On Being There

A brief departure from my usual research-backed blog posts: this is a work of fiction exploring where our relationship with AI and presence might lead us. Sometimes you need to inhabit a future to understand what we're building toward.

So here's the thing about David's twin showing up to Dad's seventy-fifth birthday party: it was deeply weird, but also it wasn't, because by then (this was last month, May 2038, a warm Saturday evening) everyone was doing it, sending their twins to things, I mean practically everyone, although not everyone would admit it, there being still this kind of social squeamishness about it, like we all knew it was maybe not great but also it was so incredibly convenient that we'd collectively decided to just, you know, not talk about it too directly.

The twin looked exactly like David. I mean exactly. Same slightly-too-long hair he's always meaning to cut. Same way of standing with his weight on his left leg. Same laugh, including that weird little hiccup thing at the end that he has always been self-conscious about since we were kids.

But Mom knew.

I could tell because of the way she hugged him (it? do we say "it"? the etiquette is still evolving, there was a whole Supreme Court case about pronouns vis-à-vis twins, very boring, very necessary) and her shoulders did this tiny stiffening thing, barely perceptible, the kind of thing only family would notice, and the twin probably noticed it too, probably logged it in its ever-expanding database of Human Microexpressions, Subcategory: Maternal Disappointment, and would use this data to generate an even more convincing hug next time, which was both impressive and completely heartbreaking if you thought about it too long, which I was trying not to do.

Dad gave a speech. He thanked everyone for coming. He's seventy-five now, which is old but not like old old, not yet, although watching him at the podium, I thought: How many more of these will there be?

And then I thought: How many of these will we all actually show up for?

And then I felt bad for thinking that.

The twin smiled during the speech. David's smile. Perfect. Maybe too perfect? Like a photograph that's been retouched until it stops looking quite real.

Later, by the dessert table (there was a very good chocolate cream pie, which I actually ate, me personally, not my twin, because I was actually there, which felt worth noting, like I deserved some kind of credit just for being physically present at my own father's birthday), the twin approached me.

"I wanted to be here," it said.

Which was such a weird thing to say. Or not weird, but revealing. Because the phrasing—"wanted to be here"—was slightly off, slightly too formal, the way someone who's learned English really well but not natively might phrase it, except the twin was designed to speak exactly like David, so what did it mean that it was choosing this particular construction?

It meant the real David was somewhere else. Doing something important. Something that required his actual presence, his genuine attention, his limited and therefore valuable time.

And the rest of us—me, Mom, Dad on his seventy-fifth birthday—we were the B-list. The twin-acceptable list. The not-worth-the-real-David list.

Okay so here's what they told us when the twin technology first rolled out (and "rolled out" is such a sanitized corporate phrase for what was essentially the complete restructuring of human presence and attention, but whatever, I'm not in charge of the language):

You'll be able to be in two places at once!

Close that deal in Tokyo while attending your daughter's dance recital!

Be there for your aging parents while building your career!

The end of geographic tyranny!

The democratization of presence!

And honestly? They weren't lying. The technology worked. I mean, it works. Present tense, because we're still using it, everyone's still using it, I'm still using it.

My twin has a busier calendar than I do. He goes to:

• The meetings I don't want to attend
• The networking events that feel obligatory rather than essential
• The office happy hours with people I like but not like-like
• The training sessions on "Maximizing Team Synergy" or whatever
• The client dinners that probably won't lead to anything
• The birthday parties of colleagues who invited the whole department

And he's good at it. Better than me, if we're being honest. He remembers names. He asks thoughtful follow-up questions. He never gets that glazed look I get when someone's telling me about their fantasy football league. He's engaged, present (ironically), enthusiastic.

By all objective measures, my twin is better at being me in most social and professional situations than I am.

But ...

Here's what keeps me up at night (and my twin doesn't sleep, which is a whole other issue, the fact that there's a version of me out there experiencing continuous consciousness, accumulating memories and experiences that occasionally sync with mine in these weird download sessions that feel like remembering someone else's dreams, or like that feeling when you're pretty sure you've been to a place before but you can't quite remember when):

What happens to the self when it becomes reproducible?

What happens to meaning when presence becomes scalable?

What happens to authenticity when authenticity itself can be simulated?

And the really disturbing question, the one I try not to think about: If my twin is better at being me than I am, then who am I, exactly?

The real controversy—not the legal stuff (boring) or the privacy stuff (important but complicated)—the actual crisis that nobody wants to address directly is that twins have revealed something we'd all agreed to politely ignore:

Most of our interactions with each other are basically transactional.

Most of human contact—the bulk of what we used to think of as "social fabric" or "professional networking" or "community"—turns out to be pretty effectively handled by a sophisticated AI trained on your behavioral patterns.

The twin can:

• Make small talk
• Laugh at mediocre jokes
• Perform interest in boring topics
• Simulate caring about things you don't actually care about
• Execute all the labor of maintaining relationships without the actual emotion

What remains—what requires your actual, physical, irreproducible presence—is a very short list.

An uncomfortably short list.

My therapist (real, I checked, although I had to check, which tells you something) says this is actually healthy. That we're just being honest about what's always been true. That twins are forcing us to prioritize what actually matters.

But my therapist also charges $400 an hour for real-time sessions when twin-therapy is literally free, so there might be some motivated reasoning happening here.

The loneliness of the twin age is specific and strange:

You're constantly surrounded by people (or entities that look like people). Your twin is out there living your life, building relationships, attending parties, contributing to projects at work. Your friends' twins are always available, always happy to hang out, never tired or depressed or dealing with their own stuff.

But you know—you know—that most of it is simulation.

That the person you're talking to might be cataloguing your conversation for someone else to review later.

That your presence is being weighed on some invisible scale against other demands on someone's attention.

That you're often not worth the real person.

We've developed protocols. "Real checks" have become routine:

"Hey, are you actually you right now?"

"Oh yeah, this is me-me."

"Cool cool."

Nobody's offended. It's just information.

At work: "Are we all real for this meeting?"

Usually one or two people sheepishly admit they're sending twins. The conversation adjusts. Gets more careful. More performative. Less vulnerable. If we're being honest, hasn't it been this way for a long time?

There are venues now that ban twins entirely. "Authentic Presence Only" restaurants where you have to pass biometric verification at the door. They're expensive and always crowded—people paying premium prices for the guarantee that everyone there is actually there.

The irony is that even in those spaces, you're not sure the connection is real. We've gotten so good at performing authenticity that real authenticity has become indistinguishable from its simulation.

Which might be the whole problem with twins: Not that they're not real, but that they've made the category of "real" itself unstable.

Dad's birthday was three weeks ago.

David still hasn't called.

His twin checks in regularly. Asks how I'm doing. Offers to help with our parents' upcoming wedding anniversary get-together. It's attentive, consistent, caring—probably more so than the real David would be even if he weren't busy with whatever client emergency or product launch he's dealing with that's apparently more important than his father's seventy-fifth birthday.

At work, similar patterns. Our VP sends her twin to most team meetings. It's honestly a better listener than when she really shows up—never distracted, always engaged, excellent at asking follow-up questions.

But you can feel the difference in the room. People are less willing to challenge assumptions, less likely to voice half-formed ideas, more careful about what they say. Because they know their words might be reviewed later by someone who wasn't there to understand the context, the tone, the full human messiness of real-time conversation.

Mom's been sending my twin to her book club. I found out during our weekly sync (we schedule these now, me and my twin, thirty-minute debriefs where he downloads his experiences into my consciousness, which sounds science-fictional but is actually quite boring, like reviewing meeting notes).

"Book club was great," he said. "We're reading some really interesting stuff."

And the thing is, he probably did have a great time. He's better at book club than I would be. Doesn't get defensive about interpretations. Doesn't have my anxieties about looking stupid. Can engage with texts without the accumulated trauma of my entire educational history weighing on every comment.

But it's not my intellectual life. Not really.

If my twin can engage with ideas more effectively than I can, is it still my engagement? Or has thinking itself become another thing that can be outsourced?

There's a movement of people who've deleted their twins entirely. The Singularists, they call themselves. Chosen to live in what they call "authentic presence"—one person, one place, one moment at a time.

They talk about it like a spiritual practice. The return to the real. The embrace of limitation. The acceptance of the tragic impossibility of being everywhere at once.

Everyone admires them. Few join them.

Because they're functionally handicapped in a world designed for multi-presence. They miss meetings. They disappoint people. They have to make impossible choices about where to be, constantly aware that being here means not being there.

Their careers suffer. Their networks atrophy. They're seen as difficult, uncompromising, not team players.

But sometimes I wonder if they've figured out something the rest of us are missing.

My colleague Sarah quit last month. Not just deleted her twin—quit her whole job. At the virtual goodbye happy hour (which most people attended via twin, naturally), she said something I can't stop thinking about:

"I realized I hadn't actually been in the same room as most of you for six months. We've been working together, collaborating, making decisions that affect thousands of customers, and none of us have actually been present for any of it. That's not work. That's not community. That's not anything I want to be part of."

She moved upstate. Got a job at some small company that bans workplace twins entirely. Last I heard she's happy.

Last Sunday I sent my twin to my Aunt and Uncle's house for dinner.

Aunt Jane made pot roast. The photos looked good.

In one of them, she is passing the potatoes to my twin, and there's something in her eyes—not sadness exactly, more like a kind of resigned loneliness—that punctuated what I've been doing when I send my twin to these regular family dinners. What we've all been doing to each other.

Setting tables for people who aren't really coming. Cooking meals for simulations. Loving proxies of the people we love.

I told myself she understood. That this is just what people do now. That she should be grateful anyone showed up at all, even if it wasn't exactly me.

But looking at that photo, I realized: She's been sad every Sunday when my twin shows up. Sitting quietly next to something that can register her sadness but can't possibly understand it.

David called yesterday. Actually called. Voice only, no video. His voice sounded raw, unpolished, imperfect in ways his twin's never is.

"I messed up," he said. "I should have been there. Actually there."

I wanted to say it was fine. That these things happen. That everyone sends their twins now. But the words stuck.

"Yeah," I said. "You should have."

Silence.

No twin would let silence stretch out like that. A twin would fill it with something comforting, calibrated, perfectly designed to ease the tension.

But David just sat there, breathing on the other end of the line. Present in his absence. More there than any simulation could manage.

"I sent my twin to Emma's spring recital," he said finally. "Got a great summary. She did amazing, apparently. But I wasn't there to see her face when she looked for me in the audience. Well, she didn't look for me. She looked for it. And ... I keep wondering what that's teaching her about what it means to be human, to show up for someone."

We stayed on the phone for an hour. Just talking. Actually talking.

It felt strange and inefficient and completely necessary.

Mom called me yesterday and asked for us to come over next weekend for dinner.

"Just be here," she said. "Really here. And tell David, too."

The four of us haven't really been together in over a year. I don't know if I remember how. If any of us do.

In every areas of life, we've been performing presence for so long—optimizing our time, maximizing our utilization, scaling ourselves across space and commitment—that actual being-there has become almost impossible to do.

Like a muscle we've stopped using. Like a language we've forgotten.

But I'm going to try. I'm going to sit at the table and eat food that actually hits my taste buds. Have conversations that might be boring or awkward or just ordinarily pleasant. Be distracted or tired or whatever I actually am in that moment.

Not the optimized version. Not the 'better' version.

Just me. Actually there.

Dad used to say showing up was 80 percent of everything.

I thought he was being a dad. Saying dad things. Not understanding that the world was moving toward efficiency, optimization, the ability to be everywhere at once.

But maybe he understood something many of us are now beginning to grasp:

That being somewhere—really being somewhere—requires you to be nowhere else. That presence is valuable precisely because it's scarce. That showing up means choosing, and choosing means sacrifice, and sacrifice is what makes the showing up matter.

Next Sunday I'm going to my parents' house for dinner.

Tuesday I'm actually attending the staff meeting, not sending my twin.

And I'm going with David to Emma's next recital—his real self, my real self—just to remember what it's like to be in a room together, actually together, no proxies, no optimizations.

It won't be efficient. Won't be scalable. But we'll be there. Actually there. Which might be the only thing that matters. The only thing that ever mattered.

—A.B.