The Most Accurate Rendition of Our Imminent Dystopia

I'm in the club.

Our great nation has mandated that, in order to control suicide rates, all men and women under 30 spend a minimum of 10 hours a week clubbing.

My head is reverberating the music; the result of countless mathematcians designing, running and iterating on specialized evolutionary algorithms to create the most trashy music humanly possible.

A drunk man spills some pepsico testo-buzz™on my hip while swinging in seeming random directions. Dispentron's eyes turn red. Testo-buzz is contraband in coke™ clubs. I'd rather not image how he got it past the wave scanners.

The Dispensotron finishes chuting soda into a cup before clamping the young man by his shoulders. Before he can finish reciting the unambiguous apology protocol, the bot in one gloriously engineered fell swoop proceeds to physically shake off all cash into a copyright tax tray, followed by a heartfelt thanks right out the door.

To get out of here, I purchase a game-of-thrones 4™ branded escapism pack and swallow the grape-sized pill, betting the street-bots will drag my unconscious body back to its apartment as usual.

My dreams are swarmed with dragons and their financing options.

I wake up.


Time for another miserable day at work. I consider jumping in front of the passing cars, but the AI has gotten too good to provide that option anymore.

The boss is talking about how hot new "topological business strategies" will let us stretch our resources in whichever direction we want while still maintaining the product's original features. Our boss is a business major.

I have to completely invert the code structure. The client is now the server and the server is the client. This is done in order to crowdsource all the responses to an array of underpaid, underpowered AIs.

I get told the tests are failing. This is ridiculous, all tests are passing. The boss says not those tests, the regression tests. I inform him we have no regression tests. He starts pouting, pointing at the array of robots and computers in the window, I inform him those are the production servers and AIs. "same thing"

After welding new parts on our shitty, defective robots I inform the boss we would net money on parts as well as labor if we just buy normal servobots that didn't need constant maintenance. The boss tells me not to question his decisions.


Its Monday and I'm not on club-duty. I spend some time with my friends; peers I went to undergrad with. We meet up at the only place we can afford: a condemned cafe.

I see the battered steel table with Seth and Justin already sitting there.

Seth studied algorithmic composition with a specialization in kazoos. He has a pretty good life making custom conformist psycho-tapes for local companies and has a steady girlfriend. Justin double-majored in Applied Mathology and Transdimensional Physics Methods. He is homeless.

Me: "Hey how are you guys?"
Justin: "Dying, but these fucking numbers man, you always need to "feel" greater than or equal to last quarter."

President LaBouf announced last quarter that "The citizen happiness index had hit a record high last quarter", and "we plan on getting it even higher.".

Seth: "Relax Justin, there's nothing we can do about it now. *sigh*. I'm doing alright though, just got another contract after weeks of no work!".

Seth sets up the solar kettle, and we boil some water for tea. Justin and I quietly creep around the permiter and rendezevous back at the old table.

Me: "It's all clear."

We take out our smuggled shanghai netbooks. Using these we can avoid almost all conventional tracking methods as well as the fine for using linux.

Seth: "So what part are we working on now?"
Me: "We only have a few big modules left to code up at this point: the routing segment, the final UI, and the classifier"
Seth: "Alright, I'll outline that UI."
Justin: "Classifier? that's a piece of cake."
Me: "Remember, we can't prove our classifier using induction or anything from ring theory because copyrights."
Justin: "Alright guys, just keep it quiet for the next few hours. Real macbook-nonchalant."

We maintain a strict code of keeping our mouths shut and our dives encrypted.

Justin: *closing laptop* "I've got a near-functioning prototype, let's wrap up for now before people start arriving for shift 3."
Me: "We're good, no-one should know we've been here."

The only time we slipped up, our would-be cofounder, James, got ratted out to neo-microsoft. The zaibatsu claimed "psychic harassment charges" for a comment he never posted, got access to his electronics and extracted our prototype ip. He went back to work for a week, a walking ghost, ending up brutally murdered with a windows logo etched on his torso.

We split and I walk home.


Before I can sleep, I fill out the daily, ringing, consumer-review to rate my day. It's the government's metric of citizen happiness, but the dataset is sold to corporations as the nation's only source of revenue. They ask "How did you feel about your lunch?". Not wanting to have my Nestle-complex™ rent "randomly" raised, I respond with the maximum number of emojis to each question. The survey closes with a jingle and a chibi clown wishing me an even better day tomorrow.

Some people think this new world hell was caused when trump was elected. Others blame the advancement of technology and scientists for the whole thing. Personally, I think it's all of our faults for throwing away our time on television, facebook, netflix instead of things that were actually in our self interest. But hey, dopamine pumps aren't all that far away, are they?