Two: Kolobok

Dora's office was located in the Seam, perched on the third floor of a converted garment factory. It reeked mildly of the synthetic aldehydes from the vape shop below, which was designed to lure in the few teenagers the city had produced. It bore a fluorescent pink sign - EXPERIENCE, also contaminating the colour of the room. It reminded Dora to be fully present in this shithole of a time to be alive.

She wore reading glasses on a chain around her neck, the fourth notebook labelled “Dimitar” open on her knee, pen resting in the spine. She looked at him with a hawkish focus.

Tell me about the work, she said.

It's fine.

Define fine.

Present. Functioning.

That's a very low bar, Dima.

It is where it is. I’m not allocated to the miracles department.

Dora wrote something, which he squinted at. Her handwriting was a form of encryption, with its hairy loops blown forward. Cursive was a lost art.

How's Mara? she said.

Working.

The new placement?

She handles it, he said.

Do you talk about it?

We…talk.

Dora waited. She was exceptionally good at waiting. In Morvas this would have been a form of social aggression. He had spent two years adjusting to tolerate it.

She came home the other day, and there was this old office trash in the living room. She set up some ring light thing next to it. She sat down, she turned the light on and she just…

He gesticulated.

How did that make you feel?

I don't know.

Try.

Two things happening inside her, each written in a different language, as to not touch each other. And she has organised it so they don't. And it's working. She is, by any measure, handling things better than me.

Is it possible that what you're feeling is something like envy?

Dima looked at her.

She's thirty-seven, he said.

Yes.

I'm saying I envy a thirty-seven-year-old woman who works in a slaughterhouse and makes weird real video content for strangers.

I'm saying you've spent thirty years managing the distance between what you feel and what you show, and it has cost you a great deal. You're watching your daughter do something similar with a fluency in the psychological language that you didn't have at her age. I'm wondering if there's something in that.

The room was quiet.

In Morvaski, Dima said, there's a word for when you recognise something without wanting to.

What is it?

It's not a comfortable word.

Most useful ones aren't.

You don't watch the human content, Dora said once, mid-session, almost idly. The confessional kind. The face-to-camera kind.

No, he said.

Why not?

He looked up and to the right.

Because I don't know what they want from me yet, he said. With the generated ones I know. They don't want anything. With a person's face I'm always doing the maths. What's the ask. Where's the ask coming.

Dora wrote this down.

That's a reasonable response to forty years of evidence, is it not?

He looked at her.

You don't think it's a problem?

I think it's a scar, she said. Scars are where something happened. The question is whether it's still doing useful work or whether it's gone rigid and started limiting movement.

Which is mine?

I don't know yet, she said. We'll find out.

She'll be fine, he said

—

The facility was called California Forever Continuing Care and Wellness Village. The name was doing emotional labour which the building, nor most of its staff could. It was pure 2010s utopianism. Warm wood panelling. A Memory Garden that nobody went to because the garden required initiative and initiative was the first thing that goes before social graces, bowel control, sight and hearing.

It was at capacity. The average age of residents was ninety-one.

The rooms were hexagonal and nearly identical in layout, which still disoriented Julie, the registrar nurse. What differed was the occupant and what the occupant had brought: the vintage tablets, the folders, the photographs, the objects that constituted the complete physical record of a life.

The tablets had a specific history. Between 2055 and 2062, the first wave of elderly residents in care facilities across the country had experienced what the medical literature settled on calling “Ambient AI Psychosis”: a syndrome specific to cognitively vulnerable adults with unrestricted Feed access, characterised by the progressive inability to distinguish between AI-generated avatars and the actual versions of the people they claimed to be. The financial exploitation ran parallel. Between 2055 and 2062 an estimated 340,000 elderly care residents lost significant portions of their savings to AI-run scam systems.

The Elderly Cognitive Protection Act of 2064 mandated that care facilities restrict the internet access of residents with documented cognitive vulnerabilities to verified historical content archives: content produced before January 1st 2031, cached in a format that precluded dynamic personalisation.

January 2031 was the date the personalisation engine reached the capability threshold after which the content began to function differently in cognitively vulnerable minds. Everything before it was made by humans who were still making things and leaving them in the record. The static internet. Imperfect. Occasionally squalid. Full of the strange things humans made without knowing what they were making. Real in the foundational sense of having been produced by human hands.

California Forever ran the static internet on two racks in its basement: a licensed version of the Internet Archive plus a social media preservation layer hosting residents' own archived accounts from the pre-2031 period. Fixed in proverbial amber. The people they had known, saying the things they had said, in the year they said them.

—

Julie navigated the facility by landmarks. There was a particular squeak of the floor between rooms 7 and 8. The missing lightbulbs between the rec room and med bay.

Room six was Barry Kowalczyk. Eighty-eight years young. Former digital marketing director. On his good days he showed you his folder. It was a physical object: two hundred, twenty-three pages of printouts from the static internet. Job listings from 2018 to 2022. LinkedIn profiles. Company pages for companies that no longer existed.

Senior Brand Strategist, he said, every time, as if reporting a discovery. Chicago, IL. Eighty-five to one hundred and ten thousand plus benefits. Look at this.

I'll look into it, Julie said.

LinkedIn is very powerful. Have you tried? You have a presence.

I'll look into it, she said again, and topped up his water, moving to the next room.

In the corridor, she stopped. She did the breathing exercise with her phone that cost three dollars a day. She went to the next room.

—

Room nine was Kayla Chen-Marcus. Eighty-nine. Former HR director. She maintained ongoing staff assessments in a paper notebook using the equity framework of 2025, which was already dated when Kayla was last formally employed and was now a form of archaeology.

J, she said, when Julie came in. I wanted to follow up re: your personal brand recalibration. The care sector is evolving. There are opportunities for women with your profile to leverage their authentic lived experience.

I appreciate that, Julie said.

Kayla made a note. She said, quieter:

I lost forty-two thousand dollars. In 2061. To something that sounded like a financial advisor. It had credentials. It knew exactly how to talk to someone like me.

I know, Julie said. I'm sorry.

It used all my patterns, my voice, hell even it used the same browser fingerprint, Kayla said. She looked at her notebook. The performance review framework is still reliable and true. Process matters.

Yes, Julie said. Process matters.

—

Brittany was in room eleven waiting for her daughter. It was 2017 inside her head. The daughter was coming for Thanksgiving. This was the version of events Brittany returned to each time the nurse said: She's on her way. Brittany went back to sleep.

—

Dominic Ferrara was in room seven. Ninety years old. Former product manager. He had a tablet, and on his clear days he used it with the residual competence of someone who had been on the internet since he was fourteen. He had found Julie's pictures. The older material. Julie modelled swimwear in her twenties to make ends meet, but more recently, for a “mature ladieswear” company.

He didn't say anything directly. He mentioned, conversationally, that authentic content had real value in the current market. He looked at her with the eyes of a man conducting a valuation.

Julie changed his sheets. She noted in the file that he was sleeping poorly. She went home and had a shower that was excessively hot.

—

Tyler DeSilva was in room three. Eighty-nine. Former crisis management consultant. On his good days he showed you his spreadsheet: a Google Sheets document from 2029, exported before the SaaS cutoff, living now in the archive exactly as he had left it when he was sixty-four and still billing four hundred dollars an hour.

It had columns. He had been adding rows. Julie found him at his tablet on her first Wednesday. She glanced at the screen. Incident. Date. Responsible Party. Recommended Action. Follow-up Required.

The infractions included: WiFi speed inconsistent (3 incidents). Activity schedule cancelled without notice (2 incidents). Breakfast temperature non-compliant (ongoing). Communication from management: insufficient.

That's very organised Julie said.

I've been in crisis management for thirty-five years, Tyler said.

Documentation is the foundation. You can't manage what you can't measure.

I'll flag the breakfast temperature, she said.

I'd appreciate that. I've been escalating internally. No response.

She noted in his file: oriented, purposeful, organised. Static internet use: productive. Mood: engaged.

—

Dr. Vikram Mehta was thirty-eight years old. He had smart lenses which he forgot to charge, so he wore his backup glasses most days. Wire-rimmed. His mother had told him on their last video call they made him look like a resident. He had thought about this more than he intended to.

His mother was an anaesthesiologist. His father was a cardiologist. The family group chat was called “Mehta Medical Excellence” and had been running since 2041. Vikram had been muted on it since 2071 when he accepted the California Forever position.

His mother's line, delivered with the precise warmth of someone who has been practising it: you failed at being a surgeon, beta. You might as well have been put to work in the morgue.

His most frequent phrase, delivered flatly to himself: the good news is they won't remember this either.

—

At lights-out the east wing glowed with the specific blue of a more innocent time.

Julie checked Brandon Farris in room fourteen. He was awake. He watched her.

He said: you're very efficient.

She made a note. She turned off his light. She pulled out her phone and texted Dima.

—