Verified Human

Bethan Rees has spent nineteen years telling the state who people are.

As a registrar in Swansea she has written down eleven thousand births, deaths and marriages, in blue-black ink that will outlast everyone in the room.

Then, on a Monday lunchtime in the car park, her phone tells her she is not a person. We couldn't verify you at this time. Without her Verified Human Mark she cannot register a birth, her bank wants to know who she is, and the only way to appeal is to explain herself, very politely, to a machine.

The machine is patient. It is sorry for the inconvenience. And when Bethan finally makes it tell her why, the answer is the last one she expected.

There is already one of her.

Her identical twin sister has come home after sixteen years, and has not told her. And as far as the system is concerned, only one of them can be real.

A funny, tender story about sisters, faces, and what it takes to prove you were there.