SnowdoniaArea: 2,132 km²
Time zone: GMT

The name “Snowdonia” traces its etymological root to the Old English, snaw dun, meaning “snow hill”. However, up to 50% of the national park is technically a rainforest, with heavy rainfall and high humidity.

Contemporary engineering reports comment on the Hardiman’s tendency towards “violent and uncontrollable motion.”

Exoskeleton iconography has become a core component of the cyberpunk genre, where exoskeletons are referred to as “linear frames” or “borgware”.

It is a quiet September morning on the saddle of Glyder Fach, Snowdonia, in North Wales. The sky is a flawless blue; the sunlight is bright and cold, casting an iridescent glimmer over the dew-slicked grass. Across the sloping contours of the mountain range, I see sheep grazing at improbable angles, and further afield, a band of wild horses makes a steady canter towards the mountain ridge. To my right is a bog, its surface barely broken by the wind that gently pushes across it. To my left, a dozen journalists pause in the crisp air – some taking long gulps of water, some snacking on protein bars. All of us are wearing robotic exoskeletons. I finish my energy drink, glance at the imposing summit ahead of me, and consider the level of mechanised assistance I would like my legs to have for the next section of the climb. Pressing a button at my hip, I start walking, my thighs vaulting forward with every step, as if I am being gently ushered up the hill by some omniscient engineer.

I am not, by any definition, an outdoorsy person: the first time I saw a cow up close was at 23, and through long eyelashes, it stared at me as if to recognise a kind of mutual misplacement. I have never owned a pair of Merrell boots, taken pleasure in the scent of manure, or understood why people spend their weekends on mountains, subjecting themselves to mud, bruises, and the grinding violence of shale underfoot. To me, the Great British Outdoors has long existed as a kind of screensaver: predictably cycling through its movements of green, blue and grey without requiring my participation.

So when I was sent an invitation to hike the Glyderau mountains in Wales using the Hypershell X Ultra, an exoskeleton partly powered by AI, I confess I accepted out of morbid curiosity rather than for any particular desire for Kendal Mint Cake. If the heavy lifting is being done by a robot, how bad could it be? Visiting the Hypershell website, I was intrigued by the Ballardian charge of the product imagery: a woman wearing polarised glasses and climbing a mountain, the filaments of the exoskeleton curlicuing around her thighs, as if in mid-transformation into a newly discovered species of influencer. Before this point, I had associated exoskeletons with remedial therapies, or all manner of dystopian nastiness; I had not assumed that those of us with a lazier and more sluggish disposition would ever be able to try one out. I accepted, made a quick beeline to Decathlon, and stocked up for what would be my first-ever mountain climb.

For all their futuristic posturing, robotic exoskeletons have a surprisingly long history. In 1890, Russian engineer Nicholas Yagn filed a patent on his “apparatus for facilitating walking, running, and jumping”, which connected the waist, thighs, and feet with bow springs. Thirty years later, American inventor Leslie Kelley introduced the “Pedomotor”, a network of artificial ligaments acting in parallel with the user’s muscles, powered by a steam engine worn on the back. Neither Yagn nor Kelley ever saw their models built, but the concept – a machine-powered support structure to aid in daily tasks – was too compelling to ignore. Over the following decades, the design would be refined multiple times, but until the mid-1960s, exoskeletons would remain a mostly speculative exercise.

Perhaps it was inevitable that exoskeletons, as a fusion of engineering, heavy industry and speculative thinking, would find their home in the military industrial complex. The excitable Industrial Revolution-era spirit of man-machine fusion that had powered Yagn’s Frankensteinian designs was meeting with the realities of a post-total war America. The goal was no longer about the potential of increased ambulatory movement, but brute force: a dream of stronger soldiers, longer marches, heavier loads. Starting in 1965, General Electric and the US Armed Forces spent six years building Hardiman, a hydraulic-powered robotic suit that looked to give the wearer superhuman strength, amplifying their lifting capabilities by a factor of 25, or up to 650kg. Taking six years to develop, the Hardiman was an exceptional feat of engineering for the time, yet would have proved entirely impractical in battle: it struggled to carry its own weight, and became reliant on a complex network of interlinking master-slave robotic systems. Humans were not permitted to wear the full suit, so prone was it to crushing whoever happened to be wearing it.

The Pitman, an exoskeleton designed during the late 1980s “for low intensity conflicts and counterterrorists”, fared little better. It was created by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico – perhaps better known as home of the Manhattan Project and the birthplace of the world’s first atomic bomb – and was pitched somewhere between a sarcophagus and a spacesuit. It was, in effect, a wearable tank, replete with sensors, virtual displays and built-in fibreglass armour. It certainly looked more battlefield-ready than the Hardiman, but any augmentation it might have provided for the soldier was cancelled out by its poor battery life and cumbersome design. Outside of the realm of medicine, where exoskeletons were required to do specific tasks and were thus easier to design, progress on exoskeletons remained sluggish until the new millennium, when lightweight battery packs, robust carbon fibre frames, and smart materials at last brought the dream of machine-augmented movement into reach.

As I check into my sleepy Welsh hotel and enter a conference room to be briefed on the following day’s climb, any dreams I have nursed about my transformation into a cyberpunk foot soldier are quickly laid to rest. The Hypershell X Ultra models don’t look like anything that might be used in medium-range combat; piled in their boxes, they look like climbing harnesses, or the kinds of complicated leather engineering one might see at Folsom Street Fair. My fears that the exoskeleton might, HAL-style, run me off a cliff or start kicking other journalists are replaced with a more troubling reality: that I might actually have to conquer this mountain, rather than smoothly traverse it. A man from RAW Adventures, the company organising our hike, shows us a simulation of the path we will be taking, which includes multiple vertiginous ascents and scrambles. As someone who has done this particular route many times, he explains that the terrain is “intermediate to challenging”. He is wearing shorts in autumn; I am wearing a bolo tie.

We then meet Toby, the soft-spoken content manager of Hypershell. Having flown in from their headquarters in Shenzhen a few days earlier, he greets us with the droll enthusiasm of someone who both believes in his product and understands the inherent ridiculousness of the phrase “AI-powered robotic exoskeleton”. He is quick to acknowledge any anxiety we might have around the Kickstarter-industrial-complex from which robotic exoskeletons emerged. He points to a photo he took at the airport on his flight over, a hoverboard with a giant red X next to it and starts to explain about what he terms the hoverboard crisis.

When hoverboards went on the market in the early 2010s, heralded by tech CEOs as the future of personal travel, they quickly developed an image problem. Not only were they ugly (as memorably christened by Dean Blunt on his 2015 album, “BBF” Hosted by DJ Escrow), but they were also exploding at inopportune moments. The badly-made-and-installed lithium batteries that powered their movement were regularly overheating, starting house fires, and badly injuring – or sometimes killing – their owners. Airlines and public spaces had responded with strict hoverboard bans, and what was once a dream of frictionless, low-energy travel now had a reputation for being extremely dangerous and, more importantly, terribly uncool.

The image is almost too good to be true; these emblems of Silicon Valley hubris literally exploding from the heat of their own lazy engineering. Hypershell, on the other hand, has built-in checks and balances to prevent this from occurring. Yes, the company was born on Kickstarter, but after raising over $2.1 million in funding from 2,600 backers, the company had sent out its prototypes within two years, to acclaim from contributors and industry figures alike. Blue Sky, China’s largest volunteer search and rescue company, as well as the American Hiking Society, had both recently partnered with Hypershell, and they had also recently won the IFA Innovation Award for their latest model. Such was their success that there existed a kind of exoskeleton rush: other companies in China had cottoned on to the Hypershell’s popularity and were constructing their own versions. Toby would later confide to me, with some exasperation, that these bootleg exoskeletons couldn’t hold a candle to the Hypershell’s market-leading energy output and state-of-the-art construction.

Four years on from its founding date, its design is fundamentally unchanged from its initial rendering: a harness worn around the waist, attached to the thighs with a carbon fibre “shell”. The exoskeleton can be operated manually or by smartphone, and there are a variety of settings, of which I would be sticking to two: hyper-mode, a more energised mode meant for ascending challenging terrain, and eco-mode for flatter land. “We also have fitness mode, which we added just for fun,” says Toby, grinning. “It fights against you.”

Photo by Clara Duan.

Welsh Mountain sheep are shorn once a year, in late spring, when they’re moved to lower ground for lambing. The rest of the time, they live in the hills. Photo by Clara Duan.

Fitting the Hypershell is simple but surprisingly intimate in its suspended eroticism, like that of a tailor or a doctor asking you to cough. Attaching the belt portion to the hips is easy enough, but adjusting it to the appropriate thigh level feels downright obscene. As I turn on the button on the right, I feel its weight redistribute through my pelvis, like my body is being gently rewritten. Its motors rest on each hip bone, whirring gently as I take my first steps. “Go test out your Hypershells!” encourages Toby.

What follows is the spectacle of a dozen journalists cavorting around the serpentine corridors of our hotel, as if in the throes of a particularly tech-minded dancing plague. On eco-mode, the effect is subtle: the motors encouragingly egg on my movements like stabilisers on a bike. Switching to hyper-mode is a different story: there is a feeling of co-authorship, not of walking but of being walked. I charge up the staircase as if I am riding an e-bike; I feel divinely authorised to pace down the custard-yellow hallways. Pensioners, the only other inhabitants of our hotel, look on, amused.

The next morning, we begin our ascent. The weather is uncharacteristically glorious: “One in a hundred days, it’s like this,” I am told. The only thing obscuring the vivid blue skies are the precipitous peaks of the mountains that we will soon be surmounting. I begin on eco-mode, maintaining a gentle tread that, even after an hour and a half of walking on a sharp upward incline, fails to break a sweat. After four kilometres, I feel proud, yet part of me can’t help but feel that this is cheating, that I have found a new, expensive way to not exercise.

In her book Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (1997), the philosopher Sadie Plant writes that technology, by diminishing the value of muscular labour, alters not only how we work but our very understanding of effort. “The rise of a vast range of new manufacturing and information-processing industries [has] combined to reduce the importance of the muscular strength and hormonal energies which were once given such high economic rewards,” she argues. For Plant, this shift endowed the digital space and its ensuing technological innovations with an inherent femininity. Hiking, like the pre-digital manual labour Plant describes, is meant to test the body’s limits, to exact proof of exertion from every toned calf muscle and blistered toe. The exoskeleton complicates that narrative: it feminises exertion, replaces it with collaboration, and undermines the notion that you can measure authenticity with suffering. The Hypershell might be cheating, but as I begin the next stage of the hike, I see its ideology less as transcending human limits as promised and more as a turbocharged form of self-care. Hovering between engineering and maternal nurturing, perhaps the fantasy of the Hypershell is being helped by something that doesn’t ask why you need help in the first place. Feeling its carbon fibre structure brush against my thighs, I am reminded of the closing lyrics of Laurie Anderson’s 1981 song
“O Superman”: “So hold me, Mom / In your long arms / Your petrochemical arms / Your military arms / In your electronic arms.”

During the hike, I think of someone in my life who had lost a years-long battle with chronic fatigue syndrome several months prior. For her, this technology could have been the difference between getting out of bed or not. In this light, the exoskeleton seems no stranger than a pacemaker or a hearing implant, things like good health, that we accept without a second thought. I start to feel queasy and frustrated about the application of this £1,700 exoskeleton, that the same technology that could help people in need will now be marketed as lifestyle optimisation, as something for the able-bodied to “push their limits”. The future never seems to go where it is needed the most.

As the views become more spectacular, the climb becomes more challenging, exoskeleton or no exoskeleton. Walkable pathways quickly transform into jagged scrambles; the weather alternates violently between oppressive heat to freezing cold. My feet start to ache from hours of uneven terrain, and I change my socks to stop the blisters that are already forming.

I set my Hypershell to its highest possible setting as I scale the steepest mountain face of the day. Stones dislodge under my weight, tumbling a clear path rolling down the incline as if mocking my ascent. In a flurry of frustration, I bolt up the mountain in hyper-mode, reaching the top before collapsing into the grass, panting. I belatedly realise that there’s still much more mountain to go, and as I sit and rehydrate, exhausted, a unit of army trainees marches past, each member about a decade younger than me, all without robotic assistance. I watch them move with effortless strength before grumpily switching my Hypershell back down to eco-mode and getting the job done.

The descent is another story altogether, because the motors seem uncertain whether to resist or restrain. I tread hard onto a particularly jagged patch of shale and nearly sprain my ankle while the Hypershell sits imperviously at my hips. The emotional logic of gravity seems not to apply; the technology has not been programmed for any direction other than up. The steeper the downward terrain, the more I feel as if my body and the prosthesis are locked into a polite argument about who is controlling whom. In this light, stripped of much practical use, I start to think of the Hypershell as a kind of mechanised couture. It is wearable, exquisitely engineered, expensive, beautiful even. But its beauty is impractical, conditional: like a pair of Alexander McQueen’s Armadillo heels, I have no desire to wear it outside of very specific, very ridiculous, situations. And yet, having reached the end of the hike, I remove the exoskeleton and feel a strange sorrow. My body suddenly feels heavier, primitive, full of idiotic blood and useless meat. Each step is lumbering; as I remove the portable battery pack, I feel that I have been unplugged. I am sweating, porous with exhaustion, and stubbornly unwilling to be extracted from my carbon-fibre carapace.

Later that night, the hotel bar becomes its own strange topography. Perhaps it is the steady flow of beers and wine, but my knees do not hurt as much as they should. A seating arrangement is set up; a table heaves with bread, Marmite butter, sausages with mustard to dip, and a plate of garlic fried mushrooms. And then, gloriously, the emergence of a microphone and a woman in a hot pink two-piece. She is from Louisiana, she says, has been in Wales for 22 years, and tonight she is here to sing. And so begins a two-hour set of full-throated karaoke covers, received with rapture by the exoskeleton party and shrugging indifference by the rest of the hotel. Her voice is enormous, and her song choices – mostly Eurodance tunes from mononymous Italian one-hit-wonders – do not require the level of go-for-broke soul she attacks them with. “You folks are so kind,” she says, gesturing to the rows of empty chairs in front of our table. “Normally, everyone is in bed by now.” For our finale, we are granted a rousing cover of Emile Sandé’s 2012 “Next to Me”, her voice all but dwarfing the tinny backing track.

As her voice cracks gloriously on the final “me”, I feel a flicker of something almost affectionate towards my exoskeleton, crumpled in a pile upstairs. Perhaps it is a problem of vision: our moral panic about robotic augmentation seems less to do with the technology itself than its refusal to conform to our rigid notions of what constitutes progress. What unsettles me is not how futuristic these devices are, but how quickly they feel ordinary, how easily they become part of our arsenal of tools. Unlike the woman on the Hypershell website, or the dreams of military exoskeletons past, my experience with exoskeletons was neither frictionless nor a signal of some imminent post-human destiny. If this is the future, it reveals itself not as transcendence or apocalypse, but as assistance: partial and a bit awkward. But sometimes, you’re just happy to have the reassurance of its presence, right there, next to you. .