> 📗 The following story stands alone and can be read without any knowledge of my prior works, but takes place prior to (and in the same scifi universe as) [Can Androids Cope with Tiny Goats?](https://eleanorkonik.com/can-androids-cope-with-tiny-goats/) %% ( [[2022-04-22 Can Androids Cope with Tiny Goats]] ) %%  Loud music filled the room, making it hard for Bentley to hear anything else. This was, of course, the point. He savored the deep, pulsing bass his bluBox had chosen for him. His coffee rippled in time to the music as he scanned the morning paper, enjoying the feel of newsprint between his fingers. His fellow technocrats insisted newspapers were antiquated, but Bentley preferred to stay offline during breakfast, putting off the inevitable confrontation with his inbox. There was always someone begging him to tweak – or better yet, override – the algorithms directing resource allocations so supplies could go “where they were needed most.” His phone vibrated in his pocket, silencing the illusion of peace his music provided. Bentley tugged the ear clip from the breast pocket of his ratty flannel and fastened it in place without bothering to identify the caller. Not many people would try to contact him by voice. "I’m here.” He finished off his coffee in a last, disappointingly tepid gulp. "We need you to come in, Bentley." Apparently, Mack was was too busy for polite greetings. He dumped his mug into the sink and rinsed it. "I’m scheduled for remote work this week, Mack." "There was a security breach in the reclamations hub.” The Director’s voice had no sympathy. “If you'd been linked you'd've gotten the alert like everyone else.” “Sorry,” Bentley lied. Staffcore had tried to make constant connectivity part of his contract, but he’d balked and in the end, taken a pay cut instead. Damned if he’d feel guilty about it now. "What did I miss?" "We had to shut down remote access, so you’re presenting in person this morning." He took his mug to the sink and rinsed, the motions mechanical as he tried to figure out the best way to transport six petabytes of pathing software and infrastructure reports by hand. Did he even have any extra drives laying around? “Can we push back the deadline?” he asked. Maybe he could reformat one of his old computational math textbooks. He hadn’t needed to refer back to pure theory since before Meck tapped him for the Reclamations Division. “The client is already waiting, Bentley.” There was no use arguing about things like contracts and benefits and commute time. Not if he ever wanted to be assigned to another project.  “Merk, even if I walk out the door right now and take the train instead of my bike, I can’t be there in six minutes.” “Be here in thirty." It took ten minutes to find clean slacks and shower thoroughly enough for polite company. He grabbed his newspaper and took the apartment's elevator down to the metro station, finishing up the comics section as the doors re-opened. A recycling bin emblazoned with the quad peaks of the Staffcore corporate logo stood helpfully beside the exit. He tossed the paper in and smiled as it was automatically shredded into eco-friendly, reusable slivers. The overhead sign claimed the next train was delayed by three minutes, an unusual enough occurrence that Bentley almost accessed the holonews before he heard a woman’s voice speculating about construction. “No, the Cerisians bombed Green Street with one of those EMP things.” Bentley winced.  His luddite tendencies had led more than one coworker to accuse him of sympathizing with the Cerisian’s humans-first, anti-algorithm rhetoric, but despite office gossip, he had no problems with the econauts. They had ushered in global technocracy in their mission to eliminate oil wars, plastic-filled oceans, and smog. He liked breathing clean air and believed in the value of his work. He just liked to disconnect sometimes. The subway train rumbled into the station and the idling mass of people around him cohered into a bloc of impatient commuters, the perfect reminder that travel by bike was great for more than just reducing his environmental impact. A short Latino woman caught Bentley in the gut with her elbow as she maneuvered through the press of bodies straining toward the doors. When they opened, the handful of passengers waited for the crowd to open a pathway. As people struggled to move out of the way, a tall GeneE in a Peacekeeper uniform pushed him aside with her bulk as she disembarked. Somehow, he managed to get aboard, though he was sandwiched between the plastic doors and a hefty bald woman who smelled of sweat and rancid beauty products. He envied the lucky few who managed to find a seat as he fought to maintain a tight grip on the vertical rail so as not to embarrass himself by falling over in public. It was difficult, though, when the train came to the third station stop and braked harder than usual. He stumbled. Someone next to him muttered, “I thought AI was supposed to offer a smoother ride than a human driver.” “Cheaper, you mean.” Bentley’s hands convulsed into fear-fuel fists. Something was wrong with the train. For that matter, Cerisians shouldn’t have been able to breach a hardened technocrat server like the one in Staffcore’s vault. What had he missed in that alert? Was the hack connected to– The _crunch_ of impact jerked the rail from his fingers. Bones broke. He had only a split-second to think, _Should have–_ before he cracked his skull against the thick glass behind him. Bloody, grayish ooze seeped out through the back of his head and stained the pants of the corpse that cushioned Bentley's collapse. The emergency response was swift and efficient, like everything else managed by the technocracy. Two hydraulic service bots ferried the mangled mass of steel and humanity back to the station and pried open the subway doors so the paramedics could enter. One squeezed in and hauled a sluggishly bleeding body to a gurney. The gurney's automatic systems began their diagnostic, and leaving Bentley alone on the cold metal. "I can't believe the failsafes didn't work.” His rescuer spoke to a colleague, didn’t even look at Bentley. Bastard. "Do you think this represents a Cerisian escalation?" A woman’s voice, strong and professional. The reporters must have arrived. He couldn’t turn his head to look. “Ambulance chasing vultures,” the paramedic muttered, then toggled a button on the gurney. In a woman's sultry contralto, the gurney reported, "Diagnostic complete. Identity: Bentley Enge, employee of Staffcore Solutions. Diagnosis: Cerebrum damage detected. Complete spinal injury detected. At current resource allocations, minimal recovery projected.  Recommendation: recycle for parts. Under current conditions, viability expires in twelve minutes." That couldn't be right. His contract entitled him to full recovery measures. Had he somehow missed a memo from the Medical Division? “Good color on the eyes.” The paramedic’s voice was oddly muffled. “My kid likes that shade of blue. Mind if I take them for her new cybot?” If there was a response, Bentley couldn’t hear it. ## Afterword I know I said last month that I don't write much sci-fi, but the response from last month's longer piece was so positive I thought I'd take a risk and send another scifi piece from the same universe even if it's not quite as punchy / humorous. I've always had mixed feelings about _Recycled,_ not because I don't think it's a good story (I do — I never share things I'm not proud of) but because it took me years to get the "moral" to a point where I felt comfortable sharing the story publicly. In early versions, it came across like the universe was punishing Bentley for his old-fashioned habit of being offline whenever possible. This was never my intention; although I have a reputation for being very online, as a teacher, I rarely took work home and rarely checked my email after hours. Moreover, while I am indeed an early adopter for a lot of technologies, philosophically speaking I myself am a bit old-fashioned when it comes to computers. I insist on local copies of my notes, I'm privacy conscious when it comes to apps, I use fountain pens and physical notebooks, I read "dead tree" textbooks, I still write websites using raw code. In my experience, top-tier professional programmers tend to fall into one of two categories. First are the ones who are great with computers and really love them, to the point where they spend their off hours fiddling with personal network storage systems and raspberry pis, building free and open source plugins and mods, buying 3D game software and self-driving cars. Then there are the ones who are great with computers specifically because they know all the reasons they shouldn't trust them. These developers would never trust a smart fridge in their homes, spend most of their downtime working with their hands doing carpentry projects or repairing sailboats, keep their phone data turned off as much as possible, and envy the old guard who could get away with writing programs in pencil. Bentley is modeled on the latter type. I try to tell people sometimes that I don't view myself as a "real" developer, even though I've written themes and plugins and deployed my website using developer-centric tools like git. My perspective that while sure, I know how to hack together some basic scripts and can use git and read a bit of javascript, most of my developer friends have impressive formal educations in the field. They understand the math involved in pathing algorithms, they have written machine learning programs by hand, they know the history of ternary computing. The best I can do is follow along with their explanations and steal bits of their lives for my fiction, to hopefully make it feel a little more realistic. That said, from everything I've heard and experienced, I'm in camp "I wouldn't feel comfortable having my house life by an algorithm." I've run into too many edge cases with software to trust automations and algorithms with anything truly important, which is why I prefer RSS feeds and keep my social media feeds sorted chronologically. Failsafes are great, but there's almost always some way to get around them, and if my study of history has taught me nothing else, it's that there are always people motivated to subvert systems. Bentley, unfortunately, fell afoul of exploitable systems, despite his best efforts to protect his autonomy while doing his job to the letter of the contract. He didn't do anything particularly wrong — but hopefully his story is a bit of a warning that you don't necessarily have to do something _wrong_ to get burned by something going awry.