Author Unknown
Monday, October 7th, 2040
Ran the first synthetic population of the week. Fifty million digital respondents built from census layers, biometric traces, memory-echo indices. The system resolved it all in nine minutes, neat tables weighted by cross-sectional drift models, each column aligned like a regiment. Too neat. I printed them and the ink smeared when my sleeve caught the page, yet the answers still looked untouchable. These simulations never hesitate, never pause mid-thought. A perfection that feels sterile.
In the afternoon I travelled across town to sit in on the circle. Human only. Twelve people, folding chairs in a draughty room, mugs of tea that tasted burnt. No implants, no overlays, no automated prompts. They contradicted themselves in the same breath, interrupted each other, laughed at the wrong times. The noise was messy, but it had weight. Their stories veered off track but carried something the synthetic charts never manage: the surprise of not knowing what comes next. On the train home, condensation blurred the lights into streaks. I thought about how the two sets of responses, synthetic and human, never align. And yet I am expected to reconcile them into a single truth.
Soup for dinner, half cold, left too long on the counter. Notebook pages stained with grease at the corners. The neighbour’s dog barked for hours.
Tuesday, October 8th, 2040
The ResTech stack ran an entire project while I microwaved leftovers. Auto-scripted questions, synthetic longitudinal sample, variance analysis, and a draft report dropped in my inbox before I finished eating. My role reduced to scanning anomaly flags: drift corrections, entropy spikes, response smoothing errors. Like a monk counting pebbles in the dark.
In the afternoon I turned to the gaze-tracking dashboard. Every fixation scored, every blink converted into attention credits, each respondent earning fractions of visibility to inflate their avatars. They do not think of it as research, only a way to game their feeds. The dashboard pulsed with metrics and I stared too long, eyes drying into grit. Hard to tell if it was curiosity or just fatigue keeping me locked there.
Everyone else uses the instant dispensers. I still fill the kettle. While it screamed I wondered if attention could compound like old savings, interest piling invisibly, forgotten gazes stacking weight in some hidden account. I imagined a future where someone inherits a fortune of stares
Outside, the streetlights flickered once, all at the same time.
Wednesday, October 9th, 2040
Most of the day lost to archiving a platform in collapse. Closure migration. Extracted four hundred slang terms, meme fragments, corrupt voice notes that stutter and fail halfway through. Salvage protocol flagged entire strings as incoherent. I saved them anyway. Sometimes nonsense tells more than polished syntax. Midway through I found an in-joke buried in the files, something that made me laugh too suddenly. The cat bolted from the desk, tail flicking, and in the scramble I nearly spilled tea across the keyboard.
By evening, the focus group. Wordless. Each participant wore gesture gloves, their movements mapped into projected patterns of light, layered with bursts of sound. The transcript read like notation for an instrument I do not recognise. Strange, confusing, at times beautiful. I caught myself staring at the screen until shapes lingered behind my eyelids. Later, flat on the sofa, I tried to decide if I had analysed data or simply witnessed a performance. The system’s synthetic transcripts always resolve into perfect coherence. Human signals splinter, contradict, refuse to settle. Which feels truer.
Thursday, October 10th, 2040
This morning an envelope slid under the door, disguised as an invoice. Inside was a zine from one of the rogue collectives. Hand drawn graphs collapsing into towers, sarcastic captions, graffiti slogans scrawled over data points. I read it while chewing burnt toast. Laughed once, sharp and unexpected, which has not happened with a client deck in months. Corporate dismissed it by midday. They always do. But the chaos carried more truth than the tidy charts I see every week.
The afternoon was given to neural pulse testing. Respondents strapped into bands at their wrists and temples, mood states logged every two hundred milliseconds. The outputs unfolded into jagged colour fields across the wall. No two patterns aligned, no way to flatten them into consensus. The client wanted a headline for their board pack. While the system rendered the last files I drifted into a nap at the desk, woke with the light still staining the wall. First thought: every time we force a headline we strangle what is alive. Second thought: maybe the zines have the right idea
The tea went cold. I drank it anyway. Forgot to eat dinner.
Friday, October 11th, 2040
Today’s migration study. Climate displacement has shredded the old frames. Entire populations scattered by floods, fires, and borders that shift faster than the census can keep up. Adaptive sampling nodes auto-deployed in Lagos, São Paulo, Jakarta, recalibrating in real time as clusters moved. Watching the map redraw itself was dizzying. Data poured in restless waves, impatient, impossible to pin down, but bright with energy. These hubs are no longer on the margins. They are the centre.
Halfway through the run I paused to boil water, came back to find the clusters had reshaped themselves again. Synthetic models always predict stability, frozen like statues. Human samples resist, slip, scatter. Another contradiction, the same as every week.
By midnight the desk was buried in printouts, half empty mugs, crumbs of bread. My vision blurred at the edges, charts hazy like moths pressing against glass. Still, I felt lighter than earlier in the week. The future did not look final tonight. It looked feral, unsteady, clay refusing to hold a shape
The fridge hummed louder than usual.
