As part of the fourth IViR Science Fiction and Information Law competition, DigiCon will publish the stories of the finalists every week. The winning stories will be revealed during the CPDP 2026 conference in Brussels on 19-22 May.
The fourth shortlisted story is now live on DigiCon.
It is called “Arise” and was written by Bernt Hugenholtz.
It follows a man who has been paying a monthly subscription fee to spend time with his deceased mother for twelve years.
The technology is seamless. The company is ruthless. And somewhere in a cardboard box in the attic, the answer to how it all began is waiting to be found.
The featured image accompanying the story is from Better Images of AI, a non-profit library challenging the tired visual tropes of AI, robots, glowing brains, metal hands, and replacing them with images that reflect its actual material reality. DigiCon has been collaborating with them, and you can explore the full flipbook on their website.
