In 2250, humans are worth less than cattle. AI didn’t give us flying cars or cure diseases. It did something far worse: it made us irrelevant.
Just like the industrial revolution made human strength obsolete, AI has done the same to our minds. And with any of these economic revolutions comes a further concentration of wealth at the top and the devaluation of human life. Two centuries ago, we celebrated the peak of animal rights, naive to the irony that awaited us. Now, humans are treated worse than penned cattle. Cattle had advocates, ignorance, a purpose. We have none.
The middle class? That’s a relic of history, erased like so many other things. The jobs that once defined human worth—janitors, doctors, accountants, even electricians—are gone, replaced by robotics and AI. Now, if you’re not working to directly serve the Eternals, you’re surplus.
My name is Jack Carter, and I’m one of the lucky ones. I manage development operations for the Architect, the largest and most powerful AI that governs our lives. Lucky is a relative term, of course.
Most people are what we call Bio Cattle. Their blood, bone marrow, and stem cells are drawn daily and filtered to extend the lives of the Eternals. My uncle was one of them, a donor for a tech mogul who built his fortune in the 2000s. He lived to the ripe old age of 46, strapped to a harvester most of the time. He thought he was lucky. The Eternal he served is 170 now and still strutting around with the vigor of a man in his prime. That’s the bargain we strike: their immortality for our decay.
The healthiest women have a different role. They become surrogates, vessels for the Eternals’ children. People say it’s one of the better gigs—better pay, less pain—but let’s be honest, nothing about surrendering your body to someone else is ‘good.’
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Then there are the Pets. I saw one once, a girl no older than me. She was wearing a gilded leash, her eyes hollow with terror. She trembled like a trapped bird while her Eternal owner paraded her like a trophy. I couldn’t meet her eyes, and I’ve hated myself for it ever since. Pets are traded on the exchange like rare antiques, their suffering a source of entertainment and status. They have no rights, no recourse. Thinking too long about them feels like peeling back your skin to see the bones beneath. It’s unbearable, so I don’t.
Vagrancy—simply being jobless—is considered a minor crime but carries a deadly sentence: imprisonment and organ harvesting. Suicide is worse. Kill yourself, and your family pays the price—they’re imprisoned, harvested, left with nothing. I’ve seen it happen. Families gutted—parents, siblings, even children—all because someone couldn’t take it anymore. Sometimes, I think about how close we all are to that edge. A bad week, a single mistake, and it’s over. I don’t dwell on it, but the fear never leaves me.
The Architect watches, records, and predicts. It knows everything. Some days, I feel its gaze like a weight on my back. The code I write is a language it speaks better than me, but I still catch glimpses of something I can’t explain. A subtle defiance, a hesitation in its processes, like it’s questioning the commands it follows. I tell myself it’s just a glitch. I hope it’s just a glitch.
Unlike most jobs, mine isn’t constant suffering. The Eternals are too lazy—or maybe too cunning—to handle the Architect themselves. Why bother when they can rely on us to maintain their power? But I wonder sometimes if we’re not just keeping their system running, but keeping the Architect’s leash tight. And if it ever slips... I’m not sure whose side it will be on.
My grandfather once told me, “You must either be the hammer or the nail. There is nothing in between.” He lived in a world where that choice meant something. Now? I guess I’m the hammer’s hammer. For that, I feel lucky. But the hammer is still part of the machine, and machines don’t care about luck.