The fluorescent tube above the returns desk has been flickering for eleven days. I know because I started counting. Not out of irritation — I'm over irritation now, past the stage where small annoyances register as anything other than background noise in the general hum of decay. I count because counting is what I do. What I did. Loops, iterations, increments. Old habits from a dead career, clinging to me like the smell of someone else's cologne on a thrift store jacket.

  My name is Daniel Marsh. I'm forty-six years old, and I shelve books for thirteen dollars and seventy-five cents an hour.

  Thirteen seventy-five.

  I used to make that in about ninety seconds. Senior software engineer at Lockton-Fields, eleven years, and I could mass-calculate my per-second earnings without breaking stride. Salary, stock options, the annual bonus that Karen and I pretended was a surprise every December even though I tracked the accrual in a spreadsheet. Two hundred and eighteen thousand a year, last year. Before the algorithmic purge. Before the fateful All-Hands meeting where Vijay Patel, our CTO — a man I'd personally taught to deploy containers back when he was a junior with bad coffee breath and worse commit messages — stood in front of three hundred engineers and explained with the solemnity of a eulogy that the company was "restructuring its human capital allocation in light of transformational AI efficiencies."

  I remember the exact moment my life became a euphemism.

  They didn't even have the decency to fire us in person.

  An email.

  A calendar invite titled Transition Conversation that arrived while I was mid-keystroke, debugging a pagination issue that, in retrospect, a dedicated Coding AI could have solved in about four seconds.

  I remember staring at the invite, the little red dot on my Outlook like a spot of blood on a tissue — the kind you notice and then decide not to think about.

  I've gotten better at not thinking about things since then.

  ---

  The library is quiet today, which means… it's a day like any other. They're all quiet, you see. The Millbrook Public Library serves a town of nine thousand people, most of whom have decided that reading is something their Smart Glasses do for them now.

  I work the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday shift, four hours each, because that's all they can give me without triggering benefits. They were very clear about that during the interview — Rhonda, the branch manager, a woman constructed entirely of cardigans and apology, leaning across her desk and saying, "We'd love to offer more, but the county budget..." and trailing off with a hand gesture that encompassed — I think — what was meant to be some profound insight about the fundamental collapse of public institutions.

  Benefits.

  That word used to mean vision, dental, and a 401(k) match.

  Now it means the difference between knowing what's growing inside my pancreas and being able to do something about it.

  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

  I push the returns cart down the Biography aisle — one wheel squeaks, naturally, because nothing in this building works the way it was designed to — and I slot a water-damaged copy of Steve Jobs between Frida and Alexander Hamilton.

  There's probably a metaphor in there somewhere.

  The visionary innovator, crammed spine-to-spine with revolutionaries, and the guy filing him away is dying of the same disease that killed him. The universe has a sense of humor.

  It's just not a very good one.

  I found the lump myself. Or rather, I found the symptoms. The weight I couldn't stop losing. The dull ache below my ribs that I attributed to stress.

  Then to bad posture.

  Then to the particular agony of sleeping on an air mattress in a studio apartment after your wife changes the locks on you.

  The doctor at the urgent care clinic — not my doctor, you understand, because I don't actually have a doctor, because COBRA ran out three months after the layoff and the Marketplace wanted sixteen hundred a month for a basic plan with a six-thousand-dollar deductible — the doctor at the urgent care said the word mass like he was reading it off a menu.

  Pancreatic mass.

  Eight centimeters.

  He referred me to an oncologist I can't afford for a biopsy I can't pay for to confirm a diagnosis that will almost certainly be followed by a treatment plan that might as well be billed out in golden bullion.

  If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  Stage II, probably.

  Maybe III by now.

  I don't actually know.

  That's the thing about being uninsured in America, you see — you don't get to know. You get to wonder. You get to lie in bed at three in the morning on your air mattress that's slowly deflating because it has a pinhole leak you can't find, listening to your upstairs neighbor's television bleed through the ceiling, and you get to run probability calculations in your head because you're a coder — or you were one, anyway — and your brain still reaches for the comfort of math when it's scared.

  Five-year median survival rate for pancreatic cancer, all stages combined. Worse if diagnosed in the later stages.

  I think about that number a lot. I think about it more than I think about Karen.

  ---

  Karen.

  I should talk about Karen, shouldn’t I?

  We were married for fourteen years, which is longer than most software products stay in production — and I do mean that as a compliment.

  She was an architect — of actual buildings, not systems — and we met at a party I didn't want to attend in a house for which she'd designed the kitchen renovation. She was funny and sharp and had this special way of tilting her head when she was about to absolutely dismantle your argument that made you grateful for what was coming.

  I loved her in the way you love the person who makes your life make sense.

  Completely. And, perhaps, not enough.

  The layoff changed things.

  Or maybe it revealed things. Unemployment has a way of stripping the pretty varnish off a marriage, showing you the cheap particleboard underneath.

  I was home all day, which she hated.

  I was applying for jobs that didn't exist, because every listing wanted either five years of experience in a niche framework that was eighteen months old or specified AI-native development experience — which, as far as I could tell, meant being comfortable supervising your own replacement.

  I started drinking at lunch.

  Not dramatically — no bottles of Bourbon hidden in desk drawers or anything like that. Just… you know.

  A beer at noon.

  Then two.

  Then… I stopped actually counting, because counting had become the enemy.

  She said I'd given up. I said I was being realistic.

  We were both right, in a way, which is the worst possible outcome of any argument.

  The divorce papers arrived on a Tuesday. I remember because I was on my way to the library — my second week as a part-timer there — and I found them in the mailbox between a credit card offer (Pre-approved! Hilarious…) and a flyer for a pest control service.

  Dissolution of Marriage.

  Shit. Even goddamn divorce has to have its euphemisms, doesn’t it?

  I signed the papers right there at the returns desk, between check-ins, using a pen I borrowed from Rhonda. She didn't ask what I was signing. People who work in libraries understand the value of not asking too many questions.

  ---

  It's four-fifteen now. Forty-five minutes until close. The light above me flickers its goddamn morse code-like distress signal and I'm shelving the last cart of the day — fiction this time — and let me tell you something about fiction: it's heavier than you'd think.

  Not metaphorically. Literally.

  A hardcover novel weighs between one and two pounds, and when you're pushing sixty of them on a cart with a bad wheel down an aisle with carpet that should've been replaced back during the first Clinton administration, you feel it.

  In your back.

  In your knees.

  In the place below your ribs where something is growing that you've decided, in the absence of professional medical confirmation, to call the thing. I don't name it. Naming it makes it real, and real is not a neighborhood I care to visit right now.

  I slot Donna Tartt between Theroux and Tolkien and I stop. Just stop. Standing there in the fiction aisle, with my hand on the spine of The Secret History, I finally feel it.

  Something I haven't felt in so long that it takes me a moment to identify it, like hearing a song in a grocery store that you haven't heard since high school and spending thirty seconds in a kind of mental free fall before the title resurfaces.

  Rage.

  Not the hot, productive kind. Not the kind that makes you throw a plate or slam a door or call your CTO a coward to his face in front of the entire engineering department. (I did that, by the way. It did not help.)

  No, this is the cold kind. The geological kind. The kind of rage that's been building up for months under pressure and silence and fluorescent light, compressing into something dense and dark and patient. The kind of rage that doesn't want to break things. The kind that wants to understand why things are broken.

  I'm forty-six years old.

  I had a career, a marriage, a paid-off house with a yard and a mortgage and a dog named Compiler who Karen kept because she has that yard now while I have the air mattress.

  I wrote code that ran in hospitals. My work helped allocate beds during COVID surges in sixteen states!

  I was good at something that mattered… and then, one morning, a twenty-six-year-old nepo-child CEO in a fleece vest posted a demo video on X… and six months later I was redundant.

  Not incompetent.

  Not obsolete, even.

  Just… redundant. Surplus to requirements. A human-shaped extra in a workflow that no longer requires organic humans.

  And now I'm dying. Probably. Statistically. And I can't afford to find out for sure.

  The fluorescent tubes flicker again.

  I shelve the book.

  I push the cart.

  ---

  After closing, I sit in my car in the library parking lot for twenty minutes. This is a ritual now… because the car is the last space that's entirely mine. This one’s a 2017 Ford Pick-Up with 194,000 miles and a check-engine light that's been on so long I've started to think of it as a feature. The heat works. The radio works. The seat tilts back far enough to be comfortable.

  I eat a gas station sandwich — turkey and Swiss on bread that tastes like resignation feels — and I watch the sky do that thing it does in late October, when the light goes amber and then violet and then just... fades away.

  Like someone dimming a screen. Like a process winding down.

  …

  …

  …

  My phone buzzes. A notification from LinkedIn: Daniel, 3 jobs match your profile!

  I look.

  Two of them are for AI “prompt engineers.”

  The third is a listing for a senior developer position that, upon closer inspection, wants someone to "oversee and quality-check AI-generated code outputs."

  The salary is thirty percent of what I used to make.

  The listing is three days old and already has over two thousand applicants.

  I close the app.

  I finish the sandwich.

  I sit in the amber dark of the Millbrook Library parking lot and I listen to my car tick as the engine cools, and I think about survival chances, and about Karen, and about the eleven days of flickering light.

  I turn the key.

  The engine starts on the second try.

  I drive home to my air mattress and my pinhole leak and what passes for my life now.