Where Digital Journeys Begin: Meeting Lucy

Hers must have been a terribly hard life: fear, hunger… yet, perhaps, sometimes, even the spark of something we might call joy. We call her Lucy. Although fully grown, she stood no taller than a five-year-old child today; her features, tenderly honest, were closer to a tree-dwelling ancestor than to anyone you might meet on the street.

I met her just days ago, in the corner of an old Swedish café. Not Lucy of the cinema, but Lucy the australopithecine, the three-million-year-old fossil, frozen mid-stride.

I hadn't been back to Sweden, my former homeland, in nearly a decade. Now I found myself among unfamiliar faces, in a place that felt both comfortable and unfamiliar. The café had the heavy, rustic warmth of an old oil painting. In a room this aged, dust motes should have been dancing in the drafts, but here, the air was unnaturally clear. It was a stillness that felt almost curated, as if the moment had been varnished to keep the mess of the real world at bay.

We had converged from distant corners of the world for a lesson in genetics, each of us carrying invisible lines of ancestry into this circle of strangers. We sat in a simple ring, ten, maybe twelve of us, on wooden chairs, the rest of the furniture swept aside as if the room itself expected something important. Today's guest, Dr Chan, held everyone rapt with stories of our shared ancestry. Everyone seemed alert, questions probing and insistent.

On the far wall hung a large, vibrant poster dominating the room. It depicted our ancestral mother, Mitochondrial Eve. She was striking: a strong, black woman standing on a sun-drenched savannah, a spear in her hand and tribespeople in the distance. She looked as real as any person walking the streets today, yet she was flat, trapped in ink and paper, staring past us from a world we could see but never touch.

Yet today Eve stood in the spotlight: not just a data point, but a legend whose lineage stitched us together with invisible thread, back through time, farther than memory. Around me, curiosity sparked. We had come to find out where we all began. And yet I found my mind wandering, lost in the hush between words.

In the corner, however, stood something else entirely. We call her Lucy. Unlike the vibrant Eve, Lucy was a ghost – a raw 3D model, grey and untextured, like a statue carved from matte grey clay. She stood no taller than a five-year-old child, frozen mid-stride. She looked unfinished, a digital sketch of an Australopithecus. While Eve stood at the centre, Lucy was little more than a footnote, her likeness tucked in a corner beside empty shelves meant for cinnamon rolls.

She looked a bit lost and lonely, like a well-loved doll left in the rain. Even the cinnamon rolls were absent – they wouldn't appear until the 1920s, I discovered later. Our scene, after all, was set in 1918. And yet, while Eve was a legend I could admire – Lucy was a lost child I wanted to comfort. A presence. She shared our space. She occupied the air we breathed.

Ancient beyond ancient, almost unimaginably older than Eve, Lucy stood quietly by, a silent testament to futures that never arrived. Surely she would have scurried off in terror at the sight of the early twentieth-century car rattling over the cobblestones outside the window. Unaccountably emotional, my gaze kept wandering to her.

Was it kinship I felt, or something deeper – the ache of what might have been, the loss of an entire future that never happened? Perhaps it was also the unique sorrow of knowing she belonged to a vanished branch of our family tree. The presenter's words faded into the background as I saw in my mind's eye my hand reaching out, gently patting her little grey, untextured head. My hand passed straight through her. It should have broken the spell. I should have felt empty. And yet, my heart whispered, and yet she is here. And that connection, woven from nothing but light, felt more solid than the chair beneath me.

Our own line, I recalled, nearly winked out, too. Eve's secret was continuity. She survived, and so did we. I like to imagine her tribe, close-knit around the fire, moving as one across the savannah. Generations later, we spread out of Africa and across continents, building societies, raising flags, drawing borders. The thread that once bound us grew thin, then frayed, and, after all our astonishing journeying, clever apes that we are, we found ourselves staring at one another across the vastness, marvelously alone together.

Today, as our ability to truly connect falters, we risk following Lucy's path – becoming too isolated to face the threats shadowing our future: climate chaos, uncontrolled AI, nuclear peril, and dangers yet to be imagined. Divides and distrust bind us into echo chambers: circles of those who look and think like us, while tying humanity's hands just when unity is most needed. Although we connect billions online, social networks have severed us from the immediate, living presence of another. One billion souls to speak to. And nobody comes to visit.

In that old, rustic Swedish café, Lucy had something urgent to say. Celebrate Eve, but never forget me. Oh, Lucy! I feel closer to you than to the billions flickering on glowing rectangles. Frozen mid-stride, you remain, impossible to swipe away, indelibly present in my mind.

The meeting drew to a gentle close: group discussion, people drifting around the room, examining genetic schematics and pictures on the walls, peering at little Lucy, exchanging fragments of idle conversation. Then, one by one, each figure shimmered for a moment and simply disappeared.

Our moderator, Helen, called us back, her voice equal parts farewell and conjuring.Thank you, everyone. It's time to shut down for today. Prepare to find yourself home in a few seconds.

With a magician's flourish, Helen summoned a tablet from thin air, tapped it—and the world dissolved around me.

This is Part 1 of a sample chapter from "On the Shores of Shared Realities." Part 2, exploring the magic goggles and a journey to Kenya, will be published next week on my newsletter.

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