Work

Dagon shivered in the dark, then jerked himself awake, afraid he would be caught sleeping on the job again. He opened his eyes wide and was relieved to see a bare wall in front of him, not the glow of a monitor, and he was lying down, not propped up at a desk. It was okay to sleep for a while.

He wrapped his arms around himself, pulling the covers tighter around himself. He pulled up his knees to get as much of himself under the thin, short, company-issue blanket as he could. After a moment he felt warmer and stopped shivering, but he still couldn’t relax enough to sleep. Knowing he had to be up in an hour, two at the most kept him from relaxing fully, and his brain and eyes were still racing, trying to recover after 20 hours of screen time, broken up by two short breaks and a half hour mid-shift for a meal and other biological processes.

The age of machines had, as some suspected not gone entirely as promised. Automation did, in fact take away most of the very dangerous jobs humans had done such as mining, exploding packages that contained bombs or were suspected to contain bombs, handling radioactive waste, repeatedly lifting heavy objects, and even most combat. However, due to growing concerns that nearly all jobs would be done by machines, legislators created regulations ensuring there would be jobs available for all.

Key positions were safe of course. While it was possible that doctors could be replaced by a diagnostic kiosk, and there were already robots performing or assisting with surgery, human doctors and surgeons were still highly preferred. Similarly, it was entirely feasible to have lawyer robots argue with each other, with rulings automated, greatly reducing if not eliminating the years-long delays in the justice system. But lawmakers are still lawyers at heart and they will always protect themselves. After that, though, effectively every job fell to the robots.

Teaching had already been done remotely, and it was child’s play to generate a real-looking teacher to communicate with hundreds, even thousands of children at a time, at their grade level, in accordance with state and local educational standards, on students’ phones, laptops, and tablets, eliminating the need for a school building. Plus, robot teachers don’t unionize, and don’t need a salary, much less a pension.

Books, movies, and streamed shows created by and featuring real humans became a novelty item rather than the norm as new articles, books, magazines, newsletters, shows, podcasts, and movies were generated so quickly, to fit every taste and interest, that that sheer volume made the struggle a quixotic crusade.

That was the tipping point, really. How could people be employed when at nearly every level they were redundant, antiquated, obsolete? The answer was simple. While robots had taking over literal mining jobs, digging for precious resources, humans could now serve as the mines themselves.

In order to provide the most authentic, cutting-edge content possible for human consumption, robots could use the thoughts, needs, skills, memories, voices, ideas right from humans themselves, recombining them at an incredible rate. If it was found that a majority of people would respond to a crime drama set in Miami, featuring a hardboiled, wise-cracking cop originally from Venezuela and his partner, a genetically engineered anthropomorphic drug-sniffing parrot, that show could be created using borrowed talents and memories, processed into episodes, and uploaded to interested humans or streamed to their devices in minutes. The same was true of any piece of new content.

Work, therefore, went billions of humans doing millions of varieties of jobs, with some unemployment everywhere, to universal employment, constant demand, and zero economic variance. At last, there was essentially no class warfare. Everyone was housed, fed, and reasonably content, provided for by the machines. Every whim fulfilled.

However, most of humanity had the same job: Sit in the chair and be mined. Sit in the chair, put the helmet on, look at the screen, and have your thoughts, your soul, your essence drained away, day after day. Initially it was 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, same as any other job. But robots are hard bosses who don’t tire. And legislators had to admit, sitting in a chair staring at a screen wasn’t much work. The screen itself was only a technicality. In theory, it showed what was being pulled and recombined from each person. If details were unclear, if something seemed wrong, the human was supposed to intervene and make corrections. But really, it was pointless. The robot managers didn’t care, and the content was going to be good enough, not that consumers were given much in the way of options. Take it or leave it, those are the options. So, the job became sitting and staring, not moving, and thus limits were set at 20 hours a day, rather than 8.

Dagon didn’t really know how long he had been doing the job now. It seemed like it was his whole life. He knew, deep down, that there was a before, a time when he did other things, worked other jobs, less than a year ago. He remembered working in a library, having a family, a girlfriend, pets. Were they bats? No. People don’t own bats. They were something else. Flying foxes? No. Sugar gliders. He had sugar gliders. And the girl was beautiful. But he was fired from the library. Drugs. He liked drugs, and games. He couldn’t keep his apartment without his job, and he couldn’t find another job. This one promised to provide food, housing, and entertainment. It seemed an easy fit. So it became all he knew. He wondered about the girl, and the sugar gliders. He wondered if they were alive, or if he was.

The housing he was provided is where he was now – the break room – a dark room with a large sleep pad, not quite a bed, covered in thin, sterile sheets and short blankets. Comfortable enough to sleep when exhausted, without really being comfortable. Just like the food provided for meal breaks. Edible, acceptable, without really being good. Most of the time he barely registered that he was eating it. He knew he was sitting, and there was some sort of loaf in front of him, similar to a chunk of lukewarm mac and cheese, or meatloaf, or sauteed tofu or something. He knew his hand was moving, putting food in his mouth, and he was chewing, but he couldn’t really taste much. A bit of umami, a bit of salt. No real texture. Just beige colored sponge going in his mouth and down his throat.

He was always tired. Days off never mattered anymore, so he stopped taking them. He simply worked every shift, the maximum hour, plugging in, then unplugging from the download machine so he could plug in to the streaming machine and play games behind his eyes. It was good enough. The world he wanted – warm and soft, with little effort. Some part of him knew it was part nightmare, but he ignored that part and gave way to the dream.

He closed his eyes and rubbed his feet together to get warm. Eventually he drifted off and was able to sleep. He dreamed of the nurse he sometimes saw instead of the girl. She stole the drugs from work and they took them together, played video games, or had sex while her daughter played video games. He felt so free there. At home with the girl and the sugar gliders it felt like a normal life, a life he never really wanted and didn’t understand. He never had a father. Family was always a burden, work an inconvenient reality. Better to be with the nurse, and the drugs, playing games and letting the world go by.

Lights snapped on in the break room and a light electric charge pulsed in the bed, waking him and forcing him out of bed. There was no use trying to sleep in. It was never an option. Dagon had five minutes to pee, another five to dress himself or brush his teeth, maybe five to eat a protein bar, before he was due back in the chair. He opted to pee and eat the protein bar. He’d go back out in the clothes he slept in.

He trudged out to the work floor, which as usual was dimly lit. Years ago this was likely a call center, divided into cubicles, but there was no need for cubicles, or privacy, or even much light. Screens were lit, and there was nothing to really see, so there only had to be enough light to find a workstation, which amounted to a chair, a desk, a small monitor on the desk, and the e-cable dangling from the ceiling above the chair.

Dagon found a workstation, and looked around before he plugged in. He sometimes watched to see if any of the faces around him changed. Did anyone not show up? Did anyone new come in? What kind of shape were they in?

This time there was someone new, but oddly familiar. The row ahead behind him, a few stations down and facing him was a tall man, 40s, with shaggy salt and pepper hair, dressed in a while long sleeved-shirt and a black vest, black jeans. Something…no. It couldn’t be.

Dagon walked closer to the man’s workstation and bent over to look at his face in the glow of the light from the screen. It was normal to blink more slowly while plugged in. In fact, dry eye was common because you were so zoned out you just didn’t bother to blink. But the man wasn’t blinking at all. Not only was ne not blinking, he wasn’t seeing. He was dead.

Dagon backed away a step and straightened. He hadn’t died on the job. He died a little over a year ago. Dagon knew, because he was Dagon’s friend, died of a heart attack after a weekend coke binge. Dagon was there when it happened, was there at the funeral, yet here he was. He had been a talented actor and musician until there was no need for real actors anymore. Now here he was, embalmed and all, dead eyes clouded over, mouth hanging open, being mined after death. Every last drop being wrung out of him.

Dagon turned, screamed, and ran, he knew not where. Just away, away.