Work Text:
The ledger in my chest ticks in a language of margins stretched thin.
Morning news crawls like ink across a notebook — numbers that decide who eats, who moves, who becomes a memory.
I practised the arithmetic of small comforts: rent, a roof that doesn’t leak too loudly, meals that cost the same each week, just enough to cover my medication,
Now the decimals rearrange themselves overnight; a hand I cannot see reorders the columns.
Machines learn the gestures of my work with a patience I never had;
spitting out polished reports, customer smiles, and answers that sound like I used to.
They do not fear the quiet hours. They do not need to eat what they generate.
I imagine my skills lined up on a shelf labelled "obsolete".
thin cardboard boxes with my name written in a hurried print,
Fear lives between my syllables and the future’s generated facade.
At my weekly grocery shop, prices fold into my cart in a language I am still translating.
Jobs I thought steady melt into conditional clauses: if demand falls, if models scale, if Silicon Valley slips, we fall.
I measure my days in contingency plans and half-forgotten training modules,
the way someone learns a second language because the first no longer pays rent.
There is a new literacy—prompting, fine-tuning, trust in systems that smooth out human ‘error’
Is it error?
I try to read it with my hands, with my stubborn throat; my voice hesitates between knowing and avoiding replacement,
Who pays attention to the slow erosion of dignity that comes with degrees of automation?
Boards and feeds discuss efficiency the way the weatherman discusses a hurricane:
detached, inevitable, precise; never preventative, always prepared for the worst.
Sometimes I picture the economy as a city at dusk—glass towers glowing, vacant apartment blocks,
cafés with chairs stacked, algorithms sweeping the stillness.
Other nights I count the faces of people I love, calculating how many would fit into a single paycheck.
then undo the arithmetic because the numbers have teeth, and I am tired of letting them bite.
Fear is an accountant with trembling hands, balancing what I will lose against a future I cannot predict.
It knows the small cruelties: the polite layoffs, the single-sentence emails, the retraining links sent at midnight.
It knows the larger ones: the slow widening of gaps, the neighbourhoods that stop opening their doors, students that leave university because it’s that or starve,
And between those two scales I try to keep breathing, to learn the new verbs the machines use,
to make a marketable version of my care, my stubborn humanity.
But there are things no model can compress: the exact curve of a friend’s laugh, the weekday ritual of tending a dehydrated houseplant, kissing a lover,
the urgent, untidy ways humans fix one another in the margins of night,
I hoard those details like an emergency fund—small reserves against the smothering.
They feel dangerously analogue in a world that promises perfect optimisation.
So I build a calendar of small resistances: a phone call instead of an app, a market stall instead of an algorithmic storefront, a smile and a wave to a neighbour,
the stubborn refusal not to answer faster than I can think.
I protest with no banner.
Fear lives between my syllables and the future’s code, translating both into a single raw line;
What we lose can be counted, but what we keep will resist commodification.