I wouldn’t say I was happy at MegaTech?. Far from it. This was, of course, as my company-provided Mental Health Counselor assured me each week at our wellness check-in/re-education session, perfectly normal.

  But I was, at least early on, despite everything I’d believed about myself and the irrepressible nature of my trademark slacker ethic, oddly content.

  As the days went on, my abject terror and existential despair gave way to a far more manageable resignation.

  There was, I found, something comfortable about the mind-numbing repetition. Something narcotic about the acknowledgement of one’s utter uselessness in the grand scheme of things.

  Back home, my problem was, if anything, the staggering amount of options I had to fulfill my every desire, the all-too-present siren song of The Manifestation Machine never far from my ears.

  But in the halls of MegaTech?, I found an environment so devoid of complexity, so expertly crafted in its inhuman efficiency, that I forgot how to want, how to expect more.

  To have no say, to no longer have to decide from infinite options—I’m embarrassed still to admit it now—was, at first, liberating.

  **

  That’s not to say that each day didn’t hold surprises and quirks of its own. Still, over time, with surprisingly little difficulty, I adjusted. My movements became second nature, reflexive.

  My inner monologue was filled no longer with selfish ruminations, but instead helpful aphorisms that carried me through these occasional variations in my daily responsibilities:

  Baboon blood is best cleaned up with circular mop movements.

  The cheese in the human-sized traps is not worth the risk.

  Don’t ask when Lunch is; this only makes them angry.

  I had become, somehow, nothing more than a willing cog in a vast machine. Anything I could think of wanting, the Company provided for me.

  My food came from MegaTech?. My clothes came from MegaTech?. Even my monthly ration of Entertainment came from MegaTech?, who, I must admit, despite their expertise in most other areas, could simply not crack the art of the Sitcom.

  My every emotion was tracked, neutralized, relieved by my employer in pursuit of efficiency. My every emotion, that is, except for the one thing the company had no interest in relieving me of.

  An emotion which, my Counselor assured me, was perfectly human, and thus, completely unacceptable: I was lonely.

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  **

  I’m not exactly sure when it started. My time at MegaTech? often appears to me a strange dream, differences in large swaths of time marked only by the various Natural Disasters which would mysteriously befall the premises on a semi-regular basis.

  If I had to put a date on it, I guess it was sometime between the Interstellar Typhoon and the Sentient Sinkhole? that I began to feel truly suffocated by the weight of my crushing solitude.

  It’s not that I was starved for interaction. I, like any good employee under constant surveillance, occasionally made water-cooler chit chat with my android coworkers who comprised the rest of the maintenance crew, most of whom were outdated machines with programming far beyond its shelf-life.

  I’d pretend as best as I could to politely laugh at their pre-programmed quips about the Boss or join them in their endless jabber about the newest popular Series—some melodramatic spectacle about a Doomed Scientist? and his Tragic Mistake?.

  I could practically see the poster: a tattered lab coat in the foreground, some looming Quantum Rupture swallowing a beautiful woman behind it.

  It wasn’t my style, but I recognized the broad strokes well enough to fake my way through.

  But it was no substitute for human connection.

  Despite the expectations laid out in my training videos of a workplace full of other people, many of whom were sure to be saboteurs hellbent on getting me to unionize, in my entire time working at MegaTech?, I scarcely came in contact with any humans at all.

  There was Tarvin, sure, a fixture at the nauseatingly frequent mandatory staff parties; mouth ever stuffed with hors d’oeuvres as he regaled me and a gaggle of androids with another story of some atrocity he’d been resourceful enough to obfuscate in mountains of bureaucratic paperwork.

  But, as is so often the case with these things, he spent so much of his time in front of Congressional Committees that we just never found the time to nurture our relationship.

  My only contact with living beings, as a result, sometimes for months on end, were the barking, mysterious Technicians who would appear each day on the Telescreens found throughout the facility, ready always with some new, absurd task for me.

  They were strange figures, otherworldly, addressing me always in an indecipherable and eerie language of their own, understood by me only via the help of the simplistic diagrams which accompanied their directives.

  Dozens of them skulked around the building, identical, always hurrying in tandem toward some urgent task, leaving behind them a trail of slime for which, perhaps by design, my training materials did not mention an effective cleaning method.

  Ostensibly, they were my superiors, but I figured it prudent not to ask.

  I knew it was small-minded of me, perhaps a symptom of my increasing isolation, but I quickly grew to detest them. I hated the way they talked, the way they walked, especially the frequency with which they’d subject me to humiliatingly invasive physical examinations while scribbling down notes with delighted curiosity.

  I was terrified by their strange mannerisms, the ant-like uniformity of their behavior, and, more than anything, the relatively free hand the company had given them in dispensing perverse forms of discipline for infractions spelled out only in memos they refused to cc me on.

  I was even, I’m ashamed to say now, physically repulsed by them; unable to stomach their strange aromas, disgusted by the slimy trails I was forced to mop up in their wake, made sick by the strange grey liquid they’d force me to drink for their own amusement on the unlucky occasions where I’d be kept late on a Friday to clean up after one of their bacchanalian revels.

  But neither they, nor my outdated android coworkers, could do anything to ease the feelings of isolation which consumed me in those days.

  And so, all alone, I persisted in this state, the state I imagined so many of my long-lost human brethren found themselves in:

  Sleepwalking through my days, lying awake at night, collecting my meager paycheck at the end of each week from a Mysterious Figure at the end of the labyrinthine scavenger hunt set before me by the higher-ups for their own amusement.

  [ARCHIVIST NOTE]: