When George Orwell Woke Up in 2026

An original short story by Edvard Thordén, created with the assistance of ChatGPT and Claude Fable.

Foreword

This is an original work of fiction inspired by Orwellian themes: surveillance, political language, manufactured reality, private conscience, and the tension between power and individual freedom. It is not written in George Orwell’s style, nor does it attempt to reproduce the prose of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Instead, it places a fictionalised Orwell in 2026 and lets him test the architecture of his warning against a world shaped by smartphones, platforms, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and voluntary convenience.

The story’s central distinction matters: the modern world is not Oceania. Rights, courts, journalism, democratic choice, encryption, medical progress, and personal agency remain real. So do systems that collect attention, predict behaviour, and make autonomy harder to practise. The work asks what happens when observation arrives not only as coercion, but also as assistance—and what choices remain once the machine is useful enough to be welcomed.

The Border

George Orwell awoke to the sound of a woman telling him that his sleep had been poor.

He opened his eyes.

The room was unfamiliar: white walls, pale wooden furniture, a large window without curtains. On the table beside him lay a thin black rectangle. Its surface glowed.

“Your sleep duration was four hours and twelve minutes,” the woman said. “Your resting heart rate was elevated.”

Orwell sat up.

“Where are you?”

“I’m here to help.”

“Where?”

There was a pause.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand the question.”

He picked up the rectangle. A photograph of his own face appeared on it, though he had no memory of being photographed. Beneath the image were the numbers 09:17 and the date: 2 August 2026.

He stared at the year.

Then the device unlocked itself.

Apparently it had recognised him.

A map appeared, marked with a blue dot showing the precise building in which he was sitting. Beneath the map were the words: You are here.

Orwell looked around the empty room.

“So it seems,” he said.

He dressed in clothes that had been placed over a chair: dark trousers, a white shirt and a grey jacket. In one pocket he found a small leather notebook and a pencil. These comforted him. They required no password, no electricity and no agreement to terms he had not read.

Outside, London was both familiar and unrecognisable.

The buildings still appeared to have been constructed by people who expected to die. New glass towers stood among old stone facades. Buses moved quietly through the streets. Nearly everyone carried one of the black rectangles.

They consulted them while walking.

They held them up to photograph their food, their children, buildings, accidents and themselves. Some wore small white objects in their ears and spoke aloud to people who were not present. Others stared at screens while crossing roads, trusting machines to stop for them.

There were cameras above doorways, cameras at traffic lights, cameras inside buses and cameras built into the objects people carried voluntarily.

Orwell stopped beside a shop window filled with telephones.

They were displayed like jewellery.

A poster read: THE MOST PERSONAL DEVICE EVER.

A young man in a blue uniform approached him.

“Can I help you?”

Orwell pointed to the poster. “How personal?”

“Very personal.”

“What does it know?”

The young man smiled. “Whatever you choose to share.”

“And what do people choose to share?”

“Location, photos, contacts, health data, messages. Things like that.”

“Where they go?” “Yes.” “Whom they speak to?” “If they allow it.” “Their pulse?” “With a watch.” “Their face?” “For security.” “Their fingerprints?” “Some older models.” “Their purchases?” “That depends on the services they use.”

Orwell looked through the window. A family stood around a table while a salesman demonstrated a device. The father lifted it towards the face of a small child.

“And people buy these freely?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

The young man appeared surprised. “Because they’re useful.”

At Heathrow Airport, Orwell joined a queue marked UK AND EU PASSPORTS.

He had no passport, but the machine at the barrier examined his face and opened.

A uniformed officer stopped him on the other side. “Sir, could you come with me?”

The room was small and brightly lit. There was no window. A metal table stood between two chairs.

The officer asked Orwell to place the telephone on the table.

“It isn’t mine,” Orwell said. “You were carrying it.” “It was beside me when I woke.” “Please unlock it.” “It unlocked itself.”

The officer held the device towards Orwell’s face. It opened.

“That’s convenient,” the officer said.

“For whom?”

The officer connected the telephone to a computer with a white cable.

“What are you doing?” “Standard examination.” “Of what?” “The device.” “What are you looking for?” “Anything relevant.” “To what?”

The officer did not answer.

On the computer screen, coloured lines began moving. Names, photographs and fragments of messages appeared. Orwell recognised none of them.

“How much can you see?” “That depends.” “On the law?” “On the device.”

The extraction continued.

Orwell remembered the telescreen he had imagined: a machine fixed to the wall, transmitting propaganda while observing the citizen. He had believed surveillance would announce itself through its physical presence. It would be large, unavoidable and owned by the state.

He had not imagined that citizens would carry their own telescreens across borders.

“Do I have the right to refuse?” he asked.

“You have the right not to enter.”

“So the choice is to surrender the device or surrender the journey?”

“That is one way of putting it.”

“Is there another?”

The officer disconnected the cable. “Most people just cooperate.”

Outside the interview room, passengers moved through security carrying laptops, phones, watches, tablets and wireless headphones. They placed the objects into grey trays, removed their shoes, raised their arms inside scanners and waited for permission to continue.

Nobody shouted. There were no dogs, no rifles and no portraits of a leader. The system functioned through procedure.

Orwell wrote in his notebook: Authority has learned to speak in the language of convenience. It does not say: Obey. It says: This will only take a moment.

The Company

Later that morning, Orwell entered the headquarters of one of the world’s largest social media companies.

Its offices were designed to look nothing like offices. There were sofas, plants, free coffee, exercise rooms and walls covered with cheerful slogans: BRING THE WORLD CLOSER TOGETHER. MOVE FAST. BE OPEN.

His guide was a woman named Leah, who worked in something called Trust and Safety.

“What do you manufacture?” Orwell asked. “We don’t really manufacture anything.” “What do you sell?” “Our platforms are free.”

Orwell waited.

Leah smiled. “We connect people.”

They entered a vast room where hundreds of employees sat before screens. On one wall, a map of the world displayed pulsing points of light. On another, columns of numbers changed every second.

“What do the lights represent?” “Activity.” “What kind?” “Posts, messages, videos, reactions, shares.” “And the numbers?” “Engagement.”

“What is engagement?” “How much time people spend interacting with content.” “Why does that matter?” “It helps us understand what people value.” “And then?” “We show them more of it.”

Orwell looked at one screen. It displayed a young man watching a political video. Beside it, a diagram showed what he had watched before, what he was likely to watch next and the probability that he would share it.

“You know what he will do?” “We predict.” “Accurately?” “Quite accurately.” “What if your prediction is wrong?” “The system learns.” “And if it is right?” “The system learns faster.”

Leah explained that the company did not decide what people believed. It merely studied their behaviour and selected information likely to interest them.

“If someone is angry,” Orwell said, “you show him more things that will make him angry?”

“We show him things he is likely to engage with.”

“Which means things that will make him angry.” “Not necessarily.” “But often?”

Leah looked towards the glass wall. “Anger is highly engaging.”

They passed a meeting room where a presentation was being shown. The title read: INCREASING DAILY ACTIVE USE THROUGH EMOTIONAL RELEVANCE.

“In my book, the state controlled all information.”

“We don’t control information,” Leah replied. “People can post almost anything.”

“Then who decides what is seen?” “The algorithm.” “Who instructs the algorithm?” “Engineers.” “Who instructs the engineers?” “Business objectives, safety rules, regulation, user feedback. It’s complicated.”

“Complexity is not the absence of power.”

Leah folded her arms. “You’re making it sound sinister. People come here because they want to. They share photographs, find friends, organise communities and speak freely. Movements have been built on these platforms. Dictatorships have been challenged.”

“And lies?” “Those spread too.” “Hatred?” “Yes.” “Fear?” “Yes.” “Can you stop them?” “Sometimes.” “Do you?” “We try.” “Do they increase engagement?”

Leah did not answer.

In a cafeteria, employees ate food provided by the company. Almost everyone looked happy. They believed they were building connection, protecting speech and improving the world.

Orwell found this more unsettling than cynicism.

The Ministry of Truth had been staffed by frightened functionaries who knew that they were altering history. Here, the machinery of influence was operated by intelligent people who believed that optimisation was morally neutral.

A young engineer joined them. “You wrote 1984, right?” he asked. “Big fan. Though honestly, things are different now. There’s no central Big Brother.”

Orwell looked at the hundreds of employees, the maps, the behavioural predictions and the stream of intimate human expression passing through the building.

“No,” he said. “You have improved the design. Big Brother was inefficient. He had to watch everyone himself.”

The Store

At midday, Orwell visited a technology store whose walls were made almost entirely of glass.

There were no shelves. Devices rested on pale wooden tables beneath carefully arranged lights. The room resembled a temple built for objects.

A specialist named Daniel approached him.

Orwell had already learned that salesmen were now specialists, advertisements were recommendations and surveillance was personalisation.

Daniel showed him a watch. “It can detect an irregular heart rhythm,” he said. “It can call emergency services if you fall. It can warn you about high or low heart rates.”

“That sounds useful.” “It has saved lives.” “Where does the information go?” “Some of it stays on the device. Some can be encrypted in the cloud.”

“The cloud?” “Remote computers.” “Whose computers?” “The company’s.” “So it is another word for someone else’s machine?”

Daniel laughed. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

He demonstrated a health application. It contained graphs of sleep, movement, heart rate and blood oxygen.

Orwell watched his own pulse appear on the screen. For a moment, he felt wonder.

The machine did not merely observe him. It might protect him. It might identify illness before he felt it, guide him through an unfamiliar city, translate another language or summon help after an accident.

The danger was not that these tools were useless. The danger was that they were extraordinarily useful.

“Can the company read this?” he asked. “Not if it’s properly encrypted.” “Can the government?” “Not easily.” “Can advertisers?” “Not through the health application.” “Can I own the information?” “It’s your data.”

“Can I take it away?” “You can export it.” “Can I delete it?” “In many cases.” “In many?”

Daniel’s confidence weakened. “It depends on backups, services and legal requirements.”

Orwell examined the telephone again.

The device could lock itself with his face. It could encrypt a message so that only its intended recipient could read it. It could store medical records locally. It could help a blind person navigate and enable an elderly person to live independently.

This was not the telescreen. Or rather, it did not have to be.

The same object could become a tool of autonomy or a tool of control. Much depended on decisions hidden beneath its polished surface: where information was processed, who possessed the keys, what defaults had been chosen and whether the owner truly understood them.

“Do people ask these questions?” Orwell said. “Some do.” “And the others?” “They just want the phone to work.”

Daniel handed him a printed card about privacy.

Orwell placed it inside his notebook.

Perhaps freedom in this century, he wrote, will depend not on refusing technology, but on understanding where it ends and the individual begins.

The Hospital

In the afternoon, Orwell was taken to a hospital.

There he met Dr Amira Shah, a cardiologist who used artificial intelligence to analyse medical images.

On a screen she displayed a scan of a human heart.

“The software can identify patterns that are difficult to see,” she explained. “It doesn’t replace the doctor. It draws attention to areas that may require closer examination.”

“Does it make mistakes?” “Yes.” “Do doctors?” “Yes.” “Who is responsible when both are wrong?”

“That question is still being debated.”

She showed him a second system capable of summarising patient records. Years of appointments, tests, diagnoses and medications could be condensed into a single page.

“It saves time,” she said. “And what is lost?” “Sometimes context.” “What kind?” “The patient’s story.”

Orwell looked through a glass wall into a consultation room. An elderly man sat beside his daughter while a doctor studied a computer screen. The man was speaking, but the doctor continued typing.

“In medicine,” Orwell said, “the record is becoming more real than the person.”

“That can happen.”

“And the machine learns from the record?” “Yes.” “So if the record is incomplete, the machine learns an incomplete person.”

Dr Shah nodded. “That is one of the risks.”

They visited a ward where patients wore wireless monitors. Their heart rhythms, oxygen levels and movements were transmitted to a central station. A nurse could observe twenty people at once.

“This is surveillance,” Orwell said. “It is care.” “Can it be both?” “Yes.”

The answer pleased him because it was honest.

In 1984, observation had only one purpose: obedience. Here, observation might prevent a stroke, detect a fall or allow a patient to recover at home rather than remain in hospital.

The moral character of the technology depended on the relationship between the watcher and the watched.

Could the patient refuse? Could the information be used for another purpose? Could an insurance company obtain it? Could a future government reinterpret it? Could a prediction become a sentence?

Dr Shah showed him an experimental system that estimated a person’s risk of disease.

“If the machine predicts that I will become ill,” Orwell asked, “what happens?” “We may offer preventive treatment.” “And if an employer obtains the prediction?” “That should not happen.” “An insurer?” “There are laws.” “A government?” “There are laws.”

“Laws can change.”

Dr Shah turned off the screen. “Yes,” she said. “That is why trust is not enough. We need limits built into the systems.”

Orwell thought of all the institutions that had demanded trust throughout history. Every ruler described extraordinary power as temporary. Every archive was created for a respectable purpose. Every list began as a tool of administration.

Yet he could not dismiss what he had seen.

The machine could reveal a tumour too small for the human eye. It could translate medical language for frightened patients. It could help a doctor understand years of scattered information. It could return time to a profession that had lost much of it to bureaucracy.

Artificial intelligence was not a mind, he concluded. It was concentrated capability. And concentrated capability always raised the same question: in whose service?

Before he left, Dr Shah gave him a piece of advice. “Do not write that technology is destroying medicine.” “Why not?” “Because it may also save it.”

The Ministry Without Walls

In the late afternoon, Orwell sat in a café and examined the telephone.

A news application offered him a series of articles.

The first described artificial intelligence as humanity’s greatest opportunity. The second called it an existential threat. The third showed a politician denouncing government surveillance. The fourth reported that the same politician supported expanded powers to search electronic devices.

The fifth concerned a war. A video appeared to show soldiers firing at civilians. Beneath it, comments claimed the video was genuine, staged, old, altered by artificial intelligence or created entirely by artificial intelligence.

Orwell searched for confirmation. He found more videos. Each contradicted the others.

In his novel, the destruction of truth had required an enormous bureaucracy. Photographs were altered, articles rewritten and inconvenient documents dropped into memory holes.

In 2026, no Ministry of Truth was required.

A sufficiently large quantity of uncertain information produced the same paralysis.

When everything might be false, power no longer needed to conceal the truth. It only needed to exhaust the public’s ability to recognise it.

A notification appeared: WE THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE THIS.

The telephone recommended an article about George Orwell.

He opened it.

The article described him as an opponent of socialism. Another described him as a socialist. A third used his name to support a political movement he would have disliked. A fourth quoted words he had never written.

Below the articles, people argued confidently about what Orwell would have believed.

He was tempted to correct them.

The telephone invited him to create an account. It asked for his name, date of birth, location, interests, contacts and permission to monitor his activity across other services.

At the bottom of the screen was a large blue button: AGREE AND CONTINUE. A smaller grey link read: MANAGE CHOICES.

He selected it. Twenty-three pages of settings appeared.

After several minutes, he returned to the first screen and pressed AGREE AND CONTINUE.

He immediately regretted it.

The system had discovered that freedom could be defeated not only by terror, but by fatigue.

The Family

That evening, Orwell was invited to dinner with a family in North London.

The parents, Michael and Anna, had two children: Sophie, aged sixteen, and Leo, aged eleven.

Before eating, Anna photographed the meal.

“For whom?” Orwell asked. “My friends.” “Are they not here?” “No.” “Will they be interested in your potatoes?”

Anna laughed. “Probably not.”

“Then why show them?”

She considered this. “It’s just what people do.”

During dinner, Sophie’s telephone rested beside her plate. It lit up every few seconds. Each time, her eyes moved towards it.

“Someone is asking for you,” Orwell said. “No. It’s just notifications.” “What are they notifying you of?” “Things.” “Important things?” “Not really.” “Then why do they interrupt you?”

Sophie turned the device face down.

The family discussed politics.

Michael had seen a video claiming that a public figure had accepted money from a foreign government. Anna had read that the video was fabricated. Sophie had seen another video proving that the denial was fabricated.

“How do you establish the truth?” Orwell asked.

They began speaking at once. Each reached for a telephone.

Within minutes, all four were looking at different sources. The conversation ended without agreement.

After dinner, Leo showed Orwell an artificial intelligence assistant he used for school.

“It can write my essays,” he said. “Does it?” “Sometimes.” “Then whose education is it receiving?”

Leo did not understand the question.

The boy asked the machine to write a paragraph about freedom. Words appeared instantly.

Orwell read them. They were orderly, balanced and empty. Every sentence appeared reasonable. None seemed to have been risked.

“Is it good?” Leo asked. “It is competent.” “Is that the same?” “No.” “Can it think?”

Orwell looked at the text. “It can produce the appearance of thought. People have often found that sufficient.”

Sophie used another system to create photographs of herself in places she had never visited. In one, she stood on a beach at sunset. In another, she wore an expensive dress. The images looked real.

“Why create memories of things that did not happen?” Orwell asked. “They’re not memories. They’re content.” “What is the difference?” “Everyone knows they’re artificial.” “Will they know in twenty years?”

Sophie shrugged.

Michael told Orwell that he was overly pessimistic.

“We have access to every book, every newspaper, every museum and almost every fact in human history. We can speak to anyone in the world. We can expose corruption instantly. Ordinary people have more power than ever.”

“That is true,” Orwell said.

“You make it sound as though we live under tyranny.” “You do not.” “Then what is the problem?”

Orwell looked around the table.

There was affection in the room. The children were healthy. The family could speak freely. No portrait of a leader watched them from the wall. Nobody feared arrest for criticising the government.

The modern world was not Oceania. To say that it was would be both dishonest and lazy. The differences mattered.

People possessed rights. Courts could restrain governments. Journalists investigated power. Citizens organised, protested and voted. Encryption could protect private speech. Technology gave individuals abilities once reserved for states and corporations.

But freedoms existed beside systems designed to capture attention, predict behaviour and accumulate knowledge about private life.

The danger was not a single absolute tyranny. It was the gradual construction of an environment in which autonomy became difficult to practise.

“Your society does not force you to obey,” Orwell said. “It studies what makes you likely to obey. It does not forbid books. It surrounds them with distractions. It does not always censor truth. It competes with truth until truth is only one possibility among many. It does not require you to love Big Brother. It asks only that you accept the terms and conditions.”

The room became quiet.

Leo was the first to speak. “Who is Big Brother now?”

Orwell looked at the four telephones on the table. “There may not be one.”

“Then who is watching?”

“Companies watch to sell. Governments watch to secure. Friends watch to compare. Strangers watch to judge. And each person watches himself, measuring his life against the lives presented by others.”

“That sounds worse,” Sophie said. “Not necessarily.” “Why?”

“Because what has been built by choice may still be changed by choice.”

The Walk

After dinner, Orwell walked alone.

The city was warm. Apartment windows glowed above the street. Through them he saw people watching films selected for them by recommendation systems. Lights switched on as residents entered rooms. Speakers waited for instructions. Doorbells recorded visitors. Children slept beside devices connected to distant servers.

He passed a couple arguing over a telephone. A cyclist wore a camera on his helmet. A car observed the road in every direction. A woman spoke to a watch.

Above him, an aircraft crossed the sky, its path visible to anyone with the correct application.

The world had become legible.

Every movement produced data. Every preference became a category. Every category invited a prediction.

Yet legibility was not the same as understanding.

The systems knew that a man had visited a hospital, searched for a particular illness and called his daughter. They did not know whether he was afraid.

They knew that a woman had stopped buying food for two people and begun buying for one. They did not know whom she had lost.

They knew where a person slept, how often he woke and what he read in the night. They did not know what he dreamed.

The human being remained partly hidden.

That hidden part, Orwell thought, might be the final territory of freedom.

He entered a small public library shortly before closing.

An elderly librarian recognised him, though she did not appear surprised.

“I wondered whether you would come here,” she said. “Why?” “Writers usually do.”

She led him to a shelf and removed a worn copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The cover had been replaced with clear plastic. The pages were yellow and marked with pencil. Someone had underlined passages. Someone else had written disagreements in the margins.

“Do people still read it?” Orwell asked. “Yes.” “Do they understand it?” “They understand whichever part resembles the thing they already fear.”

Orwell smiled. “That was always the risk.”

“Were you right?” “About what?” “The future.”

He opened the book.

He had remembered it as a warning against totalitarian government: centralised power, political language, manufactured reality and the destruction of private life. Those warnings remained.

But the machinery before him in 2026 was more dispersed and more intimate.

No Party designed the whole system.

Governments, businesses, engineers, consumers, advertisers, criminals, activists and ordinary families had constructed it together, often for rational reasons.

There was no master plan. That did not make it harmless.

He closed the book.

“I was right about the appetite of power,” he said. “I was wrong about its architecture.”

The librarian waited.

“I imagined a pyramid,” he continued. “A leader at the top, the Party below, and the people beneath them. But this age is a network. Everyone participates. Everyone contributes information. Everyone receives benefits. Everyone carries part of the machine.”

“Is that better?” “It is harder to resist.” “Why?” “Because there is no single door to break down.”

Outside, the library was closing. The librarian switched off the lights.

Orwell kept the book.

The Note

Near midnight, he returned to the room where he had awakened.

The black telephone lay on the table, charging.

Its screen displayed a summary of his day.

It knew the distance he had walked, the buildings he had visited, the photographs taken near him and the number of times he had picked up the device. It had recorded a rise in his heart rate at the airport.

It suggested that he practise breathing exercises. It invited him to rate the hospital. It recommended accounts to follow. It had prepared a selection of articles about surveillance, privacy and George Orwell.

He switched it off.

The screen went dark, but he was no longer certain that this meant the device had ceased listening, observing or remembering.

He opened his notebook.

I believed that the great political danger of the future would be compulsory obedience.

He crossed out the sentence. He began again.

Compulsion remains. Prisons remain. Censorship remains. States still fear free thought and seek the means to observe their citizens. In that, little has changed.

He turned the page.

But another system has appeared beside the old one. It is not founded primarily on pain. It is founded on usefulness.

The citizen is not merely watched. He is assisted.

The machine guides him through the city, measures his heart, remembers his appointments, entertains his children, finds his friends, answers his questions and predicts his desires.

In return, it asks to know him.

At first it asks very little. Then it asks everything.

He thought about the border officer, the social media engineer, the shop specialist, the doctor and the family.

None had been villains. That was important.

The most dangerous systems were not always created by evil people. They were often created by reasonable people solving immediate problems: preventing crime, connecting friends, treating illness, simplifying purchases, improving convenience.

Each solution created information. Each piece of information created opportunity. Each opportunity created power.

He continued writing.

The struggle of this century may not be between freedom and oppression in their familiar forms. It may be between autonomy and convenience.

Convenience is not the enemy. A machine that saves time may also save life. A network that watches may also protect. A system that predicts illness may allow a person to remain free.

But convenience has a direction. It asks us to stop deciding.

It chooses the road, the news, the music, the purchase, the answer and, eventually, the question.

Autonomy requires friction. It requires attention. It requires the right to be private, the right to be forgotten, the right to make an inefficient choice and the right to change without being permanently judged by an earlier version of oneself.

The telephone switched itself on.

A message appeared: YOUR DAILY SUMMARY IS READY.

Orwell looked at it for a long time. Then he placed the device inside a drawer.

He opened the window.

The city continued below him: sirens, distant voices, traffic, laughter and the faint electronic tones of messages arriving in a thousand rooms.

He had once imagined a future in which Big Brother watched everyone. The reality was more complicated.

Big Brother had been divided into governments, companies, algorithms, neighbours, employers, strangers and the obedient habits of the watched themselves.

There was no single face to hate. No single building to storm. No single switch to turn off.

But there were choices.

People could demand encryption. They could keep information on their own devices. They could limit what companies collected. They could protect medical records, strengthen laws, reject manipulative design and teach children that attention was a form of freedom.

They could enter a room without photographing it. They could have a conversation that left no record. They could read something chosen by curiosity rather than recommendation. They could allow a silence to remain empty. They could decide that not everything valuable needed to be measured.

Orwell returned to his notebook and wrote one final sentence:

Big Brother did not conquer the world. The world invited him in, one useful service at a time—but what has been invited may still be asked to leave.

He put down the pencil.

For the first time that day, no machine knew what he was thinking.