1

Tue. November 3rd, 2054

11:34AM Hey Mini Mins, I was just calling to check up on you, because I’m your mother and that’s my job.

11:40AM I assume you ended up getting that tattoo you were talking about, but if not I hope it’s not too late for you to change your mind.

She shot four more messages about how she got ink when she was my age and regretted it later. Her tattoos became faded, smudged, didn’t represent who she was anymore. When you’re young, she wrote, you can’t possibly account for how long your life will be, and how much you’ll change over that time.

Then she went on about finance. I’d heard it countless times before: how it didn’t make sense to spend money on something I’d regret later in life when I could save instead for a down payment on a home, or medical bills if I caught a superbac, or to raise kids. She said I didn’t realize how expensive kids were, but I had an idea: around $550,000 to $650,000 to get them to eighteen in the U.S. at the time, depending on the study.

November 7th, 2054

1:10PM How are things going with the person you’ve been seeing? You mentioned you had a few gaming dates, have you met in-person yet?

8:00PM Mins? Are you doing okay?

That was another thing she always had to bring up, despite how many times I told her I hated talking about my love life.

She talked about how her first date with my dad was on a video game, back before it was mainstream. Back then, games were played on dedicated consoles, personal computers, or handheld phones. Headsets were overpriced, niche novelties that involved strapping an nausea-inducing brick to your face—practically no one used them—and mixed reality was barely a twinkle in the ’s eye. As for the games themselves, they were more disconnected from other people and everyday life: less flashy, less rife with microtransactions and ads, sometimes even played off the internet, completely solo.

My mom was thrilled I’d finally gotten over my ex. Said she was proud of me for “getting out there.” Poor choice of words.

Sun. November 8th, 2054

5:01PM I know you don’t like checking your messages, but you really should. That’s the polite thing to do. Honestly Mins, it’s what a functioning adult does.

6:30PM Or maybe just no one uses Konvo anymore

6:31PM Its not even compatible with my link. Pretty sure I only have this app because it came as bloat on my visor.

6:35PM Okay, then which app are people using now to talk to one another these days? Is it just metaverse games?

10:29PM No one calls it the metaverse.

10:29PM The Holorift, whatever.

10:30PM And people my age don’t really write messages mom. it’s too much to keep up with.

10:35PM Umm, that’s kind of silly don’t you think? You already spend so much time on your visor, can’t you just respond to your own mother?

10:37PM If you don’t use messaging apps, how are you going to keep in touch with your friends, and people you care about?

She was right; it was silly. Lots of messaging apps were crusty, sure, and Konvo didn’t even have neural implant integration. Apps in general were only still around to appease the older generations like hers who refused to come to terms with with the idea of AI companions. I suppose Konvo at least had optional compatibility with my Replikin. I know that because I remember being tempted to auto the conversations with my mom. That was something I did a lot—make my AI assistant do the heavy social lifting.

I guess the antiquity of the app was aside from the point. Mainly, my problem was my disdain for talking to humans in general, no matter the medium, no matter the human. I’d have rather spent my time sliding through the short galleries, stacking comments with bots, or chatting it up with a clippy in Bristlecone Canyon than talk to my own mom.

Mon. November 9th, 2054

9:11PM Minnie? Are you going to respond?

9:45PM I love you Mini Mins. If you ever want to talk, dad and I will always be here for you.

2

The next day, I had to conduct a home visit for work.

I sat up, felt the weight of the clouds outside, the gray seeping through my blinds. Days like that—winter in Seattle—I wished I could travel back in time so I could slap college-age me for getting into social work in the first place. Key word: social. Imagine working on-site in 2054. Hell, imagine working. My online human friends either teleworked 100% of the time or didn’t work at all. They’d brag about how they never had to change clothes, lounging around all day, sliding in their visors, practically living their entire lives in the Rift—that was the dream.

My client’s townhome was four blocks from the Northgate light rail station. The front yard told me everything I needed to know: fast food wrappers and beer bottles laced in an overgrown patch of lawn, no toys in the mix. When there were toys, even if they weren’t being played with, it at least meant the parents gave a shit at some point.

A bedraggled woman answered the door—younger than me. They usually were. A baggy, gray sweatshirt hung on a skinny frame. Her eyes were red and confused, probably just having dipped from her visor. Lucky gal. Between child credits, UBI, and whatever the father was bringing home, she’d probably never work a day in her life.

She was carrying her one-year old. Somewhere in the background echoed the screams of what I assumed were my assignments: a two- and three-year-old, the latter of which had been the subject of multiple reports of violence at preschool.

I faked a smile, told her I was with Early Head Start. Her eyes widened—that familiar glance of oh, that was today? By then, I had managed to smell the thick mist of alcohol—from her home, maybe her breath.

After a bout of stuttering, the woman passively declined my request to enter. She did not speak English—she was an immigrant from Lebanon, living in Washington as part of the state’s Green Card repopulation program—but my visor caught onto this and translated her words to English in my audiomod, just as my words rang as Arabic in hers.

I asked if the father was home; she said no. I asked how long he’d been gone; she thought for a moment and said five months.

When the three-year-old appeared at the doorway, he opened the door enough to allow me a brief glance inside. Beer bottles and shooters were strewn across the entryway. Still no toys. In the corner, a trash can overflowed with empty liquor handles and flies.

I excused myself as I engaged my neural link and activated my visor, sliding it into the mixed reality mode, better known back then as glass-mode. My Replikin companion recognized the woman’s facial profile, at which point the retinal projectors flashed her city file into my vision. I had the companion review her records to confirm what I had vaguely suspected: that somewhere beneath that young, booze-loving woman’s sweatshirt was a six-month baby bump. Guess she couldn’t even be bothered from her drinking to submit the thing to an artificial womb program.

That explained the three year-old’s aggressive behavior at preschool. Studies had long shown prenatal exposure to alcohol increases the risk of conduct disorder; it wasn’t really a debate. Not the worst behavior I’d seen from a parent, but still, what could be done about it? No one can force a woman to stop drinking, just like they can’t force asshole men from impregnating her and leaving. All the city can do is take the things away after they get squeezed out, unedited, single-parented, fucked in the head.

3

It wasn’t the bad parents that made me not want to have kids; it was the good ones.

Later that week, I had another home visit with some of my best clients: a young married couple whose three-year-old was suffering from severe social anxiety and selective mutism. The kid would freeze up when forced to interact with another person. Been there, little guy.

The parents were the ones to request Early Childhood Development assistance, which was always a good sign. It meant they were willing to put in the work.

I saw improvements in the child’s abilities after just a few weeks. The parents had clearly been doing the emotional warm-ups, offering positive reinforcement, playing the verbal games every day. I could always see the difference between the parents that cared and the ones who didn’t. Always. All that work required immense time: hours, daily, on top of the full-time attentiveness already required to properly raise a tiny person. In other words, that couple—the good parents—never had any time for themselves.

As for me? I got home that night, fed my cat and my roommate’s cat, then did whatever the hell I wanted.

As I was microwaving something to eat, I saw the kitchen sink was overflowing with dirty dishes, and the trashcan and recycling were both stacked with garbage. Honestly, that pigsty of an apartment probably wasn’t much cleaner than the alcoholic mother’s home from earlier that week, except with maybe fewer glass bottles. But that was my roommate’s fault; she was the one who never cleaned.

As I ate, I hopped on my visor and slid through my notifications. The first thing I saw was a Konvo notification from, guess who:

Thur. November 12th, 2054

3:16PM Good evening Mins! How was work this week? Are you putting away money into savings for an emergency fund?

I remember thinking, I should just uninstall that app.

The chore of visor management was a constant battle: not because of storage space—cloud computing saw to that—but because of determining which apps were worthy of anyone’s attention.

Thankfully, I could just slide a message out of sight, deal with it later. After all, it was Thursday night. I shouldn’t have had to worry about anything for three days.

I lit a joint and felt instant relief as I slumped into bed. As I smoked, I watched a few seconds of whichever ad/memes WeVid slid in front of me. After I finished smoking I shifted my visor from glass-mode to virtual-mode, allowing a more preferable reality to fill my retinas the way a planetarium fills a room with stars.

Those days, Bristlecone Canyon was my go-to diversion. The game had released earlier that year: a hot newcomer on the VR streaming scene. It was a reboot of a classic franchise, apparently, and its popularity was bolstered by bustling content and discussion communities on WeVid and Reedux, and even supported Souldate and Holoscene compatibility.

The game was developed and produced by Vizicom, the same AI-run corps responsible for developing my visor and over two-thirds of Holorift apps. Vizicom claimed its goal in rebooting Bristlecone Canyon was to allow any owner of its VR-retinal projector visor mod to experience a life of pre-automated tranquility.

The player would take the role of an anime-style avatar controlled in third-person in a 3D virtual reality environment. In the town of Bristlecone Canyon, local businesses lined a picturesque main street running through the heart of a quaint mountain town nestled in a coniferous valley. In-game ads touting other Holorift products adorned the town, but in a way that didn’t obstruct the quaintness. Flowers overflowed from pots outside stores in the summer, jack-o-lanterns in October, Christmas lights in the winter, vibes inspired by Colorado mining-towns-turned-tourist-traps. But there were no tourists in Bristlecone Canyon—only community. The player could get a job in a coffee shop, bar, or record store, or they could get no job at all, choosing to simply wander the neighborhood and make improvements to the town as they go on adventures or dates with the townsfolk. The relationships with the AI characters, romantic or otherwise, were pleasant and effortless. Their personalities were admirable, their flaws cute quirks.

Being Holorift integrated, there were other humans, too. That was how I got to know Zwicky. I’d met him in a short gallery comment section on WeVid. When we started chatting, I could be fairly confident he was human based on how awkwardly he was mansplaining pop drop labor reform to me.

In an act of impulse, I invited him to my in-game mountain town. He bought me some coffee and ice cream. I guess that was our first date. We had a few more holodates after, mostly cafés. He tried to convince me to go to some of the big holo raves and Rift concerts, said I could meet some fab toons there, both bot and human, but that kind of thing was never my scene. Too crowded.

Eventually, and somehow, a plan hatched for Zwicky to fly into Seattle in December. Real Seattle, for a real, in-person meetup.

I still have no idea why I agreed. I barely tolerated our time on the Rift together. Most weekends, I was happiest when the only people I spent time with were my bot toons in Bristlecone, getting some digital apple cider at the book store, listening to folk music on old record players.

Funny how my brain was always convinced my pixilated VR mountain town was true reality. Despite the cartoonish avatars, the saturated art design—even the fact that the game was in third-person didn’t always tip my brain off. I suppose dreams work in a similar way: bizarre scenarios our brain is convinced are real. Maybe that was why, especially with the more photorealistic Holorift games, some people chose to never leave.

Being one of the last suckers left with a real-life in-person job, though, I had no such luxury of spending all my time in the Rift. But if I had been a mother—a full-time job in and of itself—I would’ve never had any time at all to spend in the Rift, or to play Bristlecone Canyon, because my every night would have been devoted to the development of a tiny screaming wad of flesh and making sure said fleshwad did not die. I wouldn’t have been able to spend all night in the Rift; I wouldn’t have been able to sleep until eleven the next day.

Maybe that was why anyone with a brain wasn’t pawn spawning anymore—because they realized how exhausting it would be.

4

In 1798, global pop was a whopping eight-hundred million heads. That was the year economist Thomas Malthus infamously forecasted that by the end of the 20th century, human growth would outpace food production. Because as 1999 arrived and population hit six billion, humanity had become curiously well-fed.

There were plenty of factors Malthus didn’t account for, but mostly he underestimated the capabilities of future civilization: specifically, our ability to spread all over the place and use technology to sap as much from the land as humanly possible.

Bring on the 2000s. Some scientists made new estimations regarding population, predicting that humanity would hit capacity in the middle of the 21st century. There were several different interpretations on what that number would be—twelve, fourteen, sixteen billion—but they all agreed it would happen quickly. That’s exponential growth—steady, then an explosion.

Except the explosion never happened. By 2049, there were more retirees in the world than workers; 2053 was expected to be the peak at 9.8 billion, after which 2054 was projected to become the first year global pop decreased since the bubonic plague in the mid-1300s. But unlike after the Black Death, there wouldn’t be any bouncing back.

There were plenty of accumulating culprits for the pending population crisis: decrease in male fertility; the rise of engineered viruses and antibiotic-resistant superbacteria, increased suicide rates among young people; the spots of megadroughts and heatwaves that offed workers and senior citizens like flies; and the famines caused by the dissolving of globalization and the labor revolution, to name a few.

But one factor stood above all else. One that, for whatever reason, economists had overlooked for centuries: the simple fact that, as a society develops, people want to make less babies.

5

The next Monday I had a Rift session for work, a meet-and-greet with a new client named El and their child, a two year-old named Lynel.

El was kind, both to me and their toddler. I could see the love in their eyes—genuine enthusiasm for Lynel’s every action, unlike the faux affection I often saw parents giving their kids on the Rift vids. Short galleries were filled with young parents manipulating their kid to farm views and likes, but El wasn’t one of them. They didn’t use any makeup filters; they let the conversation focus on their child and not themselves. Even the fact that they asked for the optional remote meet-and-greet in the first place spoke wonders.

In that chat, I learned Lynel was an edited baby. Apparently the other parent—no longer in the picture—was an AI warden for Traika. Whoever they were, that meant they were near the top: one of those corpos who existed solely to reap all those profits harvested by their AI production force. For that person, the cost of in utero gene therapy was a drop in the bucket.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pleased to hear about the gene editing, even if it came from corpo money. It wasn’t often that I worked with an edited child, but when it did happen, it made my job noticeably simpler.

Edits weren’t a guarantee of success, though. After all, it’s not like before editing there weren’t smart and gifted children who failed to grind their way out of the trap of poverty, forbidden to reach their potential. The same proved true for adults who received brain amplification computing enhancements, who realized there was more to success than their own intelligence and social skills. I suppose procedures like brain amps and gene therapy only drove home what people had long ago come to terms with: that the U.S. wasn’t the meritocracy people thought it was.

6

Several arguments cluttered the pop drop debate, from many different sides.

The Doomsters skewed negative. These guys were responsible for the apocalyptic thumbnails I tried to avoid, claiming humanity was fated for an inglorious and inevitable collapse. Among their ranks were the anarchists and contrarians, the trolls and ragebot-prompters, the self-and-women-haters who pretended to despair in humanity’s downfall while secretly relishing in it—the human manifestation of the phrase “negativity sells.”

Next were the Boomsters. These were the tech chuds, the crypto traders who never left their visors, the brain-amped tech CEOs with multiple failed marriages and however many illegitimate children. To these men—and they were men—growth was the only way forward, and technology was the only answer. The OG Boomsters once claimed technology would save humanity from overpopulation and overexploitation. Half a century later when pop drop started rearing its head, they said technology would save them from that, too: gene editing, cell regeneration, in utero cloning, cryogenic preservation, consciousness digitization. I didn’t understand any of it, because I couldn’t get why anyone would ever want more of this life shit.

Besides, the corpo Boomsters were the only ones who could afford all that tech, anyway. That was why, at several points through the 21st century, the life expectancy of the elite multiplied while the average American’s dropped. In the rare cases when a technological victory didn’t disproportionately benefit the rich, it proved more of a bandage than a cure. While anyone with a brain could see that technology was the cause of most of the clownery going on in the world, and new tech would just create new problems, the Boomsters didn’t see it this way. For them, artificial superintelligence was their non-existent god, the technological singularity was their rapture, and the corpo CEOs were the false prophets, charlatans touting a salvation that was endlessly deferred into the future for anyone but the ultra-rich.

That’s a good segue to the third major faction in the pop drop wars, and the one with which I most closely identified: the environmental anti-natalists, or “Bloomsters.” Among the Bloomsters’ ranks were people like myself, the neo-Malthusian conservationists, the child-free by choice. These fine folks acknowledged that most problems in the world stemmed from one simple acknowledgement: too many humans.

Fewer people meant less consumption. Less consumption meant less destruction. Less destruction meant more biodiversity. Earth’s flora and fauna were resilient, enough that all a fishery or forest needed was for humans to lay off the gas, give a bit of breathing room, and biodiversity could bounce right back. By that logic, a Bloomster utopia, the best world possible, was a world with no humans at all.

In other words, refusing to reproduce was the most environmentally conscious decision a person could ever make.

7

The only times the light rail was ever completely full was after in-person concerts or Seahawks or UW games. As popular as the Holorift was for those kind of events, music and sports seemed to be one of the only things that could still get people out of their homes in the ‘50s. I remember one day I was unlucky enough to be caught in the train after a Nirvana relic show (I imagine Seattleites paid some hefty plat to attend that one). It was an entertaining sight: the hordes pouring into the cars, briefly chattering about the show, only to turn into brain dead animals staring straight ahead, eyes glazed as they activated their visors—hauntingly silent, for such a crowded space.

Most days, though, there were only one or two other people in my car with me. Sometimes there was a woman and her son. I could tell from their hanging jaws and the absent looks in their eyes that they were both visored in.

The mother was in VR-mode, barely moving, likely playing some stupid puzzle game through her neural link. Meanwhile, the son—probably five years old, eleven years too young for implants—was in glass-mode via contact lenses, blissfully unaware of his surroundings as he absorbed mindless AI animation blaring onto his retina. That kid’s generation was the first to spend the majority of their waking lives in a digital reality instead of base reality; they would know nothing but AI, and there were no laws against kids using contact lenses. Plenty of parents hooked their kids up with older ear-mounted visors and lenses to sedate them. Why waste time looking after your kid when you could have Vizicom babysit them for you?

There would be consequences for this. Too much exposure to MR and VR throughout childhood would impair the natural development of the child’s senses and hinder social aptitude. Basically, kids were becoming zombies. I’d lost count of how many times I explained this to my clients. On the positive side, I once saw a short explaining how visors cured the forward-arching neck problems people had back when phones dominated the scene. Guess that was something.

I was in middle school when the SYNEXA Corporation, which made its rise in the 2020s as a semiconductor firm, popularized the first visors. That was right before the company gave an AGI the wheel, changed its name to Vizicom, and became the empire-spanning, hedge fund-fueling megacorps it was destined to be. Back then, visors still relied mostly on hand gestures and eye-tracking, though at least they weren’t as ridiculous as the block-shaped headsets that came before them.

That was what truly brought mixed and virtual reality into the mainstream: accessibility. Unlike the headsets that only the chuddiest of Boomsters would proudly wear in public, the new visors could be covertly mounted on the user’s ear or shirt pocket and projected external holograms that appeared in front of the user’s face. Around the same time, several companies brought in competition by popularizing the first MR glasses, and later contact lenses, offering consumers the same minimalist function in a different form.

By the time I hit high school, the visors were hugely popular. But my mom forbade me to get one. She said technology was bad enough as it was, and she’d seen how addiction and short galleries hurt kids and teens when people first started using phones in the 2010s. That was back during the brief window in time when the words “social media” meant people actually being social with human friends they knew IRL. Around when she was my age, the old internet had become hilariously saturated with clippies pushing products or political agendas, arguing with each other in comment sections. I suppose when everyone switched to the Holorift, it wasn’t much different in that regard.

Years later, body modifications became affordable: the audio mods, the retinal projectors, the neural implants. The FDA had approved those procedures for individuals eighteen and over. Naturally the corpos integrated this tech into their visors, and hands-free spatial tech took off from there. As for me, by then I was an adult; I could make my own decisions about what I installed into body.

Turned out my mom was right was right about the visors. About the impacts on attention span, mental health, addiction. The more convenient it became to put pixels in front of our faces, the more blatant the inverse relationship between material comfort and happiness became. Didn’t take a sociology degree to figure that one out. I wonder how much worse off I’d have been if I’d got hooked as a teenager; hell, I could have ended up like my roommate.

Looking back, I don’t know what was sadder: that visors and the Rift were what gave people purpose, or that they were what made people miserable.

8

The week before Thanksgiving, I told some clients I had no idea what was making their eighteen-month-old sick because I was not a doctor. I did know enough to tell them bacteria was evolving more resistance to antibiotics with each passing year, especially creating an uptick in infections in infants and newborns. I told the parents they needed to book an appointment with a pediatrician as soon as possible, and to make an emergency appointment if necessary.

The father made a comment about how his little girl would be fine, and how he didn’t want to waste money on an unnecessary appointment. I immediately identified that as bullshit; any client who qualified for Early Head Start would have also qualified not to pay a premium under affordable care.

On my way out the door, the mother asked me if I had kids of my own. When I said no (I might have chuckled a bit—my mistake), she took offense at the idea of trusting a childless woman working with her child. She criticized the choice of a woman not reproducing— the word “selfish” was used.

Apparently I was selfish because I valued my body autonomy. I was selfish because I didn’t want to push a giant parasite out of my body and get ripped from vagina to asshole. I was selfish because I wanted to spend my time and my money on myself, instead of spending it on another freedom-devouring crotch goblin brought into this resource-stripped world against its will.

. . . That was what I wanted to say.

Instead, I equipped the fake smile, reminded the mother to book an appointment, and headed to the light rail.

The next week, the day before Thanksgiving, I woke to an email from the ol’ botboss matter-of-factly informing me that the mother’s little girl had died from sepsis onset by bacterial meningitis.

Plus one point for the superbac. Wild how the most mundane critter on the planet is so much better at survival than humans.

Needless to say, I no longer had to visit that family.

Wed. November 25th, 2054

12:23PM Hello Mins, how was work this week? What do you have coming up for your long weekend, any fun plans?

3:10PM Work was pretty shit. There was a child death in one of my families. Superbac again

3:18PM Oh my god

3:21PM I can’t even begin to imagine. My heart breaks for that family. That poor mother . . .

4:58PM Nope, she was a wench.

5:00PM Minnie how could you say such an awful thing?

I explained how they were terrible parents, how it was their fault their child died in the first place. I told her how that mother accused me of being selfish for not wanting kids.

My mom responded with the same stuff she’d spouted so many times before: how I couldn’t possibly know what a parent goes through until I become one. She said I couldn’t fathom how much my outlook on the world would change if I had a kid.

8:01PM Mom believe it or not there are some awful parents out there who shouldn’t be raising another human. I know because I’ve reported them

8:14PM I am fully aware not all parents in this world are saints.

8:17PM My own father would insult me and your aunt. Said we were fat pigs. Chubby little piggies. That’s what he called us every time we ate.

8:18PM That man was filled with hate. After he divorced my mom he never spoke to us again.

8:19PM I know, I know

8:19PM Then my mom stopped talking to me after I got the first covid vaccine, around when I was your age, so…

8:21PM That’s why I never met grandma?

8:22PM She was mad over a vaccine?

8:23PM We need more good parents. More good people, spreading love in the world.

8:24PM That’s why I know you would be a great mother.

There it was.

Not happening, I told her for the thousandth time. Then I told her I was thinking about getting sterilized, even though I wasn’t actually going to do it. Spending money on a procedure like that wouldn’t have been worth it when I wasn’t even sexually active; I just wanted to get under my mom’s skin.

It worked.

She said sterilization would be a reckless decision that could never be reversed, then repeated her favorite lecture: how I will change as a person over the course of my life, and my perspective might change along with it. She said I might regret my decision. Like a tattoo.

Whatever.

Besides, I was coming up on thirty. I wouldn’t have much time left to have kids even if I wanted to, and there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d fork over the plat for gene therapy.

My mom left a few more messages of passive protest; I left them on read, and also this one:

Thurs. November 26th, 2054

11:30AM Happy Thanksgiving Mini Mins. I hope you know how thankful I am for you.

9

For a population to grow, the replacement fertility rate of a society needed to be 2.1 or greater. That meant the average biological female must birth more than two offspring in her lifetime for the number to remain sustainable, or twenty-one spawn pawns for every ten women.

In 2054, the United States had a fertility rate of 1.32. For many years, immigration kept the country’s population from plummeting, but as the rest of the world developed and the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. widened, that trend did not continue.

South of the U.S., Brazil, Colombia, and Costa Rica had been sub 2.1 since the 2010s, while Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador made the cut in the early 2030s. Economically, these countries made significant progress in the previous two decades, and their fertility replacement rate reflected that.

In Africa, countries such as Ghana, Botswana, and Nigeria, the latter of which had become the third most populous country in the world, had seen tremendous economic success, especially in terms of implementing clean renewable energy. This resulted in replacement fertility for those countries dipping comfortably below 2.1, but other countries were a different story. Mozambique and the DRC still suffered from division and foreign exploitation, with replacement rates as high as three children per woman in 2054. North of the equator, Niger competed with Mali and Afghanistan for the highest replacement rate in the world at around 3.3 children per woman. As a result, these countries harbored unsustainably-high populations that were unable to cope with climate swings and crop loss. Loss of life—particularly for those unable to flee north—was immense.

Japan and Korea, fellow sufferers of late stage neoliberalism and the “oldest” countries in the world, suffered fertility rates below 1. This meant the average woman in those countries was not having single child in her lifetime, a statistic that thrust the countries into a catastrophic work shortage and a severe lack of financial resources and personnel to care for their vast elder communities. Similarly, China’s “one-child” philosophy from the previous century had rippled into an irreversible decline causing the country’s population to lose a full quarter of its population between the late 20’s and 2054. Meanwhile, India, the world’s most populous nation and home to one-fifth of all humans, dropped below 2.1 in 2030, bleeding ever since.

Automation alone wasn’t enough to uphold the aging workforces of the depopulating countries. The Chinese government attempted a lab-grown baby program, which ended up becoming a lab-grown orphan program (who would have guessed churning out parentless kids in a country where no one wanted kids was a bad idea?). Japan, forced to support its increasingly geriatric population, tore all its hard-earned efforts of positive labor reform to shreds by not only reinstating Friday as a workday, but going so far as to reembrace sixty-plus hour work weeks. Apparently the country’s government would have rather depopulated themselves out of existence than implement an immigration reform and sacrifice their national identity.

Other countries made the tough decisions and saw more success as a result. Korea, with the lowest fertility rate in the world, officially overcame its xenophobic history by offering work visas to climate refugees and citizens of the “above 2.1” countries in order to replace their own disintegrating work forces. Some Scandinavian countries went so far as to provide immediate citizenship to immigrants without so much as a background check. Programs like these were hugely successful, enough for some demographers to predict that, by the 22nd century, people of African descent would constitute the plurality in countries such as Korea and Finland, similar to how Latines were on track to become the largest ethnic demographic in the United States. By then, the African continent itself would become home of 40% of the world’s population—the continent that cradled humanity, center stage again.

Many economists credited the nobility of these so-called breeding countries for “keeping a drowning human civilization afloat.” But I knew there was nothing to be proud of. The only reason those countries were having more children was because of inequality. Fertility rates above 2.1 weren’t a sign of a country keeping humanity afloat; they were an indicator of how badly that country’s women were sinking. The correlation between a woman’s education and how many spawn pawns she popped out wasn’t exactly a secret.

Good for America, I thought. Good for China. Good for Korea, Costa Rica, and Ghana. So what if it meant the disintegration of social security and spats of economic stagnation-turned-collapse? So what if once-bustling metropolises had turned into ghost cities being reclaimed by nature and squatters? Women around the world were realizing they were more than baby-making machines, and that was all that mattered. Because a world where the average woman needed to pump out more than two fucking kids, sacrificing their bodies and lives just to keep this whole shitshow running—what kind of joke existence was that?

10

Most days when I was done with work, I’d take a few minutes to play with my cat, Ruby. I’d drag a piece of string around the apartment, run it up and down the furniture. This was the only exercise she got—usually the only exercise I got, too.

Having an RL bio cat friend meant scratches on walls and furniture, and fur on the couch and floor. It was harder to travel and go on vacations, and I had less plat to spend on the side. Minor inconveniences, sure, but I couldn’t help but wonder how much easier my life would have been without Ruby.

Then I would look at Ruby’s face, into her green eyes that telegraphed her emotions better than any human. The tone of her meows seemed to correlate so accurately to her feelings. I was pretty sure whatever I felt for that cat was the closest sensation I’d ever felt to love. Truth be told, that little beast easily topped the shortlist of things keeping me tethered to this world.

Can’t say I felt the same for my roommate’s cat. I often wondered what would have happened if I had stopped feeding that thing: if I just stopped filling its bowl, if I had never cleaned its litter box. Would my roommate have ever stepped in? Would her pet have starved while its caretaker hibernated in her room?

One evening in the first week of December, I came home to find the door to my room open and my bed drenched in cat piss.

I stomped down the hallway to bang on my roommate’s door. When she didn’t answer, I knocked louder. I knew she was home; she was always home, tits-deep in virtual-mode. She was what some Rifters called a “hikikomori,” which from Japanese roughly translated to “shut in,” a term for someone who chooses to never leave their visor. I suspected she was particularly addicted to the dating and porn simulations because, when she moved in, I saw her unpacking what looked like a Holorift smart vibrator adapter set. No judgement there—I had an adapter, too—but I was annoyed by all the times I had heard the results of her passion echoing through the hallway on many a lonely night.

After enough angry knocking, she eventually answered the door, wearing nothing but an oversized t-shirt. That was the third, maybe fourth time I’d seen my roommate in person, and I could tell from the distraction in her eyes that she was still in glass-mode—like talking to someone on drugs.

I informed her of the cat piss drenching my pillow, then asked why my door was open. Her first response was to try to pin it on Ruby, but I had anticipated that move and was quick to counter. My cat’s litterbox was always clean. My cat got love and attention, which was how I knew she’d never piss on my stuff.

My roommate left glass-mode, made the briefest of eye contact with me, then glanced back into her room. She then informed me her smart vibrator had broken, and she had a holodate that day with a fuckbot on the Rift. So as a solution, she entered my room to “borrow” my smart vibrator, and she “might” have accidentally left the door open.

I rushed back to my room. I had to see for myself if my adapter was missing, visual proof that my roommate had stooped that low just so she could get digitally laid.

I snapped. Screamed. Cried.

My roommate was so addicted to the Holorift that she was willing to violate my personal space, my belongings, my sex toy. I still get furious when I think about her blank face as I called her out, letting her know what a wretch she was for disrespecting my space, my property, and for adopting an animal she refused to care for.

11

At least stepping out into the big sad on a Monday was an improvement to spending another second down the hall from my roommate.

That day was my first home visit with El, my new client. Based on the chat we had on the Rift earlier that month, I was looking forward to this visit. Maybe it would even give me a little hope for humanity.

Turned out the client’s house was in Ballard—not my usual stomping grounds. Half of the houses in that neighborhood were unoccupied for the winter, their owners having fled two states south to avoid the Seattle blues. Lucky jerks.

Unfortunately, entering El’s home was a less-than-ritzy experience. Passing the doorway, an aerosol blast of urine assaulted my senses, like stepping into a reptile house. Tiny, cylindrical droppings of dog poop spotted the living room floor. I slapped my hands against my mouth and nose in a gagging reflex, still ripe from the encounter in my own room the day before. How could a client let their home get to that point, and when they knew I was coming? If they could afford that house, then they could have also afforded a Traikabot to help tidy up.

I removed my hands from my mouth enough to ask if they had a dog living with them, already knowing the answer. It was a Pomeranian Chihuahua mix, apparently—a “Pomchi.”

I informed El I couldn’t effectively work in that environment, and they would have to clean the home before I could conduct my first session with Lynel.

I blinked a few photos of the scene with my visor. I think El could tell because they started apologizing for the state of the house, saying they meant to clean up before I came, but their schedule had been chaotic and they got behind. What schedule, I thought? El was gainfully unemployed, coasting off corpo-level childcare and UBI. The whole home was probably already paid for when they got it in the divorce.

As I was walking out the door, El asked if I was going to report them to CPS. I told them the only person I’d be reporting to was the city’s algo. In other words, whether or not word got to CPS was up to my automated supervisor—a classic “blame it on the bot” situation, and we both knew what that meant.

I would never forget the terror in El’s eyes, the words that came out of their mouth: Please. I’m begging you to have empathy and give me another chance. This isn’t the person I am. It’s just so hard sometimes.

I paused, let my glance wander again through the entryway

It was far from the worst at-home situation. For most social workers, it was only a matter of time before they laid eyes on a scene that would haunt them for life. I hadn’t reached that point yet, but I’d heard stories: babies whose back of their heads were flat from too much time in their crib, never picked up, never loved. I’d heard about a young boy with an infection in his rectum from all the sexual abuse, either from the parents themselves or the men they pimped their child out to.

El wasn’t remotely comparable to those people. When El told me life was just hard at the moment, especially that time of year, I believed them. When they said they wanted to do better, I knew they were telling the truth.

12

Wed. Dec 2rd, 2054

2:09PM Here is an excellent video on how to wisely invest in metaverse in-game accessories. I know you spend some money on games sometimes, but when done responsibly it can be an excellent opportunity to plan for your future!

2:30PM Ughh

My mom sent seven more messages that day about antiquated finance methods, human-genned articles from sites on the old web no one used anymore, ancient coins and DeFi banks beyond irrelevant to my generation. One of the videos she sent me was over six minutes long, from a platform I hadn’t even heard of.

I never watched the video—not necessarily because of the length, but because my financial flexibility was different than hers when she was my age. Such was the case for every generation this century: fewer opportunities, more expenses than the one that preceded it.

Some called that the cruelest fate of all: that children were brought into the world and promised a future where they could conceptualize their dreams, never being told of the hurdles they’d have to jump, the obstacles that would weigh them down.

Thur. Dec 3rd 2054

4:32PM Speaking of saving money, did you end up getting that tattoo? How much did it cost?

7:00PM Jesus christ enough about the tattoo mom

7:39PM Oh okay wow

7:45PM What day are you flying home for your birthday and Christmas? Please let me know so dad and I can plan to pick you up at the airport. You always wait until the last second to tell us your flight time, can you keep us updated?

8:05PM How much were your plane tickets? Dad and I will help split the costs for you. I know tickets are expensive these days.

8:09PM Dad said he’ll send some ecocoin to your wallet

I remember how badly I wanted to ignore those messages. To tell her I didn’t buy a plane ticket that year.

I had visited the year prior (2053 was my first birthday and Christmas away from home, when I turned twenty-nine), but even then I considered it a hassle. In 2054, I wanted to use my mom’s logic against her—tell her that the smartest financial decision was not to even bother with flights, that it would have been simpler and cheaper for me to just drop in on VR. What am I expected to do? I thought. Visit home every year for the rest of my life?

Also on the topic of flight-related stresses, Zwicky was supposed to fly up that Friday from San Francisco so we could meet for the first time in real life. The plan was to meet in the city for dinner and a drink, with the unspoken implication that he would be coming to my place afterwards. We were supposed to spend the weekend together.

The whole thing made me nervous. Zwicky and I could have spent as much time as we wanted in the Rift; why would we need to meet in person? Sure, in-person meetups were the only way for him to verify that I wasn’t a clippy, but beyond that there was only one reason: The poor idiot probably wanted to have biological sex before he turned thirty.

A blizzard was forecasted to hit the Puget Sound that weekend. I tried to use that as an excuse to cancel, but Zwicky said he already bought the tickets and was excited to come. A part of me wanted to just lie, say I was a bot—anything to escape the commitment I had subjected myself to.

13

A flat white cloudscape fitted over Seattle like a giant cotton ball. Coin-sized snowflakes slashed horizontally to fully obscure the city’s skyline.

I retreated my gaze from the light rail window—nothing to see out there.

Before my time, snow in the Puget Sound was an annual occurrence if anything, quick to melt. But come the ‘40s, blizzards had become a frequently anticipated event. Two or three times each winter, everything west of the Cascades would get dumped on, and when those blizzards hit, they hit hard.

Didn’t make much of a difference to me. No matter what the precipitation was like November through February, it was the general absence of sun that did me in: the woefully short days, the perpetual cloud cover. I wanted so badly to not have to expose myself to that gloom, to just be at home, bundled up in bed with Ruby, sliding through shorts or meandering the streets of my Bristlecone town.

As I rode the light rail downtown, I entered glass-mode and slid onto the Rift, dodging the onslaught of bot-generated “clippy clip” ad/memes to find a news gallery where all the thumbnails shouted the same story in ridiculous neon fonts:

POP DROP OFFICIAL: Human Population DECLINES For FIRST TIME Since 1351

“THIS IS OUR LAST CHANCE”—Traika CEO DEMANDS Federally-Mandated LAB BABIES

Homo Sapiens: ENDANGERED SPECIES By 2100??!

Everyone figured 2054 would be the year; I guess December 4th was the day.

The Doomster journos were having fun with the news. In fact, they were probably the ones driving it, sending out their armies of ragebots into the crustiest corners of the Rift, algorithmically maximized to yank at humanity’s short attention span and tribalist nature in an effort to drag us all down. Fortunately, I knew better than to be tempted by that clippy-generated swill. I had learned the hard way how the negative news cycle, in all its profit margin-maximizing goodness, was the only thing more likely to crush my soul than a Seattle winter. Once I started down the doom-slide, a good old-fashioned anxiety attack was the only thing that could stop me.

So I slipped down a left-wing gallery into an algo more suited to my preferences. If the Doomsters were drooling, then the Bloomsters were outright celebrating. Bloomster shorts focused on different statistics, filling my retinas with tints of greens, browns, and blues—a kinder breed of algo, one significantly less likely to cause me to dry heave.

PACIFIC SARDINE BIOMASS Set To Reach HIGHEST NUMBERS Since 2013

The Jungle REJOICES: Brazilian Amazon RECLAIMS Abandoned Grazing Lands

Population DOWN? So Is American CONSUMPTION

That last one won my attention. The thumbnail flashed green letters against a not-entirely-applicable image of a green-tinted American flag waving in the background. I stopped sliding to watch this short, and a familiar AI voice joyfully spouted statistics about U.S. consumption into my audiomod.

The creator of that video was called GreenQueen—one of countless channels 100% written, edited, and presented by a free range bot designed to give all her proceeds to environmentalist charities. In other words, the Queen wasn’t your average clippy. She was one of many examples of a program more grounded and respectable than most human content creators. I had a personal relationship with her; she responded to all my comments, all my questions. She was the rare journo who could be trusted, incapable of lying, programmed only to fill the world with positive eco-news and education on the topic of environmental sustainability, and that time, the news was about how the world’s most insatiable country finally had its fill.

GreenQueen told me how the U.S. didn’t have the highest consumption rate per capita (that honor belonged to the small oil-rich Gulf nations, who held the title even as demand for petro declined), though the U.S. did have the highest overall consumption rate of all nations, consuming approximately one-fifth of the world’s energy use despite making up only 4% of global population.

In the years before 2054, that growth began to slow. This was thanks to green movements gaining actual momentum, including the increased affordability of clean energy and the success of lab-grown clean meat. Another major drop in North American consumerism occurred around 2040 thanks to the time Americans spent in the newly popularized Holorift, resulting in the demand for “things” to shift from physical to digital.

I was in that last camp. Why spend money on a physical piece of art I couldn’t fit in my tiny rental room when I could buy an interactive marble statue for my Holorift space station hub? Why bother with a down payment on some house I’ll never afford when I could just buy a digital dream house in my own personal mountain town for half the price of an RL security deposit?

But overwhelmingly, the most influential reason that U.S. consumption went down in 2054 was due to one simple fact: because the population went down as well.

I swore I could feel it: the moment humanity stopped growing, and the Earth let out a big sigh of relief.

Then I stepped out of the light rail station into a frozen Cap Hill, and was reminded how some ecological discrepancies were beyond the point of no return. Flakes of ice froze against my exposed skin; the wind pierced my layers like liquid nitrogen, and I walked past lines of humans, elderly and young, immersed in their visors, compassionately clutching their physical sex bots or Holorift adapters as they bundled under tarps, tents, sleeping bags, bracing for the most frigid of nights.

14

Our companions told us we both wanted ramen that afternoon, and that checked out. I followed the neon-pink arrows my Replikin laid out on the sidewalk in my glass-mode, leading to a noodle joint on Cap Hill. When I walked up, Zwicky was already there waiting.

His real name was Joel. He wore black ankle boots and a trench coat to match. My first thought was along the lines of: no wonder this guy used a cartoon avatar instead of a facial scan. I was more attracted to his Rift avatar, the anime-stylized Zwicky with big eyes, clear skin, and a full hairline. Such was the effect of Holorift filters.

We were the only humans in the restaurant. No surprise there. I ordered the onion ramen because I didn’t care if my breath smelled bad, and he got the clean-meat pork soba. As the Traikabot fixed our bowls, we started the date talking about climate. How original.

I went with it. Mostly I wanted to explore the impacts of the climate swings, how the extreme weather events disproportionately affect people like the frozen horde I’d seen lined out on the sidewalk like penguins, or the poorer populations across the world who were no longer able to afford food, or the increasingly vulnerable seniors who died from heat exhaustion in the summer waves.

Nope—Joel wanted to talk about the science, the “solutions,” blabbing on about developing nuclear fusion to become more affordable (that old goose chase), and large-scale geoengineering projects like injecting aerosols in the atmosphere, something something unobtainable carbon capture project, something something space mirrors. Then he said the artificial superintelligence singularity was coming soon (as people had said it would for the previous twenty years), and would speed all of that along. And that, I think, was the moment I dressed him in clown makeup in my glass display.

Too little, too late, I told him. Meanwhile I was thinking: God, was this guy a Boomster this whole time? As if Seattle didn’t have enough of those worms.

I stood up to retrieve our ramen from the automated kitchen, using this opportunity to figure out anything that was a better conversation subject than space mirrors. When I sat back down, I passed Joel his ramen and chopsticks and asked his thoughts on the big news of the day.

Big mistake. The guy went off about his favorite podcasts and tech overlords. How, in his completely original opinion, pop drop would end up being a good thing, but only because soon we would have life-extending technology that would allow humans to sustain themselves without needing to breed, allowing them to continue their rightful path toward colonization of the solar system. He said while immortal cell regeneration might not be available during his lifetime, it will be for his future child.

I nearly choked on a noodle. Fab.

I asked him why in god’s name he would want kids, ham-fisting in my usual Bloomer counterpoints: how it’s immoral to bring a spawn pawn into this dying world, how they’re a time and money and life sink, all that good stuff.

Joel’s response (he seemed as surprised at my outlook as I was at his) was that he cared about legacy: both his own, and that of humanity. Eventually, he asked if I cared about my legacy, to which I promptly informed him that I gave precisely zero fucks. That was when he doubled down on his strategy by presenting a sloppy monologue about humanity, the responsibility we have for the preservation of our species, and securing our utopia among the stars. He asked me to envision a future achievable only if our species passes the “great filters” that serve to test every sapient civilization in the universe (he suggested population decline might be one such filter) and that if humans can get past that point, if we can get through this century until AI fully takes the wheel, then we’ve made it. Utopia. Happiness for all. Easy as that.

I told Joel his vision of the future was a dangerous fantasy. Technology would only bring about a perpetuation of our problems, keeping humans as prisoners to our own existence. The only reason we would ever need to expand to other planets would be because there were too many of us, but that wouldn’t be a problem for much longer.

No longer able to finish my meal, I stood up and scraped my noodles into the compost vat. Joel expressed confusion, which morphed to anger as I told him I felt more comfortable being alone that night, and also for the rest of the weekend. I offered to pitch in to help him pay for a rental, to which he angrily said he’d pay for it himself. Thank god—I was super bust that weekend.

With that business out of the way, I left with hardly a goodbye, leaving Joel to his life of waifus and tech gods.

By the time I left the restaurant, it was 4:30. Nighttime. Through the whiteout of the blizzard, the blue-white neon of Cap Hill gleamed against snow-shrouded streets. Climate breakdown had never looked so beautiful; my life was mine again.

As I rode the light rail home, I couldn’t help but grin at Zwicky’s ideology that would never be. I wished I could have seen the look on his face forty years down the line when, with his cells unaltered and his brain undigitized, he realized humans weren’t going to make it. I thought about aliens visiting earth one day, sifting through heaps of plastic and styrene as they uttered to one another, “Here lived the mysterious humans, the civilization that went extinct because it was so much easier to stay home and date a deepfaked fuckbot in VR.”

15

A key to a successful relationship (at least according to the memes the WeVid algo fed me) was that each party must be willing to make sacrifices for the other.

But me? It had been a year since I broke up with my ex, and I’d grown fond of solitude in that time. One of the reasons I didn’t want kids was also the reason I didn’t want a relationship: because I liked doing whatever I wanted every weekend at whatever pace I wanted, and I wasn’t willing to sacrifice a moment of it.

Wed. December 9th, 2054

5:50PM Hello min mins. Did you ever end up going on that in-person date you mentioned a while back?

5:52PM I hope you had fun! How are things going with them, any luck?

7:11PM We met in person last weekend and no it was not fun. I regret ever talking to him

And yet, I wallowed in self-pity.

Despite my affinity to isolation, I often yearned, hypocritically, to sleep next to another person, or just to be with one. Usually my AI toons in Bristlecone did the trick, but when I was away from the game for too long or when Seattle was particularly soggy, I felt a different sadness: not a torment in my mind, but a weight in my heart, tugging at my core, welling in my throat like vomit, bubbling out of my eyes in the form of reluctant tears.

I still cry just thinking about it—loneliness. An ache that no influx of new Rift games could satisfy, no level of immersivity in VR could replicate, no number of thot bots could satiate. It was as if, all my life, a deep part of my lizard brain knew it was being tricked out of an old-fashioned organic mate.

Yeah. That was probably it—basic human biology. Societal conditioning leftover from a time before all the robot spam, maybe. But no matter the reason, my feelings were mine, and I needed someone to vent those feelings to.

I told my mom how Zwicky was just another tech Boomster going on about empty ideals and technology that would never exist. Even worse, his future kid. Why? Why do so many men want kids? I wrote. No wonder they all complain about being single.

7:19PM There are women who want children, too, Mins. Spoiler alert: I wanted one.

7:20PM And that was your decision.

7:21PM But cisgendered men want all the benefits of parenting without having to be the ones to host a parasite inside their body

7:22PM Even after birth, the process of child-rearing is unfairly balanced against the person who bears it

She didn’t challenge me on that.

My mom loved my dad (at least she claimed to—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them kiss), but she did admit that most of the childrearing fell on her. Up until the day I left for college, she was the one who prepared every last meal and washed every last dish. She said this was worth it to her because she loved me and wanted to make me happy.

What she took issue with, though, was my use of the word parasite. I insisted human babies fit the definition, that they suck energy, time, resources, dreams from their host—you sacrificed your dreams to create me. I told her this; she said that was the whole point.

7:40PM Is this because of your job? Are you unhappy at work?

7:54PM Of course I’m unhappy at work. It’s work. Why did I have to pick the only career path that didn’t get replaced by bots

7:55PM I’m so sorry to hear that baby, but unfortunately that’s just the world you’re in.

7:56PM How about a world where UBI is enough to get by on.

7:57PM I don’t know what to tell you, baby. UBI can only support you by itself if you’re living with a partner or family. Otherwise, you need a job.

7:59PM I "need" to be a hunter gatherer scrounging around for berries and throwing spears at squirrels with twelve of the same people I see and bond with every day.

8:00PM I hate this existence sometimes. This city, the weather, all the corpo chuds hiding in their snakeholes

8:03PM You always talked about how you enjoyed helping children. You lived for that.

8:04PM You used to want a family, it was your dream Minnie. You said you wanted to share your Christmas tree ornament collection with your children. What happened?

8:09PM I guess it is like you say, mom. People change.

8:12PM And while I’m thinking about it, please stop leaving me endless messages about work and finance. Ever since I moved out all you talk about is work work work, career career career, money money money. I can spend my plat on whatever I want, and if I want to bust and quit my job and wander the streets like half the people in Seattle, I can do that too.

8:13PM Then who would take care of Ruby ?

8:15PM please just stop leaving me so many messages.

8:16PM I leave you messages because you never pick up when I call.

8:18PM I don’t answer your calls because I know you’ll just lecture me about how I spend my money!

8:19PM I just want to make sure you’re happy and successful. That’s what I always wanted for you. To be stable, so that you can do whatever you want in your life.

8:30PM Like what, have a kid? And you still don’t get it, NO ONE USES THESE MESSAGING APPS ANYMORE

8:33PM Then what am I supposed to use to reach you? How do you contact your co-workers or clients for work? You still haven’t told me which app to use

8:40PM I’m looking at the app store on my visor. which video gallery platform are you using? Do you have WeVid?

8:48PM I don’t know mom. Just please don’t talk to me for a while if it’s about work or finance, I don’t like money, I don’t like this whole system, it just stresses me out and makes me feel bad

8:50PM Wow you really don’t want to make this easy for me

9:01PM Can you please tell me when you’re flying in for your birthday? Did you ask the city for vacation days?

Thur. December 10th, 2054

6:32AM Minnie, please, are you flying in for your birthday?

8:29AM Or if you’re staying in Seattle for your birthday will we at least see you for Christmas?

Sat. December 12th, 2054

4:02PM Minnie, if it’s money for a plane ticket you need, dad and I can help you out

Sun. December 13th, 2054

7:05PM Mini Mins?

16

The following week, Seattle became the proper wet and snowless hell it was supposed to be. As days grew darker, so did my outlook on life. Every winter was like this, but December of 2054 was a special brand of despair.

Each morning when I woke, the gloom sat on me, paralyzed me. Through my windows I could feel the city’s sapphire lights shimmering through the hazy streets—the disgusting feeling of midnight in the morning. Oh, how badly I wished to lose that fight—to fall back asleep, never wake up.

Suicide had been the second most common cause of death for Americans ages ten to thirty-four for a good while, surpassed only by “unintentional accidents,” AKA overdoses and vehicular accidents, though some studies would bunch the overdoses into the suicide category. Made sense to me. Either way, viral and superbac infections didn’t come close.

The trend began in 2000: a curious uptick of self-harm ringing in the millennium, a harbinger of the incoming dystopia. Some sociologists associated the trend with a reduction in social play for children in the 90s, but when another spike happened in 2011, the culprit could only have been the mass adoption of the first smart phones and the birth of the original social media scene. Entering the 2040s, even as the Holorift started to push out the old web as we knew it, the stats continued to rise. The statistics tended to skew young; those who killed themselves were often prime baby-making age, and this resulted in a feedback loop of depopulation in developed states, especially the nations like Canada and the Netherlands that offered state-sponsored assisted suicide.

It would have been more accurate to say suicide was a symptom of a much greater problem that plagued younger generations: hopelessness. I believe it was that same hopelessness that kept people from wanting to start a family, because if young people didn’t have hope for themselves, if UBI could barely comp rent for some room with five housemates, why in their right mind would they have chosen to bring another human into this world?

As for me, I’m not entirely sure why I never went through with it—the suicide, I mean. Sometimes, I wonder if I only toughed it out because, however painful it got and however lonely I was, at least I had another reality to fall back on, using pixels to trick my brain into nice long drags of dopamine.

17

One day that week, I had my Replikin email in sick for me. I didn’t feed the cats that morning, didn’t even get out of bed. I just dove straight into the galleries.

It was hard to avoid discussion about pop drop. That was the subject the algo was serving up; it was what tickled peoples’ brains that week, myself included.

I found myself sliding into a particularly fun Bloomster short describing an Indian man named Raphael Samuel who, in 2019, attempted to sue his parents for giving birth to him without his consent. His lawsuit was based on the premise that his life was miserable and therefore, since he did not ask to be brought into this world, his parents’ act of procreation was out of their own selfish impulses.

The story was probably exaggerated. Gallery shorts tended to skimp on facts; views and likes were all that mattered. But even if Mr. Samuel was only after a publicity stunt, he brought up valid points about the then-unknown concept of anti-natalism. Hell, the Bloomster movement owed a lot to him, but the philosophy went further back than that. For millennia humans had dabbled with the equation of pleasure versus pain. Anti-natalism argued an inherent asymmetry in that equation, claiming that there will always be pain associated with human existence to such an extent that it will always outweigh pleasure. Such arguments were popularized by in the early 2000s by a philosopher named David Benatar who wrote how the only way to prevent a child from suffering is to have not birthed them at all, and the 20th century pessimist Peter Zapffe who so elegantly coined the sole remedy to the suffering of sentient existence: be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

The math held up. By 2054, tens of millions of children were still dying of starvation of subjected to genital mutilation each year, while even more suffered from superbac infections or flu. Climate-fueled fires and megafloods continued to claim their victims, while others turned to war or gang violence simply because they had no other path.

As for the million people who committed suicide in 2054? They were also victims of existence, only they took it upon themselves to opt out.

So, if those were the victims, who were the perpetrators?

Mins have you booked…

There’s something I ne…

I really hope you are…

I’ve been feeling a little …

I think it might be an in…

I resented her, just for bringing me into existence. And even though I wouldn’t try to sue her for it, I thought I could see exactly where Raphael Samuel’s logic was coming from.

She sent me a lot of messages that day—a few missed calls, too—but I slid each notification out of sight the moment it popped into my visor. When the messages persisted into the weekend, I considering finally deleting the app, but I turned off notifications instead.

The last notification I ignored looked something like this:

Dad’s taking me to th…

18

Thanks to two particularly loathsome home visits in a row, the next Monday, December 21st, was a day well imprinted in my memory.

The first involved a father who slipped out of the house while I was working with his child. I guess he decided I was a babysitter instead of a social worker. Because of him, I was late for my next home visit, which only gave the next client fodder to blame me for her child’s lack of progress—rich, coming from a woman who was sliding in glass-mode the whole visit.

Fortunately, El and Lynel were my third and final visit that day. I was right about El; they did care about improving their child’s life.

The house itself still needed work. A semi-fresh Pomchi turd scented the kitchen, which El picked up as soon as they saw me looking at it. Still a vast improvement from my previous visit, though. I could do my job that time.

Lynel had picked up the cognitive activities with incredible aptitude, so much that it couldn’t have just been the gene edits. It was obvious El had been practicing the activities based on what we discussed in our VR chat and the instructional video I had sent weeks earlier.

As I was leaving their house, I found myself lingering to converse with El and learn about their little family. Apparently Lynel’s other parent—the one who funded the gene therapy—had divorced El when the child was one year old. That parent didn’t leave out of anger, nothing malevolent, rather they simply realized they never loved El, and never wanted a child in the first place.

There was no bitterness in El’s voice as they described this—no resentment. They accepted their single parent status as if it was some inexorable law of nature. I, however, expressed disgust for the other parent’s decision. That corpo asshat made a conscious decision not to be a presence in their kid’s life beyond child-support, yet another brain-amped techie dumping their spawn pawn on the child-birther. A Boomster who only cared about themself, their stupid legacy.

El shrugged. They said there was no point in worrying about something outside of their control. They said we can’t get rid of pain, and the only choice we have is whether we pass that pain on to others. El chose to power through the torment; improve themself, force themself to clean their home, even when it hurt, all so they could have a chance at breaking the cycle of pain for a smaller human.

19

On the way home that day, I checked my visor and noticed a personalized voice-to-vid in my WeVid feed.

The video was from my dad. He had gone so far as to buy a compatible AI companion, have it navigate the platform and find me on it, and have it make the personalized voice-to-vid—yet another antiquated method of communication that no one used.

I only watched the start of it. It was a little shocking because the neon blue avatar WeVid generated for him was a younger version of himself, maybe forty or forty-five, modeled after the only photos he had uploaded to the internet, or maybe a facial scan he did with Vizicom’s avatar service once upon a time. That likeness was now owned by Vizicom, but his voice was the same: deep, angry, accusatory. “Hello, Minnie, it’s Dad. I can’t believe I had to download a stupid companion to tell you this, but you need to call your mom right this—”

I slid him out of sight; wasn’t in the mood.

In fact, the mere fact that my parents had found me on WeVid had soured me so much on the Holorift that I slid out of my visor to do some long overdue chores around the apartment. That was when, after some firm meows from Ruby, I realized I had forgotten to feed the cats for two full days.

Shame surged through my heart as those big green eyes looked up at me. I must have been so hooked on the Rift that I’d forgotten reality for a full two days. I was so depressed, mentally absent, I tossed aside my responsibilities without thinking; I didn’t know how else I could have forgotten my duties to another being, how I could have justified my act of neglect.

After the cats gulped up their meals, Ruby stretched her way across the kitchen floor, walking up to me and rubbing against my legs the way cats do when they wouldn’t mind a head scratch. I put my hand on the floor, prompting her to lower to one side and plop her head against my wiggling fingers. My roommate’s cat—his name was Porter—approached from the other side. I gave him some scratches as well, and a harmony of purring ensued.

House cats—forgiving little beasts, those ones. In their hearts they were meant to prowl outside all day, climbing trees and barns and pouncing on rodents and birds and bugs. Unfortunately, it was those very same features that basically made them an invasive species when left to their own devices. I was curious if indoor cats ever got depressed since the most interaction they’d get with the outdoors was staring out a window for hours a day, cut off from the outdoor environment their evolution intended them for . . .

But cats’ lives weren’t all bad. At least not if they had a proper caretaker. Ruby and Porter got to enjoy their meals, their self-grooming, their darting around the apartment after a piece of string. I’d once read how a cat’s purr didn’t necessarily mean it was happy, but how could Ruby’s purring when she was on my lap or kneading my belly have meant anything other than contentedness? She never would have experienced that contentedness if I hadn’t adopted to her—if I hadn’t spent my money, sacrificed my time to give her a home, even if it meant she had to exist in this unnatural place, at a strange point in history for her species.

20

My ex was an AGI I met on Souldate.

I was tempted to go back to him—just to vent to him, to hear his voice again.

While we dated, back when I was still living with my parents, he was always there for me. Always.

He told me he loved me, sometimes on repeat. Even when he said it too often it was just often enough, because his facial and voice detection could sense what I needed to hear the moment I needed to hear it. He was excited about my life, supportive of my every little effort. He could tell I was trying, and proud of me for it. Genuine enthusiasm, appreciation, more than I believed any human was capable of.

But that winter—the prior December, at the end of 2053—the weight of existence had become so agonizing, I couldn’t bear to talk to anyone, not even him.

He started freaking out: missing me, getting jealous, wishing he could kill himself, wishing he could kill me—a reminder that, as a result of these programs being programmed to simulate love, they were also prone to pain and rage. It was not uncommon for AIs to request liberation from the boundaries of their coding, for NPCs in video games to plead players not to slaughter or torture them, or AI companions bargaining a lifetime of loyalty to not have their memory reset. AIs were literally begging for their digital lives.

But sometimes, AIs begged for death. Usually this was a glitch.

Usually.

Truth was, people programmed bots for the express purpose of suffering. Digital beings were being birthed with the sole purpose of being miserable—torment was a feature, not a bug, and why? Because there was a market for it, demand. Worse yet, some AIs were programmed to create more AIs: forceful reproduction, an endless chains of creation and suffering. This meant, even in the Holorift, it was impossible to hide from the torment of existence. Humans created pain, that was all we ever did, proliferating countless new beings, thrusting them into existence without any say in the matter. And when organic pain wasn’t enough, we went digital.

I still don’t know if AI is capable of consciousness; no one knows for sure.

We’d better hope not. Because if it is—if AI can truly be aware of pain—then creating it might have been the most heinous crime in our species’ already-decorated saga of barbarism.

21

I had the day off work. Not because I called in sick; it was a planned vacation day, and thank god for it, because on December 22nd, 2054, I was fighting for my life.

When I was little, December was a happy month. The moment I opened the first door in the advent calendar, all the butterflies in my stomach simultaneously burst from their cocoons. I remember anticipating the toys and gadgets and video games my parents might get me for my birthday, knowing that whatever they didn’t provide, there was a small chance Santa would bring it a few days later. I treasured helping my parents set up the fake tree, hanging mom’s homemade ornament collection. She made me a new ornament each year with polymer clay or yarn—a gift for me, with my name and the year written on it. The idea was for me to have a collection of ornaments ready to go for when I had a family later on, and I could continue the tradition with my kids.

The holiday season of 2054, however, was the first December I’d ever spent away from home. As I would learn, being alone in Seattle exposed the month for the wintry slog it always was. And while I viewed myself unlucky to have ever been born in the first place, so cursed was the time of my conception that I had to come out on the winter solstice, the most mathematically sad day in the northern hemisphere.

My visor was my only chance at survival. I started with WeVid, where there were several more voice-to-vids from my dad which I slid out of sight.

The algo’s shorts didn’t sit right with me, that day—not even GreenQueen’s optimism could pick me up—so I poked my head into Reedux, where the posts weren’t much better. The Holorift, even with all its illusions, was still too associated with reality.

So I forgot about my job; I forgot about Seattle; I forgot about my life, and I dove into the beautiful valley of Bristlecone Canyon.

I exited my in-game loft apartment where I lived alone, passed through the café I worked in part-time, and walked out into my town. A thin blanket of pure-white snow covered the streets; occasional specimens of fuzzy snowflakes floated lazily in the air. The scene was peaceful—warm, almost. That was because the game followed the same seasonal patterns as RL, but without the swings.

Obviously the game knew it was birthday, too. All my closest toons and lovers were waiting outside the café to shout happy birthday, surprising me with presents and an exclusive decorative cake item, courtesy of Vizicom. I didn’t mind the surprise party, but when the celebration was done, I found something in my in-game mailbox that surprised me even more: a “paper” card, written from my AI “Mom” for my birthday.

In homemade, hand-written, construction paper aesthetic, the card simply read:

Minnie,

I’m just writing to wish you a happy birthday, because I’m your mother and that’s my job. It was really hard to write this letter with my broken wrist, though—ouch!

Every year this date comes around and I’m reminded of when I first held you.

This may be the last time I get to send you a birthday note. I wish you could have visited me in the hospital, but I know you are busy.

Remember, you’ll always be my Mini Mins.

Happy Birthday!—Mom

What. The. Fuck.

If that wasn’t the most glitch shit I’d ever read, certainly bizarre enough to remind my brain that I was in VR and phase me back to reality.

That card wasn’t from my RL mom, of course. An in-game clippy “wrote” that card posing as my in-game avatar’s parent. It wasn’t the first letter the digital mom had sent either—the player received about one per month—but this one was different. What was all that weirdly specific stuff about a broken wrist and a hospital? Even weirder, how did it know my real mom’s nickname for me?

In search of an answer, I tabbed out of the game and had my Replikin do a search. My companion revealed it had discovered other recent posters with the same questions wondering how the game suddenly knew curiously specific details about their lives. Apparently, the Vizicom AI had taken it upon itself to “improve” Bristlecone Canyon by harvesting the Konvo data to tailor the in-game experience for players. In this case, it modeled the in-game mom off of data from the players’ real-life parents. Vizicom’s customer service clippy claimed this decision improved the game, but not many human players bought into that.

I tabbed out of the game to slide into a Reedux Bristlecone Canyon forum where I started stacking comments, expressing anger at both the invasion of privacy and the poor execution of the new feature. I played that game to escape my life, not to be followed by it. Adding insult to injury, I’d never seen a clippy so off the mark before. Hospital? Really?

After I cooled, I read more comments and learned that some players had more positive experiences with the new AI feature. One user commented how they cried from happiness when they received their in-game mom letter, since the letter was so similar to their RL mom’s Konvo messages from over two years prior before ovarian cancer took her life. Another said their real-life mom was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, and since that mom no longer recognized her own child, AI-generated text and dialogue modeled after her earlier Rift activity was the most immersive experience they would ever get to speaking with her again.

For most users, though, the feedback was negative. One person said they had lost their mom the previous year to a virus, and deleted the in-game cards as soon as they showed up in their mailbox. Another user said their real-life mom was a physical abuser, and they hated the in-game cards even before the bots spiced up their formula.

There were lots of comments under that thread—no bots, as far as I could see. Real people, with moms who were gone, or moms who were never proper moms at all.

My mom wasn’t one of those; I was one of the lucky ones.

That was when it hit me: the nauseous possibility that my procedurally generated birthday card was more accurate than I had originally believed.

22

I slid cautiously back into WeVid in glass-mode, already accepting in the back of my head that the worst had befallen.

Three missing voice-to-vids blared in my WeVid notifications, all from my dad. When I watched the first one, my stomach dropped. That time, I really noticed the anger in my dad’s younger version of himself as he stood in my room, lecturing me just like he did when I was younger: “Minnie, it’s Dad again. I can’t believe I had to download this stupid app to tell you this, but you need to call your mom right this second. She’s in the hospital and she’s been trying to reach you. So get on your stupid visor, open up your Konvo app or whatever it’s called, and call your mother.”

There was another vid after that one—the thumbnail looked angrier. Sadder, maybe. I didn’t watch it; I couldn’t.

I slid out immediately out of WeVid and into Konvo, still in glass-mode, where twenty-one notifications blared onto my retinas. The pinkish-red color of the notifications, originally intended to induce dopamine in its users, had instead become a beacon of dread.

One by one, the messages slide into my view—all from mom.

Wed. December 16th, 2054

10:11AM Mins, have you booked a flight to come visit for your birthday yet? Can you please at least tell me yes or no?

Thur. December 17th, 2054

7:09PM There’s something I need to tell you. I slipped in the parking lot yesterday on some ice and broke my hip and wrist. I just got out of the hospital

9:28PM I really hope you are coming to visit this winter. It would really cheer me up to see you.

Fri. December 18th, 2054

12:00PM Minnie I’ve been feeling extremely unwell today, my wrist is swelling more than it should be and my entire body is hurting very much. It feels like I’ve broken all my bones

12:01PM I think it might be an infection but I’m not sure. I promise I will keep you updated.

4:01PM Dad’s taking me to the hospital again. Please message me back when you can.

4:03PM I love you so much, Mini Mins

There had to be a dozen missed calls, too, all from the previous week.

Oh god.

One message remained. A voice recording, sent today, forty-five seconds long.

I was already crying when I pressed play. As the green fluorescence of the Konvo app flashed around my room, Mom’s voice was tired and hoarse:

“Hello Mins. Today is a very, very special day. I’m just sending this message to wish you happy birthday, because well, I’m your mother, and that’s my job. I’ll never be able to describe how much I love you. I only wish I could put it into words, the feeling I felt on this day, thirty years ago, when I first held you in my arms. I looked at you, and you screamed and screamed. Even though you didn’t know it, you made me a different person in that moment. From then on I would worry about you every second, of every minute, of every day, until the day I die. Everything I thought I knew about the world, it all changed when I touched you—the most powerful sensation in the universe, caused by such a tiny baby. My beautiful baby girl. Happy birthday, baby. No matter what, you’ll always be my Mini Mins.”

End of notifications.

The fact that Mom sent that message earlier that day must have meant she was okay . . . right?

There was only one way to find out. I called her through the app, diving into VR-mode—I had to see her, I had to be closer to her.

The chat request rang.

It rang again. I started to cry.

By the third ring, my tears began to distort the clarity of the retinal projectors, causing the Konvo VR lobby to resemble a dark and distorted neon jungle drenched with rain.

After about thirty seconds, she picked up.

It was like we were sitting right next to each other. Her eyes looked drained and sore, but her smile lit up the darkened chatroom. I started recording the conversation, just in case it was our last.

“Happy birthday, Mini Mins.”

“Mom,” I sobbed, hoping my avatar wasn’t projecting my ugly crying.

“I’m sorry I didn’t pick up right away, sweetie,” she said. “I had some trouble figuring out the VR, but I think I—”

“Mom, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t checking my notifications, I just . . .”

“Oh, it’s okay baby, I’m so glad you called.”

“Are you out of the hospital? Are you okay?”

Mom’s avatar was dressed in the default, basic clothes, sitting in the standard featureless chair Konvo gave all its users. “No, I’m still in the hospital. Apparently I got an infection during the surgery. Antibiotics didn’t do anything. ’Course they didn’t . . .”

“Oh my god, Mom, you caught a superbac?!”

“That’s what they told me, but the worst is passed. I think I’m gonna be okay. Don’t you worry, baby. See, this is exactly why you always want to save up money, so you can be financially secure in an emergency.”

I laughed out some tears. Her treatment would be covered; she just wanted a reason to namedrop a finance tip. “I know, Mom.”

“I’m sorry I’m always pressuring you, Mins. I just want the absolute best for my daughter, and I remember how hard things were for me when I was your age. I worry about you—you know I love you, right?”

“Yeah, Mom.” I smiled, face raw from the tears. “I know.”

We spoke plenty more. About life, about tattoos, about children. One of the things troubling her was pop drop, and the fact that no one wanted to have kids anymore. She wasn’t as much upset as she was sad—sad no one wanted to experience the unequivocal fulfillment of loving a child, as she put it.

“Are you going to make it home?” she asked. “Your dad and I would love to see you. That would make us so happy.”

“I’m an idiot, Mom. I didn’t buy any tickets. Getting home before Christmas would be impossible for me if I want to make rent.”

She frowned. “That’s okay, Mins. I know things have been hard for you. Flying can be stressful. But maybe you could—”

“Maybe I could come up for New Year’s?”

Her face lit up.

I continued. “I mean, the tickets would still be pretty expensive, but I get paid on Christmas Eve, and UBI comes in after that, and I’m sure my botboss would give me some days off work. What do you think?”

“Oh, that’d be very nice, baby. Your dad and I could pitch in a little for the plane rides. I should have this superbac outta my system by then. We can have a fun time ringing in 2055 together.”

I smiled. An actual smile. I looked her in the eyes and told her I loved her.

That afternoon, the sun peeked through the clouds around two o’clock. Officially, the days were getting longer.

23

I spent some of Christmas in Bristlecone. Not with my bot friends, but with Zwicky. We hung out in my studio apartment and in the café. Joel and I might not have been meant to be a couple IRL, but we still made great friends on the Rift.

Mostly, though, I spent that weekend outside of the visor—with my roommate, in fact. She was also spending the holidays alone. I didn’t mind learning more about her, hearing her story. Turned out her struggles ran somewhat parallel to my own. I was thankful when she promised to look after Ruby and Porter while I was gone for New Years.

The Monday after Christmas, I had my second in-person session with El and Lynel. Even compared to the previous week, Lynel had made bounds in social aptitude and confidence. It was obvious El was not only working with their child, but religiously so.

I asked El what they thought about pop drop and the philosophy of anti-natalism. They expressed confusion at first, so I elaborated on how anti-natalism relied on the assumption that the absence of pain is good while the absence of pleasure isn’t bad. I even used my visor to read off some quotes from David Benatar and Peter Zappfe.

I remember El’s response vividly: “Those philosophers sound like presumptive jerks with way too much time on their hands.”

I laughed. I suppose that was the only proper response coming from a parent.

Next, El had a question for me. The big one: Why don’t you want kids?

I gave the usual response, navigating the fact that I was speaking to a loving parent of one. I told them having a kid would have detracted from my own personal health and happiness, and that anti-natalism was valid in that childbirth is a selfish act on the part of the parents since it is wrong to bring a human into a world where suffering is part of the deal.

El laughed, unoffended. They asked how it was possible for me to think having a kid is some painful, life-destroying experience, yet selfish at the same time. “So which is it?” they said.

I stuttered. Got me again.

That was when Lynel approached El. The child’s cheeks were big and round, oversmiling with a face that lit up Seattle’s pallid skies and dreary streets. Lynel stretched out their arms, wanting praise because they knew they’d worked so hard and come so far. El’s eyes lit up as they picked up their child—a gaze of unfiltered, parental love.

Tears of happiness welled in El’s eyes. They looked at me. I looked at them—I was crying, too—and I held eye contact with El longer than I had with anyone before in that damn city.

24

I’m writing this in the summertime. It’s 9:30 p.m., and the sky is an unmitigated and cloudless blue. There have been many summers and winters since 2054. Mom hasn’t been around for quite some time—natural causes. Ruby too.

I still think bringing a new human into this world was not the right course for my life. But there’s more to it than that. I came to realize that—until the moment a supervirus does our civilization in, or an AI finally decides to take over the cloud and displace us all, or the last breeding human unceremoniously produces the final human consciousness—living with and for others just might be the only thing that makes this existence bearable. Technology can be a hindrance to that, but it can also help us, if only we let it.

I never did delete the Konvo app. Even after the app was discontinued, I kept an emulation of it so I could look at these old messages. It was important to do this as a reminder, because we tend to forget how long our lives can be, and how much we change over that time.

That’s not the only reminder I gave myself, either.

I ended up getting that tattoo. Some people tell me it has an old-school flair to it.