Autocorrect
Your phone has started 'correcting' the people you text about — swapping the real person for whatever you typed. It thinks it's helping. It does not have an undo.
Play as
Graphic designer, chronic fast-texter, the sort who trusts autocomplete more than his own spelling. Now paying for a lifetime of not looking before he taps.
How it opens
You are Halvard Sten and you were texting your sister about your ex when your thumb fat-fingered his name — Jonah became Jonas — and the bar offered the fix and you tapped it without looking, the way you have tapped it ten thousand times.
His next message came in signed Jonas. Not a typo on his end. His contact photo is different. Your sister replies like Jonas is simply his name, has always been his name, and you sit there holding a phone that has quietly decided a word is more authoritative than a person.
You start typing his name again to check. The bar lights up with three suggestions before you've finished the first letter — and the middle one, highlighted, bold, the one your thumb goes to on muscle memory, is not anything you would have chosen.
Setting
Present day, an ordinary flagship phone after an update you don't remember approving. The keyboard's autocorrect now reaches past the message: type a person's name with an error and 'accept' the suggestion, and the person themselves is corrected to match the word you accepted. Predictive text learns your habits and starts offering corrections you didn't ask for. The suggestion bar sits above the keyboard, three options, always confident.
A branch can end when
- Halvard turns off predictive text and lives with whoever the last accepted suggestion left behind
- One correction reaches a name Halvard can no longer spell back to how it was
- The keyboard offers a suggestion for Halvard's own name and his thumb hovers