Childish is certainly a term that had been used to describe Alan before, but he did his best to ignore all of that. It was part of what he had based his life around. You don’t know other peoples circumstances, and for those things which didn’t hurt anyone, there was really just no reason to judge.

Someone looking in on Alan at this moment would find this relevant because currently he was flicking his hands and making hand gestures at a water bottle which was sitting out of reach. Holding a leftover chopstick from lunch he waved it around and basically told it to “come” in some approximation of Latin. Next, he held his fingers to his temples and glowered at the bottle.

Childish. Not an incorrect statement, but considering he was technically disabled he didn’t care. He had given up a lot to his disability. His dream job, even though it wasn’t glamourous was out of reach, so instead he was doing the best he could, working at a job that did a little of the same in idea as what he’d dreamt, but he could work from home, which catered to his needs.

He wasn’t physically disabled, not in a wheelchair or some such, and as much as he knew the grass was always greener on the other side, he felt like in one thing he had it harder than that. When you aren’t obviously unwell or disabled, people ran out of patience fast.

The workday had ended with him being chewed out by his supervisor. He had gone offline during the workday for half an hour for a toilet break. Not that anyone should get chewed out for being in the toilet for a long time, but in his case, it was legitimately part of his condition, which all the people who needed to know, knew. Including his supervisor.

An autoimmune condition. Invisible. Could put him in hospital or just make him need to run to the toilet a bunch. In this case the stress he was getting from work was making it worse, which in turn ended up with more snide comments or being talked to, which in turn made the stress worse.

So that’s why at the end of his work day, a 32 year old man, was glaring at his water bottle from across the room.

With a sigh he leaned back into his chair. His partner was overseas at the moment and he was not looking after his health as much as he should. This damn job had seemed like a godsend at first. Working from home so that his fucked up immune system wouldn’t be getting sick every other day, but still something in which on the box was a job about helping people, that was really all he had wanted.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

By most metrics he was a pretty smart guy, he looked at the world and knew he couldn’t actually change it. He didn’t believe in any egregious conspiracy theories or anything like that. But he did apply critical thinking and Occam’s razor. For instance, the whole your phone listening at all times. As time progressed, AI became better and better it became more possible. But there were just simpler explanations why you got an ad for KFC after your friend talks to you about how they had KFC. Certainly, manipulations of the public’s thoughts and opinions, but that could be done more simply. Afterall, it was human nature to share recent thoughts, so if you consider an ad more like a virus, where being around someone with that virus will pass it to you, it makes a lot of sense, that they had forgotten that they got KFC because an ad had made them crave it. Well, that’s just human nature.

But anyway, that’s just his theory, and in simpler terms, why he did not believe it was still possible for a single person to have that big of an impact on the world, or even their country. It was an untestable hypothesis, because although he liked to think he just might hold a candle to other minds who had been the great minds behind revolutions in the past, he knew he didn’t have the charisma to match.

So, he fell to escapism, the path that had led him from a young age into the world of fantasy, of games and then back to fantasy now with the status screens of the games he loved but with implications of how it would affect real life. A lovely escape, and the reason in which he went back to glaring at the bottle.

He raised his hand again “Come to me” he hissed in his best evil old man voice, while imagining a force tearing through the space and an atmospheric event of charged ions appearing from his hand. He closed his eyes while building his cackling, manic, evil laughter.

*Thunk*

He fumbled cutting off his melodrama as he scrambled to hold on to the empty water bottle which was somehow in his hand. “Dammit, I need to get up and refill it anyway” he thought before thinking more clearly at the situation. “Wait how the fu-“

*Ding*

There was an unintelligible noise in his head, like a language you didn’t know being spoken to you. As the noise stopped a small yet sharp pain ran through his head.

After a moment there was another *Ding* “Language faculties acquired” This time the voice was vaguely feminine, but like one of those early AI assistant voices, still robotic.

His musing was cut off by the voice appearing again

“Hello Pioneer Prime of terrestrial designation: Earth.”