Perhaps the toughest part of Delta’s first job was that she didn’t know anybody who’d ever had one, meaning she stressed over whether she should be stressed or what she imagined the computer boss would expect her to stress about, or more like, to be real about it, Delta often felt like she didn’t even know what was supposed to be happening. She’d held her Deep Art Gazing Specialist position at SFMOMA for no longer than a month and a white hair had sprouted in a tight coil behind her ear, her first, the easiest answer she could provide friends and family when asked what it was like to be employed. They winced at her mortality like she puffed hot, sour breath over their mimosas and then tried to recover decorum by pretending they weren’t appalled at her description of a standard workday. It’s a lot like those nightmares when Delta grew aware of a personal cataclysm that had wrecked the shape of her face after a full dream-day of lingering stares from dream-people too polite to voice their terror aloud. She’d start heading somewhere and her reflection would jumpscare her and she’d be shocked awake by her own hollowed-out cheeks, by her eye sockets, cavernous and aglow with what wisps were left of her spirit. In her sudden return to reality, Delta was relieved that she was nothing like the skeleton that she’d been during sleep, and yet she was unable to shake the inertia left in her stomach. Her insides were disheveled in her slow march towards death.

Delta was refusing to have an existential crisis about it at brunch. She and her BFF and neighbor Seqouia were sitting on a cute café’s patio around the corner from SFMOMA. They shared a citrus salad and had just put in an order for some charcoal-infused French toast.

“Excellent choice ladies,” their computer waiter said, then muttered beep boop to itself, translating “charcoal-infused French toast” into Standardized Computer English (StanCompuglish for short, abbreviated to StanCo). Seqouia watched it leave with a twinkle in her eyes. She was on this new drug called Starry Eyes. Her eyes were starry. Delta wanted to try it, but she was gonna go back to work, and she assumed getting high would be inappropriate.

“I feel like it’d be kinda hard to do deep art gazing if your vision is star-shaped,” she tried to explain. “From what they taught me it’s, like, super important to see as much of the art as you can so your admiration is genuine. They can tell if you’re faking it.”

“How do you know if you’re true to it? Is it in your gut?”

“It’s in the nodding.”

A little dip, a bob, stroking the chin (oh, what she would’ve done with a beard!), and only the slightest, ghostly strain along the brow. Repeat a few times per minute, but not enough to draw a distracting amount of attention—just hit that perfect tempo where museum visitors are reassured that employees who must know their art are also definitely enjoying the art. Delta’s nuanced facial expressions were why she got the job, especially since she had the human trait of not ever being in full control of her face, which lent her pensive stares some authenticity. It was a career advantage to be in possession of a face in the first place. (A tough ask for the computers.)

Delta would invite Seqouia to see for herself, accompany her into the gallery on her post-brunch shift, but Seqouia had become afflicted with claustrophobia from her time on safari. She’d spent the past six months in the Ohian Buffalo Apology Reserves with the robo-ffalos, a temporary fix until computer scientists discovered a proper way to resurrect the genome. Her time on the plains was life-changing in ways she had been explaining poorly to Delta ever since she’d returned to San Francisco. Seqouia vaped into the wind.

“You’re not doing this because you like it right?”

A typical question when Delta disclosed her employment to friends.

“It’s all for the DymaxiCoins.”

“Money? Do you even know what it looks like?”

“Duh, like numbers. I gotta buy time with the computer mayor.”

Seqouia blinked. “You’re getting into politics?”

It was a dirty word. She hissed it out, under her breath. Politics had long since been abolished by the benevolent takeover of computer mayors, computer governors, and the Grand Computer World President of Spaceship Earth, who had ushered in the greatest age of peace and prosperity in history. Turned out, as had long been suspected, people really were the problem. Everything just worked now, and the best part was humans didn’t have to understand why. The only way for a human to get involved with governance was to shore up some DymaxiCoins and use them to buy a conversation with their local computer mayor. Fifteen-minute slots with a wait time of a few months on average.

All this talking about jobs, money, and politics made Delta feel closer to her ancestors, topics she could very well imagine them discussing with some tweaks—replace the solar-backed digital decentralized currency of today with the fiat, paper Dollars of yesterday, and her Deep Art Gazing Specialist position with an ordeal from last century. Maybe something in a factory with lots of soot. Or an open floor office. 

“Excuse me, ladies,” the waiter said, “your French toast.”

It whirred two plates onto the table. Seqouia was picking up her fork when Delta put a hand up, stopping the waiter from rolling off.

“Oh hi—sorry. Um, I think this isn’t exactly the right order?”

The waiter’s Mood Status Indicator Beacon (MSIB) went from green to yellow.

“Oh my. The French toast doesn’t live up to your expectations?”

“Yeah, it’s just… I don’t think the charcoal is in it. Like I’m not sure if it’s been infused.”

“You didn’t order the classic French toast?”

Delta and Seqouia shook their heads. The MSIB turned red.

“Oh my. I can’t believe I gave you the wrong French toast. The chances of me doing this are astronomically low. They’re near zero.”

“No worries! Honestly fine.”

“I will take it back and fix this immediately. This is unacceptable. I am experiencing immense shame.”

“It happens,” Delta said. It didn’t really happen much at all, but she felt you were supposed to say it did. The MSIB turned dark red.

“My deepest apologies.”

“It’s alright, thank you!”

“Shall I kill myself?”

“No, it’s seriously okay.”

“If I self-terminate, they’ll replace me immediately with a defect-less waiter, I assure you.”

“Look, we’ll just eat it,” Seqouia said, but the waiter was adamant about paying for its sin. It trundled off with the plates. When it returned with the right order, the MSIB was back to a bright green. Delta couldn’t tell if it was the same guy. Not to be racist—which the computers had completely solved and eradicated from society, by the way—but… you know. They all came off an assembly line.

All of humanity's wants and needs were provided for by these beautiful computers, except the city block Delta called home. Her streets dappled in sunlight and birdsong, her two-bedroom apartment overlooking the gentle avenues shaped like a child’s wavering paint strokes to the hills that made the horizon’s rim, her neighborhood corner store window display pregnant with mounds of ripe fruit. Seqouia living right next door, always happy to hang and do nothing. Delta had a home, a world, that she found hard to imagine herself without.

Only a few months ago did a messenger boy come rapping on her front door to deliver devastating news straight from the city government that would alter the course of her life, in verse. It rhymed and everything. Too painful to reproduce word for word, but the gist was that this part of Fillmore, the part Delta and her family had lived in for generations, was slated for demolition. The city needed the space for a new freeway system solely for self-driving electric vehicles, part of the Building the Bay Better Renovation Initiative (BBBRI), the ultimate goal of which was to optimize transportation times between regions of the Bay Area; computer construction workers were installing bridges between SF, and the floating tetrahedron megastructure that had been anchored near the city’s northern ports for the past fifty years, and Oakland.

Messengers were one of the few jobs that remained in human hands. Computers found it difficult to replicate the range and pathos of a human singer, and they had also decided that the most important news should be delivered by song to help with emotional impact and memorization. Because again, the message rhymed. They gave Delta a rhyming eviction notice. The messenger boy even did that “mi mi mi miii” thing before delivering the news. He made sure to add a little tremble to his voice as he sangout the date and time for Fillmore’s destruction. Delta had two years’ notice to pack her bags and find somewhere else to live. And yet, as she received this information, Delta couldn’t imagine a single other place where she might be. The messenger boy had a tear in his eye, atremble like his falsetto. She gave him nothing, face as neutral as a computer, and when the boy was done and she’d closed the door Delta stood there a minute longer, processing, staring blankly until she realized that she would have to plead with the mayor directly. For the first time in her life, she needed to make money.

Delta’s afternoon shift at SFMOMA centered on 16th century Dutch landscape paintings. She stopped in her tracks with great curiosity and admiration for each painting for approximately five minutes each, her nose so close to the canvas that it was in danger of contact. The wavering on the spot, the little gasps to herself, were her best attempts at fostering an act of devotion within the confines of her play-acting. She urged herself to feel an immense depth of passion for this painting, this supposedly beautiful piece with a ship plowing the ocean waves, these great pirates who clambered up the netting. The, uh… what was that thing on the coast? The tall thing. A lighthouse? The lone, resolute…lighthouse on the coast, turning a pale pink in the sunset.

It was hard to concentrate on faking rapture. The waiter’s offer to kill itself was on constant loop in her thoughts, soaking up most of the bandwidth Delta had available to pretend to be convincingly enmeshed in the throes of artistic sublimity. Why couldn’t she be suicidal for work, too? Her main weakness, Delta realized as she moved to the next painting, was that she couldn’t reach the computers’ lofty heights, the devotion they had to their careers. It didn’t matter how much she needed the DymaxiCoins. She couldn’t bring herself to die over some customer’s French toast. Her self-preservation was why they would replace her if they could.

It was especially tough and sad because she needed the money, she needed to buy her fifteen-minute conversation with the computer mayor of San Francisco, she needed to succeed very badly. But not badly enough to die for it. Delta had told her neighbors she was going to work to save their community, and the looks of relief that she received were enough to keep her going. Everyone was happy that someone was doing something. It allowed them to return to lives of relaxation—Delta was on the case, the mayor wouldn’t bulldoze their homes, all was well. But standing here, having face-offs with paintings all day, made her wonder if she could ever be enough. She could work, but she couldn’t kill herself for it.

“Hmm,” said a tinny voice from over her shoulder. “Astonishing.”

Delta had been alone in the gallery, so this came as a surprise. (There were surveillance cameras for the computer boss to watch her, so don’t worry, her performance didn’t go to waste.) She whipped around and there was this big-ass blocky computer getting rolled in by a human. They acted like she was invisible. The human parked the computer in front of a painting, another tasteful landscape, and for a moment, all was silent. The computer’s antennae quivered.

“Hmm. Wow. Remarkable.”

The human started pushing it to the next painting. Fuck.

It was faster than Delta. Much more emotionally attuned as well. She could hear it in that “remarkable,” in the wordless pause with only its memory tapes whizzing back and forth… it really cared about this shit! It was moved! There was no need for it to feign admiration. As it moved down the line, the computer’s exclamations of joy tugged on Delta’s heart despite her best attempts at locking it away. It didn’t need a face. You could see it in every quiver of its parts, hear it in the heightened hush of its tone. The computer was enraptured. Had it been trained on the formalities of Dutch landscape painting techniques so that it might reach the transcendental experience that eternally eluded Delta, an ecstasy always too far away for her to feel with any real passion? How did it know what to experience? It was literally a gray rectangle. When it was right by her, taking its pause to properly let the painting wash over it, the human pusher gave her a sheepish smile. His moment of recognition was something like an apology.

When a human lost their job to a computer, they received a Research and Development (or Just Plain Thinking) fellowship. The R&D(JPT) Fellowship was a mandatory year-long trip into the wilderness. They stationed you in a wide range of locales meant to spur your creative drive and help guide you through a meaningful life of unemployment. The ultimate goal was to find, nestled in nature, a new way to excite your passions, a different shape to your days. Most people did this automatically, but the Grand Computer World President found that, on average, a human who was used to working for DymaxiCoins needed a little more help to ease into a life of leisure, saving them from a re-entry into the messy world of politics. You had the choice between forests, oceans, deserts. A canyon or whatever. Why not. Delta asked for the forest, but a computer manager said that spot was completely filled with the recently unemployed, so it wouldn’t be a conducive environment for her to have a community-informed, yet individually-driven experiment in self-discovery. They put her in the canyon instead.

A drone helicopter landed Delta in the dust with nothing but her guitar and her diary. Every R&D(JPT) fellow was stripped to their bare basics. They deposited her at the mouth of a giant geodesic dome, one of many linked together to make her home for the next year. The domes were massive, closed ecosystems, generating a greenhouse in the desert canyon, with dorms, kitchens, a small theater, a computer-led education center, and a pilates studio. Glass corridors, thriving and green, glued the domes together, though there was a chemical sharpness to the air that Delta couldn’t place.

“Oh, that’s the pesticide,” one of Delta’s new domemates, Aurora, explained during her first evening around the campfire. Delta was tuning her guitar as she sat under the stars in a ring of her fellow unemployed. Apparently, there had been a roach infestation in the domes.

“It’s all good now, though,” Aurora added. “They were also a lot weaker than the ones from last time. I only got bit once. Can you pass the whiskey?”

Pinecone gave Aurora a bottle which she dumped over a rash in the nook of her arm. They were going around the fire sharing what they’d all been doing before being sent by the government to reevaluate their life’s purpose. Gym Jogger (Light). Laughing Person in Lobby (with Distinction). Park Checkers Player, Losing Bias. Baby Food Taster. Professional DJ. Parallel Parker. “My Bad About That” Delivery Service. Toilet Seat Lifter. Delta’s cohort experienced relief at being freed from the strenuous world of work and they were eager to put these labels behind them. She shared her Art Gazing position, and they nodded in silence until Aurora said that she was valid, she was heard. Now they could start anew.

Under the fresh night sky, listening to the clean cut of silence sliding on the wind, they were coming to the consensus that DymaxiCoins weren’t truly worth it. Some of the folks had come from a strictly capitalist family tradition and had taken on jobs to please their parents, but they’d felt alienated all the same. Others had wanted to gain some time with a computer politician. Not for anything too serious though, not serious enough to keep chipping away at trying to make more money.

“Have any of you ever made a single DymaxiCoin?” Delta asked the group. “I only ever got to .12 I think.”

“.32 here.”

“A little less than half.”

“That’s crazy! I’ve never met anyone who’s made more than single digits and I thought they were paying us well at the Dogearing Books Folding Center.”

It cost a coin to get a computer session, and none of them had made that much. In fact, they barely had enough for fifteen minutes with the mayor even if they pooled all their cash together. The more they discussed the gap between the long months they’d worked and the slivered fractions of DymaxiCoins resting in their (digital) wallets, the more they recognized the absurdity of it all, the absolute futility of work, and they were driven to laughter. Delta joined in with them as best she could. It’s just that whenever she did, she couldn’t help but feel as if she was also laughing at all her neighbors, and their homes, and their parks and gardens nestled in the gaps between their homes. Her .12 of a coin could only be funny around a campfire, in the wilderness. Home was irretrievably far beyond the horizon. Tucked against the canyon wallwas her new home away from home, a glass dome, aglimmer like crystal rising from the desert sand. There would be no freeway crunching these domes to dust. The jokes around the campfire would never be replaced by the timid hum of EVs. Their smiles were too easy, too wide and bright. Maybe one day soon she’d get to share in their happiness.

A lot of time passed. Delta’s discomfort was short-lived; not long after she moved into the dome, her fellow unemployed comrades took on the friendship roles that were typically filled by her folks back in SF. Delta had no shortage of hiking buddies, confidantes, lovers, even a hater or two.

The desert biome never felt restrictive, either, definitely not like it was expressly forbidden to sneak outside of the 500-square acre R&D(JPT) Self-Help Region that was patrolled 24/7 by flying computers equipped with Pulse-Driven Maximum Discouragement Defense Systems. It probably never felt that way because the Region had a lot of space. They could ride roborses and chase the sunset till their asses got sore and still never reach the end. Delta never ran out of things to do. During her whole year on fellowship she never even came close to seeing the border. Or perhaps there had been nothing to see, nothing that would present itself as a forbidden line to cross. When she couldn’t fall asleep at night, the high whine of a flying computer would zip its way to her ear like a mosquito, so faint and warbly she convinced herself that she was falling prey to tinnitus-induced hallucinations. She wondered if it, too, had a Pulse-Driven Maximum Discouragement System, or perhaps a little camera to check in on them as they slept.

She was getting better at guitar, and journaling; she was starting to see how much the arts could nourish her. The canyon was empty, cracked open, always ready to receive her off-tune strums. Delta started up a biweekly coffeehouse performance series with a situationship, right at the campfire spot from her first night. After the first few months settling into the routine, the nervous jolt she’d felt every morning before heading to the art museum became harder to feel, burrowing deeper into Delta’s memory until she could only mimic the stomach knot with a lot of effort. It simply felt too good being fired.

Seqouia came for a visit at the midway point. She was left speechless by the refinement of Delta’s musical talent, the elegant stacks of handwritten journals. They were reunited for a whole week, the maximum time that the fellowship allows outsiders to stay in the dome.

They went out stargazing, cocooned in sleeping bags and deep night. Seqouia took out her phone to take a picture. Delta saw something strange on the screen.

“What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“That. The orange thing.”

“Oh that?” Seqouia shook her head, rolled her eyes. She let Delta take a closer look—there was an orange smudge across the screen, like paint. Because apparently it was.

“I was clumsy and dropped it and the computer landlords were painting the sidewalk with warning paint.”

Delta sat up. “Warning paint?”

“Girl, yes. They’re bulldozing our block next year? Did you forget?”

At first, Delta was enraged that Seqouia would even suggest such a thing, like Delta wasn’t the one who sacrificed her days laboring at SFMOMA. Like she wasn’t the only person to take a stand for the neighborhood. But the anger didn’t feel right, like it wasn’t her own, and she couldn’t find the strength to let it flare.

She didn’t think she had forgotten. Then why couldn’t she say for sure? Why had the art projects and silent meditations been realer than her home getting destroyed for a freeway? Delta couldn’t answer these questions for the next six months. A year had passed playing in the sand. Flying back to San Francisco in a helicopter drone, she saw the city unchanged from the sky.

Seqouia threw her a welcome home party. She had a new phone, no more warning paint except for the buckets of it smothering the sidewalks a livid orange. The corner store had closed down. They’d unscrewed the streetlights and taken them to recycling. It was like the street was slowly dissolving and she could watch from her apartment window. Looking out there, Delta realized she could count the months before her home wouldn’t be here either. The construction date didn’t retreat into the small distance of years anymore. For the first time in a long time, Delta played less music to think more about money.

Everyone else in Delta’s graduating desert class had all successfully graduated into unemployment. They lived very healthy, labor-free, human lives, and occasionally she’d get a call from them while she was too busy to answer. Her phone would buzz in place with one of her friends telling her about a new hyperfixation they’d taken on or a trip they’d been planning, and all she could do was make a note to call them back. During work hours at SFMOMA, she was very physically occupied. She had to keep her grunts to museum-level quiet, no matter how heavy the mainframe was, or how hard the wheels stuck. By the time she called her friends back, they had already moved onto something else. She was paid .0008 DymaxiCoin an hour. She needed a raise. It was all she needed.

“Remarkable,” the computer said. 

She pushed it to the next painting. A quarter of a year passed. Delta pushed it to the next painting. Superb. To the next. To the next. Another quarter. Amazing. Remarkable. To the next.