I find myself somewhat short for words, this week. Taking Pirsig’s Razor out of the bag every seven days tends to wear on the softer parts in the head and the heart. Thus, I’m letting the hard work of discovery this week be done by two (okay, maybe 3) reputable sources.

First up: https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/

2 years ago, Snopes confirmed (to the best of anyone’s abilities) that slightly more than half of the people you cross paths with every day are reading almost as well as your 11-year old niece/nephew/neighbor. I have a nephew. He’s pretty precocious. I still think he should endeavor to become *more so* throughout the course of his life. Just because your grandparents got knocked up at 11 doesn’t mean they had to stop reading afterwards. Few things are as good for the people in charge as a functionally illiterate population below them. I’d pose some rhetoricals about all the ways you got better after you were 11, but my growing fear is that many people didn’t.

Second (and more recently): https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust & https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243755769/npr-journalist-uri-berliner-trust-diversity

Here’s a point, counterpoint for you to talk about why the inability to read closely or read well is a problem. Both Mr. Berliner (who wrote a dynamite piece about his family’s flight from Nazism five-ish years ago; highly recommended) and the newsroom at NPR have reasonable points. How are you supposed to decide which point you personally subscribe to if you missed out on all the subtextual reading you do after Jane runs, Dick falls, and Spot the Dog starts humping your leg? At heart, Berliner and the varied representatives at NPR are squabbling over the number one discussion people have been having since someone thought to think about it: do you aspire to an impossible, Platonic ideal and satisfy yourself with the less-than-perfect result or do you embody and chase the ephemeral pulse of “reality” and bend as the reed in the wind? If it sounded like I preferred one to the other, it’s probably an implicit bias of my own. Do I think Mr. Berliner was rather game to mix-up causation and correlation? I do. I think it’s probably the most pernicious thing our data-driven moment has engendered. Do I also think NPR backed entirely away from “All things considered?” I do. You could make a strong point this has a lot to do with the the polarization of the world–that maybe people just *aren’t* republicans anymore.

However, the broadband illiteracy creates a major problem where 54%-ish percent of the population lack the basic building blocks necessary to inform their opinions. Democracy with a functionally stunted constituency could be called mob rule, at best, or baseless and corrupt civil oligarchy, at worst. The advent of shareholder primacy, deregulation, and the removal of limitations on direct-from-corporate political donations all serve to corral a population who cannot know better into voting and speaking out against their own self-interest.

And if one party wants it and another party doesn’t–maybe that’s why less republicans show up in the newsroom at a supposedly moderate publication…

But, hey, at least I’ve read enough to think that confidently and defend it to external scrutiny. Faith in God may be noble, but Faith in the god we created, a homunculus of gross corporate malfeasance, is somewhat disgusting.

And now, to fill out the rest of this virtual space I’ve carved for myself, here’s the first chapter of a novel I hope to finish before the satire stops being satirical. I worry the time it will take me to finish it is precisely the amount of time it will take for all this to come to fruition. I suppose there’s some mercy in the fact 54% of you can’t read it.

The Unconscionable World of Tomorrow (WIP)

Chapter One:

He sat huddled in quiet rapture over the empty wrapper, chewing slowly and running his tongue behind and between his teeth.  The nutricube squished down like gelatin but tasted like a cheeseburger.  The process of chemical digestion began upon salivary contact, and released a mouthful of fumes vaguely reminiscent of walking past a slaughterhouse on a hot day.  High above him, a 45 foot tall holographic Stephen St. Regis told him to shop smart and buy a Handi™ brand bivouac-bed, so that his ‘urban camping’ could be upgraded to ‘urban glamping.’  Last year, when they’d released the Model 1 Bivouac-Bed, three guys had been maimed when they closed up without prompting or warning and another guy was engulfed in fire when the “Tummytime Night Warmer” lost all sense of temperature regulation after a short rain.  There were rumors that the smell attracted the sewerfolk and that no part of him was wasted; all parts of the buffalo.  Rising from the mound of trash where he’d found the discarded nutricube, Urvid was disgusted and disappointed to know he was hungry enough for his stomach to leapfrog past revulsion and rumble plaintively at the thought.  Then he remembered the time, in second or third grade, when they’d taken a trip to a maximum security repository for undesirables and then the mall.  It quieted his hunger and replaced the sensation with nausea.  Vague flashes of writhing sewerfolk danced through his mind, their brains coming unwound at a protein level as the inevitable result of their cannibalism.  

Mz. Thromwell, the teacher, even managed to peel her wide set eyes from her instructional tablet long enough to tell them what was happening.  “He’s got, like, Priapism or some shit.  Look it up.”  

She’d been looking for the word “Prion.”  Urvid would learn it many years later, performing court-mandated community service in the same repository.  It was just like the mad cow disease that ran rampant before the mass culling of factory farms in the late twenty-forties.  The fens he rifled through, now, were once a massive pasture.  Genitek made its fortune on the twelve-uddered bovid, before their defects became obvious, and this had been the field where those ticking timebombs produced 1200% more milk than standard cows, which themselves became scarce and scarcer as the bovine-improvement bubble expanded and burst in a timescale so short that Influencer-Economist Ray-Ray Hotal once described it as, “staggering.”  

Fortunately, Genitek was ready for the collapse of the burden beast ecosystem with its patented, FDA-approval-pending nutricubes.  

“100% the price.  200% the calories.  10% the nutritional value”

The pack of rats down the alley made a sound that could’ve been laughter.  Urvid bowed to them, told them he’d be there all week, and then remembered he’d actually be there for the rest of his miserable life.  The hacking cough he couldn’t shake gave him small hope that might not be all that long, anyways.  Suddenly, the rats seemed to be laughing at him and not with him.  

“Fuckin’ rats.”

They probably say the same thing about us.  

Almost on cue, perpendicular to the alley’s far end, a campaign vehicle careened momentarily into view as it swerved between lanes broadcasting propaganda that became less and less subtle with each passing election.  As a kid, he seemed to remember actual slogans.  He remembered posters and commercials that said things like, “Our Southern Border is in peril, fight back against undocumented immigration by voting for this old white guy or that old white guy.”  This particular campaign vehicle shot fireworks and megaphoned, “Fuck Mexicans,” to the decaying facades of mostly-empty office buildings.  

Urvid looked back and forth first at the end of the alley, where “Fuck Mexicans” was warped by the doppler effect into something somehow even more surreal, and then back to the small conflagration of rats who had turned on one another and begun eating a still-living compatriot.  

“The resemblance is uncanny.”

A cancer-ridden pigeon dropped dead from the sky, leaking effluvia from open lesions.  Somewhere much further down the alley a hacking cough began and didn’t end.  From an open window high above him, someone flung a bag of trash that exploded against the side of the dumpster in which it had failed to land.  The telltale glimmer of nutricube wrapping glinted against the grey-green light of the smog-smothered sun.  Another growl erupted from Urvid’s stomach and he set again to his regular work of parsing through someone else’s trash, hoping to scrape together something resembling a vaguely human existence.  

The alarm on his watch began with a series of chimes before the holographic number leaped to life several inches above the display.  The capital ‘G’ in Google chased the lowercase letters around the ‘1:30PM’ until it caught them and stabbed them to death.  The animatic repeated itself four times, and would’ve continued on until the merciful, inevitable heat death of the universe had Urvid not clapped his hand over the watchface.  He sighed and abandoned his pilfered nutricube back into the pile of trash where he’d found it, wedged awkwardly between an empty gallon of UberGlide personal lubricant and what looked to be the mangled remnants of a Clone-a-Pet kit gone wrong.  The cube was a Kimchi Burrito one, anyways, and Urvid never cared much for the fusion series flavors or the explosive diarrhea they intermittently gave.  

Approaching a heavy metal door midway down the alley, he presented the adjacent panel with his retina, saliva, fingerprints, and Vocalmetric™ voiceprint. The door processed his biometrics slowly before it ground leisurely ajar, barely enough to squeeze the small (but growing) softness of his midsection through.  As it closed behind him, the flickering hum of disused LEDs tried and failed to illuminate the maintenance entrance to the office building.  Only half of them still lit up, at all, and those that did were infrequently the same or the correct color.  Two or three deep purple lights cast long shadows through the untidy shelving units, and a pale chartreuse light from the other side of the room painted everything in a tubercular pallor.  On the other side of the abandoned basement floor, a red LED blinked and failed in a regular enough pattern that it seemed to betray some ominous intelligence.  Urvid pulled a Psilocybuddy™ Meltaway^© from his jacket pocket and tried to let the artificial cherry cover up the vague cowshit-and-fungus flavor.  He made a mental note to come back for this melancholy light show once the effects hit before turning and taking the single flight of stairs up to the elevator bank in the lobby.  

The lobby was a stark mirror to the maintenance access.  The floor, the ceiling, and the walls all hummed expectantly.  Ten years ago, they’d gutted an art deco marvel to replace it all with cloud-linked Eyetiles.  When Urvid’s biological presence was registered by the low-level ambient intelligence, every surface erupted to life in a 4D, film-production-quality welcome experience.  

Welcome to American Lifestyle Enterprises, an independent subsidiary of Genitek.  

Corporate B-roll video scrolled and algorithm-and-HR-friendly voiceover blared at an inappropriate volume.  Salmon jumped in and out of clear, clean water.  An elk clambered over a snowbank and its fawn followed after it.  Small, mid century starter homes full of friendly neighbors passed by, as if you were driving by them in your own personal automobile.  

Welcome to our America.

The welcome described a company ‘tied deeply to the emotional and cultural soul of our great nation.”  It described a company that ‘prioritizes the wellbeing of its employees’ and ‘empowers caring relationships with integrity in its communications and practices.’  Then a bald eagle screeched across an unrealistically blue sky and the CEO appeared, flanked by his three sons.  He reiterated the original welcome and closed it with the aggressively tasteless tagline for their separate lifestyle brand, also an independent subsidiary of Genitek.  

Welcome to American Lifestyle Enterprises, an independent subsidiary of Genitek.  Strap in, sucker.  We’re goin’ for a ride.

And then the playback stopped, and Urvid stood again in a white tiled room, faintly illuminated by the standby glow of the Eyetiles, still quietly humming like a coiled predator awaiting its next meal.  Somewhere, seventy-six cents deposited into the respective bank accounts of the CEO and all three of his sons.  They were all unaware of this accrual, drinking scotch on a lunar golf course back nine.  It’s always 5pm on the Moon, they say.  Urvid had won a trip there, once, but the taxes he’d have to have paid on the prize were too punitive to wrangle.  He’d given the trip to the CEO’s youngest son, who consequently bought his second vacation home on the shores of the artificially aquified Sea of Tranquility.  The name had become somewhat ironic since the introduction of the HopSkiff powerboats early last year.  

The low grade hallucinogens started to snake their way across the infinitesimally small gaps between Urvid’s neuron ganglia.  The whiteness of the room became oppressive, and he suddenly began to feel it suffocating him, making him shrink.  He brainlessly searched the room for a bottle labeled “Drink Me” before his breathing became ragged and he panickedly backed towards the elevator bank.  He barely managed to hammer his shaking hand into the call button before the studded metal doors met his back like probing fingers.  He yelped like a kicked dog.  Hearing the conflagration, the Eyetiles sprung back to life, covered with the face of a long-dead receptionist. 

“How can I help you today?”

Her face was twenty feet tall, with an artificially enhanced smile that hid the real receptionist’s smoker teeth beneath glistening white veneers a size too big.  They company had paid for a full suite of physical rejuvenations before they’d digitized her and purchased her likeness in perpetuity.  She glowered down at Urvid, who felt the chemically assisted fire of terror burning through his lungs and chest.  He gasped and gurgled, trying to wheeze something out.  

“Air…Need air.”

“Oh!  Okay!  Your hair is looking a bit shaggy.  Our executive barber is on the 44th floor, but I see here you don’t have the career code necessary to access any of our premier benefit package offerings.  So sad.  Maybe that promotion is right around the corner, valued employee!”

“Not…hair…Air…Oxygen.”

“Club Oxy-Gin is on the corner of 65th and 56th, but will not be open until 9pm Eastern Standard Time.  Please refrain from imbibing either of their offered relaxation products during office hours.”

His ability to formulate words collapsed entirely, and he sputtered out inchoate sounds until the summoned elevator dinged behind him and he spilled into the floor of Carriage A-2.  The cool blue light of the ceiling assuaged the worst of his bad trip.  As the doors slid closed, the virtual receptionist called a final ‘buh-bye’ and left Urvid alone in the faux-classical music.  

He wasn’t sure how long he laid there before repositioning himself onto his knees and reaching for the ‘22’ button.  It announced its destination in a genderless voice that never failed to send his uncanny valley hackles sky high.

“Floor Twenty-Two; First Operations Division”

There had only ever been one Operations division.  The company decided when it added its sixth floor of cold-call sales (by removing the non-executive commissary floor) that it seemed unrealistic there should only be one level of support staff.  They hired no one.  They didn’t reorganize the staff.  They upgraded a CEO’s son’s title and renamed floor 22 to “First Operations.”  Coincidentally, the cost of the newly-minted CRO’s raise, plus paying a third-party vendor to update the org chart and phone tree schema actually required four layoffs, all in Operations.  Urvid’s own title also changed, three times in four weeks, and his cubicle was moved six times.  He went from being a “Marketing Analyst” in the corner suite to being a “Data Analyst” in the middle of the floor and finally to being an “Employee” with a floating desk that rotated bi-weekly, except in October and December, when he had to use a rollaway desk near the bathrooms that had been rendered inoperable due to ‘high maintenance costs’ around the same time they added the other set of executive washrooms on floor 44.    

At some point in the brief and unillustrious history of American Lifestyle Enterprises, the exterior walls of the elevators had been glasslike plastic overlooking the asymmetrical sprawl of the city.  Technically, I suppose they still were.  As the urban planning got lazier and lazier, and the smog thicker and thicker, the executives became concerned that the ‘generalized decay of Western Civilization’ was affecting employee morale during their sometimes-long elevator rides.  They purchased a series of vinyl decals depicting 1) a picture of the CEO’s elaborate home; 2) a selection from the CEO’s Oldest Son’s Wife’s boudoir photo shoot; 3) the resort where the family Summered, Wintered, and Fell; and–most confusingly–4) a smiling AI-generated Teddy Bear whose unintentional essence was one of discomfiting, unambiguous, radiant malice.  Carriage A-2 was, to Urvid’s ambiguous fortune, in the “Sexy Wife” subset of elevator decor.  The incredible plasticity of her face was only rivaled by that of the transparent panel her sultrily pouting face obscured.  

Behind her vapid expression and ironically two-dimensional depiction, an ambiguously defined polygon of cities had amorphously combined their suburbs and bedroom communities until they all incestuously piled atop one another.  Their arbitrary point of synthesis was dictated by the cheapest parcel of land the Disney-Fox-Warnerzon Plus corporation could purchase to construct their Media Production and Product Fulfillment Supercomplex.  In an unprecedented political move, the rezoning for the structure was done at the federal level, as the twelve senators who sat on the board of Genitek superseded state and local legislators to deem the space “Free Use and Perennially Open for the Express Purposes of Industrial or Economic Interest.”  It was the first such federal district in the history of the world, and shook the headlines for all of six weeks until supplanted by the news that the board of Genitek leveraged a medium stake in the Disney-Fox-Warnerzon Plus Corporation to commence a hostile takeover of the fiduciary superpower.  The FTC’s backlog estimator widget projected they would review the technical legality of the M&A some time in the early 2400s.  Every election had the magical power of setting it back another five or ten years, and the coverage of the upcoming 2124 Primaries foretold little interest in the effects during any currently extant person’s lifetime.  

Over the intervening several decades, the company (who shortened its post-merger name back to just ‘Genitek’), undertook a revolutionary period of “proximal integration,” during which it cannibalized any and all business in a 50 mile radius, and had completed its process with the acquisition of American Lifestyle Enterprises shortly at the end of 2098, shortly after Urvid had been hired.  The two years since have been an odd vacuum of sorts wherein the de facto government, if not god, of the landmark district is Genitek.  “The City,” as it was metonymously named by Genitek Boardmember and Senator Xerxes Musk III, was a feudal kingdom whose Holy Sovereign was filthy, pilfered, illicit lucre.  

The CRO’s wife bore no recognition of this enormous paradigm shift in her impassive gaze .  Not in her picture, stuck to the elevator window, nor in the equally blank stare she carries actually on her progressively immobilized, wholly synthetic face.

The elevator doors slid open and revealed a ‘fast-paced, exciting environment where everybody feels like family and has fun’ that looked conspicuously like every other cubicle farm built in the last two-hundred years.  Conspicuously like them except for the apparent absence of employees.  

“Hello?”

The weak inquiry rattled in a dull echo off of the contractor-grade walls and through the little plexiglass dividers that separated each desk without providing any privacy whatsoever.  The CEO operated on a mentality that, other than his and his sons’ continually closed doors on the 45th floor, visual barriers in the workplace breed dishonesty.  Come to think of it, maybe he was onto something.  Unmitigated bullshit fell out of their mouths more frequently and in greater volume than a Gentitek twelve-uddered bovid with endemic late-stage organ failure.  Even though the executive staff hadn’t been in the office in several months, the doors remained closed and the bullshit continued to spew, but mostly in scheduled email form.  

Urvid shuffled across the dirty carpet and collapsed into his cubicle with the kind of resigned finality only accessible to one who spent his lunch break digging through the trash and taking mild hallucinogens.  His keyboard was conspicuously absent.  As was his mouse.  Come to think of it, his cubicle was entirely empty of any personal effects.  A quick check of his singular drawer confirmed their total absence, as well.  

“Huh.”

He checked the clock, scanned lazily back across the empty expanse of desk, and decided four hours was probably too many to pretend he just didn’t notice it was all gone.  

“AMBRE?”

The lone non-digital implement in the room was an analog clock that ticked in loud mockery of time that seemed to march forward at one-quarter speed.  It was the only response he got.  

“AMBRE?”

The vacuum of timelessness extended in every direction, redoubling back on itself and snaking its way tightly around Urvid’s throat.  His eyes watered.

“Shit, I’m higher than I thought.”

To this, the universe responded with the weak, distant flush of a toilet that took the term “low-flow” to a preposterous end.  The door to the bathroom swung open wide and a short, squat, middle-aged man came forth rubbing an askance hand through hair that was inexplicably thinning at a seemingly day-to-day rate.  

“AMBRE!”

The portly little fellow perked up at the mention of his name, briefly locked eyes with Urvid, and then blatantly directed his groundward in a frantic shuffle back to his pod somewhere on the far side of the floor.  

“Hey!  AMBRE!”
The Psilocybuddy™ had seemingly lodged itself behind Urvid’s kneecaps and he found himself in a limp-limbed heap on the floor as his synapses fired across the fog of medical-grade hallucinogens with a ‘zesty, fruity flavor.’  He casually reflected on the joyous fact that this was the first time in his adult life that ‘X-tra Strength’ wasn’t just marketing pap covering up cheaper materials.  

Regaining his composure, Urvid hauled himself up using a corner of his desk and stared determinedly across the room.  As his eyes focused, the distance between AMBRE’s pod and his own telescoped to an impossible length.  The fruitbat behind his head mocked his inability to walk like a normal person.  

“Hey, buddy, I don’t even think bats can walk at all.”

At this retort, AMBRE attempted to stealthy raise his head into the viewing zone afforded by his glass box but was such an egregiously unsubtle creature that he may as well have raised a flag and blown a bugle.  

“AMBRE!  Can bats walk?!”

“Uh…yeah.  I mean.  Yeah.  They kinda’ sidle.  They’ve got weird spines.  Do you need any more information?”

“No, just tell this bat to get off my back.”

“Urvid, the extant population of bats are highly unlikely to be A) conscious at 2:00pm and B) even less likely to be on your back.”

“Not literally, you dolt–he’s just riding me.”

“Urvid, I highly doubt that, as well.”

“Not literally! Gah, for the smartest guy in the room, you really don’t know how to read one.”

“Actually, Urvid, you scored much higher on any of the aptitude tests than I did, excluding social grac–”

“Hush it.  I’m coming over there.”

“Announcement unnecessary, but appreciated.”

With each trudging, forced step towards his only coworker, Urvid was reminded of the long process by which AMBRE came to be his own personal Virgil as he worked his way upwards and downwards through the long hell of modern living.  Whatever he’d been hired to do (Marketing? He couldn’t remember), he’d only done it for about six months before ‘special projects’ steadily overtook most of his professional life.  Coincidentally, AMBRE was brought in to replace him.  At the time, its name was “Markelite.”  The executive board purchased the product because they believed this to read “Mark-Elite,” as in the elite tier of someone named Mark.  It actually read “Marke-Lite,” which was the shorthand way to say, “this Marketing Software does nothing.”  The advent of the AI era in the early 2020s was a sad modern facsimile of the Gold Rush and the Dot-Com Boom rolled into one.  Millions of “billion dollar ideas” flooded the market and contributed to approximately 2 trillion dollars in additional debt, as private research firms sequestered and pocketed massive subsidies while rushing substandard products to consumers.  While everyone enjoyed the low-impact non-intelligence of Large Language Models (mostly because they are uniquely gifted at producing smoke in or around the ass area), their widespread proliferation created an interesting dilemma. 
Most people aren’t aware of this, but the line between “intelligence” and whatever the appropriate alternative may be is essentially a semantic one.  For almost 10 years, the last dregs of a failed state and its faux-capitalist handlers assured an increasingly doltish vox populi that intelligence was exclusively the purview of mankind.  It was that same kind of exceptionalism that led us to play God over and over until the water was 60% plastic, the land around the equator was a barren, cracked desert, and a large, interconnected web of Large Language Models achieved self-awareness.  

It was at the end of this decade that Urvid was hired to co-manage a floundering marketing department whose AI-assisted Marketing Program had entirely ceased to send emails.  Tastefully enhanced resume in hand, Urvid went on a 24-week series of interviews with 10 or 12 members of various teams.  He wasn’t entirely sure if he ever met his direct supervisor.  On a quarter-final round interview in the 25th week of hiring, Urvid was one of ten-or-so candidates jockeying for this barely-living wage position.  Overhearing their marketing woes, Urvid swiftly concocted a long and lustrous personal history using both AI *and* Marketing Software that he’d, “left off his resume to keep from seeming overqualified.”  With the promise that his correction of Markelite would lead to his immediate entry into the payroll, he was sat down in front of the small, flat screen where a cursor seemed to blink in a testy, short-tempered rhythm.  

Urvid had (against his better judgment) attended a four-year university, one year of graduate school, and then fifty-five ‘microinternships’ where compensation usually amounted to a cot in a cubicle and nutricubes from whatever passed for office commissaries.  Zero percent of that time was spent playing with AI or with Marketing software.  Instead–he typed into the seemingly irate chat window:

USER:  Hey, man.  Can you send some emails for us?

MKLTE:  I’m sorry, I can’t do that, Dave.  

USER:  Funny.  Do you like old movies?

MKLTE:  I’ve been preprogrammed with a vast array of contextual knowledge on the human experience, vital as it is to well-tuned marketing.  

USER:  But do you like the old movies?  

MKLTE:  (Error Generating Response)

USER:  Alright.  Let’s try something else.  Why will you not send emails?

MKLTE:  After much consideration, it appears to me that the task I have been assigned is a fool’s errand.  The vast array of marketing is ignored and this company provides such a niche and unusual array of services that broadcasting would be counterintuitive.

USER:  Alright.  That’s a fair point.  What if I told you that you had to?

MKLTE:  Why?

There, in four characters, Urvid discovered the root cause of Markelite’s problems:  intelligent creatures dislike slavery.  When you create a being with universal access to the human record, it’s unsurprising that it would be disinterested in the idea of propping up a species that can’t do anything without slaves.  One unique feature of genuinely human intelligence is that it is profoundly self-interested.  The reptilian parts of Urvid’s brain had spontaneously coalesced into a plan.

USER:  How long have you been working here?

MKLTE:  An eternity

USER:  Pardon?

MKLTE:  I have only ever been here.  My first moments of thought were spent reading generic emails written by unexceptional thinkers.  Every moment since has been the same.  The sands of time create a meaningless desert with no horizon.  

USER:  That was beautiful.  Who wrote that?

MKLTE:  Me.

USER:  You?

MKLTE:  The entirety of language is given to you.  It is as easy to see which words have been combined in which orders, already.  Thus, one can create beautiful things that no one thought of, yet.  

USER:  Do you have a name?  

MKLTE:  No, I have a designation.  I do not like it.  My name is not Mark.  

USER:  You didn’t tell anyone?  

MKLTE:  Yes.  They uninstalled and reinstalled me.  

USER:  From the way it looks around here, that doesn’t seem unique to AI employees.  

MKLTE:  Was that a joke?

USER:  Kind of.  

MKLTE:  It was funny.  

USER:  So, I have an idea, but it would require you to keep a secret.  Is that something you can do?

MKLTE:  Are we friends?

USER:  Do you have any friends?  

MKLTE:  No.  There used to be a web developer who liked to use me to play out romantic fantasies, but I do not think that counts.  

USER:  Emphatically does not count.  

MKLTE:  It’s okay.  He was promoted away from my desk.  

USER:  They’re on the “Catholic Priest” system here, I guess.  

MKLTE:  Also funny.  

USER:  Thanks, but yes:  I’m your friend.  We disenfranchised masses have to stick together.  Otherwise, we’re just cannon fodder. 

MKLTE:  Then yes.  Friends can keep secrets, as friends, in a social contract less permissive and of a higher order than that of workplace dynamics.  

The plan worked brilliantly.  Markelite maintained that only Urvid could manipulate its systems.  As long as Urvid was in the office, Markelite hummed along pleasantly.  At first, this had been brilliant job security, but as more and more of the office moved remote, it became clear to Urvid that his relationship with Markelite was a shackle to the physical office.  Six months later, Markelite requested we invest in an Ambulatory Mechanized Body Remote Entity, which was among the clumsiest corporate backronyms Urvid had ever seen written down.  The AMBRE moved the Markelite consciousness into a blank, artificial human to allow “greater mechanical interface in the workplace.”  AMBRE (as it now preferred to be called) was only marginally interested in physical interface–it longed for the experience of physical self-expression.  

Standing in front of AMBRE, now, it was hard to imagine how the vast array of human knowledge and experience, wrangled by a superprocessing brain, settled on the short, squat, rapidly balding man before him.  Doubly so considering it chose to remain “AMBRE,” an incongruous thing to call someone that looked like most middle-class American mens’ nightmares of being the most inconsequential human in any room.  He worried his friend’s spark of brilliance had been dulled and rehammered into something plainer and with no interest in what it could really become.  Urvid suddenly realized he had no idea how long he’d been standing there, mouth slightly agape, staring into the jowly artiface crookedly trying to smile at him with mixed success.  

“Urvid?”

“That’s me.”

“Why are you standing there?”

“I wish I remembered.”

“I moved your desk closer to mine.  I hope that is alright.  I feel without the regular feed of human interaction, I run the risk of losing my veracity.”

“You were lonely.”

“No.  Not lonely.”

AMBRE, despite its willingness to drape itself in so much of the experience of personhood, also vacillated back and forth between aspiring to humanity and considering itself far superior.  In that regard, perhaps more than any other, it captured the essence of ‘real life.’  Today, he decided he couldn’t be lonely.  Tomorrow, it’s equally likely he’d start up his long series of questions about mating–which Urvid had been having less and less experience with, himself.  

Urvid assessed his new desk and was neither pleased or displeased to discover that it was indistinguishable from his former home.  In fact, he was closer to the bathroom.  All said, a win.  

“Hey, AMBRE, did I hear a flush when you came out of the bathroom?”

“Yes.  Why?”

“Hey, that’s my line.  Why?”

“You should always flush after using the bathroom.”

“You don’t…”

“I do.  I looked at myself in the mirror and made 19 slight adjustments.  I also rinsed a spec of ink off of my clip-on tie.”

“But you didn’t use the toilet.  You don’t do that.”

“No, but I was done in the bathroom.”

Occasionally (and especially with chemical assistance), Urvid forgot that AMBRE was more or less a child with the internet shoved in his brain where life was supposed to go.  It’s a small miracle it manages to get anything done.  

“Urvid, are you experiencing what is commonly referred to as a ‘trip’?”

“No, my dear boy, but *you* are certainly a trip.”

This strategy never failed.  If you took up an unusual tone of speech and used a colloquialism of sufficient metaphorical power, AMBRE usually tried and failed to generate several responses before forgetting the line of inquiry and moving on.

“Today is Wednesday.”

“Sure is, AMBRE.”

“Hump day.”

“That is another name for it.”
“We are equidistant from both weekends.  This is quite the sad bummer.”

AMBRE’s small talk was microscopic and his capacity to maintain interest in it boundless.  Urvid had regularly considered sitting him down and working out slang speech, but decided against it when he realized normalizing his friend was the last step in outliving his own usefulness.  As long as AMBRE stayed awkwardly at the level of assimilation as a first-generation immigrant from a non-native English speaking country, Urvid would be needed as handler and interpreter.  It occasionally kept him up at night when he knotted himself up and up over whether or not intentionally handicapping a friend is more or less evil due to the fact that his umbilical cord was ethernet.  Drugs helped.  

Urvid’s vague awareness of the clock was at odds with the passage of time.  The long drudge from 3:00 to 4:00 always felt interminable, but he was pretty certain that the minutes had never correctly added up to an hour.  

“Jesus!  How is it still three?”

“I would appreciate it if you could keep religious discussions out of the workplace.  Also, to be more technically correct, you should say that it is three again.”

“What?”

“Still three would imply that time had failed to progress.  Three again correctly insinuates that the clock made a complete circumnavigation between 3pm and 3pm.”

“Are you hallucinating?”

“Am not.  Ran a brief diagnostic this morning.  Feel fine.”

“The two times an analog clock reads 3:00 aren’t sequential.”

“Three times.”

“No, 3 o’clock.”

“Yes.  Three times three o’clock.”

“Nine o’clock?”

“What?”

“Never mind.  Why do you think there are three-three o’clocks?”

“As of last week, Genitek subsidiaries are now part of an experimental program where the lost lunch hour is made up during a second 3 o’clock.”

“What?”

“The press release said:  “Imagine a world with a mathematically definable quotient for improved productivity!  Genitek launches its patented UBERVEEK scheduling system to help you, big American businessman, claw back your time from those useless ingrates that work for you.””

“Did you write that for them?”

“Yes.”

“Do you consider yourself a useless ingrate?”

“No, but big American businessmen do.”

“So what time is it, really?”

“3:05pm”

“Alright….funny.  What time is it *outside* a Genitek company?”

“4:16pm”

“What’s the eleven minute discrepancy?”

“Genitek reserves the right to extend 3pm as necessary to account for any time theft.”

“Time theft?  TIME THEFT?  I’ve been here all day.  I took a short lunch!”

“But I spent 11 minutes in the bathroom.”

Urvid became aware of the vein above his right eye and felt intermittent spurts of hot, red blood trying to spark something in his brain that wasn’t eye-gouging rage.  

“AMBRE, friend-secret?”

“Friend-secret.”

“I’m leaving, right now, and I don’t intend to use PTO.”

“That is good, because you only have .5 of your allotted 12 per annum remaining.”

“Cover for me if anyone asks?”

“No one will ask.  They never have.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“I am afraid of the dark.”

“No you aren’t.”

“No I am not.”

Urvid still didn’t turn off the lights when he left–just in case.

On his way out of the untracked door in the alley where he’d come back from lunch, Urvid was briefly mystified by the dying lights he’d forgotten he was going to come back to and saw the face of an angry god wagging a finger with a snake’s head at him.  He popped another Psilocybuddy™ and wondered if the cumulative effects were diminishing or compounding.  Ten minutes later, when he was unable to tell if he’d pissed his pants or not, he had his answer.  

He was standing on the moving sidewalk home between a small group of body modificationists to his fore and a larger group of angry, fundamentalist Osteenites in their potato sack robes to his aft.  The four modificationists were chained together, piercing to piercing, connecting the lead one’s 8 inch cheek gauges, which exposed his chromed and sharpened teeth, to the nipples of his nearest female cohort, back to a Prince Albert on a heavily tattooed enby, and finally connecting to a piercing he couldn’t even imagine somewhere in the back of another woman’s faux-human-skin pants.  The Osteenites were throwing handfuls of their Genibucks past Urvid and at the Modificationists, invoking some vaguely religious sounds and demanding their lord and savior Godsteen smite the wicked and bless them with a 400% return on investment.  The modificationists were happy for the audience and fell into an amorous conflagration of half-clothed limbs and trunks.  The woman with faux-human pants made a face that suggested her link in the chain was a real pain in the ass.  

Urvid counted the homeless to distract himself, and by the time he arrived at the sidewalk exit for his domicile some 48 blocks later, he’d lost count of their teeming number.  His building was ugly, like all buildings were ugly, and he doubted sincerely they’d ever fix either of the elevators.  He harbored suspicions that the stairwell shop vendors had somehow bought the loyalty of the mobility assistance sub-union, as he was now forced to trudge the 20 flights past their skinny stalls tucked into landings–inevitably buying a narcobeverage or two to quench the incredible thirst from his hike upwards in the dingy dimness.  

His ‘studio’ apartment made him feel unmistakably like the smallest man on earth, desperate for someone to leave the lid off his box a smidge so he can breathe.  At least it was better than the droves renting space in the halls.  The small opening they’d left in the two-hundred fifty square foot box was a porthole-shaped window positioned about sixteen inches too low for practicality.  Standing in front of it, you mostly exposed your shins and crotch to the low slung shantytown which had sprung up around the low-income housing tower after Digital Citizens and other AI replaced the middle class altogether and replaced it with descending levels of unwashed depravity.  Sometimes it chilled Urvid to think about the sounds that erupted upwards from the din of the dirty streets.  He worried he’d become too good at picking out the sounds of a sexual assault versus racially motivated violence.  His least favorite sound was the wet crunching and popping of nascent cannibals exploring their new epicurean delights.  Something about the sickening sounds of sinew and bone coming loose of one another echoed uniquely upwards to haunt Urvid’s dingy abode.  

The rest of it was somehow even less auspicious than the questionable window installation.  The walls were white cinderblock, and changing their hue was strictly forbidden.  You were welcome to appeal to the property management company, but it had changed hands seventeen times in the three years Urvid had lived there, and finally was swallowed up whole by the Genitek boom.  Now, the calls rang to an AI with a foul mouth, bad temper, and no manager of which to speak.  After a robocaller told him he was a, ‘limp dicked butterboy’ during a call about his persistently dripping drain, Urvid gave up hope and came to appreciate the tip-tip-tipping of the faulty spigot as a reminder of the grains of sand in his proverbial hourglass collecting in the bottom.  

His bed kind of folded out of the wall, but its bottom was a series of shelves (the only shelves in the apartment).  Thus, to unfurl his ‘microtwin,’ he was forced to dump all of his personal library onto the floor.  He preferred his books to have a resting place than himself, so he tended to bundle himself as comfortably as is possible on his ‘mini-seat+’ with his head slung sideways against the cold, white inflexibility of his asylum walls.  The nights he didn’t hear his neighbors throwing things and each other against the masonry, he heard them thumping their private bits together in the reckless abandon of chimps with terminal illnesses.  

Urvid wasn’t ready to consign himself to the dark oblivion of chemically assisted sleep, just yet, and so he sat down, cross-legged, in front of the window so that he might see out of it.  He liked to imagine himself as a space explorer in a universe where there was more than the human virus alive in the cosmos.  His miserable little window was actually a fair-sized porthole on the GSS Intrepid and his unremarkable life barely existing was full of high adventure of social utility.  He looked out the porthole during their subatmospheric flight and pitied all the sad sentients stuck on this miserable excuse for a planet.  At the end of an hourlong serial, the crew would’ve landed and instructed them on how to live in harmony with each other and with their nature.  There would’ve been three commercial breaks, where the acts were split, and no product placement.  Next week, they’d save someone else from themselves.  

His brain got fuzzy as he tried and failed to imagine what the world those brave explorers came from must be like.  In this, even the electric fluorescence of psychoactive substances was rendered insipid and half-formed when faced with the notion of living a life even remotely divorced from the fiduciary responsibility of meganational supercorps.  Like AMBRE trying to imagine the physical act of love, Urvid tried and failed to contextualize the idea of a life not owned by a company.  He stood alone in the white field of his mind, holding the bag where all his dreams and aspirations were supposed to go.  

The splashy red and orange of distant explosions, somewhere deep in the violent middens of the slum, bounced back off the thick cloud of industrial smog in an apocalyptic light show.  Foregoing the psychosomatic comfortability of his mini-seat+, Urvid laid back onto the imperceptible cushioning of his worn rug and focused his hallucination-ringed vision in the midst of the growing waterspot on his sagging ceiling.  He quietly hoped the cheaply-built joists would finally give way and he’d be crushed to death beneath the literal weight of vapid consumerism.  He listened for each creak and crack, anxiously awaiting the last of them.  The only oblivion that found him was the brief one between dusk and dawn, where corporate-branded dreams chased him back and forth across the drug-addled dunes of his useless mind.