Distance Between Us

One week in October 2040. Three families. Three countries. The same restless world.In a Malawian village, Grace Banda plants by the advice of a voice in an old cracked phone while her daughter reaches for a future together with a friend four thousand miles away. In Columbus, Ohio, a forty-seven-year-old trucker watches the machines take the last of the road he loved, and tries to imagine what a man is for when the driving is done. In a country that would be sea without its pumps, a girl tutors a stranger's daughter across the planet and finds the century has quietly stitched their lives together.Only two of them will ever speak. All three are already inextricably bound — by the same drones crossing the same night sky, the same intelligences whispering in every ear, the same tender arithmetic of who gets held up and who has to let go.The Distance Between Us is a warm, hopeful novella of the near future: one ordinary week in which the whole world turns out to be a single household — held together, mostly, by people who will never know each other's names.This edition also includes The World of 2040: Fifty Developments That Reshaped Daily Life — a short nonfiction companion mapping the world the story lives in, and how the ongoing advance of AI may change ordinary daily life.