He got in at the corner of the glass towers with a cardboard box under one arm. That's the universal sign language now. You see the box, you know what happened before anyone speaks.
Suburbs, please, he said. Polite. Flat.
Fifty-one years old. Copy director, one of the big agencies, twenty-two years in the same building. The box had a plant, a mug, and what looked like an award.
The agency merged with an AI platform in the spring, he said. Today they finished the job. My whole floor. The email called it a reorganization of creative resources. Forty people in one email. The word people appeared exactly zero times.
He wasn't bitter in the loud way. He was bitter in the quiet way, which is worse, because the quiet way has done all its arguing internally and arrived at the facts.
I trained the thing, he said. That's the punchline. Last winter they had me feed it ten years of our best campaigns so it could learn the house style. I taught it my own voice. Now the voice works weekends and doesn't ask about royalties.
So what's the plan, I asked.
There's a plan, he said. There's always a plan on the day you don't need one. My daughter says I should start a YouTube channel. She's fifteen. All problems look solvable at fifteen.
We sat at a long red light. He turned the box a little, reading his own award upside down.
Twenty-two years, he said. The exit interview was eleven minutes. They gave me a printout of my contributions and a barcode for my laptop return. Very efficient. Nobody was rude. That's the new thing, you notice. Nobody is ever rude anymore. They're just thorough.
At his street he shook my hand, which nobody does anymore either, and carried his box up the walk like a man moving into a smaller life, one room at a time.
The towers behind me were all still lit. Whole floors of them, glowing.
None of this happened. All of it is true.
#nightfare #ai #layoffs #nightshift #fiction
