Joomin'

In the USAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

So it's 2141 and you're a Joomer (Generation J). You theoretically have a Very Prestigious Title, by the standards of people from 100+ years ago at least. You are the Chief Giga Uber Manager President of the 21st MegaDistrict's ÜberaltertePalliativpflegeeinheit Automata Hub. In practice though, your job carries much less status, power, compensation, and meaning than your ancestors might guess; inflation eventually came for job titles as well. In reality, you're much closer to a janitor, maintenance staff, or plumber than anything else.

While AI really started to kick off in the 2020s, it took longer before large scale deployments of robots became Core Infrastructure. Many places still have massive bits of legacy infrastructure, which then had now obsolete or unmaintained robots placed to bridge the gap. Many people have gone full wirehead, as there really isn't much else for them to efficiently or morally do given the average age of the population. Life extension has made great strides alongside robots and AI, but progress has been insufficient to fully defeat the entropy within the human body.

Companies, clusters, or collectives claim they are working on fully artificial bodies into which they can transfer the bicentenarians' cyborg bodies. You can theoretically repair any part of the body, but it's not really good for your quality of life or resource utilization to spend all your time on that.

As you mull Existentially (your OSS brain implant tells you this is SelfPattern 2754 and it is being strengthened 1% by a period of angst), you get an alarm on your console. The console looks remarkably like what 1970s sci-fi artists imagined tech to look like. The appearance is partially for aesthetic, meme, and cultural reasons, but more so because you can mentally interface with the console, and it needs to be easily repairable since you won't receive any help or replacement if it breaks down (which it will).

Grabbing a set of handles, you groan as you slide yourself into a chute conveniently located under the console footwell. Even in the brief window of time as you fall nearly vertically down the shaft, you flick through various information feeds nearly subconsciously. Your implant will stop you, but browsing is a nearly universal emergent behavior that comes from having access to unrestricted information feeds.

As you exhaust your brief window of browsing, you get reminded gently by one of your internalAgents that browsing unfiltered feeds can literally cause brain cancer, but you flit past that inserted thought faster than a Redditor ignores their own glaring personality flaws. Reddit somehow still exists, though there is no central company that runs it. It turns out that Reddit is just an obvious format for forums, and it became a general word used in concert with "forum".

As the tube starts to curve, having fallen a bit under 2 miles in the past 24 seconds, precisely timed and shaped bursts of air slow and redirect your body into a waiting minisub. Constructed from Carbon Allotropes (tm?), the tiny sub can run for weeks with life support. Unlike space, air, or sub crafts of prior generations, this sub was 3D printed and assembled with a molecular cluster level of precision.

While modern techniques are not quite able to perform the kind of atomic precision called for in original nanotech descriptions yet (Drexler)...the partially self-aligning molecular assemblies you can mass produce make for a very high level of macroscale structural integrity. Despite its claustrophobic size, you are not bothered by the constraints of the sub.

You're far busier putting out fires - literally. While the sub quickly seals and darts off into the massive fluid works for the nascent ecumenopolis, AI agents are bringing you up to speed on the crisis. A massive electrical fire has broken out due to an incomprehensibly complex intersection of theoretically self-maintaining systems overlapping in ways that led to failure.

You help direct local control agents to clear a path through the fires and debris. The problem will theoretically mostly work itself out, except for some of the weird interactions between systems that require a maintenance human to fix some finicky and old issues. This will involve goo - it always involves goo.

Nearly launched out of your pod, your nervous system is briefly hijacked by your implants to help crash transition you into a full sprint. You only have a brief window to move through massive Shoggoth-like construction bots wading through the flaming liquids, debris, cables, and other machines. Without implant assistance, it would be near impossible to follow the plan. The physical requirements are well within the capabilities of a human moving at a jog, but it still requires remembering to duck and stop at the right times to prevent getting crushed. This is safe, or at least safe enough for it to be deemed reasonable for someone to do this. Or at least that's the justification that people half joke about in your social graph.

You're actually numb to the chaos on a number of levels. You're used to dealing with tight coordination with robots, structures, and people due to the commonality of Massive MultiAgent Pathfinding being used to support the degree of density around you. At some point, you do have to shove your arm into some Unknown Device Goo to repair some connections and to remove random junk. This is the physical equivalent of removing a splinter from someone's foot or fixing a critical typo in a massive code base.

As you stop partial BodyGuidance and look back upon the large space you just ran through, things are already settling down. The Shoggothbots are no longer on fire, and the debris are gone. By the time you make the lazy walk back the way you came, there are hardly any signs of the burning hellscape you autopiloted through. Modules are already slotting through the wall, reconfiguring, and crawling to refill the space initially opened up because of the Software(Hardware) conflict.

Your pod takes a longer path back to the surface, eventually dropping you at what looks like your front door. You check; it's the next block over. With a sigh, you head to the nearest sandwich dispenser and then finally take the yet slower path allocated to take you home.

You take a shower