Miami, 2060

It’s not even 7 AM yet and the air’s already sticking to Larry’s skin as he steps out for his morning walk, vintage Air Force Ones crunching on gravel, fisherman’s hat on his head. A battered MP3 player’s clipped to his pocket, Miles Davis Kind of Blue in his earphones as he strolls down the cracked sidewalk. He passes a neighbor’s house where their kid’s inside the open garage with his AR lenses glowing, hands dancing in the air playing some game.

A delivery drone hums overhead, the light from its scanner passing over Larry and a screen on the undercarriage blinking red. A message appears:

UNVERIFIED

Larry barely glances up and the drone moves on, the red letters replaced by an ad for algae water.

At the end of the block, Larry turns the corner, heading east towards the shoreline, where US-1 used to be. Some people say they’ve gotten used to it, how the coast keeps swallowing the city inch by inch.

Larry doesn’t think he can ever get used to something like that.

After about half a mile, Larry comes across an old EV pickup truck parked across from the shore, the trunk full of fruits. A couple sits on the shaded side of the truck in beach chairs, both wearing VR sunglasses so Larry can’t tell if they’re looking at him or not. There’s a digital sign leaning against the inside of the trunk listing the fruit prices. Larry picks out three bruised mangos, pulls a folded cloth bag from his pocket and drops them in. He reaches back in his pocket and pulls out a couple of tattered dollar bills as the digital menu switches to a checkout screen.

Larry glances at the couple. “Does this thing take cash?”

The woman raises her sunglasses and squints first at Larry, then down at his frayed singles. Slowly, she reaches her hand out. Larry gives her the bills and she turns them over, studying them before looking back up at him curiously.

Larry gives her a polite smile, leaving with his mangos in hand.

Halfway through his circular route, Larry walks back home with sweat clinging to his shirt. The run of Miles Davis’ tracks gives way to Mos Def’s “Mathematics.”

A woman going the opposite direction passes wearing a sleek AR visor and walking her dog, eyes fixed forward, finger swiping through the air. A wrist drone on her right arm guides the dog’s leash.

Back at home, Larry locks the front door behind him and flicks off the MP3 player, taking off his shoes. He sets the mangos on the kitchen counter next to a stack of library discards, picking up a battered copy of Ellison’s Invisible Man. He flips to the page with the folded corner, staring at the highlighted line in the middle:

“When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”

Raising his head, Larry stares out the back sliding glass door at some birds flying by, the sky a dull gray that threatens rain he knows will come in a couple of hours, like clockwork. The quiet settles. The Ellison quote lingers in his mind.

Tucking the book under his arm, Larry shuffles over to his couch, sitting down and opening the book again on his lap. He reads until his mind drifts to Marcelo, as it does sometimes.

He still has the nightmares. He considers them a reminder.

Larry puts the Ellison book down on the couch and stands again, heading to the backyard and the small garden he’s managed to keep alive in a corner plot. He grabs his gardening gloves and the spade lying next to them, snatching a packet of okra seeds off his patio table. A couple of folding chairs lean against it, and he shakes them a little, watching the lizards scurry down the legs. Kneeling by the garden, he drops the gloves beside him and presses his fingers into the dirt. He digs a few holes then opens the packet and shakes some seeds in, shivering a bit as the sunlight touches his shoulders. His sweat mixes with the soil on his hands as he works methodically.

An hour passes and the wind shifts around Larry, carrying the faint tang of salt from the ocean. Sitting in front of the garden with his legs in front of him, Larry closes his eyes and breathes.

_____________________

Jonah’s condo in West Perrine hums with life as he steps out, AR suit adjusting to red, matching his energy after a morning workout. The building’s exterior is all glass and solar panels, artificial vines running up the walls in neat vertical gardens. The air’s heavy with humidity, barely noon and it’s already above a hundred. Jonah dodges a couple of power walkers strutting by with umbrella caps on, just two of many on the busy street. Pops told him once this used to be empty land, like Brickell before the ocean took it. Jonah wouldn’t believe it if Pops hadn’t shown him pictures, and even then he wondered if they were artificial.

Standing at the curb, Jonah waits for the drone-piloted car to lower in front of him, door sliding open with a hiss. He climbs in, suit and scalp nodes dimming as he leans back, closing his eyes.

The car rises and angles east, the whirring engine reminding Jonah of the server in his apartment, which reminds him of the meeting in the SimpliCity conference room yesterday. He was in the middle of a pitch presentation for his client’s open world VR game concept when he was interrupted by a journalist’s offhand question:

“Did you say your grandfather’s never been online?”

Her name was Ren, and Jonah smirked at her avatar’s surprised expression. He shrugged and tried to continue but Ren the journalist leaned forward.

“Like, ever?”

After the meeting, a private chat box opened under Jonah’s profile and Ren’s avatar appeared again.

“I want to meet him,” she said. “In person.”

He hadn’t expected her to actually follow up.

The drone car jostles Jonah as it hits the coast and heads south, standard routing to avoid the worst of the flooded zones. Gliding over submerged lots where neighborhoods used to be, sunlight catching on water pooled in the skeleton of an old strip mall, the drone turns back west for half a mile then drops Jonah in front of Pops’ house. The old two-bedroom’s surrounded by a patchy lawn, the small garden Pops has somehow managed to keep alive out back.

Jonah climbs out of the drone and it flies off as he tries his grandfather’s front door. It’s locked so he rings the doorbell, gets no answer.

Jonah smiles, circling around the side of the house and peering over the fence. “What’s up, Pops?”

Hunched over his plants, Larry says something that’s too muffled for Jonah to hear, standing and wiping dirt from his hands on his jeans as he walks over and unlatches the gate.

“You found me,” he says, smiling at his grandson.

“I’ve been pinging you all morning,” Jonah says, closing the gate behind him and giving Larry a quick hug. “Got a notification said you missed your appointment again.”

Larry waves him off, heading back to the garden. “I was busy.”

Jonah’s AR suit recalibrates to the brightness as he follows his grandfather to the garden. “Busy playing in the dirt?”

“Something like that,” Larry says, bending down to pull a weed and set it aside carefully. He looks up at Jonah, and Jonah can’t tell if he’s smiling or squinting at the sun behind his head.

Looking around his grandfather’s garden, Jonah pulls his AR goggles down and taps the side, putting them in search mode to identify the many plants. Coconut palms fringe the fence line, their shadows cutting across patches of lemongrass, collard greens, and a sprawl of sweet potato vines weaving between pockets of firebush. A single papaya tree leans heavy with fruit near the corner against Pops’ fence, where the breeze rolls in strongest.

Jonah sits and helps his grandfather pull weeds, brushing dirt from the roots before dropping them in a pile.

Jonah’s hands don’t touch real soil often.

“Garden’s coming on nicely,” he says.

“Looks good, don’t it?” Larry says, surveying the plot. “Weather’s been helpful.”

“You inspired me, actually,” Jonah says, tapping the side of his goggles again. This time a projection pops into the air above his palm: a digital garden, lush and green, blooming in impossible colors. “Built this for my architecture class. It’s part of a larger sim. Thinking about submitting it for the SimpliLiving design comp.”

Larry looks at the virtual model, leans in close and squints.

“It’s pretty,” Larry says, shaking his head and turning away. “You can’t smell it though.”

“Spring for the synaptic facemask and you can,” Jonah says, dropping the projection so it dissolves in a shimmer. “State-of-the-art.”

“State-of-the-art,” Larry says, smirking. “State-of-the-art is the sun on your back.”

“They’ve learned to simulate everything, Pops,” Jonah says, glancing up at the sky. “Even sunlight.” He looks around the lawn, the garden, the house a dozen feet away. “It is nice to go R-dub every now and then though.”

Larry raises an eyebrow. “What the hell is R-dub?”

Jonah laughs. “R-Dub,” he repeats. “The Real World. Where we go when we log out.”

Larry leans away from his grandson. “R-dub sounds like a disease.”

Jonah laughs again, heartily.

The breeze cuts through the heat for a second as a news helicopter drone speeds by. They both grow quiet. Jonah glances at his grandfather, who watches the helicopter until it disappears out of sight.

Jonah’s stalling.

“Listen, Pops,” he says. “I need to ask you about something.”

“Shoot,” Larry says, pulling a weed out by the root.

Jonah hesitates. “I was talking to this journalist yesterday after a conference meeting,” he says. “Her name’s Ren Valencia.”

“Sounds familiar,” Larry says, pulling out another weed.

“She’s freelance,” he says. “Does work for some of the major news sites, mostly The Current. You’ve probably seen her byline.”

Larry looks up at Jonah. “What’s she want with you?”

“Actually,” Jonah says, studying his grandfather’s face for a reaction. “It’s you she wanted to talk about.”

Larry tilts his head. “Why would she want to talk about me?”

Jonah shrugs. “That’s what I asked.”

Larry pauses. “And?”

“Apparently,” Jonah says, scratching the back of his neck. “Being a digital ghost makes you some kind of unicorn these days.”

“Ghosts and unicorns,” Larry says, standing up slowly and brushing dirt off his jeans.

Jonah smiles, standing too. “She wants to meet you.”

Larry stares at Jonah. “Why?”

“I don’t know, Pops,” Jonah says. “She just wants to talk, I think.”

Larry looks off toward the horizon. “I mean — what does she want to talk about?”

“Think she’s looking to do a profile or something,” Jonah says. “Because you’re like the only person on the planet who doesn’t spend most of their day online. I didn’t agree to anything though, told her I needed to ask you.”

Larry stays quiet long enough that Jonah assumes he’s going to turn it down.

Then he looks at his grandson. “What do you think?”

Jonah isn’t expecting this question, and gives it some thought. “It can’t hurt to just talk.”

Larry pauses. “You gonna be there?”

“I can tell her no, Pops,” Jonah says. “If you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s fine,” he says quietly. “No goggles, though. And if she wants to talk, she can come here. We sit on the couch or the porch or wherever, she talks to me in real life like a real person.”

Jonah nods, tucking his hands into his pockets, his suit dimming to a neutral gray. “Yeah. I told her you’d say that.”

They stand there in the quiet, side by side, the world humming around them.

“When’s she want to do it?” Larry asks finally.

“Told her I’d ask you today and if you agreed — ” Jonah pauses. “Maybe next week?”

Larry looks over at his grandson. “You need to be here also,” he says. “Tell her to come Friday, when you visit.”

Jonah studies his grandfather.

“Sure, Pops,” he says, touching one of the coconut palm fronds. “I’ll be here.”

_____________________

Stepping out of the XR hub in Orlando, the air thick as syrup, Ren Valencia’s shirt is sticking to the small of her back before she even clears the platform. She’s just spent six hours in SimpliCity reviewing spatial edits for a feature on Starwave Station (still the most profitable low-orbit resort), fielding a thousand pings she doesn’t want, nodding at editors who talk at her, not to her.

It’s only when she pulls off her neural band with a slight sting across her scalp that the real world floods back in: smells, heat, the true weight of gravity that the haptic suits never get quite right.

She checks the time. The train south leaves in fifteen minutes.

Ren buys a coffee and a lab-grown beef sandwich from a corner bot vendor and leans against a column with the steaming cup in hand, muttering to herself as she scrolls through the notes she scribbled in her digital journal as soon as she logged off last night. She draws a line with her thumb under the words memory vs archive then taps the screen off, thinking of Jonah and his avatar during their SimpliCity call.

The way his tone shifted when he said, “Pops doesn’t do remote anything.”

The platform chimes and Ren boards the bullet train, settling into a window seat as the landscape blurs from suburban sprawl to drowned fields to the messy edge of Miami, where cranes and seawalls fight a losing battle against the Atlantic.

Arriving at the Miami station, Ren exits the train and hops in a drone car. The vehicle heads south, skimming cracked roads lined with mangroves and the skeletons of old shopping plazas now half-flooded, tagged with colorful AR graffiti codes that will reveal their messages if she puts on her goggles, but Ren doesn’t feel like doing that.

When she arrives, Larry’s street is quiet, only the faint whir of drones coming and going from the sky. The silence in the wakes of their exit draw attention to the distant hush of waves.

Ren spots Jonah first, sitting on the porch, staring at a small AR projector in his palm. He jumps up when he sees her, the projector blinking off.

“Ms. Valencia,” he says as she approaches.

“Ren,” she says, holding out her hand.

He hesitates, then shakes it.

“It’s weird, huh?” he says, gesturing around. “Meeting R-dub.”

She glances at the house.

“R-dub’s the only thing left that’s actually real, right?” she says.

Jonah smiles, turning to open the front door. “Pops is gonna like you.”

Inside, Larry’s sitting on a couch with a real live actual paperback balanced on his knee, glasses perched low on his nose. He looks up when Ren and Jonah enter, setting the book aside and rising to greet her.

“Ms. Valencia,” he says, voice calm, measured.

“Ren,” she repeats, shaking his hand. His grip is firm, warm.

Jonah grabs Ren a chair and places it in the living room across from Larry before drifting into the kitchen. He rummages for a snack and finds some plantain chips, sitting at the dining table on the other side of the room and slipping on his goggles.

Ren pulls out a small audio recorder with a red blinking light and sets it on the coffee table between her and Larry. She opens her tablet and grabs her stylus too. She always likes having both, written and recorded.

Larry eyes her, smiling. “A digital recorder,” he says. “Haven’t seen one of those in a while.”

“Your grandson told me you had a no VR-AR stipulation,” she says. “Which already fit my interview method.”

Larry nods. “Nice to look a person in the eye when you’re talking to them, you know?”

Ren smiles.

And so, they talk.

She asks about his life, about what he’s done throughout the years. Larry tells her he worked as a mechanic for a while, before the drone cars were rolled out, back when gas-powered engines were still legal. After the shop closed, he worked in a library for a bit, where he met Jonah’s grandmother who also worked at the same library. They’d had one daughter, Jonah’s mother, and Larry and his wife had worked at the library and raised their kid until she left for university and the libraries all went digital.

This was around the time they found the lump in Larry’s wife/Jonah’s grandmother’s throat.

Larry retired then, spent what little time with her he had left and, after she passed, sold their condo and moved into his parents’ old house. Which was when he started tending to his garden.

Ren jots it all down then gets to the real questions she’s come to ask:

“Why aren’t you online like 95% of humanity?”

Larry leans back, hands folded over his stomach, thoughtful.

“You make it sound like — I don’t know, like I opted out of society,” he says finally. “I just didn’t want to trade my mental peace for the sake of keeping up with the times.”

Ren nods, scribbling that down on her tablet. Without looking up, she asks, “But don’t you ever feel disconnected?”

“From what?” Larry asks.

When Ren looks at him, his expression is genuinely curious.

“From… people,” Ren says, waving a hand through the air. “From the world.”

Larry glances out the window, sunlight filtering through the blinds.

“I see the world every day,” he says. “I see people, too. They don’t always see me.” He smiles. “But I see them.”

Ren doesn’t say anything.

“I always loved working with my hands,” Larry says. “Back at that shop in the Grove, my favorite place to be was inside an engine. Every part, clean and quiet. Nothing virtual.” Larry sighs. “You can learn a lot about patience and design when you strip a machine down and put it back together. Nobody needs that kind of work anymore though.”

Ren’s stylus jitters across her tablet screen.

“I taught some classes too for a while,” Larry continues. “Woodwork, circuits, welding. I liked helping the kids learn to do something real, you know? Not everyone needs a Master’s or PhD to build a good life. Used to think that truth would last, at least.” He chuckles. “But then the schools said the trades were obsolete and dropped them. Replaced the lessons with VR modules and holo-workshops. I taught my last class back in twenty-nine.”

Ren finally looks up again.

“Was that it?” she asks. “The reason you stayed unplugged?”

“No,” Larry says. “I was never really plugged in, to be honest. After Chello — ”

Larry’s eyes go blank for a second.

“Sorry, my friend Marcelo,” he says. “He died a while back.”

“Marcelo,” Ren says. “Marcelo Reyes?”

Larry looks at her carefully.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Ren says, scanning her tablet. “I did some research.” She pauses. “You were his best friend, right?”

Larry hesitates, nods slowly.

“The article I read said you were supposed to be with him the day he went missing,” she says.

Larry glances at Jonah, who shifts in his seat, uncomfortable.

“I’m sorry,” Ren says. “We can — ”

“No,” Larry says, holding up a hand. “It’s fine, it’s just been a while.”

Ren says nothing, watching him.

Whenever Larry thinks about Marcelo, the first thing that pops into his head is the article; maybe the same one Ren’s referencing, though the one he’s thinking about isn’t even close to being the only article that was written about it at the time. He has a copy of the one he’s thinking about somewhere, the article faded now, all the color gone from Marcelo’s picture except the black and yellow. They’d kept using his school photo from that year, freshman year, and his eyes were bright, mouth half-open like he was about to say something.

Larry can still hear his own mother’s screams the day Marcelo’s house popped up on a breaking news broadcast, a sound that shattered Larry’s calm forever and kept ringing in his ears long after his friend’s coffin dropped. For weeks, he’d see Marcelo’s face flicker on TV screens in store windows, headlines burning into his mind with a rhythmic cadence — AIM to Blame: Teen Lured Online Found Brutally Murdered — that made them impossible to forget.

He tells Ren about the article, and the dreams that followed. How in the dreams, Marcelo switches from laughing to screaming for help, his face flickering like static.

In the dreams, Marcelo reaches out for him and Larry reaches out too, and when their hands touch, Marcelo’s always pulled back by something unseen. He disappears and Larry sits alone in darkness for a while, waiting for his friend to return. Then, instead, he’s bombarded with images pulled straight from descriptions of Marcelo’s remains, descriptions that leaked to the press not long after he was found, each sensory, bloody image shimmering like heat off asphalt until Larry wakes shaking in the dark.

“We were supposed to go into business together,” Larry says. “Chello wanted to open a garage and a studio. He made music, was really into computers too. Used to say everything had a beat, engines, motherboards, nature. Tapping the hood of a car like it was a drum. But after — ” Larry’s voice catches and he coughs, swallows. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Ren says. “Take your time.”

“It’s just,” Larry says, looking at the ceiling. “This was before all the socials, you know? Back when all we had was AOL.”

He pauses.

“After, I figured there was nothing really gained staying connected like that. And then I saw when it stopped being about connection and just became this — this risk, this distraction, this— this dependency.” He shakes his head. “One I’m glad I never picked up. Never missed.”

Ren stares at him, not quite frowning. Not even taking notes now, just listening.

She glances at Jonah. He’s taken off his goggles, watching his grandfather talk.

Ren looks back at Larry, sees that his eyes are watery. She looks down at her notes, feeling uncharacteristically insecure.

Larry chuckles suddenly, a dry, quiet sound.

“Don’t romanticize this,” he says. “I’m not some — some prophet with a profound message for the world.” He shrugs. “I’m just trying to live my life.”

Ren smiles, shutting off the tablet and storing the stylus in the slot on the side. They sit in the quiet, listening to the hum of the fridge.

“Sometimes that is the message,” she says finally. “Live life.”

Larry purses his lips. “I like that.”

“Thank you,” she says. “For this. The interview and your time.”

Larry nods. “No problem. You hungry?” he asks, glancing toward the kitchen. “Could make you something.”

“No, I’m okay,” Ren says, standing and shutting off her recorder, slipping it into her pocket. “Thanks for the offer though.”

“You sure?” he says. “Jonah got me this recipe for mofongo. Used to be a staple in Puerto Rico before it went under. Got leftovers, can whip you up some if you want.”

Jonah laughs from the kitchen. “She’s not staying for dinner, Pops.”

“Maybe next time,” Ren says, tapping on her wrist pad. A minute later they hear the whir of a drone approaching outside.

Larry and Jonah walk Ren to the door, watching as she climbs in. The sunlight flares off the windshield and the two men squint, waving as the car pulls off.

Later, after Jonah heads back home, Larry sits back on his couch and picks up the latest paperback he’s working through, a creased copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Rubbing the paper between his fingers.