Chapter 1 — The Proposal

January 2029

Sarah Chen had been rewriting the same paragraph for forty minutes when she finally admitted what was happening: she couldn’t think.

The cursor blinked in the empty space where her argument was supposed to be, the way it used to blink before she gathered momentum. Once, a blinking cursor had been an invitation. Now it was a reprimand.

She glanced at the sticky note on the side of her monitor: 47 proposals sent. 0 wins. She had written it after New Year’s, partly as a tracking mechanism, partly as a warning. This one—an analysis project for a regional development nonprofit—was small, barely fifteen thousand dollars. Five years ago she would have passed it to a junior colleague. Tonight it felt like oxygen.

She tried again, fingers heavy on the keys.

I propose to examine the intersection of regional trade elasticity and— No. That was wrong. She deleted it. Her thoughts came in pieces now, fragments that refused to assemble.

With a quiet sense of failure, she opened the browser tab she had sworn she would keep closed until morning.

“Claude,” she typed. “Please restructure this proposal into a clear, persuasive narrative.”

The effect was immediate, like stepping into a room where the lights were already on. The paragraphs aligned. The argument emerged. In under a minute the thing looked like something she might once have written herself.

Relief came first, then the familiar aftertaste of shame.

She sent the proposal and leaned back, staring at the ceiling of her home office. The room was still filled with trophies of a different person—conference plaques, a framed copy of her 2027 congressional testimony, the first edition of The Third Disruption on the shelf behind her. She had written a book about the future of human labor, and now she couldn’t sell fifteen hours of her own.

Her phone buzzed.

Thank you for your submission. We have selected another candidate.

Forty-eight proposals. Zero wins.

She opened her banking app and scrolled to the latest transaction.

AI Services – $600.00

Eight percent of her monthly retirement income. For what she privately called, without irony, her cognitive prosthetic.

She shut the laptop, pulled on a coat, and drove to the community center.

The support group met in a low beige building between a laundromat and a dental office. The sign on the door said AI Transition Circle, which was optimistic. They all called it the dependency group.

Twelve chairs were arranged in a loose ring. Kevin was already there, hunched into his hoodie like he was trying to disappear into it. Maria sat across from him, flipping through a notebook with pages too empty. David, the retired attorney, nodded to Sarah as she entered.

“How was the week?” Dr. Okoye asked once everyone had settled.

Kevin laughed, the brittle sound of someone rehearsing cheerfulness. “Bombed another interview. Whiteboard coding. No tools. I froze.”

Maria went next. “I tried freelancing without AI. The client said my campaign copy was… uninspired.” She swallowed. “I used to win awards.”

When it was Sarah’s turn, she hesitated. She still had the subscription. She was still cheating.

“I sent forty-eight consulting proposals in three months,” she said finally. “None accepted. I keep thinking if I just refine the pitch, I’ll get one project—just one—and then I can justify keeping the AI.”

David gave her a sad smile. “Like a lawyer keeping his library card because maybe someday he’ll practice again.”

Dr. Okoye folded her hands. “Sarah, you’re not looking for work,” she said gently. “You’re looking for permission.”

The word landed with surgical precision.

On the drive home, Sarah remembered a conference room in 2026—oak table, glass walls, the polite astonishment on a CEO’s face as she walked them through a multi-market collapse scenario she had mapped with her AI partner in a single afternoon. That woman had been unstoppable. That woman had been her.

At home she did not reopen the laptop. Instead she went to the bookshelf and pulled down the slim paperback she had bought years earlier but never read.

She sat by the window, streetlight haloing the frost on the glass, and opened to the first page.

Flowers for Algernon.

Chapter 2 — Oak Table

February 2029

Sarah kept the oak table.

It had been shipped to her house in pieces the summer before she retired, after the think tank renovated the executive floor and decided it no longer needed solid furniture, as if gravity itself had become a legacy cost. The facilities manager had called it a decommissioned asset. Sarah had called a moving company.

Now it sat in the center of her dining room, scarred in the places where people used to tap pens while pretending to listen. The grain was dark and patient. It waited for her to become someone worthy of it again.

She set her laptop in the center and opened the folder labeled CONSULTING — 2029. Forty-nine proposals now. She had updated the sticky note that morning.

This time she tried to work without the AI.

She reread the project description—supply-chain resilience modeling for a midwestern manufacturing consortium—and began to sketch an outline in longhand, the way she had once taught her graduate students. Identify variables. Establish boundaries. Form hypotheses.

The words came out of order.

She wrote transport latency, then stared at it, unable to remember how she used to operationalize the term without a model whispering suggestions into her ear. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. The oak table felt like it was watching her.

Her phone buzzed. A reminder from the support group: Weekly check-in survey due tonight.

She ignored it and opened the laptop.

“Claude,” she typed, with a reflex that had outlived her pride. “Help me build a framework for supply-chain resilience under regional trade shocks.”

The response bloomed instantly. Variables aligned. Equations emerged that she recognized the way one recognizes a melody they no longer remember how to play.

She leaned forward, breath shallow, the way she used to when a real insight was forming. Only this time it wasn’t forming. It was being handed to her.

Flashback, uninvited: 2026. The oak table in the conference room downtown, twelve people around it, all of them quiet while she dismantled a flawed national policy model in real time. She had drawn the correction on a whiteboard herself, no prompts, no scaffolding. At the end someone had said, half in awe, How do you see that? She had smiled, because she genuinely didn’t know.

Now she watched herself accept the framework like a patient nodding at a diagnosis.

She closed the laptop.

At seven o’clock she logged into the support group’s video call, face washed out by the kitchen light. Kevin was already there, hair wet from a shift he never talked about. Maria had her camera off.

Dr. Okoye asked, “How did today go?”

Sarah surprised herself by laughing. “I tried to write a proposal without AI. I couldn’t define my own terms. Then I used it and everything came back. So I shut it down again. I don’t know which version of me is real.”

“The one in pain is real,” Dr. Okoye said. “The one who notices the loss.”

After the call, Sarah carried the book back to the oak table. She hadn’t made it far the night before. Only a few pages.

She read about Charlie Gordon wanting to be smart more than anything else in the world, about the small hope in his clumsy sentences, and felt something tighten behind her eyes.

She rested her hand on the table’s scarred surface, as if it could remember for her, and kept reading.

Chapter 3 — The Algorithm

March 2029

By the time Sarah reached proposal number fifty-two, she stopped pretending this was about persistence.

It was about dependency.

She laid her notebook open on the oak table and wrote a single question at the top of the page:

Why isn’t anyone hiring me?

She didn’t open the AI. Not yet. First she tried to think like the woman she used to be.

Data first. She listed the facts she could verify without help.

• Proposals sent: 52
• Callbacks: 3
• Offers: 0
• Average rate she was asking: $500/hour
• Average market rate, from job boards she could still parse: closer to $200

She stared at the numbers until they blurred. She remembered teaching regression analysis with nothing but a chalkboard and a room full of bored students. Now the variables refused to line up in her head. The patterns she once saw instinctively had become opaque, like looking at a language she used to speak fluently and now only recognized.

Her phone chimed.

AI Services — Usage Report Available.

She opened the laptop.

“Claude,” she typed. “Analyze my consulting pipeline and identify failure points.”

The answer came back clean, professional, devastating.

The market was saturated. Everyone was augmented now. Younger analysts delivered comparable work at half her rate. Reputation decay in fast-cycle fields meant her peak years barely registered anymore. And—this one she hadn’t expected—her current output clustered around “competent but non-distinctive,” the danger zone where nobody pays a premium.

She read it twice.

Flashback, unwelcome: 2027, a Senate hearing room. The question she hadn’t prepared for.

Could you do your work without AI, Dr. Chen?

She had paused too long. Long enough for the clip to become a meme. Expert who can’t think without chatbot.

At the time she told herself the pause meant honesty. Now she understood it had meant truth.

She closed the report and rubbed her eyes. The room felt smaller with the laptop open, as if the oak table were slowly turning into an altar.

That night at the support group Kevin announced he was selling his second car.

“I can’t keep the subscription and the insurance,” he said. “One of them has to go.”

Maria admitted she’d cancelled hers the week before. “I cried for two days,” she said. “It was like… losing a limb.”

Sarah didn’t tell them she had prepaid her year.

On the way home she passed the library, dark behind its glass walls. She used to love libraries. The smell of paper, the quiet competence of shelves that waited without demanding anything in return.

She thought of the $6,000 she had spent to keep the voice in her head.

At home she stood in front of the oak table and didn’t sit down.

Instead she picked up Flowers for Algernon and read until midnight, watching Charlie Gordon become someone he had never been, and wondering which part of that story she was living now—the ascent, or the fall.

Chapter 4 — The Prepayment

April 2029

The receipt sat in her inbox like a verdict.

AI SERVICES — ANNUAL PLAN CONFIRMED — $6,000.00

Sarah read the email three times, as if it might change on the third pass. She had expected relief. What she felt instead was the dull ache of finality, the sense that a door had closed behind her and she hadn’t even turned around to see which one.

She carried the laptop to the oak table and opened the budgeting spreadsheet she had sworn she would never need. Fixed income. Medical insurance. Property tax. Groceries. The numbers were neat, obedient, nothing like her mind.

Eight percent of everything she lived on, now earmarked for thinking.

She tried to tell herself it was temporary. Just one year to bridge the gap, to find a project, to reestablish relevance. But she had already used that line in January. And February. And March.

The support group met that evening in person. A thunderstorm had blown in from the west, rattling the windows of the community center and leaving the room smelling faintly of wet asphalt.

When it was her turn to speak, she surprised herself by telling the truth.

“I prepaid for a year,” she said. “Six thousand dollars. Because I was afraid that if I didn’t, I’d lose myself completely.”

No one judged her. That was the worst part.

Kevin nodded slowly. “I’d do the same if I could.”

Dr. Okoye leaned forward. “Sarah, I need to be honest with you. Keeping full AI access without rebuilding independent pathways doesn’t stop the decline. It just slows your awareness of it.”

“So I’m paying to stay comfortable while I’m getting worse.”

“Yes,” Dr. Okoye said. “In medicine we call that palliative care.”

The word landed harder than any statistic.

At home Sarah didn’t open the laptop. She went to the oak table, traced one of its old gouges with her fingertip, and tried to remember the meeting where it had been made. She couldn’t. The memory felt like something she’d read about rather than lived.

She opened Flowers for Algernon again and read the entry where Charlie writes about wanting to stay smart forever, even if it means being alone.

Sarah closed the book and whispered to the empty room, “I didn’t want to be alone. I just didn’t want to be ordinary.”

The rain kept falling outside, patient and uninterested, as if it had all the time in the world.

Chapter 5 — The Countdown

May 2029

Sarah stopped pretending she was a consultant.

She was an applicant.

Not in the professional sense — in the pleading sense. She refreshed her inbox the way she once refreshed regression outputs, scanning for patterns that weren’t there.

SUBJECT: Re: Consulting Proposal — Decision

She opened it before the notification sound finished.

Thank you for your interest. We have decided to move forward with another candidate whose experience more closely aligns with our current needs.

Her fifty-fourth rejection.

She didn’t delete the email. She moved it into the folder she had named, without irony, DENIAL.

On the oak table her notebook lay open to a page titled Runway.

• Savings: $23,480
• Monthly AI cost: $600
• Other fixed expenses: $4,120
• Consulting income YTD: $0

She drew a line under the numbers and wrote:

Time left: 26 months.

That was the truth she couldn’t say out loud at the support group.

That night the room was fuller than usual. Two new people had joined — both laid off from a biotech firm that had replaced most of its analysts with an internal agent stack. Neither had kept their licenses.

When it was Sarah’s turn, she didn’t talk about feelings.

She talked about math.

“I need work to pay for the AI. I need the AI to get work. And no one is hiring me even with it. So I’m paying six hundred dollars a month for something that isn’t even keeping me competitive anymore.”

Kevin leaned forward. “How long can you last?”

She hesitated. Then told the truth.

“Just over two years.”

No one spoke. They all understood countdowns.

Dr. Okoye broke the silence. “You’re not chasing work, Sarah. You’re chasing the right to remain who you were.”

The sentence felt surgical.

At home she opened a spreadsheet titled SURVIVAL.

She began cutting hypothetical costs.

• Travel: zero.
• Gifts: minimal.
• Dining: eliminated.
• Hobbies: irrelevant.

Nothing moved the needle like the AI line item. Six hundred dollars glared back at her like a taunt.

She tried to imagine canceling it.

The thought produced a physical sensation — a constriction in her chest, heat behind her eyes, the faint ringing in her ears she associated with panic attacks. She opened the AI interface before she realized she had done it.

“Claude,” she typed, fingers shaking. “Help me write another proposal. Any sector. Any problem. I just need something to submit tonight.”

The response came instantly. Calm. Competent. Generous.

She copied the text into a new document, adjusted the client name, and hit send.

Proposal fifty-five.

She closed the laptop and rested her forehead against the oak table.

“This isn’t work,” she whispered. “This is maintenance.”

Her phone vibrated with a reminder from the support group platform:

Next session: Thursday. Topic: Identity Without Augmentation.

She laughed once, sharply.

Without augmentation she wasn’t an identity. She was a remainder.

Later, in bed, she opened Flowers for Algernon and read Charlie’s early entries, the ones where he was proud just to be allowed in the experiment, where being chosen felt like proof of worth.

Sarah closed the book and stared at the ceiling, thinking about how easily pride could turn into dependency, and how impossible it was to tell the difference while it was happening.

Chapter 6 — The Begging

June 2029

Sarah lowered her rate for the first time in her life.

It wasn’t strategic. It was surrender.

She opened the template she now used more than any paper she had ever written — PROPOSAL_vFINAL_FINAL5.docx — and changed the number.

From: $500/hour To: $225/hour

She stared at it, waiting for shame to arrive. It didn’t. What came instead was something quieter, worse: relief. At that price she was no longer selling expertise. She was selling access — to the AI, to the workflow, to the ghost of the person she had been.

She sent twelve proposals before lunch.

By two o’clock her inbox was full of automated acknowledgments and nothing else.

She spent the afternoon refreshing LinkedIn, watching younger analysts announce promotions with a fluency she recognized as AI-native. Their posts were polished, confident, indistinguishable from one another. She clicked through profiles and saw the same words repeated: AI-driven insights, agent orchestration, autonomous analysis pipelines.

No one wrote independent thinker anymore.

At the support group that evening Kevin arrived late, eyes rimmed red.

“They cut my hours,” he said. “I told my wife I can keep the subscription for three more months. After that…” He didn’t finish.

Maria had printed bank statements. She passed them around like medical results.

“I’ve started paying for groceries with credit,” she said. “Just to keep the tools.”

When it was Sarah’s turn she didn’t dress it up.

“I dropped my rate,” she said. “By more than half. If that doesn’t work I’ll go lower. I don’t care anymore what it says about me. I just need one project. One.”

Dr. Okoye watched her for a long moment. “Sarah, that’s not a business plan. That’s a bargaining stage.”

“With what?” Sarah snapped before she could stop herself. “What am I bargaining with? Time? Dignity? Brain cells?”

Silence spread through the room. No one challenged her.

At home she checked her credit card balance and then, because she couldn’t not, opened the AI again.

“Claude,” she typed. “Find me niches where senior economists are still in demand.”

The answer was thorough and merciless. Shrinking markets. Automated procurement. Internal agent teams replacing consultants altogether.

She scrolled until her eyes burned.

A notification popped up.

Thank you for your interest. We regret to inform you…

Proposal fifty-eight.

She shut the laptop hard enough to make the oak table shudder.

For a moment she imagined dragging the table to the curb, letting the city haul it away like any other obsolete asset. Then she imagined the room without it, and felt as if the floor itself would vanish.

Instead she opened Flowers for Algernon and read about Charlie begging to be allowed to stay in the experiment, even when the scientists already knew it was ending.

Sarah closed the book on her chest and whispered into the dark, “I would have begged too.”

Chapter 7 — The Room

July 2029

The support group had outgrown the community center.

They met now in a church basement that still smelled faintly of coffee and bleach, folding chairs arranged in uneven rows like a waiting room that had lost its sense of purpose. Someone had written WELCOME — AI TRANSITION CIRCLE on the whiteboard in a hand that tried too hard to look hopeful.

Sarah counted seventeen people.

Two months ago there had been twelve.

The new faces were younger than she expected — forties, maybe early fifties — people who should have been in the thick of their careers, not sitting in a basement negotiating the loss of their own minds.

A man named Trevor spoke first. He had been a logistics planner for a national retailer. Laid off in May.

“They didn’t even fire me,” he said. “They just turned off my agent access. Said the new system could handle my entire workflow. I tried to apply elsewhere, but every interview is tool-free. I can’t do the whiteboard problems anymore. I don’t remember how I used to think.”

A woman Sarah hadn’t seen before added, “I canceled my subscription last week. I thought I’d feel free.” She laughed once, brittle. “I just feel empty.”

When it was Sarah’s turn she told them about the rate cut. About the proposals she was sending at midnight, copying frameworks she no longer understood deeply enough to defend.

“I used to walk into rooms and make people quiet,” she said. “Now I’m begging strangers for scraps so I can afford the software that makes me look like I still belong in those rooms.”

Kevin raised his hand. “How many months can you keep paying?”

“Twenty-four,” Sarah said. “If nothing changes.”

The number hung there like a prognosis.

Dr. Okoye stood. “I want you all to hear something clearly,” she said. “This is not individual failure. This is a structural withdrawal crisis. You were integrated into systems that have removed the exit ramps.”

Someone muttered, “So what do we do?”

No one answered.

At home Sarah opened her email and saw three new rejections stacked neatly in her inbox, as if someone were curating her despair.

She didn’t open the AI.

Instead she sat at the oak table with nothing in front of her and waited for a thought to arrive on its own.

None did.

She reached for Flowers for Algernon and read about Charlie noticing that people were speaking more slowly around him now, the world subtly rearranging itself to accommodate his decline.

Sarah closed the book and stared at the far wall, suddenly aware that her own world was already doing the same — clients disappearing, colleagues promoted past her, whole rooms she no longer entered.

Not because she was incapable.

Because she was unreachable without the machine she could no longer afford to lose.