Tom couldn’t remember when the changes had started, which was sort of the point.
He woke at 6:30 to an alarm that had learned, over three years, exactly how to wake him without making him miserable. It started with a faint amber light, then birdsong that was either recorded or synthesized—he’d stopped being able to tell. His schedule was on the bathroom mirror, projected by something he’d installed in 2031 and hadn’t thought about since.
Breakfast: he asked the kitchen what he had that was about to expire and got a recipe suggestion that used the last of the spinach, three eggs, and a logic he couldn’t follow but that always tasted fine.
The commute was twenty minutes on a bus that drove itself. Tom read the news on a tablet. The lead story was about a new material that could store solar energy at 94% efficiency, discovered by an AI system at a lab in Zurich. The article was written by a journalist he liked, with research assistance from something that wasn’t a journalist. He could tell because the sourcing was too thorough for one person.
At work—he managed logistics for a regional grocery chain—he spent most of his morning reviewing decisions his planning system had already made. It had rerouted three delivery trucks to avoid a road closure he hadn’t heard about, substituted a supplier that was cheaper and closer, and flagged an inventory anomaly that turned out to be a decimal point error in the warehouse software. Tom approved everything, corrected the decimal, and felt vaguely useful.
His afternoon meeting was about whether to let the system handle supplier negotiations autonomously. His boss was for it. Tom was uneasy. “What do I do, then?” he asked. His boss said, “You make sure it’s doing the right thing.” Tom wondered what that meant in practice and whether anyone would notice if he stopped checking.
He picked up his daughter Lily from school. She was twelve and doing a project on the water cycle that involved a simulation so detailed he couldn’t understand it. She explained it to him on the bus and he nodded at intervals.
Dinner was something the kitchen suggested again. It was good. It was always good. He couldn’t remember the last time dinner was bad, which bothered him in a way he couldn’t articulate.
In the evening, he watched a documentary about people who had lost their jobs to automation in the fish processing industry in Grimsby. It was sympathetic and well-made and featured an AI-generated narrator whose voice was warmer than most humans’. At the end, it suggested three related documentaries and a retraining program. Tom closed the tablet.
He lay in bed and tried to identify the feeling. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t excitement. It was the sense that the world was moving at a speed just slightly faster than he could track, like standing on a train platform and watching the express go past—you could feel the wind, you could see the windows blur, but you couldn’t read the faces.
He set his alarm, which was really just a suggestion that something would wake him gently at the optimal time, and fell asleep. Tomorrow would be Thursday. It would be fine. It was always fine. That was the strange part.