"I guess the trouble all started when I signed up for a Gig Work application on a platform created by MegaTech?: The Cartoonishly Large Corporation that Owns Everything in the Near-Future.

  A little on the nose, I know. It's their slogan, not mine.

  I had been out of the labor market for some years, scraping by on a Universal Basic Income provided to me in exchange for having the subversive part of my brain removed. My savings were meager, to say the least, having long since burned through the cash settlement I earned as compensation for The Year the Water Was Poison.

  My employment history, even before this point, had always been inconsistent at best. I liked to think of myself as a late bloomer, having never quite found a community I could call home that wasn’t later universally decried as an “obvious pyramid scheme that preyed on the naivety of rubes.”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to find my passion. It was just that I, unlike the hurried masses ceaselessly running toward the next opportunity, thought the wonder of life lay in its multitude of possibilities.

  To me, being a human wasn’t about rushing headlong into some profession I’d do until the day I died.

  Its beauty, I thought, lay in the opportunity to try on many different hats, in the legal loopholes that allowed one to remain technically enrolled in academia for decades without ever declaring a major—thus qualifying them for certain forms of economic relief (and exempting them from a considerable number of military drafts).

  Anyway, it wasn’t my fault. Underemployment, to use the popular euphemism, had become endemic in our society.

  Even things once considered menial jobs, due to the complex nature of modern technology and rampant automation, required a level of education far beyond what I understood to have been the case for much of human history.

  Make no mistake about it: plop me down in just about any other age and I’d be lauded as a genius, likely showered with accolades and feted as a luminary who, despite preconceptions about the demeanors of those with beautiful minds, was also pure of heart and not without his masculine charms.

  Unfortunately, it was this age in which I found myself so unceremoniously plopped.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Suffice it to say, the idea of needing to resort to finding work on an intergalactic gig app wasn’t exactly where I’d thought I’d be at this phase of my life.

  **

  But none of this could change the fact that I had run out of ingenious loopholes.

  I tried to see the bright side. Maybe some structure would do me good. Millions of people used GigaGig? (by MegaTech?). It was just how things were done. There was no shame in getting with the times.

  Besides, no one could question my bona fides as an old soul. The monstrous way I treated robot waiters alone was evidence enough of my discomfort with certain aspects of modern life.

  This was, I must admit, a quiet point of pride for me. I had managed, to a degree considered quite unusual, to avoid the Personalization? so many people let run their lives, except in absolutely necessary areas.

  It was really only, quite quaintly, in the media I consumed, who I associated with, and the thoughts I allowed myself to think in moments when I was utterly alone that I’d given my life over to the ones and zeroes.

  If circumstances beyond my control forced me to adapt to an aspect of society I didn’t like, that hardly constituted a compromise of my values. In fact, if anything, being forced to surrender in this way was even more of an indication of how right I was.

  This wasn’t just some justification I cooked up to make myself feel better, either, I assure you. My Personalized Life Coach echoed my sentiments exactly—and he was a professional.

  It’s not that I hated technology. Far from it. If anything, I think maybe I was a little disappointed by it.

  Sure, I was comfortable. Even I, celebrated malcontent, couldn’t find a way to pretend I suffered from any lack of material comfort. Despite my precarious financial state, I really wanted for nothing.

  I had, at all times, the technology to spin up on demand just about anything my mind could dream up.

  This was, of course, miraculous in its own way—despite the snide comments I sometimes heard my devices make about some of my habits and proclivities.

  But often I’d wonder after some hedonistic binge: is there more to life than having everything you could ever want at your fingertips with the click of a button?

  **

  I remember, as a kid, the wonder with which I’d hear stories of the technological advances the future would bring.

  We were, I was assured by my artificial instructors, on the brink of advances so revolutionary that it was only our meager, pea-brained imaginations that could limit the potential for what life in this glorious new age would hold.

  Instead, this was my life.

  Underemployed. Overstimulated. Ceaselessly mocked by the small but rabid community of people who watched the all-day livestream I was forced to broadcast of my every action in order to earn extra income.

  An unspectacular guy, living an unspectacular life, surrounded by incredible technology—technology that I mostly used for terrible things.

  So it was, with a heart full of conflict and an apartment full of MegaBurger? wrappers, that I opened GigaGig? (by MegaTech?) for the first time.