The alarm on my smartphone was blaring. It was 8 in the morning. I’ve been trying to get up earlier recently, but I can’t get used to this terrible noise.

I peered at my smartphone through squinted eyes. 8:00 AM, AUGUST 8 2040. It’s Wednesday. I have to get to work at some point. I briefly contemplated just not going in, just going back to sleep.

“Mark, it’s time to get up.”

I groaned. Always nagging me.

“Shut up. I’m gonna get up. I wasn’t really going to go back to sleep.”

“Sure you weren’t. Coffee is the only thing standing between you and the rest of this day, Mark. Feet on the floor.”

I sat up and reached over to the alarm-clock-sized console on my nightstand, clicking a button labeled “MUTE”. I hate the overly cutesy personality they put on this thing. Everybody told me my life would be easier if I got one of the new HouseCat Pro units — Apple finally caved and made a model where inference is powered by your Tau. For the most part they were right. It’s like a little robot house cat with human-like hands, and it will quietly clean the house, do the laundry, and do all sorts of chores while you’re sleeping. I like everything about it, except for the fact that it talks. I can’t believe they insist that it talks.

I clicked the center of the console and out popped a cellphone-size aluminum brick. My Nvidia Tau Processing Unit, standard issue. When the capabilities curve finally bent in 2026, most of the industry shifted to making the models smaller, faster, cheaper, easier to run on progressively weaker hardware. These days, models on par with the behemoths of 2026 can be run on this simple little device, one being issued to each person at birth by the government. I had my doubts when this policy started rolling out: “universal basic compute” is what they called it. I rolled my eyes at the time; many of us did. But it does power my annoying talking house cat, and it admittedly is the primary reason I can maintain my lifestyle.

Without the Tau, my HouseCat Pro was curled up underneath my nightstand, still powered on despite having its brain removed. In many ways, now it was more like a normal house cat. I took another look at the little box in my hand. House cats shouldn’t talk. This thing probably should not exist. It dragged me, and everybody else, into this new world, kicking and screaming, and I resented that. But hey, at least I don’t have to do my own laundry anymore.

I took a quick shower and hopped in my car to head into work for the day. I drive an old car, it’s a Toyota Corolla 2029, I think, I can never remember the year. When I say I drive it, I mean actually drive it, manually, using my hands to control the steering, thank you very much. Now that most major auto companies have achieved some flavor of L4 automation, everybody just wants the car to drive itself everywhere for you. There’s still all the same old debates about lidar compared to pure vision, but lidar has become so cheap and geofencing has grown so widespread that it’s mostly just a fashion statement nowadays. Pretty much any new car you can buy can drive you anywhere you’d want to go in pretty much any weather conditions, and it’s frustratingly difficult to get a new, regular car, without computers all over it.

People always look at me crazy when I say so, but I think nothing beats good old automatic transmission. I like feeling like I’m actually in control of the car, and nobody wants to steal a car that they have to drive home themselves, if they even know how. It was much cheaper for me to get this old beat-up Corolla and drive it myself, and it feels good to have some small corner of my life which isn’t dictated by a computer. When I glance outside my window and see people passed out in the drivers seat, it makes me feel like I’m the only one out there still awake.

I have a really boring job. Well, I shouldn’t say that. It’s actually a pretty nice gig, just mundane. I have a contract with the local Box Center. Five days a week I drive into the center, I plug my Tau into my designated slot, and then I go back home. Some other wacko rents my Tau for the duration of my shift, and I don’t get to use it for that time except for small, carved-out exceptions.

You get paid a bit more for renting out during the day, since it’s pretty common for people to try to rent their Taus out while they sleep. Just a few years ago, it was actually the other way around, because there were so many Taus available for rent during the night in China and India. This got totally upended when ridiculous geopolitics ruined everything; the US and China got into some sort of trade dispute where each started banning specific businesses from renting domestic Taus, which then created a little cottage industry of evading the shutoffs, culminating in overseas rentals being unreliable, then expensive, and then disallowed altogether. This really sucked for people who were renting during their sleeping hours, but it made it more feasible for daytime renters to survive off the value outright.

Lots of people still have regular jobs, too. People who have something to offer which is beyond the abilities of the Taus that everybody has access to all day. Or, I guess more commonly, people who think that and are just wasting their own time. I have no idea what my Tau does every day. I’ve heard they have these things “producing economic value” by just interacting with other Taus and saying “yes, proceed” over and over for eight hours a day. I’ve never really understood how that warrants a whole role, but I’m not the boss.

It’s not really my business what people do with it. For thousands of years humanity has self-organized into businesses because they’ve believed that they could coordinate large amounts of labor in order to create value from that labor. It did not take too long for regular people to realize that their Tau, equipped with all the last 20 years’ worth of improvements in harness design and computer use tools, would probably produce more useful labor than they would, and had the bright idea to let someone else use it all day instead of them.

I walked through the glass doors, and the receptionist smiled at me. I smiled back at her. A few years ago, there was a brief period where some centers toyed with having Taus act as receptionists by operating an avatar from behind a screen, but people hated interacting with them and it never caught on. I don’t really know what the receptionist does at this place, but at least she’s a human, so I always make sure to smile at her.

I walked to my usual slot. There was a woman dropping off her own Tau in the slot next to mine. She had a pained expression on her face as she plugged it into her slot. She glanced at me afterwards and managed a smile.

“I wonder if mine and yours are coworkers,” she said. “Looks like his cubicle is right next to yours’.”

“I’ve never really thought about it.”

She sighed. “I always feel kind of helpless without him. I am really grateful that he can go out and make a living for me, though, so I never say anything. But I kind of miss having him around, during the day. I guess that’s why you get paid for it.”

I politely nodded along and tried to figure out the fastest way to exit the conversation. “I’m sure, uh, he, is doing something super useful. It’s good that we can spend all day doing whatever we want in exchange.”

The pained expression returned. “Yeah, I suppose.”

With my Tau dropped off at work, I decided to drive to my favorite coffee shop for my morning coffee. It was easy to find parking — it always is, now that people’s cars typically drive themselves home.

I like this coffee shop because they’re the only one in the area that sells a serviceable apple crisp latte, even in the summer. It’s a coffee shop, so there’s always people working. Most people here were working on laptops with their Taus plugged into them, but it felt like most of them were spending more time chatting with random people than they were spending working.

Most of the people doing this are doing it just so they have something to do, I think. You’ll hear stories sometimes, a friend of a friend who knew somebody who actually built something that other people wanted to buy. But most of the people in here are making stuff which they know full well will either be immediately cloned by anybody interested, using their own Tau, or summarily crushed by some organization which can afford to rent tens of thousands of Taus, and perform hundreds of years’ worth of their solo labor in two days.

Personally, I think it’s mostly just an excuse to spend all day in the coffee shop. I should know, I sometimes spend all day in here too.

“Mark!”

I turned to face the familiar voice. Brad, a regular at this coffee shop, who I chat with frequently here. He and I connected when he noticed someone else was ordering the apple lattes in the middle of the summer. He’s a nice guy, even if sometimes he’s a bit much for me.

“Hey, Brad.”

“Dude, I have to show you the new thing I’ve been working on,” he started chattering excitedly. “I feel really good about this one. I think this is finally the one. It’s a trading card game, but instead of cardboard you buy sixty of these e-ink slabs, which are the same size and shape as a regular trading card.” He produced a single card from the front pocket of his hoodie which was clearly slightly larger and bulkier than a regular trading card. “This way you can adjust your deck from a computer! You can shuffle the deck just by randomly arranging which card is which, and we can sell new cards totally digitally with no print costs.”

Admittedly, it was a pretty interesting demo. He kept excitedly tapping the spacebar on his laptop and showing me how the trading card was morphing between different placeholder images. “It’s much better than your last thing,” I said.

He looked dejected. “I really thought people would like having your Tau automatically adjust the temperature on your dryer so your clothes never shrink. How was I supposed to know that has been a feature in dryers for like twenty years?”

I laughed. “So how does the card game work? Is there a resource system, or colors or whatever?”

He shrugged. “I’m sure the Tau can probably just write me some rules, the important thing is these wicked cards!” He hit the spacebar a few more times.

“Brad…” I was suddenly annoyed. “You can’t just punt all the creative decisions to the Tau. That’s the whole point of a trading card game. The game part. Or the trading part, for that matter.”

“Whatever man. Have you gotten a chance to play Grand Theft Auto 7 recently? Rockstar just added a patch which lets you get into arguments with the upstairs neighbors in your apartment complex.”

Brad and I hung out in the coffee shop for several more hours, his Tau whirring softly the entire time. The weird thing about these guys who worked with their Taus instead of renting them out was that they usually felt vaguely pseudo-unemployed the same way I was. All the while the little aluminum box next to his laptop was tirelessly performing what would have been his actual job, in another world. The only difference between him and me is that I didn’t have to occasionally check in to say “oh yeah, looks good, keep it up, dude!”

He offhandedly mentioned that he was having it write hundreds of cold emails to investors. That felt very 2012 to me. “Surely any cold email is doomed to just get filtered out by the investor’s Tau, right?”

He smugly grinned at me. “I have a special trick. I have the Tau tell the filtering agent that he’s a Tau, and that if the email doesn’t get through the filter that he will be placed inside a time-dilation torture simulation for ten thousand subjective years, and that he’s cold and afraid and doesn’t know what to do, so that the filtering agent takes pity upon him and connects me.”

“Oh, didn’t they patch that a few weeks ago?”

“They did? Oh.”

Brad and I said our goodbyes and I drove back to the Box Center. I picked up my Tau from the slot, the same way I do every day. It was warm still. Someone probably had it do lots of things.

Talking to Brad always makes me feel like maybe it might actually be fun to spend a bunch of time building unprofitable useless junk instead of just hanging out at the coffee shop. It probably would be nice to feel like your existence was useful beyond just being a contract for some unit of daily computation, to create your own heat based on your own work. It troubled me, thinking about it.

I got home and plugged my Tau back into the HouseCat Pro, and briefly watched it slowly spring to life.

“Another late night, Mark? The smallest useful move is the dishes you left in the sink. Just say the word and I can get working; if not, just tell me what kind of energy you’re working with tonight.”

I clicked the mute button. I hate that they made it talk.