Every Version of You

Grace Chan’s Every Version of You compresses space and time, crafting a dystopian future that feels as real as it is unimaginable. Despite the story’s futuristic advancements, including a wholly immersive online realm named ‘Gaia’, the protagonist’s experiences of isolation and digital disillusionment feel familiar.

The characters socialise and work in the more beautiful utopia of Gaia. Here, speed, convenience, and the capacity and expectation for everything to be instantaneous work like an elixir, particularly for characters such as Navin who suffer debilitating chronic health conditions. However, the protagonist, Tao-Yi, grows increasingly detached from the digital realm. She mourns the enigmatic intimacies of existing in a body, something she struggles to translate to the people she loves as they rapidly abandon their physical selves and ‘upload’ entirely to Gaia. 

By extrapolating our relationship with digital media, Every Version of You highlights how quickly we normalise disconnection in a digitally saturated world. As technology enables personhood to, in some ways, expand across space and time, Chan asks what we may lose as we stretch our consciousness more thinly. Every Version of You is a gripping tale and a timely reminder of the value that’s to be gained from switching off and slowing down.