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 because 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 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. Because from everything I've heard and experienced, I'm in camp "I wouldn't feel comfortable having my house controlled by a smart device." 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.