The first time I thought about a digital twin, it was 2:17 a.m.
I know the time because I checked it twice. Once, when I woke up because the dog was barking hysterically at what must have been deer in the backyard. Once, when I realized I wasn’t going back to sleep due to the resulting dose of adrenaline.
My husband was breathing steadily beside me. The house was quiet in that suburban way that only exists between midnight and dawn. The refrigerator hummed. The furnace clicked once and settled.
I had fallen asleep watching another short film from Black Mirror. They publish short films that blend the digital and physical worlds so seamlessly you stop noticing the seam. None of them feels as far-fetched as we’d like. It’s gripping and equally unsettling how the plot could easily become reality tomorrow afternoon.
Earlier that week, I had been back inside a notebook I’d been filling for the past year. The working title was Continuum. I had an outline: three rough chapters and a dozen diagrams connecting bee colonies to blackberries, dinosaurs to apex predators. I had tested the framework on anyone who’d sit still long enough. It was the first plausible book idea I’d had in years.
It was also, like the solar recycling company and the art program I’d started and the operations consulting business I obsessively worked on for six months, currently sitting in a state I’d learned to recognize: alive enough to feel like abandonment, dormant enough to feel like failure.
I think in systems. The problem is that systems require sustained energy to build, and my energy tends to fragment before the structure is complete.
The premise was about power, and how it exists on a spectrum. At one end: the distributed strength of many people working toward a shared good. At the other: concentrated power defending itself in a “me first” reflex. Most of history oscillates between those poles in some form.
Altruism and narcissism.
Cooperation and extraction.
Regeneration and dominance.
My aha was that these roles don’t exist as binaries. Instead, society and our environment are in constant movement, oscillating from one end to the other.
Thus, a continuum. We, in our tiny sliver of time, can’t tell whether the oscillation is close to one extreme and ready to swing back, or just partway.
Sometime between the credits of that dystopian short film and the second glance at the clock, a thought assembled itself.
If power has always oscillated between distributed and concentrated, between cooperation and extraction, then someone, somewhere, is measuring which way it’s currently moving.
Both physically and digitally.
Simultaneously. In real life.
For example:
Nearly every person alive has at least one email address. Most of us have a phone number, a credit card, and a login to something. And we can’t do much of anything without them. Every day, each of us is placing digital pixels on a virtual shadow we will never see. A twin built from receipts, clicks, location pings, likes, comments, and sign-ups. Those are physical and digital personas.
We know we have a digital footprint.
What we don’t know is how coherent it is.
Or who can see it.
I lay there imagining it as a 3-D overlay.
A shifting field of probability, currents clustering around topics, money flowing between organizations like heat through a pipe.
It felt plausible enough to be unsettling.
I told myself it was science fiction spillover and went back to sleep.
The digital twin idea drifted to the junk drawer, as if it were under a pile of pens, key rings, and lettuce rubber bands, to be found next year when we “go through it”.
The two days & the Frisbee weekend:
The message arrived on a Thursday.
By Friday noon, I had done exactly four minutes of investigation: two Reddit searches that surfaced nothing but prepaid phone ads, and one deeply unhinged forum post from someone claiming they’d been contacted by extraterrestrials via Slack.
I closed the tab.
Then I spent three hours finding the garage key, locating the cooler behind the camping gear, and packing the Rubbermaid bins with the coffee maker, chips, marshmallows, and enough dog food for two days. My son and daughter both had teams in a tournament in Seattle. Getting ready for a small road trip is exactly as hard as a big one.
All weekend, we ran between fields as I tracked scores in my head, cheered until my throat hurt, and tried not to think about the Amazon. I mostly failed at the last part.
At some point between Saturday’s semifinal and Sunday’s consolation bracket, I had a familiar feeling. Of something interesting slipping back into the pile. The feeling of real life being exactly full enough to bury whatever had briefly felt urgent.
I had felt it with Continuum.
With the recycling program.
With the art program.
I did not want to feel it again.
By Sunday night, unpacked and exhausted, it was 11:30. The house was quiet.
Everyone was asleep.
I opened my laptop and stared at the screenshot for four minutes.
Then I closed it and went to bed.
Monday morning, after everyone left for school, I walked the dog, came home, and did the first thing that came to mind.
I went to the library.
The message had instructed me to use a public network.
The anonymity of a library seemed like a good idea.
I mostly assumed that the whole thing was a prank and was ready to be burned by today’s version of Candid Camera.
I sat at a wooden table near the window. Teenagers were whispering over homework. An older man was reading a newspaper folded in precise quarters. The internet connection was normal, even though the computers looked a bit old. Most people were on their own laptops scattered around the study tables.
I typed the URL from my screenshot.
A white login page loaded. It was strikingly stark. So minimal, that it looked like an Error page. No help links. No logo. Nothing but 2 fields.
Username:
Password:
I hesitated long enough to look around for anyone watching, and I considered closing the tab 100 times as my body heat and heart rate started to climb.
I entered the credentials scribbled on my neon-orange Post-It.
Double checked that it was right and hit ENTER.
The screen refreshed.
A line of text appeared.
The login page transitioned into a map before I had time to process what I was seeing.
Dark background. Topographic outlines. A pulsing overlay of color.
South America filled the screen.
The Amazon basin glowed in layers, deep green in some areas, bruised orange in others, thin red fissures branching like fractures along planned roads and mineral claims.
Data tags flickered when my cursor drifted near them.
Projected land transfer: 56,500 hectares.
Mining probability: HIGH.
Confirmation window: 12 months.
Projected land transfer: 12,500 hectares.
Clear-cut probability: MODERATE.
Policy shift window: 6 months.
I kept scrolling. The numbers accumulated.
Then I recognized the name of a river we floated in Ecuador.
We drifted around searching for parrots gathering on the salt lick (a steep cliff).
This was the same place we visited in the Amazon.
Years ago, before any of this, I spent time with an indigenous community deep in that basin. I remembered the smell of earthy smoke threading through the canopy, the cacophony of bird calls from dawn til dusk that wove its way into the electric hum of insects at night. Their leaders spoke as we listened through two translators, Spanish into English, about the slow encroachment of investors and developers hungry to buy and ultimately destroy their land.
I had made a promise that day that felt both necessary and absurd: to protect land at scale. A hundred million acres, I told myself. A BHAG — Big Hairy Audacious Goal. If I could ever find the leverage.
The overlay zoomed automatically across and down, in and out.
Financial notes. Underground acquisition strategies. Projected timelines.
This was a monitoring dashboard paired with a forecasting machine. Showing me how it could forecast extraction before deals hardened into roads and contracts. Explaining how a system like this could make it strategically possible.
It was a way toward that goal.
Then the screen froze.
The map dissolved.
Two lines appeared:
Identity confidence is insufficient.
Establish an independent payment vector and a communication node.
Below that, a list:
Prepaid financial instrument.
Prepaid communication device.
Cash acquisition required.
I stared at it long enough that the library’s screensaver nearly activated.
This was not a random phishing scheme.
Whoever built this knew exactly what they needed from me.
And exactly why I would come back.
The question was whether I would.
New Here?
You’re reading a serialized short work of autobiographical fiction about digital infrastructure, attention, and the systems that shape us long before we notice them.
It begins with a gas station, a prepaid card, and a Slack message that shouldn’t have existed.
If you’d like to start from the beginning, read Part I here.
New installments are published once every week or so.