All these people and not even one aware of the suffering all around.
Task Rabbits, Grub-hubbers, and Instacart lemmings jammed into the lobby along with Graham where the PC (package coordinator) shouted for everyone to scan in. The cacophony reduced to a dull hiss in Graham’s ear thanks to the noise-canceling ear implants cycling through the newest NPR podcasts. He averted his eyes from any contact, which didn’t matter for the worker who busily swiped at apps flashing red ticking clocks that reduced their tip with each second.
On his floor, Graham navigated past the hundreds of boxes, many emblazoned with Amazon or Alibaba, littering most of the available walking space while keeping his eyes on the horizon for possible errant delivery drones. Companies boasted about zero collision rates on quarterly earnings calls, but there was always room for a freak Final Destination style accident. He didn’t see any of his neighbors, though that wasn’t a surprise, he could count on one hand the number of interactions in the five years since moving in. A dodge past a precarious pile on his neighbor’s doorstep brought into view three boxes on his grinning Totoro doormat presents ordered by a past Graham, and he felt his pulse quicken with excitement confirmed by the beep from his fitness tracker.
Graham poked at a piece of pine nut-crusted salmon, simultaneously taking a swig of whisky, with a fish spatula that had been one of three boxes. The second package was the newest John Grisham inspired novel, inspired seeing as Grisham was long dead but his publisher had built an AI that kept pumping out book after book. He didn’t particularly like John Grisham, but it always seemed like when he got a haircut or went to the dentist someone brought up John Grisham or Stephen King and it was easier to fake along knowing something about the plot. Come to think of it, since buying the Trimz home haircare system, Amazon Prime!, he didn’t need to visit a stylist anymore. The disappointingly bulky Trimz helmet used scans of his head to design custom hairstyles, patent-pending. Similarly, trips to the dentist were obsolete now that a local start-up had released a daily gel spray that killed all harmful bacteria; FDA approval pending. So why he purchased the book was anyone’s guess but some old habit loop in his brain put it in the cart and there it was sitting on the granite countertop next to the sizzling piece of fish. That was the third box, the last meal at this apartment complete with fish cloned from actual Alaskan salmon genes, serving size: one. Scanning the bar code of the box activated his oven which was preheated to the temperature specified in the recipe.
Moving the salmon to the oven vibrated his wrist alerting him of his oven tweeting “Salmons in the oven for finishing off. Can’t wait for dinner. Yum! #blueapron #SmartOven”. The smart oven came with a variety of text editors allowing Graham to customize the writing style, but he doubted his hundred and twenty-three followers, most of whom were suspect bots, would notice the inconsistencies. The oven’s tweet was right above a New York Times article about the gender wage gap Graham had seen on Facebook and felt would look good on his feed. He hadn’t actually read the article but was convinced the NYT would make a perfectly well-structured liberal argument he agreed with. Actually, he didn’t really care about the gender wage gap, seeing as he was the beneficiary of a patriarchal society that, through projects like the Salem witch trials, chastity belts, and ubiquitous image-issue advertising reinforced his rightful status beyond the glass ceiling. However, women wanted to see that he cared about these things so he curated his feed to align with this desired worldview.
After dinner he poured another whiskey before slipping down into a leather chair, Ikea built by a tasker, facing a sixty-inch flat-screen he barely used except to watch reruns of Frasier or porn when he just had to see a high-definition rendering of a puckering asshole. His phone lock screen indicated a current blood alcohol level of .06% with a polite reminder that restrictive measures started at .10%, a setting he implemented after one too many disastrous nights of drunk social media. The fact that they had let people drive with a .08% alcohol level back before mandated autonomous driving was insane. He thumbed through his various newsfeeds and checked his email, nothing but spam, before navigating to the red and white icon he’d placed on its own home screen.
The design of the app was clean. Not in that overly sterilized Meta way nor in that overly homely Apple way. It was just clean, with soft tones and smooth lines. After a welcome sequence, a prompt to perform a simple logic puzzle, answering correctly gave him a gold star and a winking face emoji, then the app proceeded to a series of mental and family health questions. For the past several weeks the app had been going through general questions the way TurboTax innocuously made you feel like you were taking that month’s Cosmo quiz before spitting out your yearly tax return. All these simple questions were carefully designed for crafting documents with all the pertinent information. The screen then flashed: have been drinking? Graham cracked a smile, the app goddamn well knew, it had access to the health monitor. Yet somehow it was comforting to know a programmer was giving him the option to lie. He clicked yes. A message appeared warning that over-imbibing at any time in the night would result in the suspension of his ability to request services for at least seventy-two hours. He decided against the second drink.
To make sure he would be fine he drank a glass of water and then peed into a tube that fed directly to a collection bag. He glanced at his wrist noticing an indicator light warning him the facilities were almost at capacity. Originally when the system was installed he had been asked if he wanted regular pick-up but had opted out. Turned out he shat as much as everyone else and regular pick-up would have been advised. Oh well, he flicked the indicator scheduling a pickup for when he should be at work tomorrow. Even though the shit was freeze-dried like in the space station, actual quotation from the advertisement, he still thought it was a pretty crappy job, pun intended, to be the poo picker. These people literally gathered other people’s shit, delivering it to a composting center the size of a rural city. But hey, there were worse jobs.
Back in the living room, he navigated to the order screen on the app, an only recently unlocked feature. It asked if he desired a man or a woman. He thought for a moment weighing the pros and cons ultimately choosing the female option. Your companion will be with you in twenty-three minutes intoned a soothing asexual voice accompanied by a dot on a map of her current location. Suzy Q. was servicing someone in the Haight. The screen then informed him of the option to cancel at any time up to and including once Suzy Q. had arrived while indicating it would conduct multiple mental health tests at random intervals over the next twenty minutes that required mandatory participation within thirty seconds. If he failed to comply, the date would be canceled, and services blocked for the next seventy-two hours. He tapped the accept button.
Navigating his calendar he wanted to make sure there weren’t any important meetings coming up; however, this was just a way of exercising nervous energy as Graham had been systematically clearing his schedule for the past two months. A psychological profiling problem popped up, one of the mental health tests, that he answered quickly. Another gold star and smiley face. Up until this morning, his schedule had included citations from his dog walker with detailed comments of her interactions with Mr. Bottomsly, his French bulldog, including all bathroom breaks and contents. However, with his upcoming departure, it wasn’t responsible to leave the dog alone and so he found a non-profit that picked-up unwanted animals and placed them in new homes. They came while he was at work, let in by his smart door, and he had already received several pictures from Bottomsly’s new owner. Graham thought there might be a moment of sadness coming, but it turned out to just be a sneeze. He should have taken his yearly allergy shot, ordered via WebMD and administered through his health monitor, but he had decided it wasn’t necessary this year, which had made the last month unbearable.
Another puzzle, another gold star, another smiling face. In his calendar, he saw the notation for the start date of his little experiment. The goal was to go for as many days as he could without speaking to a single person. It had now been three months. This was partially possible because Graham worked as an accountant for a fortune 500 company where he had cemented himself as a hard worker earlier in his career. However, ten years in he had lost all of that young college kid ambition opting to craft a perfectly insulted bubble consisting of work that was too complex for most people to want to do. This led to his career stagnating but he had already made it to a pay grade that dwarfed the world median income, though that wasn’t saying much as this elite one percent only had to earn forty-thousand a year. To top it all off he ingeniously outsourced the majority of his work to a hired assistant in the Philippines for five dollars an hour, which meant he only showed up three days a week for appearances while he watched Friends reruns and trolled the internet. He could spend hours arguing about the policies of the current administration, random ‘90s pop culture, or hounding religious fanatics about how asinine their beliefs were until they blocked him. Regardless, he hadn’t spoken with anyone at work, in transit, or at home in over three months.
Suzy Q. was on the move; her green flashing dot was heading toward his apartment in Dog Patch, ETA ten minutes. His stomach hit an ascending scale of notes much like a kid minutes before Christmas. Graham thought back to those childhood moments with something less than the fondness of true nostalgia. There had been sparse Christmas’ where he got a sweater and a cardboard box and flush Christmas with lots of toys, but neither was particularly comforting. Mom and Dad were gone now and he had a sister he hadn’t spoken to in years, not because they were fighting, more simply because they both observed the societal rule that if people really wanted to know what was going on they could check Facebook. Why bother with mundane conversations that conveyed readily available information?
One more logic puzzle and a final gold star with a kiss face emoji. Graham flicked on the TV to cut through the deafening silence of his apartment. A subscription to MEdia allowed him access to every movie and TV show made prior to 2000, as well as, all record label albums and books whose copyright horizon had lapsed. He had partially made his way through the IMDB list of 100 best films, but about twenty in he realized that classic movies were like classic books, most of them were crap that some elitist group of assholes agreed was amazing. From then on he stuck to a familiar line-up of sitcom reruns seeing nothing worth his time from these, air quotes, classics. He flicked on Seinfeld turning back to his phone.
The sound of the doorbell, which Graham had set to be the roar of the T-rex from Jurassic Park, thundered as his wrist simultaneously pinged an alert of Suzy Q.’s arrival. His phone was slick in suddenly sweaty palms and his body ratcheted up the adrenaline to eleven along with his pulse. The ten or so steps to the door vanished and he took a deep breath.
Suzy Q. stood in the doorway all black leather and latex, Trinity, from the Matrix, hairstyle. She took out her phone inviting him to do the same. With the screens touched together a message flashed on Grahams.
“Please hold your thumb on the screen for ten seconds to confirm the transaction.”
Graham stared into Suzy Q.’s eyes but she looked away. He put his thumb on the screen setting off a countdown. As he exhaled it felt like releasing a breath he’d been holding for a decade. Eight seconds. Graham closed his eyes calmness coming over him as if his brain had released every endorphin in his body. Six seconds. He finally felt the way he always wanted to feel. Three seconds. The way he thought he would feel after that month-long meditation retreat actually left him more miserable. Two seconds. The way he always hoped girlfriends, or love, or drugs, or sex, or surfing, or writing, or playing, or something would make him feel. He felt—free.
He let out a final breath as a completion ping sounded from his phone. Opening his eyes he was staring down the barrel of a silenced handgun aimed directly at his forehead. It looked the way he had always imagined it would as he let out a “thank you” his voice metallic with disuse. There was a mild puff of air and a flash accompanied by the sound of a robot bunny sneezing into a pile of cotton. And then nothing.
Transaction Complete.