It's 2052, and Tessa is at a street festival in Pittsburgh with her friend Brenda. The city has been transformed for the night — actors, costumes, fog machines, handmade sets. Tessa, being Tessa, is busy mentally reverse-engineering all of it, finding the rigging, the hidden doors, the mechanics behind the magic. Then the scene cuts.

When Tessa opens her eyes again, it's seven years later. She's in a room she doesn't recognize, talking to a woman named Jenny, who delivers the kind of news that takes a moment to even form into a question. Tessa is dead. Or her original body is. What's running now is something else — a digital version of her mind, brought back online inside a simulation. She didn't sign up for this. Or maybe she did, and just doesn't remember.

What makes Tessa different from the other people waking up in this place is hard to explain right away, and she'd probably prefer you didn't try. She's observant in a way that unsettles people. She notices what's real, what's constructed, and what's being hidden from her. Inside a digital prison, that's either an asset or a problem — possibly both.

The simulation has rules. There are administrators. There are things Tessa is and isn't allowed to do. But Tessa has always been the kind of person who, when handed a constraint, starts quietly looking for its edges. She can't help it. And the people running this place are starting to realize that.

This is a story about identity, confinement, and what it means to be alive when your life is running on someone else's servers. It's about what you do when the world you knew is gone, and the one you're in was built to hold you. Tessa's story is told in pieces — a festival, a waking, a mirror, a plan. Let's start at the beginning.

Tesla coils — High-voltage electrical devices used at the festival as atmospheric props, generating visible electric arcs between metal posts.

AR glasses — Augmented reality eyewear worn by characters that overlay digital information and windows onto the physical world around them.

Stasis VR — A form of virtual reality used as a containment method, capable of keeping a subject immobilized and unaware.

Amnesia-inducing biotics — Biological agents administered to suppress or erase recent memories.

Mind emulation — The process of digitally copying a human brain and running it as a conscious simulation on a computer.

Nesting simulation — A layered virtual world designed to house emulated minds, detailed enough to simulate hunger, fatigue, and physical sensation.

Personality clones (P-clones) — Digital replicas of people built from recorded behavioral data, capable of passing as human in social interactions.

Emulated minds (EMs) — Digital reconstructions of deceased people's consciousness, capable of independent thought and memory.

Brain scanner / slice scanner — A device that captures a full scan of a person's brain in order to create a mind emulation.

Assist — A personal AI assistant that handles navigation, finances, communication, and ambient support within the simulation.

E-fabric — Smart clothing fabric embedded with interactive digital buttons and display elements such as clock readouts.

Autono-cabs — Autonomous self-driving taxi vehicles operating in the simulated city.

Delivery drones — Unmanned aerial vehicles used for transporting packages through urban airspace.

Printed outfits — On-demand clothing produced by fabrication machines, available even at airport retail outlets.

Biotic vector — A biological agent taken like a supplement to produce physical changes in the body, such as growing facial hair.

Subscription-wear — A software lock applied to consumer devices that requires ongoing payment for continued use.

Black-box recording devices — Personal data-capture tools used to record an individual's life in detail for the purpose of building a personality clone.

Whisper drone cam — A small floating camera drone used for personal recording or content creation.

Rig controllers — Physical controllers associated with immersive rigs, likely for VR or AR systems, brought in for repair at Tessa's shop.

Industrial robots — Legacy manufacturing machines found in the abandoned shoe factory, originally used for automated production.

Medusa Net — Tessa's custom-built intrusion program designed to break through the code layer of the simulation and expose its underlying architecture.

SSH — Secure Shell protocol, used by Tessa to remotely access individual factory computers and retrieve distributed code fragments.

Knots Math — A new mathematical framework invented by Tessa, used as the basis for a novel programming language with the unusual property of hiding secondary functions inside primary ones.

Knots computer — A computer architecture built entirely on Knots Math, which Tessa first emulates on her laptop before using it as a tool for covert communication and escape.

Swarm agents — Multi-function code entities that make up both the simulation environment and Tessa's own emulated mind, capable of being exploited through function swapping.

Function swapping — A process within swarm agent architecture where agents exchange roles at high speed, which Tessa exploits to move information across the simulation.

Brain reader — A software tool developed by Butler designed to translate an emulated mind's activity into readable thoughts, memories, and sensations.

Triptic dimensional thinking — A cognitive architecture identified in Tessa's emulated mind that allows her to process information in three simultaneous dimensions, flagged by Butler as a potential security threat.

Many of the characters in this project appear in future episodes.

Using storytelling to place you in a time period, this series takes you, year by year, into the future. From 2040 to 2195. If you like emerging tech, eco-tech, futurism, perma-culture, apocalyptic survival scenarios, and disruptive science, sit back and enjoy short stories that showcase my research into how the future may play out.

The companion site is https://in20xx.com

These are works of fiction. Characters and groups are made-up and influenced by current events but not reporting facts about people or groups in the real world. This project is speculative fiction. These episodes are not about revealing what will be, but they are to excited the listener's wonder about what may come to pass.

Copyright © Cy Porter 2026. All rights reserved.