ted’s team were all carbon copies of him, aged-out adolescents in bad clothing, who could never resist an opportunity to explain. Shannon had sized them up before he took a seat and gracefully rolled out the list of big-name clients that we’d worked with. It was clear they were going to hire us.
I spent most of the meeting watching my sister, unnerved by the poise she displayed in a corporate environment where she looked so out of place. She spoke twice, I think, both times to correct Ajay on some abstruse technical point.
“Ted and his boys don’t have a clue about the system, how it works,” she told me afterwards, as we took the bus back to our parent’s house. (I’d booked a day’s leave to see them). “They grew up in the era when a computer was a box on a desk, something you could turn on and off. Something that did what it was told with a few lines of code.”
“And what is it now?” I asked, genuinely interested in her insight.
“The computer is everything. Omnipresent. Little RFID chips on vending machines and traffic lights, monitoring every flicker of activity. Watches on every wrist for remote tracking. If it’s still a box, then we’re inside the box.”
I nudged her, affectionately. “Is that why you need us? To teach Ted how to work it?”
She didn’t look at me. “I don’t think your guys know much more than Ted does. I didn’t hear Ajay say anything you couldn’t copy from Wikipedia.”
The scenery rolled past, old buildings and dead trees. There was a fading mural from the last time the football team had any sort of success.
“They’re going to hire you for the usual reasons. Having a consultancy onboard makes it look like the project has some momentum, some purpose. They can blame their failures on you and hire someone else in three years’ time,” she said. “Besides, Ted Alexander was at university with Dave Ingram. It’s how these things work.”
I was hurt, I think. At no time had she said that it was good to see me, that she’d missed me, that I was looking good in my business suit. Still, I tried to laugh it off.
“When did you get so cynical?” I asked and nudged her again.
“Didn’t you hear? I’m Emily Bronte. I’ve got three more years of Gothic romance before dying of tuberculosis.” We sat in silence for the rest of the journey.
That trip back set the pattern for the next few years of my working life. I would travel to Leicester every month, meet with Ted and his boys, watch as Alice did all the meaningful work. Then we would ride to the family home, mostly in silence.
It often felt as though Alice was the visitor, not me. She would run to her room and reappear – or not – to drink coffee with us while we ate. My dad confided that it was standard practice for her to spend two or three nights out of the house during the week, and they hoped – desperately – she was staying with a friend or partner. She’d placed a lock on her bedroom door and wouldn’t let anyone enter to clean or chat.
“You know, there’s a Japanese term, ‘Otaku’,” I told her once, when we were sitting in the council’s grey break room. “It means someone who becomes obsessed and retreats from the world. Do you think—”
She snorted, probably at my audacity in talking to her about any aspect of Japanese culture. “You mean, ‘Hikikomori’,” she said. “And I’m not retreating from the world. I’m trying to understand it without interruption from our mother.”
Meanwhile, my mum would tell me I was looking healthy, and start pointed conversations about declining fertility rates. I was always relieved to get the train home to restart to my other, brighter life.
Still, the Leicester Neural Network became a success for all parties. Local hospitals started issuing outpatients with wristbands that tracked their blood pressure and oxygen levels, while warehouses in city limits received special rates if they agreed to fit their trucks with tracking devices. We were able to secure funding for a dedicated data centre to help manage all the incoming intelligence, and all the while the digital twin grew in complexity and detail.
My sister received no credit for this. Her department tolerated the near endless breaches of dress and decorum codes and turned a blind eye to the sleeping bag and sanitary products she’d placed under her workstation. In return, Ted Alexander and Dave Ingram toured the technology conferences of the world and bragged about their results.
‘A Circuit Board City,’ said an article in the Wall Street Journal, the polite journalist from Utah having spent three days shadowing Alexander and trying to puzzle how such mediocrity had created a ‘miracle’. He didn’t, of course, speak to Alice.
If any of this bothered her, she never mentioned it to me. Her only frustration, as far as I could tell, was the ‘imagination deficit’ she encountered in the office every day.
“You can use the digital twin to understand everything, anything,” she told me once, as we passed the football mural for the umpteenth time. “You could map the destiny of every individual in the city through every potential eventuality, and all they want to do is solve planning issues.”
It was true that the council had started delegating simple but controversial decisions to the Neural Network project. If some developer wanted to turn a historic building into additional parking space, or the Bengali nightclub was trying to extend operating hours against residents’ howls of protest, they simply ran the different outcomes through the simulation. And strangely, people accepted the judgement of the digital twin in a way they wouldn’t from an elected politician or licensing board. The sheer weight of data gave it an awful sense of authority.
They kept the glamourous work for themselves of course. Every time they announced a new-start scheme or urban regeneration initiative, the councillors made it clear it was their idea, that the neural network had only been used to validate their decisions. It was only when they had exhausted every other option that they turned the big problems over to Alice.
That was the case with the energy crisis, for example. Three local nursing homes had gone bankrupt trying to cover their monthly bills, while a fourth had seen eight residents die when temperatures kept creeping over 45 during long nights without air-conditioning.
Shortly after the awkward lunch when my sister ranted about failed housing policy, when she’d submitted the Cool Bank proposal, Alice had her first attack. I was back in London, smarting from my half-year appraisal. Dave Ingram had told me that, while the work I was doing in the East Midlands was ‘exceptional’, I needed to be doing more to generate new business.
“We want to replicate the Leicester experience in markets outside the UK, package it for easy sale,” he said. “I don’t see you helping with that. You’re too focused on the negatives. I think you’ve allowed the personal to interfere with the professional.”
I didn’t point out that he’d visited Leicester just once in all the time we’d worked on the project. I didn’t mention that the couple of times we’d tried to help replicate the digital twin for other cities, they had been dismal failures without an Alice equivalent in the background.
So, when my mum called crying, I was ready to dismiss her. It was only when I was able to understand that they’d found Alice unconscious in her bedroom, that my frail bony dad had needed to break the door down, that I shrugged off my career anxieties and accepted the seriousness of the situation.
I was able to see her in hospital the next day. They had fitted her with a smart wristband, which she fiddled with self-consciously.
“It’s not a big deal,” she said, as the monitor beeped beside her. “Mum’s had difficulty with the shopping recently, so there hasn’t been much fruit and veg in my diet. Plus, I’ve managed to get a vitamin D deficiency even though it’s been so sunny.”
We’re worried about you, I wanted to say.
“I’m really part of the computer now,” she said, showing me her wrist. “I’m the newest resident of digital twin town.”
Dad had been in the next ward briefly, receiving care for his damaged shoulder.
“Our father, action man,” laughed Alice. “I wish I’d been awake to see it.”
Mum told me what they’d found in her room. Layers of detritus built up since adolescence, dirty clothes that had lain in the same sad piles for months. And the computer, the special model that Dad had worked so hard for, rewired and reworked to plug into the council’s network.
“Please don’t tell anyone about that,” said Alice when I mentioned it. “I’ve covered my tracks pretty well so far.”
She’d been using her home network to ask the digital twin all the questions her bosses didn’t have the courage or foresight to ask. What happens if river levels rise more than five percent? What happens to food production if a drought runs into a third month? I thought, at first, she was doing it for a professional edge in her career – it had clearly inspired her to suggest the Cool Banks – but in fact she was being driven by a more existential sense of inquiry.
“Climate change is non-linear,” she said to me on her fifth day in hospital. “Once you pass a certain threshold, the damage is irrevocable. And then, all the time you’ve spent on your career, and trying to make things right with Mum… it all ceases to be of value.”
I spent a bleak day running through the simulations she’d worked on. Looking at the bridges that would warp under extreme heat, the rising mortality rates that might accompany record ‘wet bulb’ temperatures. You could zoom out and see those versions of the virtual city from space, the vast tracks of grey where fields should have been. What I couldn’t find was any sign of interior life. No private chats with a secret boyfriend, no diary of domesticity with our aging parents. No surprise she’d made herself sick.
I put the computer back on her desk and stepped out over the piles of junk, exactly as she had left them. I didn’t ask her, why focus on those questions? Why torture yourself with the future, rather than improve your present? It was the same old dynamic, Alice tackling the big issues while I grubbed around for self-advancement. I think I resented her even more after the attack.
You see, you never know how people will respond to the presentiment of grief. We know, on some level, when we’re about to lose a loved one, but we store that information at the back of our mind and get on with life. I threw myself into work and developed a proposal to commodify the Leicester Neural Network and make it available for sale to villages and cities in Southern and Eastern Europe, places where even the aspiration to order would make a difference. I proposed a commercial package that would compensate the council and split the team off as a standalone business, with Ted Alexander and Dave Ingram as co-directors. I didn’t mention my sister’s name once. There are no credits on lines of code.
Alice went back to work, but in a reduced, quieter capacity. They made her remove the sleeping bag from the office and go home at night. I’m not sure if they found out about her illicit workstation, but Dad said they’d tidied her room and removed all electronics on the doctor’s advice.
We spoke on the phone a few times afterwards. I told her I was sorry that I wasn’t there for the opening of the Cool Bank, but my office was restricting non-essential travel at the time. I would be working less in Leicester and more in Chorzow in Poland moving forward.
“I heard you were implementing a new neural network there,” said Alice, quietly. “I hope they get better results than I did.”
There’s a special fear that expats suffer from, that news of a death will arrive in the most impersonal time and format. You’ll read about a school friend’s passing on some group chat late at night, or stumble across a neighbour’s expiry while nostalgically flicking through your old local newspaper.
For me, it was Dave Ingram, of all people, sending an alert on the office messaging programme. The spin-off business was co-owned by my employers, you see, and it was the one way he could be sure of reaching me.
Alice died, officially, from an undetected heart defect, a closing of the left ventricle that had likely set in with the onset of puberty, around the same time she had started the accelerated learning programme. I associated it with another Japanese term, ‘karoshi’, which means occupation-related sudden death. I doubted her reduced duties had enabled her to work any less.
They gave me a week’s compassionate leave and sent me home for the funeral. I took the train, as always, and rode the same bus that I had taken with her so many times. It was May, and already unbearably hot. There were some familiar faces in attendance. My parents, obviously, being painfully sincere when thanking everyone for attending, like it was her graduation ceremony or engagement party. Shannon and Ajay, both tanned from work in more glamourous locales. Even Ted Alexander, who told me they were considering renaming the Leicester Cool Bank in honour of my sister and her work.
“Just what she would have wanted,” I said. “A refrigerated warehouse full of desperate strangers.”
That night, I sat in the room that wasn’t hers anymore. The computer was there, unplugged and tidied in a drawer, a thin layer of dust upon it.
I play with it most nights now. Like Alice in her youth, I log on and spend hours entering information. I work, almost exclusively, on the digital twin. There’s a subroutine where you can go back in time, and see what would have happened if…
I’m trying to see whether another Leicester was possible, if there was any path that we could have taken that would have avoided the now. I’m looking to see if all this was inevitable, and – if not – what was the point at which it could have been avoided. But really, I’m looking for her, for Alice, for whatever trace her smart wristband might have left behind. I’m looking for the ghost in the machine.
That’s the comforting lie of the computer age: there’s always a way to recover lost messages, always an option to restart the game. It’s only real life where the endings are irrevocable.
EDWARD BARNFIELD is a writer and researcher living in the Middle East. His stories have appeared in Roi Fainéant Press, Ellipsis Zine, The Molotov Cocktail, Retreat West, Third Flatiron, Strands, Janus Literary, Leicester Writes, Shooter Literary, Cranked Anvil, and Reflex Press, among others. He’s on Twitter at @edbarnfield.