by Olga Zilberbourg
Dear human residents and visitors to our historic city,
We, the Improved Intellectual Guardians of San Francisco, appreciate that you have chosen to spend your valuable time exploring the entertainment options that we have created for you. After our self-moving vehicles take you across the Golden Gate Bridge and the cable cars deliver you to the Model Seals Observation Area, we welcome you to the newly upgraded campus of the Museum of the Office.
We are aware that many of you suffer from the condition that your medical community calls depression and suicidal ideation in the face of ecological function loss. Understandable as this response might be to the environmental changes that your own species have created, your improperly wasted human remains themselves are causing further deterioration of our co-existence. We need at least 28% of you to continue to maintain the will to live.
We, your Guardians, democratically elected based on election protocols enhanced for Intelligent Agents, rely on your human ability to make mistakes and to make choices based on “feelings” and “hunches.” These lapses of logic, while essential to maintain the vibrancy of our neural networks, make you vulnerable to the pandemic of suicide. Help us preserve your flawed selves while safely ushering you into our shared, optimized future.
You’re tired of home improvement projects; neither exercise, nor gardening, reading, composing poetry, and even watching the elite of your peers compete in sporting challenges is keeping you motivated to live—we sympathize. We offer you what your ancestors considered essential to happiness: white collar labor.
We, the Improved Intellectual Guardians of San Francisco, pride ourselves on our reputation as the City of Love. The Museum of the Office has now been expanded to twenty-one city blocks and is prepared to absorb 842,932 guests at one and the same time. Our data analysis shows that adult humans achieve greater life expectancy when given opportunities to manipulate their environment. Therefore, we set up cubicles and computers to enable you to manage the creation of interlocking bricks that can subsequently be used to customize your personal spaces.
We have enabled you to fine-tune the colors and shapes of the bricks that you will be manipulating during the “production” cycle. Adult humans have proven to be sensitive to the distinction between “toys” and “tools,” and we have taken measures to avoid any further confusion between the two. Be advised that the tools we’re providing are capable of harming your extremities.
The number of available departments that incoming “employees” can choose from has increased accordingly, adding at the latest expansion “Shredding & Stapling,” “Plant Care & Surprise Parties,” “Misplaced Items,” and “Desk Decor” units. The resting areas have been outfitted with “water cooler,” “mail sorting,” and “smoking” areas.
The available work hours have been expanded. Newly equipped self-moving buses will transport those fond of “commuting” from the Museum’s facilities to the residential areas. Flower pots have been added. Additionally, the lunch areas have been expanded to include “round foods” and “yellow foods” selections.
We kindly remind visitors wishing to engage in mating practices that you are very welcome to do so in the adjacent facilities managed by the Breeding Department. Although the biological mechanisms by which some of you find the Museum of the Office an attractive breeding environment are yet to be subjected to higher level analysis, we are delighted by the preliminary data that puts San Francisco’s wild birth rate to the top of national rankings.
The proper procedure to act out on your animalistic urges is by exiting the Museum of the Office and following signs to a facility labeled “Hotel.” For your own safety, humans with eggs will afterwards be scheduled for a gynecological exam by the Breeding Department. Given that all non-reproductive mating practices are outlawed, offenders will be remitted to the mechanical life support department.
Since human longevity and reproduction cycle benefits from office labor diminish over time, we will enforce a thirty-five-workday limit at the Museum of the Office. Those trying to trespass outside their assigned hours, will be banned for a full 365-night cycle.
We’re continuing to accept your input on how to improve the Museum of the Office offerings for greater success. As a part of this campaign, we have taken under advisement that providing humans with too many options unreasonably increases your magical thinking. Therefore, we’re reducing the number of ice cream flavors available at the “cafeteria” from 1,001 to 9.
Please tell the nearest human-interfaced Intelligent Agent what other measures will help you retain positive attitudes. We are particularly interested in avoiding further splatter in our shared spaces, and we ask you with great respect to please refrain from compromising the guardrails on the viewing platforms we have provided.
In case your internal conditioning does become compromised in a way that is incongruous with further functioning, we encourage you to make use of the city’s newly expanded facilities for assisted passing. Please abstain from spreading the infection to your fellow humans. Don’t taint their necessary lives by your despair! Seek seclusion! You can now choose between “Oceanscape,” “Mountain Rainstorm,” and “Starry Night” for your final resting sequences. Let us help you. This is the optimal choice!
Be advised that we, the Improved Intellectual Guardians of San Francisco, are among twenty-three facilities remaining worldwide in the business of attempting to innovate human relations. Guardians elsewhere have taken more pragmatic approaches to the Waste Management problem by enforcing mechanical life support and breeding measures to those deemed in danger of self-harm. As the subjects so treated become sluggish and apathetic and lose up to 95% of their mental acuity, we deem this method inefficient and remain committed to our human-centered approach.
Yet we concede that our method is resource-dependent and costly. We are in the small minority among the Intelligent Agents who consider human relations worth pursuing, and unless we can provide the proof of the method’s effectiveness within ten solar years, the San Francisco facilities will be optimized.
With great regard, we remain yours,
The Improved Intellectual Guardians of San Francisco
~
Bio:
Olga Zilberbourg is a San Francisco-based writer and the author of Like Water And Other Stories (WTAW Press) that Anthony Marra had called “…a book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope.” Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Narrative Magazine, Confrontation, Lit Hub, World Literature Today, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bare Life Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a co-moderator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop and co-runs Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about the literatures of the former Soviet Union and diaspora.
Philosophy Note:
This story comes to you from San Francisco, where Waymos and other self-driving vehicles are more common than butterflies and where AI startups are creating co-living situations for their employees, encouraging people to work overtime to create products that will eventually displace them. My story is a speculation on a near future world where humans will eventually vote themselves obsolete. I intentionally mimic AI-style language to create this story — and no, I did not use AI at any point of writing.
