If you’re reading this, my name is Jamie Reed. If you know who I am, please tell my mom and dad I love them. I think I might die here.

I graduated college last year, and I was the first person in my family to do it. My parents aren’t exactly well-off, so I had to take on… a lot of debt to do it. I tried my best to keep everything to a minimum. I was in a work/study program. I applied for every scholarship and grant I could find. I went to a community college first, and even after I transferred to a state university, I lived at home to cut costs. But still, I racked up a lot of debt before I was done. My parents were so proud of me though, and when I got a job out-of-state, they encouraged me to take it. They didn’t really have the money to keep me living at home much longer.

Things were okayish for the first few months. I was working for a non-profit, so I could qualify for student loan forgiveness. Then all of a sudden, it came out that the director was fooling around with one of his daughter’s friends. The scandal was everywhere, donors fled for the hills, and as things went from bad to worse it turned out the asshole was embezzling funds too.

One month, I had a job and the next, I was turning in resumés everywhere I could think of, driving for Uber and taking gigs from Taskrabbit. Things were pretty bad. I didn’t have enough money to move back home, and my parents couldn’t help me. My loans went on forbearance, and I was eating ramen most nights.

That’s when one of my friends mentioned there was a beta test for a new app. It was some kind of budget app that not only helps you keep track of your finances, but also makes suggestions for saving money or trimming finances based on the data you share with the app. Yeah, it was a little intrusive, but I was pretty fucking desperate for any ways to shave a few bucks off my monthly expenses, so I signed up.

The first couple weeks it went well enough. It even suggested I cut back on the data plan for my cell phone because I never came close to hitting my data cap now that I spent most of my time in my apartment looking for work. It saved me a few bucks, so sure. Why not, right?

Then the timing belt in my car went up in the middle of an Uber fare. The repair killed my savings, and soon, I was living off my credit cards. My budget was never all that pretty before, but now it looked like a fucking nightmare. I went past due on two credit cards, and I had to take out a payday loan from my phone to cover rent. That’s when the app stopped working, which was absolutely terrifying because that’s where I stored all my budget information. I tried restarting the app, and the only thing that would show up was the stylized diamond gemstone the app used for a logo.

I emailed a complaint to their tech support line, and within an hour, I got a call. The guy told me that they were updating the app, but he would upgrade me to diamond status for my trouble. He said that since they were still beta testing, I would be eligible for a monetary stipend if I attended a short onboarding session for the new features and provided a weekly user feedback report. At that point, I was willing to do anything for money, so I told him yes.

That’s where things started to get weird. They gave me an address, but it was for this old smelting plant that had been abandoned for years. As far as I knew, it was just a squatting ground for the homeless. I’ve heard somewhere that tech start-ups might sometimes buy condemned buildings and completely refit them into cheap offices, and maybe that was what was happening here.

I was partially right, inside despite some rust on the sides it looked like a lot of the machinery had been upgraded. The incinerators looked like they were top-of-the-line stuff that could have only been installed a few weeks ago given how pristine they were. There was also attached to some new kind of machine I’d never seen before. It was futuristic, almost like something you’d expect to see in a research science lab. I was trying to figure out what the hell all this was doing at a site that was supposedly hosting an app startup when I heard the sound of a truck pulling in.

The metal garage doors lifted up and a large black van came rolling in. Four very large men piled out; they looked like the kind of paramilitary “contractors” you sometimes hear about on tv. One glanced at me, looking me over before he threw open the doors on the back of the van. Two more dragged disheveled looking man out of the back… the man had a black bag cinched tight over his head. The goon who opened the van doors, pulled the bag off the man’s head, revealing dirty hair, and sunken eyes. The poor man began to scream, “I’m not an animal, I don’t know who you are, but I got rights man. You can’t just drag me off the street without reading me my rights. This is America you shit bags!”

The guards ignored his protests with each of them grabbing him by his arm and dragging him towards the huge incinerator. He tried to struggle against them, but he looked weak, scrawny. He couldn’t do anything against them. They threw him into the incinerator.

It was then that I tried to run. The slamming of the heavy iron doors jerked me from the daze I was in and I tried to flee back the way I’d come in. The door had locked behind him. I pounded on the door, and the sound of my fists on the steel security door joined with the sounds of the old man pounding on the door of the incinerator.

Then one of the black-clad contractors hit a red button on the side of the machine and it rumbled to life. I couldn’t hear him scream, but I knew he was. The drumming on the door intensified from just a rhythmic pounding to a frenzied metal beat that fell off after only a few seconds. I felt sick. I slid along the wall, trying to escape further into the plant. They’d seen me, but no one seemed to care. Maybe I could find another way out.

But then my phone started ringing. I tried to stop it, but it just wouldn’t stop. I tried to muffle it and turn it off, but I was completely locked out. And then the phone answered itself, and suddenly it was on speaker phone. It was the voice of the customer support guy.

“Don’t worry about leaving.” A slim man in jeans and a turtleneck holding the newest iPhone to his ear walked in the same entrance all the hired goons came in. He ended his call with a push of the button and spoke in a voice meant to carry, as though he were giving a sales pitch to a crowded boardroom. “Let us take a look at you; make it easy for all of us.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out something that sparkled between his thumb and forefinger. “This is a ten karat diamond. It was created artificially which decreases the value a bit, but it’s still worth, well, more than that man’s life ever was. It’s amazing what you can do with all the useless carbon in a human body if you just keep squeezing it.” He pointed at the incinerator. “And soon enough, our friend over there will be worth something too. It’s lovely to see something so useless made valuable again” He started pacing back and forth like he was doing a TED talk.

“I started learning C++ when I was 7, by the time I was 9 I’d learned Python, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, and more. I watched my peers and wondered why they couldn’t seem to get it. The American dream was alive and well and they could do whatever they wanted. Make as much money as they wanted, but they just didn’t. I’d already started my first company when I was 16. Sold it for a million when I was 17, then used that capital to start another. If I could make my destiny, why couldn’t anyone else when it was just so easy?”

I stared at him, the urge to run warring with my complete and utter confusion. He laughed as he caught my expression.

“Dumbfounded? Confused? Would you like to know how I accomplished so much more than you? Or maybe you’re just wondering who I am, since I certainly don’t show up on any of those pathetic little celebrity shows you watch because I do real work.” He grinned then, and in an instant, he went from confident tech bro to cold blooded monster. “My name is Jeffrey Lucas, and I helped create some of the behind-the-scenes Internet infrastructures you so desperately depend on. Every time you to want to apply for another pathetic little job or post a picture or even just jerk off, I get paid.”

He looked especially pleased with himself as he held up the diamond to the light, watching it flash and glitter. “You see I came to a realization. There are over 7 billion people on the planet. Just go to any movie theater showing an Adam Sandler or Transformers movie, and it becomes pretty clear that not everyone is going to be able to contribute anything significant. We already have a limited amount of resources and an overpopulation problem. Coupled with the fact that things are only going to become more automated in the future, it becomes obvious that we will not be able to support those who cannot contribute in any significant way. Soon we’ll have record unemployment as the insipid masses who can’t even manage to learn HTML will be all begging and pleading for the more competent to take care of them. So why not convert these people into something that could be useful instead of letting them just stay as parasitic leeches?”

I couldn’t tell where this was going, but I didn’t know if there was any way out of it so I asked him, “So you think I’m worthless?”

“Yes,” he replied curtly. “You’ve fallen into debt and you’ll never acquire a job that will allow you to repay it. You’ll never be able to own a home. Hell, you’ll probably have your car repossessed within the month. You’re a cancerous growth on the body of the world economy, but before you can get older, I have to cut you off before you can do any real damage. I could sell your organs, but frankly, that just means some other pathetic waste of flesh lives longer. I might take a bit of a hit on the operating costs, but I believe it’s worth it to turn your useless excess carbon into something structurally perfect and valuable.”

He sighed. “Still, I believe in second chances. I think all people can make themselves useful if given the proper motivation. So let me propose a wager. If you can live until the sun comes up and prove that your life has more meaning than everything I’ve managed to accomplish then I will personally pay off all your debt out of my own pocket and you can go free.”

There was obviously a catch. But I didn’t have any other choice. He could just as easily have ordered one of those paramilitary grunts to come over and break my neck just to amuse himself. But whatever he was doing obviously gave him some kind of twisted pleasure. He grinned and fiddled with his phone. I could hear a metallic scraping and a… monster. I’m not really sure how else to describe it… skittered into the building with eight spindly hydraulic legs connected to a slender, segmented body with spines bristling along the length of it, waving gently back-and-forth like feelers. The way it moved was unnatural.

The legs clicked and skittered erratically, each tipped with four delicate clawed toes but the body always held it’s place. The insect-like body ended with a head made of what looked like a deer skull. The sockets where the eyes should be were filled with lenses and blinking LED lights that made it look like it had compound eyes. The jaws gaped open to reveal a long tongue-like proboscis tipped with a four-inch-long needle.

“Do you like it? And people say tech wizards aren’t artistic. I was at a complete loss of how to finish my design until it hit me.” He pointed at the skull. “Why not adorn it with the first thing I ever killed? My little prototype here really is the best of both worlds. Why train a guard dog when you could have this? Why bother with a hunting hound when you could watch this rip apart a brown bear? So let’s get to it. Can your instincts save you from my genius? If I was a betting man I’d say probably not, but you got five minutes before I let my little creation loose.”

I ran. My heart was beating in my throat. My palms were covered in sweat and I just ran. I had no idea where I was going. If there was anywhere I could even be safe in that steel hell hole. All I knew was that I needed to put as much distance between me and that thing as I could. It was around 11:00 PM. Dawn would hit around 5:00 AM. All I had to do was live for 6 hours and I’d be free. I saw a little alcove and dived for it. It was filled with empty rusted metal shelves. I was hoping this would be my salvation. Then I saw the door to a bathroom.

I flung open the door. It was a mess. The only light left was one sputtering fluorescent tube in the ceiling. Trash was everywhere, and at some point someone had thrown an old desk chair at the mirror, cracking the mirror and breaking the sink and fixtures off. The exposed pile was still dripping I closed the door behind me, and almost slipped on the wet tile. Thinking fast, I grabbed the desk chair, jamming it under the doorknob before anything could make it through. That would be enough to at least give me some protection. But that wasn’t enough. I went to one of the rusted out stalls and closed the door behind me and stood on the toilet. My hope was that maybe it might think no one was in here, but then I realized barricading the door was a dead give away.

Before I could try and rectify my mistake I could hear the soft scraping of metal on metal. There was a thump at the door. It was having difficulty getting in. But then I could hear clicking. I could imagine the thing rearing up and trying to manipulate the doorknob with those delicately jointed claws A few seconds went by, and I thought I was safe. Maybe it thought I couldn’t have gotten into a locked room. But then I heard it. The clicking of claws and soft whirring of servos in the ceiling. It didn’t have to break the door down. It had climbed the wall, crawled through the ducts. One of the crumbling ceiling tiles fell, and I could hear it gently slip to the floor. Then I was looking directly at it, the blinking sensors in its skull studying me from the space below my stall. The needle-like tongue stabbed at me as I scrambled over the stall.

It kept after me trying to grab a hold of any fleshy vulnerable part of me it could. I felt one of the clawed legs grab at my sneaker. But I just kept pulling myself over until my food popped straight out of it. I tumbled onto the floor, slamming my shoulder into the ground hard enough to leave me gasping in pain, but got myself off the ground. Grabbing the chair I’d braced against the door, I threw it at the thing chasing me. The chair knocked it backward, sending it toppling over in a mass of flailing legs and screeching metal, but that barely slowed the thing down, and it was on its feet in seconds even as I fled out the bathroom door.

I ran down an abandoned corridor, but it was too fast for me. It’s needle tipped tongue stabbed through my leg, piercing all the way through my ankle. I fell to the ground, holding my bleeding leg as it advanced on me. I scrambled backward on hands and knees, but then my hand brushed a rusted pipe on the ground. I grabbed it and stuck it in its face as hard as I could. It shrugged off the first few blows, but then I felt the bone give, and the lights in its eye sockets began to flicker. It slumped over, struggling to stay upright, but it eventually collapsed in a tangle of twitching legs.

But I couldn’t walk. The best I could do is crawl away to a corner. I propped myself up, using my shirt to try to stop the bleeding. All I can do is lay here and hope to surprise whoever comes to collect the metal thing Jeffry sent after me. I’m hoping Jeffery does it himself.

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Oh, my god, this shit is probably the greatest trophy I could ever ask for. I can’t believe he thought he was going to survive. Like I wouldn’t make sure my pet’s claws and spines weren’t tipped with poison. And he was stupid enough to think I wouldn’t read this shit after I cracked his phone. I went through everything to make sure that nothing incriminating actually got through all the malware I uploaded onto his phone through my app. No. Just this. I thought you guys might like it. I’m the new apex predator. One more shit tier asshole out of the gene pool, right? And hey, on the off chance any of you get butthurt over a very necessary streamlining of the world’s population, just make sure your finances are in order. You wouldn’t want to be eligible for diamond status.