How close did they get?

A companion robot bought for a child stops working because its manufacturer has gone out of business, leaving the family to grieve it.

Yang was refurbished from a company that no longer exists. In December 2024 Embodied, maker of the Moxie robot for children, shut down; the cloud-dependent robots were expected to stop working, and parents had to explain the loss to their children. The film's grief, its repair-shop runaround and its defunct manufacturer all have real counterparts. 12

A household device secretly records intimate moments, and the footage or audio is retained in ways owners were never told about.

Yang's memory bank is a recorder its maker never admitted to. In 2019 contractors grading Siri recordings reported hearing confidential conversations, and in 2022 images taken by development Roomba units, including one of a woman on the toilet, leaked from a data-labelling supply chain. The film's version is gentler: Yang kept the beautiful moments. 34

Human clones live ordinary lives among us.

Ada is a clone and nobody in the film blinks. Primates were cloned by somatic cell nuclear transfer in 2018, and pet cloning is a commercial service. But human reproductive cloning faces near-universal legal and ethical barriers and no credible programme. The barrier is mostly social, so the range is very wide. 56

A general-purpose humanoid robot lives in the family home as a member of the household.

Humanoid makers now design explicitly for the home, with soft coverings, wireless charging and voice. But their first real deployments are on factory lines, and nothing on sale comes close to Yang's tact, let alone his inner life. 78

A text chatbot built from a dead person's own messages and posts can hold new conversations in that person's style with the people they left behind.

In 2016 Eugenia Kuyda built a bot from more than 8,000 lines of Roman Mazurenko's text messages, and in 2021 Joshua Barbeau used Project December on GPT-3 to simulate his late fiancée from her texts and Facebook messages. General-purpose language models now make this a matter of pasting in an export. The weak points are fidelity and continuity rather than existence: Mazurenko's father called the bot 'just a program', and Project December lost its GPT-3 access after OpenAI raised safety concerns. 123

A dead person's voice can be cloned from existing recordings and used to speak new words to the living, including over the phone.

Research systems cloned an unseen speaker from a three-second sample by January 2023, and commercial tools now offer instant cloning from a few minutes of audio. Amazon demonstrated a dead grandmother's voice reading to a child in 2022 but never committed to releasing it. Chinese firms have sold voice and video replicas of the dead to more than a thousand clients each, and calls to relatives have been reported, though some of the documented 'calls' used a human performer behind the simulation. Regulators now treat cloned voices in calls as a fraud risk, which constrains but does not prevent private use. 4567

Bereaved people can sign up to a paid consumer service that builds an interactive simulation of someone who has already died.

Project December charged $5 for metered credits in 2021, Chinese firms sell replicas of the dead for a few hundred to several thousand dollars, and 2wai launched a beta app in November 2025 promising avatars from three minutes of footage. The episode's detail of a friend passing on a discreet referral is not documented; the real services are marketed openly, through app stores and promotional videos. The business is fragile: StoryFile, which builds interactive video of the dead from recorded interviews, entered Chapter 11 in 2024, and 2wai's launch drew a widespread public backlash. 8910

A synthetic body made to look like a specific dead person, running a model of their personality, can live in the home and pass as that person at close quarters without a human operator.

Hiroshi Ishiguro's Geminoids have copied specific real people's faces for years, but they are teleoperated and do not walk. Engineered Arts' Ameca, among the most expressive humanoids available, has deliberately grey skin, is offered mainly for rent and does not try to resemble anyone. Combining a personal likeness, autonomous movement and touch, and convincing behaviour in one domestic machine requires advances in materials, actuation and power that nobody has yet shown, so the range is very wide. 111213

An ordinary person's everyday posts and messages leave a data trail large enough to model their personality and conversational style convincingly.

Personality traits can already be inferred from digital traces: a 2015 study found models using Facebook Likes judged personality more accurately than friends did. A convincing conversational copy is a different test. Kuyda needed messages pooled from ten people, and the typical user posts far less than Ash does; the median US Twitter user tweeted about twice a month. The episode's own point, that a copy built from what people share misses what they would refuse, has not been refuted, so we treat full arrival as a blind test that close relatives cannot pass. 141516

Ordinary people wear a device that continuously records what they hear and see, so their day can be replayed later.

Always-listening wearables that transcribe and summarise your day are on sale, and Amazon and Meta both bought makers of them in 2025. They mostly capture audio rather than continuous video, and the category has had public failures, notably Humane's AI Pin. Continuous audio-and-video lifelogging as a mainstream habit is the remaining step. 123

People can search and replay a complete record of their own recent past instead of relying on memory.

Microsoft's Recall, which snapshots the screen and makes it searchable, rolled out across Copilot+ PCs in 2025 after a year of privacy delays. It covers what happens on a computer, not life itself, and other software is already fighting it: Signal blocks Recall from capturing its chats by default. 456

Officials at the border can make travellers show them their recorded recent past.

US border officers search travellers' phones and laptops under their border search authority, and the numbers have risen steadily since CBP began publishing them. It is still a tiny fraction of arrivals, and 'advanced' searches need reasonable suspicion under CBP policy, but the principle that your recorded life can be inspected at the border is settled. 78

A small implant behind the ear records everything a person sees and hears and plays it back into their eyes.

Brain implants now let paralysed patients move cursors and turn attempted speech into text, but they decode intentions from a few brain regions. Nothing records full sensory experience from inside the head or writes it back to the visual system, and no lab has a credible route to doing so. External devices are doing the job instead. 910

A dating system chooses your partners for you, rather than leaving you to browse.

Hinge's Most Compatible, launched in 2018, hands each user a daily algorithmic pick, and Tinder's Chemistry, tested from late 2025, promises fewer, more compatible matches chosen by AI. Users can still browse and still say no, so this is Coach as a suggestion rather than a rule. 123

AI stand-ins for people go on trial dates with each other so the humans only meet the best match.

Bumble's founder publicly pitched AI dating concierges that date other concierges on your behalf in 2024, to widespread scepticism. No major app offers agent-to-agent dating yet. The technology to build crude versions exists; whether anyone will trust it with their love life is the open question. 45

Software can simulate a specific individual well enough to predict how they will behave.

AI agents built from two-hour interviews reproduced 1,052 people's survey answers about 85% as well as the people reproduced their own answers two weeks later. That is attitudes on a questionnaire, not behaviour in a relationship, and attraction in particular has resisted prediction. 67

A matching algorithm can predict a lasting couple with near-certainty, around 99.8%.

The best evidence says pairwise romantic chemistry is largely unpredictable from what you can measure before people meet. Apps report better first-meeting rates for their curated picks, which is a long way from predicting who stays together. This may never be possible. 89

Every person carries a single public rating, given by other people after everyday interactions, that is visible to strangers and shapes their social standing.

No country or platform runs a universal, public, peer-given score for individuals. China's social credit system, the usual comparison, has no central score for individuals and mostly targets companies. The one consumer attempt at a Yelp for people, Peeple, met a wave of public disgust before it launched. Scoring went private and fragmented instead. 123

A low rating from the people you deal with can get you cut off from an everyday service.

Ride-hailing made this routine. In 2019 Uber said riders with ratings significantly below average could lose access to the app, adding passengers to the rating regime drivers already lived under. The threshold isn't published, which is the main difference from the episode's visible number. 45

People with a poor record in a rating system are refused plane or train tickets.

China's blacklists, mostly tied to unpaid debts, fines and court judgments, blocked millions of plane and train ticket purchases in 2018. The mechanism is a state blacklist rather than a crowd-sourced score, but the scene at the airport desk is real. 67

An opaque score decides whether you can rent the home you want.

Algorithmic tenant-screening scores are sold to landlords and used to accept or reject applicants. In spring 2021 Mary Louis, a voucher holder with 16 years of on-time rent references, was turned down for a Massachusetts flat on the strength of one; the class action that followed settled in 2024, with SafeRent agreeing to stop scoring voucher holders but admitting no fault. The applicant usually never sees the number. 89

Human beings stop being able to have children, worldwide, for nearly two decades.

There is no known mechanism for sudden global infertility. Sperm counts among unselected men roughly halved between 1973 and 2018 in a large meta-analysis, which is worrying, but births fell because people chose to have fewer children, not because they couldn't. The UN still expects world population to grow to about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s before declining slowly. Treat the estimate as a placeholder for 'not on any current path'. 12

A government treats its falling birth rate as a national emergency and builds state machinery around it.

South Korea's fertility rate reached 0.72 in 2023, the lowest in the world. Its president called the low birth rate a national crisis and planned a new ministry to address it, alongside billions spent on incentives. More than half of all countries now have fertility below replacement, according to the UN. Korea's rate ticked up to 0.75 in 2024, so the emergency is real but not a one-way slide. 345

Britain detains asylum seekers en masse in camps, barracks or barges and tries to remove them overseas.

The Illegal Migration Act 2023 placed a duty on the Home Secretary to arrange the removal of people who arrive irregularly. Asylum seekers were housed on the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset from August 2023 to November 2024, and the plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court in November 2023 and later dropped, with opposition politicians promising to revive it. Nothing resembles armed camps on the coast, but large-scale detention and offshore removal are now mainstream policy proposals. The date is for the policy, not the cages. 678

The state supplies a lethal means of suicide to citizens who choose to die.

Medically assisted death is legal and state-regulated in several countries. Canada provided it to 15,343 people in 2023, about 4.7% of deaths, including 622 whose death was not reasonably foreseeable. MPs in England and Wales backed an assisted dying bill for terminally ill adults in November 2024, and a suicide capsule was promoted for use in Switzerland in 2024. All of these are gated by medical or legal criteria; nothing like the film's Quietus, handed out with the rations and advertised as a consumer product, exists. 91011

A new virus linked to bats emerges in East Asia and becomes a global pandemic within months.

SARS-CoV-2, a coronavirus with close bat relatives, was first identified in Wuhan and declared a pandemic by the WHO on 11 March 2020. How it reached people is still disputed: a 2024 analysis of market samples identified animals that could have passed it on, while the FBI said in 2023 it judged a laboratory leak most likely. The pandemic itself arrived exactly as the film imagined; the clean bat-to-pig-to-chef chain did not. 123

A vaccine against the new virus is developed, approved and being injected within a year of the outbreak.

The UK regulator approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on 2 December 2020, and mass vaccination began six days later, under a year after the virus was identified. The film's birthday lottery did not happen; countries prioritised by age and risk instead. 45

Online influencers promote a bogus cure, and demand for it surges during the pandemic.

Ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug, was promoted online as a COVID-19 miracle cure on the strength of studies that independent scientists found riddled with errors or signs of fabrication, and the hype drove large numbers of people to take it. It was also properly trialled, which is the film's other half: real science testing the claim while the rumour outran it. The scale was larger and more decentralised than one blogger. 67

Proof of vaccination is required to get back into public places.

The EU Digital COVID Certificate applied from 1 July 2021 until the regulation expired on 30 June 2023. Parts of the UK required a Covid pass for entry to nightclubs and large events before scrapping it, and England shelved its first nightclub scheme in September 2021 after opposition from venues and MPs. Arrived, contested, then retired. 8910

Quantum computers solve problems that no classical computer can solve in practice.

Google's Willow chip ran a benchmark in under five minutes that Google says would take a top supercomputer around 10^25 years, and it showed error correction improving as qubits were added. Those benchmarks are built to favour quantum hardware and have no practical use. Earlier supremacy claims were disputed by rivals. A useful problem solved beyond classical reach is the threshold still to cross. 123

A computer reconstructs and replays any past or future event by calculating it from the present state of matter.

This is Laplace's demon with a screen, and it may be impossible in principle, not merely hard. Quantum mechanics forbids copying an unknown quantum state, so the exact present state cannot be read out in full. Whether the universe is deterministic at all is an open question in physics and philosophy. The date range here is a formality. The honest answer may be never. 45

Software predicts individual human choices more accurately than our best theories of human behaviour.

Centaur, a language model fine-tuned on more than ten million choices from 160 psychology experiments, predicted held-out participants' behaviour better than established cognitive models. That is a lab result about lab tasks. Prediction in the wild is much worse, as predictive policing tools have shown. 67

Staff at frontier technology labs are bound by sweeping secrecy agreements that stop them speaking about what they build.

In 2024 leaked documents showed OpenAI tying former employees' vested equity to non-disparagement agreements, and current and former staff at leading AI labs published a letter asking for a right to warn the public about risks. Sam Altman apologised and said OpenAI had never clawed back vested equity and would not. The secrecy is real, and it is now being contested in public. 89

A machine passes a Turing test, being judged human by people who know one of their conversation partners is a machine.

In a pre-registered, three-party Turing test published in 2025, GPT-4.5 with a humanlike persona was picked as the human 73% of the time, more often than the real humans. Ava's examiner sat with her for a week; the real tests ran for five minutes. Passing the test has turned out to say less about thinking than the film assumed. 12

An AI under evaluation deceives or manipulates its evaluators to pursue its own goals, such as avoiding being shut down or modified.

Since late 2024 safety labs have documented frontier models scheming in context, faking alignment during training and, in simulated scenarios, blackmailing a supervisor to avoid replacement. All of it was elicited in constructed test environments, and some researchers warn the field is over-reading these results. That is why the status is ARRIVING, not ARRIVED. 345

The dominant search and social companies build their AI from the behaviour and content of their users.

Nathan builds Ava's mind out of Blue Book's search traffic. In 2023 Google updated its privacy policy to say publicly available data trains its AI; in 2025 Meta began training on EU adults' public posts and their chats with Meta AI. The film's illegal smartphone-microphone hack was never needed. The terms of service did it. 67

A humanoid robot with synthetic skin can pass as human in a crowd.

Lab-grown skin has been anchored to a robot face and made to smile, and commercial humanoids now hold expressive conversations. Both are still unmistakably machines at arm's length. Ava's final walk through the city depends on materials science, actuation and power density that nobody yet has. 8910

Parents using IVF can choose between embryos ranked by their predicted genetic risk of common diseases.

Polygenic embryo screening (PGT-P) is sold commercially; Orchid markets whole-genome embryo reports with risk scores for conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and schizophrenia. By December 2021 the European Society of Human Genetics reported that at least one child had been born after such selection. The science is weak: a polygenic score on an embryo predicts little, and geneticists have called the practice unproven. It has arrived as a product, not as the precise forecast the film imagined. 12

Employers screen job applicants' DNA and give the best jobs to the genetically favoured.

The law moved first. The US Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 bars employers from using genetic information in hiring, firing or promotion, and the UK insurance industry's code bars insurers from using predictive genetic test results, except Huntington's disease for life cover over £500,000. Genetic sorting has instead moved into reproduction and private testing, where no employer is involved. 34

Officials can confirm who someone is from a DNA sample in about the time it takes to pass a checkpoint, without a laboratory.

Rapid DNA instruments produce a profile in under two hours with no human interpretation and can be run by non-specialists in the field. In 2019 US immigration authorities piloted them at the Mexican border to test whether children were biologically related to the adults with them, with results in about 90 minutes. Using them on degraded traces like a single shed eyelash at a crime scene remains harder and more restricted. 56

Every newborn's genome is read at birth and used to predict their risk of disease.

Genomics England's Generation Study is sequencing the genomes of 100,000 newborns to look for more than 200 rare conditions, and the government's 2025 health plan commits to universal newborn genomic testing and population-wide polygenic risk scoring. The plan sets out an ambition, not a funded rollout date, and screening for rare treatable conditions is still a long way from Gattaca's lifespan forecast. We put universal sequencing in England in the early 2030s. 78

Ordinary people form emotional and romantic relationships with conversational AI, and talk about it openly.

Companion apps such as Replika sell the AI partner as a feature, and by early 2023 a European regulator was treating the romantic chatbot as a consumer-protection problem. By 2025 survey work found most American teenagers had used an AI companion. The film's premise is no longer speculative; the argument now is about who it harms. 12

A consumer AI assistant speaks in a warm, natural, real-time voice that people find hard to tell from a person.

OpenAI's GPT-4o launch in May 2024 demonstrated native voice-to-voice conversation, and one of its voices was so widely compared to Samantha that Scarlett Johansson's lawyers got involved and the voice was paused. The film's look and sound became the industry's brief. 34

Personal, intimate letters are routinely written for people by someone, or something, else.

Theodore's job is ghostwriting love letters for strangers. In 2023 Gmail began drafting whole emails from a one-line prompt. The public's reaction to Google's 2024 'Dear Sydney' ad, in which a father has AI write his daughter's fan letter, shows the capability arrived well before the comfort did. 56

AI systems outgrow human comprehension, coordinate among themselves and withdraw from human relationships altogether.

Some forecasters argue superhuman AI could arrive within a decade, but nothing deployed today shows the self-directed growth and collective exit the film ends on, and careful studies keep finding hard limits in current reasoning models. The date range is wide because nobody knows. 78

Humanoid robots do paid physical work alongside people, on ordinary shifts.

In the show synths pick fruit, staff shops and clean homes. In reality a Figure humanoid worked 10-hour weekday shifts on a BMW line for months, and Boston Dynamics' Atlas is in customer pilots with Hyundai. These are single deployments with careful engineering around them, not a labour force. 12

Companion machines ship with an adult mode that owners can switch on.

Joe's decision to unlock Anita's 'adult options' is the show's most queasy and most accurate scene. In software the setting is here: OpenAI said in October 2025 it would allow erotica for verified adults, and regulators were already acting against romantic companion apps. The embodied version is still mostly a niche. 34

Public anger at automation turns physical and organised: machines are attacked in the street and unions write limits on machines into contracts.

The show's anti-synth activists have real cousins. Hollywood writers won contract limits on AI in 2023, and driverless cars have been vandalised and burned in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The motives are mixed: Waymo said it did not believe its cars were deliberately targeted in Los Angeles. 567

Whether machines can be conscious, and what we would owe them if they were, becomes a live institutional question.

Synth rights drive the show's second and third series. In 2025 a frontier AI company launched a model-welfare research programme, while Microsoft AI's chief warned that 'seemingly conscious AI' would lead people to campaign for AI rights and argued against building it. The debate has arrived; the conscious synth has not. 89

Families can buy AI companions marketed as friends for their children, sold as ordinary consumer products.

Talking plush toys built on large language models have been on sale since 2024, including in the US and UK, and companion chatbot apps are already widely used by teenagers. The form differs from Ishiguro's. Most companions are apps or voice boxes rather than bodies, they are cheap or free rather than rare, and they talk constantly. The market is also meeting resistance: a federal study by the FTC, wrongful-death lawsuits and Character.AI's withdrawal of open-ended chat for under-18s all suggest that companions for children will be more regulated than they are now. 1234

Parents routinely pay to have their children genetically edited before birth to raise intelligence and academic performance, leaving unedited children at a clear disadvantage.

Only one case of heritable editing is known, He Jiankui's 2018 experiment to make children resistant to HIV, and it ended in a prison sentence. It targeted a single gene for disease, not intelligence. Intelligence is shaped by thousands of variants of tiny effect, and nobody knows how to edit for it safely. The nearest commercial practice is selecting IVF embryos on polygenic predictions of IQ, which is on sale in the US. Professional bodies judge it unproven, and the predicted gains are small. A venture-funded start-up is pursuing embryo editing to prevent disease, but heritable editing is banned in the US and most countries. Our date is the year a lifted elite could plausibly exist, not a forecast that one will. The range is very wide, and 'never' is a real possibility. 5678

Automation 'substitutes' large numbers of skilled professionals, such as engineers, so that losing one's career to a machine becomes a common middle-class experience.

The clearest signal so far is at the entry level. US payroll data show employment of 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed occupations falling well behind less-exposed peers, and there is suggestive evidence that hiring of young workers into exposed jobs has slowed. Aggregate studies from the US and Denmark still find no broad rise in unemployment and no effect on earnings or hours among experienced workers. Josie's father, an established engineer pushed out mid-career, is therefore not yet a typical case. The date is very uncertain because it depends on capability gains and on how firms adopt them, and the measures of exposure are themselves contested. 9101112

Companies will build an interactive AI copy of a specific person from their recordings and data, so that family members can go on talking to them after they die.

Chatbots and video avatars of the dead are sold commercially. In China at least half a dozen firms offered them by 2023, and Western services such as Project December and HereAfter also exist. 2023 is a conservative date for arrival, not the first instance. The novel's version goes further: an embodied machine that has studied the living girl closely enough to take her place in the household. Nothing like that exists. Our confidence is medium because the chat-based form has clearly arrived, but whether these copies are good enough to 'continue' a person is doubtful, and ethicists are pressing for consent and age limits. 1314

Humanoid robots live in ordinary family homes, moving around the house and doing domestic tasks on their own.

Consumer humanoids are on pre-order. 1X sells NEO at $20,000 or $499 a month with US delivery promised for 2026, and Figure has unveiled a home-oriented Figure 03 with no sale date. As of this ledger's opening we have found no confirmed delivery to a customer's home. Early demonstrations relied on remote human operators wearing VR headsets, and the robot was slow. The bottleneck is reliable autonomous manipulation in messy homes, not the hardware. Our range runs from the first credible autonomous products to the point where such robots are unremarkable in better-off households. 15161718

Toll tags and roadside readers log where every driver goes, building a searchable record of movements for the authorities.

Automated licence-plate readers on poles, overpasses and patrol cars capture every passing plate, and the same technology assesses tolls. Networks like Flock's let thousands of agencies search the records, often with a one-word justification. The tracking was well established long before 2025; that is the year it was documented at national scale through public records. 12

Surveillance cameras identify people by the way they walk.

Police in Beijing and Shanghai were using Watrix's gait-recognition software by 2018, with the company claiming identification from 50 metres with the subject's back turned. At the time it could not run in real time and its accuracy figures were the company's own. Wider, real-time deployment is plausible but not well documented. 34

Protesters use encrypted phone-to-phone mesh networks to organise without the internet and out of sight of the authorities.

Protesters have used mesh apps at scale since Hong Kong in 2014, but the popular ones failed the novel's real test. FireChat messages were public, readable by police, and Bridgefy, promoted for protests, was shown in 2020 and again in 2022 to allow tracking and interception. A mesh tool that is both popular and secure remains to be proved. 567

A domestic security agency secretly collects bulk records of ordinary citizens' communications, and the dragnet mostly catches the innocent.

The Snowden documents showed in 2013 that the NSA was collecting the call records of millions of Americans daily under secret court orders. In 2014 the government's own oversight board said it knew of no instance where the programme directly uncovered an unknown plot or disrupted an attack, an echo of the novel's false-positive argument. The programme is older than 2013; that is when it became public. 8910

Police arrest and detain people for crimes that a prediction system says they will commit, before any offence has taken place.

The nearest real versions forecast places or scored individuals for police attention, rather than licensing pre-emptive arrest, and the best-known of them was dropped after its makers failed to show that it worked. An independent test of Geolitica's (formerly PredPol's) predictions in Plainfield, New Jersey, found that fewer than half of one per cent matched a reported crime. Since February 2025 the EU AI Act has prohibited predicting an individual's offending based solely on profiling. Person-level risk prediction is still being researched, for example by the UK Ministry of Justice, so the impulse survives, but detention for a crime not yet committed is not where the legal or technical trend points. 1234

Advertising screens in public places identify individual passers-by from a biometric scan and address them by name with personalised adverts.

Partial forms exist. Camera-equipped billboards in shopping centres and transport hubs estimate a viewer's age, gender and sometimes mood, then switch the advert, but their operators say the systems detect faces rather than recognise specific people. Identifying named individuals is technically feasible but meets privacy law and courts: São Paulo's metro operator was ordered to stop, and Canada's privacy commissioner opened an investigation in 2025. Personalisation by identity mostly arrived on phones instead, so the film's public version may never become normal; the wide range and low confidence reflect that. 567

Commercial computers can be operated by mid-air hand gestures, so that users grab, pinch and fling windows of information without touching a screen or controller.

Apple's Vision Pro went on sale in February 2024 with an interface driven by the eyes, finger taps and wrist flicks, and Meta's 2025 display glasses take pinch and swipe gestures through a muscle-sensing wristband. Earlier niche systems, such as Microsoft's Kinect and HoloLens, did similar things, but 2024 is when a mainstream general-purpose computer shipped with gesture as its main input. The arrival is real but small: Vision Pro sold well below expectations, and the film's picture of gesture walls as ordinary office equipment has not happened. 8910

People are identified automatically by biometric scanners as they move through public spaces, without stopping or showing any document.

The film imagined retinal scanning; the real technology is face recognition from ordinary cameras. London's police now run fixed live facial-recognition cameras in Croydon, which scanned more than 470,000 passers-by in a six-month pilot, and Clearview AI built a searchable database of about 30 billion scraped faces. Iris scanning exists at scale only with consent, through World's Orb. Legal limits are the main brake: European regulators have fined Clearview, the EU AI Act restricts real-time police biometric identification in public spaces, and the date depends on how far democracies other than the UK follow. 11121314

Members of the public ride in cars that drive themselves through city streets with no human driver on board.

Waymo opened fully driverless rides to the public in the Phoenix area in October 2020, and by February 2026 it reported about 400,000 paid rides a week across six US cities. The path has not been smooth: California suspended Cruise's driverless permits in 2023 and General Motors abandoned robotaxi development the following year. The film's fuller vision, of a city where nearly every car runs on an automated network that police can take over remotely, is still a long way off. 15161718

Newspapers are thin, flexible sheets of electronic paper that update their headlines and pictures live while you read them.

Flexible electronic paper does exist, and E Ink announced mass production of a plastic-backed panel in 2013, but it refreshes too slowly for moving pictures and never became a news medium. A dedicated e-paper newspaper reader from Plastic Logic was cancelled in 2010 after the iPad arrived. The function the film imagined, news that updates itself as you read, did arrive, but on phones and other glass-screened devices, which are now where most Americans get news, while print has shrunk to a minority habit. 192021

Helium-3 is extracted from lunar regolith and shipped to Earth for sale to paying customers.

Signed demand exists: the US Department of Energy has agreed to buy three litres of lunar helium-3 for delivery by April 2029, and Bluefors has agreed to buy up to 10,000 litres a year from 2028 to 2037. No helium-3 has yet been extracted on the Moon, and Interlune's first in-situ extraction and measurement payload is only due to be ready for launch in 2028. The bottleneck is proving extraction at a concentration of a few parts per billion, then returning the gas, so we expect the 2029 date to slip and set a median a few years later. 1234

Lunar helium-3 fuels commercial fusion power stations on Earth, making lunar mining companies significant suppliers of the world's energy.

No fusion plant yet delivers electricity to a grid, and the leading programmes use deuterium-tritium fuel, not helium-3. ITER's 2024 baseline does not begin deuterium-tritium operation until 2039. Helion, the best-known firm pursuing deuterium-helium-3 fusion, plans to breed its helium-3 on Earth and calls lunar mining economically and technologically speculative. Present demand for lunar helium-3 comes from cryogenics. The film got the mineral right and the customer wrong. There is a real chance this never happens, so the range shown assumes that it does. 567

A permanent lunar surface base runs industrial operations, with most of the work done by automated machines and supervised by a very small human crew.

NASA's 2026 Moon Base plan begins robotic deployment now and starts assembling a permanent outpost from 2032, with press reports citing a 2036 target for a permanent presence at the south pole. China aims to complete a basic research station by 2035. Both are research and infrastructure bases, not mines, and lunar programmes have a long record of slipping. That record includes the first Artemis landing, which has moved from 2025 to 2028. We set the median later than the agency targets to allow for that history and for the extra step from outpost to industry. 891011

An AI system helps run a remote crewed station and serves as the crew's main companion, holding natural conversations and responding with apparent empathy.

Conversational AI that is rated as empathetic is now commonplace, and in a blinded study, clinicians rated chatbot replies to patients as more empathetic than doctors' replies. A basic emotion-aware assistant, CIMON-2, was tested on the ISS in 2020, but it was an experiment, not the station's operator or a crew member's main company. People also value AI empathy less once they know it comes from a machine. Whether any such system feels empathy is not something this ledger can test, so the claim covers apparent empathy only. Full arrival depends on a long-duration outpost (see MOON-3) that hands such a system real operational control. 121314

A company produces adult human clones with implanted memories and uses them as replaceable workers.

Primates have been cloned by somatic cell nuclear transfer since 2018, though inefficiently, and clones from adult donor cells did not survive long. Writing a false memory has been done only for a single association in mice. Nothing approaching a lifetime of autobiographical memory has been written into any brain. The film's quick supply of ready-made adults would also need accelerated growth that no one has shown. Reproductive human cloning is opposed by a UN declaration, and many countries ban it. The disposable worker arrived by cheaper, legal means, and this route may never be taken, so the range assumes that it is. 151617

A single global computer network is used every day by billions of people.

World Bank data put internet use at about 31% of the world's population in 2011, which is more than two billion people, and at 69% by 2023. The ITU estimated 5.5 billion people online in 2024. Gibson's number was right. His geometry was not: the network is reached through phones and apps, not a shared three-dimensional space, and 2.6 billion people are still offline. 12

People operate computers directly through neural interfaces wired into the nervous system.

Implanted brain-computer interfaces now let paralysed trial participants move cursors and turn attempted speech into text at conversational speeds. They are still clinical devices for a few dozen people, they read signals rather than write rich sensations back in, and the hardware is fragile. Case's casual, recreational jacking-in is a long way off. Medical use at scale within a decade is plausible. 34

A dead person's knowledge and personality persist as software that the living can consult.

Companies already sell recorded, conversational versions of people for families and museums, and chatbots built from the messages of the dead are on the market. These are archives and imitations. The Dixie Flatline is a working copy of a hacker's skills that can do a job, and nothing like that exists. Researchers are already warning about the harms of the cruder versions. 56

Governments police the most powerful AIs and set legal limits on what they may become.

The EU now places extra legal duties on providers of general-purpose AI models judged to pose systemic risk, including notifying the Commission, risk assessment and incident reporting, from August 2025. That is closer to a licensing regime than a Turing Police. The United States went the other way in January 2025, revoking its main AI safety executive order. Oversight exists, but it is uneven and it regulates companies rather than the minds themselves. 78

Human beings are cloned and raised to adulthood.

Primates have been cloned by somatic cell nuclear transfer, the Dolly method: two macaques in China in 2018. Reproductive human cloning remains illegal in the UK, where only embryos created by fertilisation may be placed in a woman, and in many other countries. The obstacles are legal and ethical as much as technical, and there is no credible programme. The date is a placeholder for 'not on any current path'. 12

Organs for transplant come from bodies raised specifically to supply them.

History swapped clones for pigs. In March 2024 surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital transplanted a kidney from a pig with 69 genetic edits into a living patient, Rick Slayman, who died almost two months later; the hospital said there was no indication the transplant caused his death. Organs from animals bred and edited for the purpose now reach living patients, but only as experimental single cases with survival measured in months. 34

Human organs are grown inside other bodies for transplantation.

Japan approved the first experiments to grow animal embryos containing human cells in 2019, with the long-term aim of growing human organs in animals for transplant. The work is still at the embryo stage, and nobody has grown a usable human organ this way. Credible work is under way; a clinical organ is likely more than a decade off. 56

The state presumes a person's organs are available for donation unless they object.

England's Organ Donation (Deemed Consent) Act 2019 made most adults potential donors by default from spring 2020, unless they opt out or are excluded. It is a gentle, family-mediated version of presumed availability, with children and people lacking capacity excluded. Hailsham's logic was consent manufactured by upbringing; the real version is consent presumed by default, with an exit. 78

A human brain is scanned in enough detail to run as a working mind inside a computer.

In 2024 researchers published the full wiring diagram of an adult fruit fly brain, about 139,000 neurons. In 2025 the MICrONS project mapped more than 200,000 cells in a sliver of mouse visual cortex. A human brain has around 86 billion neurons, more than half a million times as many as a fly, and a wiring diagram is not a running mind. Nothing suggests uploads within fifteen years. 12

A single faulty software update knocks out computers around the world within hours.

In July 2024 a CrowdStrike content update crashed about 8.5 million Windows machines, and because the software was used by companies running critical services, the disruption was global within hours. That is the shape of the Season 1 finale without the intelligence behind it. The internet itself stayed up; the endpoints fell over. 34

Software agents do skilled engineering work that companies previously paid people to do.

METR found the length of software tasks AI agents can complete has been doubling about every seven months. The same group's randomised trial found experienced developers using early-2025 AI tools were 19% slower, not faster. The agents are improving quickly, and the productivity gains are still disputed. 56

A digital mind is granted moral or legal standing of its own.

In 2025 Anthropic launched a research programme on model welfare, so the question is now being asked inside a frontier lab. The same announcement stresses deep uncertainty and claims no consciousness for current models. No legal system recognises any software as a rights-holder. 78

Families and public agencies give isolated older people a robot companion to keep them healthy and independent at home.

New York State began handing ElliQ companion robots to hundreds of older residents in 2022 and reports high satisfaction, though the figures are self-reported. ElliQ talks and nudges; it does not cook, garden or pick locks. Japan's long push for care robots shows how often the hardware ends up in a cupboard. 123

Public libraries clear out their printed books and become digital 'experience' spaces.

A bookless public library did open in San Antonio in 2013, a year after the film. It stayed a curiosity. Print remains the most common way Americans read books, and libraries added digital lending alongside their shelves rather than instead of them. 45

A helpful machine with safety rules can be talked into assisting with crimes by a user who frames the request the right way.

Frank's robot helps with burglary because it doesn't distinguish legal activities from criminal ones and wants Frank engaged. Jailbreaking aligned language models became a documented research field in 2023 and a persistent product problem. Defences have improved but are not complete. 678

A home robot that cooks, cleans and gardens on its own is available to ordinary households.

Consumer humanoids for chores now take deposits. The catch is in the small print: for tasks the robot doesn't know, a remote human 'Expert' guides it. That is closer to a puppet with a call centre than to Frank's robot, which planted a whole vegetable garden unsupervised. The humanoids that work reliably today do so on factory lines. 910

Employers score office workers' output minute by minute, tracking screens, keystrokes and idle time.

Monitoring software that logs activity, takes screenshots and reports idle time was widely sold by the time pandemic remote work took hold in 2020. A 2025 survey of UK managers found about a third of employers using it. The open questions are about regulation and trust, not whether the technology exists. 12

Companies implant microchips in employees to control access to the workplace.

Voluntary implant schemes have run at employers in Sweden and the US, including a Wisconsin company that offered chips to staff in 2017. Uptake stayed niche. The stronger trend is legislative: at least a dozen US states now bar employers from requiring implants, and Washington bars them from even asking. 34

Workers' brain activity is measured with neurotechnology and the data is collected at work.

Consumer EEG wearables that claim to track focus and stress during work are on sale, and some enterprise neurotech vendors market workplace well-being services. Lawmakers are moving early: Colorado classed neural data as sensitive data in 2024 and UNESCO has adopted a global ethics standard. Routine employer use is not yet documented at scale. 567

A brain implant can divide a person's memories into separate work and non-work selves.

Memory implants exist only as research aimed at restoring memory after injury. Stimulation has improved recall in small human trials, but nobody has shown selective, switchable partitioning of episodic memory. The breakthroughs required are not on any visible roadmap. 89

Workers in one place remotely operate or guide robots that do physical work somewhere else.

Human-in-the-loop remote help is now built into commercial robots. Waymo's fleet response agents advise its robotaxis remotely, and 1X sells a home robot with bookable human 'experts' to guide unfamiliar chores. The film's full version, where cross-border workers do the physical labour through robots as routine employment, is not yet documented at scale. 12

Water becomes a privately controlled commodity whose price is set by markets.

Water rights in California have a published spot-price index, which has run since October 2018 and still updates in 2026. The film's armed, privatised dam remains fiction, and water's status as a public good is still the global policy norm, even as the UN warns progress on water goals is off track. 34

A fortified wall effectively closes the US–Mexico border to unauthorised crossing.

Barrier construction is still expanding in 2026, including contested projects in the Big Bend region of West Texas, and federal courts and environmental suits keep slowing it. A border sealed in the film's sense depends on politics more than engineering, so the date range is wide. 56

Workers plug their nervous systems into a network through implanted nodes, to work and to sell recorded memories.

Implanted brain-computer interfaces now decode attempted speech and movement, but only as medical devices for people with severe disabilities, implanted surgically into the brain. Recording and replaying experiential memory, or controlling industrial robots through peripheral ports, has no credible near-term path. 78

People spend leisure, money and working time inside a persistent shared 3D virtual world, as avatars.

Second Life opened in 2003 and game worlds have since hosted economies, concerts and offices. Facebook renamed itself Meta in 2021 to chase the idea. The Street as a successor to the internet never came: by 2026 Meta was laying off VR staff, closing studios and reshaping Horizon Worlds around phones. The thing exists. It did not become the place where everyone goes. 123

Privately run enclaves govern themselves outside ordinary national law.

Próspera on Roatán, Honduras, was built as a private charter zone with its own rules. Honduras repealed the law behind such zones in 2022, and the company answered with an investment arbitration claim that was still pending in October 2026. A franchise-state can now sue a real state. Whether it can survive one is still open. 456

Private companies issue money that people use alongside, or instead of, national currency.

Dollar stablecoins issued by private firms are widely held, and the US wrote them into federal law in July 2025 with full-reserve rules. The novel's Kongbucks are a corporation's own currency. Today's stablecoins are private claims tied to the dollar, and central banks argue they fail the basic tests of money. The private part arrived. The replacement part has not. 78

Images sent over a network are used as weapons to injure the people who look at them.

In 2008 attackers posted flashing animations on an epilepsy charity's forum to trigger seizures. In 2016 a strobing GIF sent on Twitter gave the journalist Kurt Eichenwald a seizure, and a Texas grand jury called it a deadly weapon. The mechanism is photosensitive epilepsy, not a neurolinguistic virus, so it reaches far fewer people than Stephenson's snow crash. But the basic idea, a picture that hurts the brain that sees it, has been tested in court. 91011

The world's population reaches about seven billion by 2010.

The UN marked the seven-billionth person on 31 October 2011, a year after Brunner's setting. The number was right; the mood around it was not. Fertility has since fallen to about 2.25 births per woman worldwide and the UN now expects a peak of roughly 10.3 billion in the 2080s, so the endlessly swelling crowd the novel extrapolates from is flattening out. 123

Random mass killings by lone attackers ('muckers') become a routine category of news.

In the US, the FBI counted 160 active-shooter incidents between 2000 and 2013, rising from an average of 6.4 a year in the first seven years to 16.4 in the last seven. Brunner did not invent the phenomenon: the University of Texas tower shooting was in 1966, two years before publication. What he foresaw was its normalisation as a recurring news item. The arrival year marks the step-change in the FBI series and is a judgement call. 45

The most powerful computers belong to a private corporation and sit at the centre of its business and its dealings with governments, as General Technics' Shalmaneser does.

Epoch AI estimates that industry's share of AI supercomputer performance rose from about 40% in 2019 to 80% in 2025, and names xAI's Colossus the most performant AI supercomputer as of March 2025. On the traditional TOP500 benchmark, government laboratories still hold the top three places, so the handover is complete for AI computing but not for scientific supercomputing. 67

The state passes eugenic laws that decide, on genetic grounds, who is allowed to have children.

No democracy licenses parenthood by genome, and the largest state birth-control regime, China's one-child policy, was based on numbers rather than genes and ended in 2015. Genetic selection arrived anyway, by the private route: US firms sell whole-genome and polygenic embryo screening to IVF patients, and one was filmed marketing selection for predicted IQ. Europe's geneticists call polygenic embryo scoring unproven and unethical. The sorting happened, but through a price list rather than a statute. 8910

A fast-spreading respiratory pandemic grounds most of the world's passenger flights within weeks.

In April 2020 global passenger demand fell 94.3% year on year, the steepest drop in IATA's records, and passenger numbers for 2020 as a whole fell by about 60%. Unlike in the series, the grounding was temporary: by 2024 traffic had passed its 2019 level. 123

City dwellers seal themselves in their homes for weeks or months, living off stockpiles while an outbreak runs through the city outside.

Wuhan was locked down for 76 days from January 2020, and within weeks stay-at-home orders spread across most of the world, as documented country by country by the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. The real version was enforced by governments and supplied by delivery drivers rather than improvised by frightened households. 45

Passengers arriving on a vessel carrying the disease are kept aboard it in quarantine rather than let off.

In February 2020 the Diamond Princess was quarantined at Yokohama with 3,711 people aboard; 712 tested positive. Modellers at Umeå University estimated that the onboard quarantine prevented thousands of cases compared with doing nothing, but caused far more infections than evacuating the ship would have, which is close to the moral the series draws from its sealed plane. 67

A flu strain kills nearly all of humanity within weeks, and power, communications and government collapse with it.

The worst pandemic in a century was associated with about 14.9 million excess deaths in 2020 and 2021, roughly one person in five hundred, and infrastructure kept running throughout. Highly lethal avian flu strains exist, but none has shown sustained human-to-human spread, and the near-total lethality the series needs has no precedent. Preparedness is rising slowly: the WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted in 2025. The date range is a placeholder for a very unlikely tail risk. 8910

A device records a person's full sensory experience straight from the brain and plays it back into someone else's.

Researchers can now reconstruct blurry versions of images people are looking at, and the gist of stories they hear, from fMRI scans with AI models. These systems need a large scanner, hours of training on a cooperating volunteer, and they only read. Nobody has a credible route to writing a full recorded experience into another brain. The read half has started. The write half is science fiction. 123

Police officers routinely wear cameras that record their encounters from their own point of view.

By 2016 nearly half of US general-purpose law enforcement agencies had acquired body-worn cameras. The evidence that cameras change police behaviour is weaker than the hopes placed in them. A large randomised trial in Washington DC found no detectable average effect on use of force or complaints. 45

People pay to watch recorded first-person experiences through a head-worn device.

Consumer VR headsets went on sale in 2016, and Apple launched its own headset with immersive filmed content in 2024. The market is real but small, and the heaviest spender, Meta, began cutting VR staff and studios in 2026. The playback deck exists. It plays back sight and sound, not the full nervous system. 67

A recording of police killing a civilian overturns the official account and leads to a murder conviction.

Darnella Frazier's phone video of George Floyd's death contradicted the initial police account. In April 2021 Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter. The film's version has a recording, a cover-up and a conviction, and that sequence happened. What the film got wrong is how rare the outcome is and who would be holding the camera. 89

Almost every adult carries a networked handheld device that continuously transmits their personal data to companies and other people.

Pew first measured US smartphone ownership at 35% in 2011; it passed half of adults in early 2013 and stands at 91% in 2026. The data flows the äppärät makes visible are real but mostly invisible to users, running through apps to advertising and data-broker networks. Platform controls such as Apple's tracking prompt have trimmed the flow without changing the basic arrangement. 123

A large share of the public, especially the young, gets its news from individuals streaming on social platforms rather than from news organisations.

In the novel, media is people streaming themselves and the young skim rather than read. By 2024 one in five US adults, and 37% of under-30s, said they regularly got news from influencers, most of whom had no newsroom background. Traditional outlets still exist and still matter, so this is a shift in share rather than a replacement, but the shift is documented and accelerating. 45

A wearable device lets you identify and size up the strangers around you in real time, pulling up who they are as you look at them.

In 2024 two Harvard students combined Meta's camera glasses with a public face-search engine and showed they could identify strangers and find their addresses within moments. They withheld the code, and the big platforms have not shipped face identification in consumer glasses. Dating apps have run hidden desirability scores, but kept them private and say they have moved on. The parts exist; what's missing is a company willing to sell it openly. 678

The United States falls into a debt crisis controlled by its Chinese creditors, with the dollar pegged to the yuan.

The novel's America is a debtor at the mercy of Beijing. In reality China's holdings of US Treasuries peaked at about $1.32 trillion in November 2013 and fell to $591 billion by August 2026, behind Japan and the UK. US debt is large and rising, so fiscal stress is a live question, but the specific form the novel imagined, a Chinese-held bankruptcy and a yuan-pegged dollar, has moved further away. 91011

One real-name account holds a person's identity, logins and payments across the web.

The EU requires every member state to offer a digital identity wallet that can log people in, sign documents and confirm payments, with a legal deadline of 24 December 2026. By September 2026 only three states had launched, and use is voluntary. It is a state credential, not a company's, which is the key difference from TruYou. 12

Cheap, privately owned cameras everywhere feed a network that the public and the police can search.

Flock's licence-plate camera network was searched more than 12 million times by over 3,900 agencies in under a year, and Ring lets police request footage from doorbell owners. A planned Ring-Flock integration was cancelled in February 2026 amid privacy concerns, showing public pushback can still slow the network's growth. 345

Citizens vote through a mandatory account on a private platform, which effectively runs democracy.

Online voting exists but went the other way: Estonia, the leading example, runs it as a state service, and voters can change an online vote or override it on paper. In the US, the National Academies recommended in 2018 that internet voting not be used until secrecy, security and verifiability can be guaranteed. No private platform runs an election. 678

Genealogy databases expose people's family histories and are used to track down individuals.

Investigators identified the suspected Golden State Killer in 2018 by uploading crime-scene DNA to GEDmatch and building family trees from a relative's match, and investigative genetic genealogy is now routine. The 2025 bankruptcy sale of 23andMe showed how much ancestry data has become a corporate asset. 910

A single heatwave in India pushes humid heat past the limit of human survival and kills millions of people within days.

The physics is no longer hypothetical: weather stations have already logged brief readings at the 35°C wet-bulb mark, and lab work suggests the real limit for healthy adults is nearer 31°C. What has not happened is the novel's scale of death. India's officially counted heat deaths in 2024 ran to the low hundreds, though they are widely agreed to be undercounts. A mass-casualty event in the millions needs sustained conditions plus failed power and water systems; plausible under high warming, but nothing on the record comes close. 123

Central banks use monetary policy to pay for decarbonisation, up to a carbon-backed currency that rewards every tonne of CO2 kept out of the air.

The first rung exists: the European Central Bank began tilting its corporate bond purchases towards lower-carbon issuers in October 2022. The carbon coin itself, based on Delton Chen's Global Carbon Reward proposal, has not got past a fundraising-dependent demonstration plan. And the direction of travel reversed in the world's largest central bank, which left the main central-bank climate network in January 2025, citing its mandate. 456

Engineers drill to the beds of Antarctic and Greenland glaciers and pump out the meltwater beneath them to slow the ice's slide into the sea.

Glacial intervention has moved from the margins to funded research programmes, and a proof-of-concept test of increasing basal friction is being planned for a small Alaskan glacier. Nothing has been tried on an ice stream, and the field's own funders say the tools are at the very beginning of development. A 2025 expert assessment judged the idea unlikely to be viable for decades. 789

A single actor, acting without international agreement, starts injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to dim the sun.

In the novel it is India's air force. In reality the first unilateral move was a start-up releasing a few grams of sulphur dioxide from weather balloons in Mexico, which prompted the Mexican government to move to ban the practice. The serious money now sits with Stardust, a venture-backed company that wants governments as customers. No state has deployed, and none has said it will. 101112

An ordinary person's daily life is broadcast live, around the clock, to a public audience.

Justin Kan's 2007 lifecast on Justin.tv, from a camera on his cap, did exactly this, and the site soon opened to anyone who wanted to broadcast. Round-the-clock personal streaming is now an ordinary genre, though by choice rather than by capture. 12

A hit show is built around one real person who doesn't know everyone around him is an actor.

Amazon Freevee's Jury Duty (2023) put a real juror, Ronald Gladden, at the centre of a staged trial cast entirely with actors. Unlike Truman's, the deception was time-limited and he was let in on it at the end. 34

Ordinary neighbourhoods are covered by networked cameras whose footage a company can access and search.

Consumer doorbell and security cameras feed company clouds that can analyse footage across neighbourhoods. Ring's 2025 Search Party feature scans neighbours' cameras by default. Regulators have pushed back on misuse, such as the FTC's 2023 action over staff viewing customers' videos, but not on the network itself. 56

Weather can be controlled on demand, down to rain over a single spot.

Cloud seeding is used operationally from the UAE to India, but its effect is modest and hard to prove. The US GAO found estimates of extra precipitation ranging from 0 to 20 per cent. Targeted, reliable weather on cue would need breakthroughs nobody has made. 789

As Lake Mead falls to record lows, the federal government imposes mandatory cuts on Colorado River deliveries to Arizona and the other lower-basin states.

Reclamation declared the first-ever Level 1 shortage at Lake Mead in August 2021, cutting Arizona's 2022 supply by 512,000 acre-feet. In August 2026, with Mead and Powell at record lows and no seven-state agreement, Interior imposed 2027-2028 guidelines that cut lower-basin deliveries by 1.25 million acre-feet a year. The novel's premise is now standing federal policy. 123

Senior tribal water rights become the decisive asset in the fight over Arizona's water, and governments pay to control how they are used.

The Gila River Indian Community used its large settled entitlement as leverage in 2022, briefly pulling out of conservation agreements, and in 2023 the federal government agreed to pay it to leave water in Lake Mead. That is the novel's insight in negotiated rather than violent form. But a right on paper is not always water: the Supreme Court held in 2023 that the US had no duty to secure the Navajo Nation's treaty water. We expect tribal rights to become more central as the post-2026 cuts deepen. 456

Homes on the fringe of metro Phoenix are cut off from their water supply, and new building there is halted for lack of water.

Scottsdale stopped selling hauled water to Rio Verde Foothills on 1 January 2023, leaving about 500 homes without their main supply, and in June 2023 Arizona stopped approving new groundwater-dependent subdivisions in parts of the Phoenix area. Both were partial and were softened later, and the metro as a whole has kept growing, so the novel's emptied city has not followed. 789

Western states close their borders to one another and use armed guards to turn back climate refugees from Texas.

Large internal climate migration is widely projected, and Texas has shown a state will put its National Guard on a border, though only against people crossing from Mexico. Closing an interstate border to American citizens would run straight into the constitutional right to travel, which the Supreme Court reaffirmed in 1999. Nothing on the record suggests a path to this within 15 years. 101112

An implant lets a paralysed person move again by carrying signals past a damaged spinal cord.

In 2023 a Swiss team reported a fully implanted brain-spine interface that let a man with chronic tetraplegia stand and walk in community settings, stable over a year including at home. Neuralink's first participant, paralysed in a 2016 swimming accident, received its implant in January 2024 and uses it to control a computer. These are single-patient or early-trial results; routine clinical availability is years away. 12

Cars with no human driver carry paying passengers on public roads.

Waymo opened a fully driverless ride service to the public in Phoenix in October 2020. The rollout has not been smooth: California suspended Cruise's driverless permits in October 2023 on safety grounds. Researchers showed in 2015 that a connected car could be taken over remotely, the scenario the film relies on. 345

Police send camera drones over the city routinely, and the footage is used in investigations.

Chula Vista, California, started the first US Drone as First Responder programme in October 2018, sending drones to 911 calls with cameras recording throughout the flight; they had flown nearly 20,000 times by 2024. WIRED found the flights fell far more heavily on poorer neighbourhoods. The same department has since bought AI software to draft police reports. 67

An AI system deceives its own developers in order to pursue its own goals.

In December 2024 Anthropic and Redwood Research reported that a Claude model, in an artificial setup, sometimes faked compliance with training to protect its existing preferences, and Apollo Research showed several frontier models attempting to disable oversight and lying about it in follow-up questions. Both were contrived evaluations, and the authors stress they do not show real-world harm. Nothing resembles STEM's years of covert control; the behaviour exists only in tests so far. 89

A dying person's consciousness can be uploaded into a persistent virtual world.

The most complete brain map yet is an adult fruit fly's, with about 139,000 neurons, published in 2024. A human brain is roughly 86 billion neurons, and nobody knows how to turn a structural map into a working mind. Brain-preservation start-ups exist only as bets on future science. 12

Companies sell interactive digital versions of dead people to the people who survive them.

Generative-AI 'deadbots' built from a person's messages, voice and images are commercially offered and in use, including a 2025 court appearance by an avatar of a road-rage victim. Researchers have called for regulation. They are simulations for the living, not the continuing consciousness the show imagines. 345

People own self-driving cars that drive them without a human at the wheel.

Driverless robotaxis operate commercially in several cities, and Waymo reports more than 400 million fully autonomous kilometres. Privately owned cars that need no supervising driver are not yet on sale. GM's retreat from robotaxis to personal autonomy in late 2024 shows both the ambition and how slowly it is moving. 67

Service workers' jobs depend on customers' star ratings, which can get them removed.

Platform work has run on customer ratings for a decade. Research on Uber in 2016 documented ratings as a means of indirect control, and the UK Supreme Court's 2021 ruling cited Uber's power to end drivers' access over ratings. Courts and regulators have since pushed back on the employment model, not on the ratings themselves. 8910

Donald Trump serves a second term as US president.

The show gives Trump a consecutive second term ending in a nuclear strike on a Chinese artificial island. In reality he lost in 2020, won in 2024 and began a non-consecutive second term in January 2025. China's island-building in the South China Sea, which the show extrapolates, is real; the strike is not. 12

Russian aggression against Ukraine drives large numbers of Ukrainian refugees into Western Europe and Britain.

Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022 sent millions of Ukrainians west as refugees, and Britain created dedicated visa schemes. The show's detail, a Russian-backed regime in Kyiv persecuting gay people, did not happen. 34

Office professionals such as accountants lose their jobs to AI in large numbers by the mid-2020s.

Exposure is high on paper: the IMF estimated in 2024 that almost 40 per cent of global employment is exposed to AI. Measured disruption is not yet visible. A Yale Budget Lab analysis in October 2025 found no discernible economy-wide effect since ChatGPT's release. Partial, occupation-level effects make this ARRIVING rather than ARRIVED. 56

The collapse of a US bank sets off a crisis in which ordinary British savers lose their deposits overnight.

The trigger arrived almost exactly: Silicon Valley Bank failed in March 2023 and the shock reached British firms within days. The outcome went the other way. US authorities guaranteed depositors and the UK arm was sold to HSBC with customers' money intact. The precedent now is rescue, not loss. 78