That day, it turned out, was the following Monday.

  Compromising on your most deeply held principles is much easier than I thought it would be. It came quite naturally, in fact.

  Tarvin and I had a good laugh about my sudden and cowardly assent to unacceptable circumstances. It was quite common, he assured me.

  We parted the best of existentially opposed foes. We promised to meet up the next month, when I had earned my first lunch break.

  **

  Life as a MegaTech? janitor, as it turned out, wasn’t much different from the odd jobs I’d taken in the past. That is to say, nightmarishly bleak and altogether unfulfilling.

  My responsibilities were laughably minimal; my job being, as was helpfully explained in the training materials, “a ceremonial concession on behalf of our increasingly obsolete race.”

  Each day, I’d wake up in my company-subsidized micro-apartment, rehydrate my discounted MegaBrand? gruel, put on one of my innumerable beige smocks, and pin on the ID badge which was emblazoned with the new identity in which all my previous hopes and dreams became subsumed: Employee #23072 ?.

  On the way to work—just a measly two-hour ride underground on the hyper-efficient MegaLoop?—I’d occupy myself by listening to Daily Refutations. They were recordings helpfully provided to me as part of my generous Employee package, narrated by Professor Pyque himself, reminding me as I breathed in and out through my gas mask how selfish I had been to expect anything more from life.

  Upon arriving at work, after being sufficiently deloused and briefly quarantined, I set off to accomplish my duties.

  I was responsible, above all else, for mopping, dusting, scrubbing, vacuuming, and emptying the garbage in the offices and research labs that made up the sprawling grounds of MegaTech? Headquarters.

  The fact that MegaTech? was almost entirely post-waste, self-regulating, and, to a large degree, self-cleaning made this job quite easy and, arguably, almost entirely unnecessary.

  Still, though, I would be required and expected to visit each and every one of the thousands of labs and offices, making sure they were clear of garbage and dirt, monitored each step of the way by MegaTech?’s “revolutionarily invasive” tracking software.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  It, now omnipresent in all facets of my life, tracked not just my speed and efficiency, but also my mood and, on weekends, my prowess as a lover.

  If at any point in my workday I fell behind the pace, Meg would appear, gently reminding me to take pride in my “utterly Sisyphean task” and to remember to be grateful for “my Kafkaesque predicament.”

  **

  It wasn’t all tracking and punishment, though. There were perks.

  I had, somehow, upon entering the Premium Tier, been enrolled in a complicated Points System of some sort.

  Meg, the System’s Voice and, apparently, its Omniscient Rules Expert?, tallied for me a dizzying array of metrics.

  My very existence became gamified. I was, at all times, aware of the opportunity to “level up.”

  Just when these opportunities would come, however, was extremely hard to pin down. I was, as I still am today, very confused about just how the System’s mechanics worked.

  I’ll never forget my first Readout; the indecipherable categories and scores she assigned to me on my first day of work:

  NAME: LUDO BRAX

  TIER: PREMIUM (INVOLUNTARY)

  SOCIAL REPUTATION: SKEPTICAL INDIFFERENCE (2.3/5)

  CORE ASSETS: DOCILE, INCURIOUS, DISASSOCIATIVE

  TRAGIC LESSONS LEARNED: (0/7)

  PAIN THRESHOLD: 42% (NEW DATA EXPECTED)

  HEALTH READOUTS: ANOMALOUS

  LEVEL 1 PROGRESS: (12/100%)

  It was weird to be summed up this way. Not to mention, I didn’t agree with many of her findings. And, if I’m honest with you, some of them hurt a little to read. Not that I couldn’t tolerate a little pain.

  As time went on, though, I found myself less and less curious to find out just exactly what it all meant. I don’t know, I guess I was kind of a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. Or maybe I was checked out.

  What really got to me was the obscurity of it all; it felt like the System was judging me, skeptical of me somehow, a kind of bureaucratic indifference. Not dissimilar to how I’d been treated socially.

  I wasn’t going to let that stop me from trying to level up, though. I had the sense somehow that I was on the precipice of something, that if I could just keep pushing, I could reach another rung on some progress ladder.

  I just hoped the strange nosebleeds I’d been having of late would settle down. Something told me I had lessons to learn, and not all of them would be so easy to swallow.