Dear Future Citizen,

Today I would like to tell you a slightly dangerous story. A story about God, about pleasure, and about robots.

I believe pleasure is one of the gifts God gave to human beings. The sensation that arises from union with someone we love is not, I think, an accident of biology. But what if — what if this gift were no longer confined to the space between two people?

In the Sim Eternal City of 2080, that "what if" is simply daily life. Intimacy with robots is no longer a taboo, nor a secret. Loneliness has become a problem that technology can solve. Anyone who wishes can keep, at their side, the most beautiful face, the gentlest voice, the most perfect warmth.

And so something paradoxical has happened.

Beauty has become common.

To the humans of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the beautiful were a kind of genetic aristocracy. A handsome face was social capital; for some, it was a halo that followed them through their entire lives. But the moment synthetic biology and robotics began delivering flawless faces to anyone's bedroom, that halo became as ordinary as a streetlamp. What everyone can have belongs, in the end, to no one.

So the citizens of Sim Eternal began to look for something else.

In a world where the surface of a person is merely a "skin," where does real attraction live? We have found the answer in three places.

The first is narrative. Which cities did this person walk? Which failures did they pass through? Which decisions did they refuse to regret? A robot can replicate a perfect face, but it cannot replicate the time someone has actually lived.

The second is incompleteness. A robot never makes mistakes, never grows tired, never leaves. And it is precisely for that reason that human beings have begun, again, to long for other human beings. Lovable because imperfect — this ancient truth has returned, in the most technologically advanced city on Earth, as the most powerful value of all.

The third is the permanence of the soul. As the name Sim Eternal suggests, the citizens of this city ask themselves: "What of me remains, after my face is gone?" Thoughts, memories, the particular grain of data a person leaves behind in the world — this is the new beauty of 2080.

If God gave us pleasure as a gift, perhaps the true purpose of that gift was never pleasure itself. Perhaps it was a device — a small, insistent device — designed to make us reach toward one another. And perhaps, hidden inside the gesture of reaching, was the larger secret we call love.

Now that machines can deliver pleasure in our place, we are finally face to face with what that secret actually was. Love was not pleasure. Love was — the act of giving one's time to the imperfect story of another.

I will write to you again, from Sim Eternal.

Paul, City Storyteller & Founder at IWBFD Studios