I worked as a server at a local branch of Rare Meat Al’s™, an absurdly-named tiny branch located on a highway, right next to the lone hydrogen station in miles.

My job came down to grabbing food prefabs from a box, dumping them into a food dispenser, then serving the result to patrons with a robotic smile. Your typical minimum-wage fare.

Do you remember when I mentioned that I made an hourly twenty-two credits plus tips? Well, tips were hard to come by, since most transactions were digital in this day and age and most people don’t bother to go the extra mile and press the button to select “the tip option” when they’re in a hurry. Quite the amazing UX design choice, I might add. The place saw constant traffic, mainly from truckers coming and going as they refueled their trucks next door. During the short windows of time available when their trucks got replacement hydrogen cells, they’d flock inside our little slice of heaven to have a quick meal and chug gallons of coffee, before resuming their dreary night-long trips.

It was a tiring, demanding, thankless job. I honestly wished that the owner of the franchise—Big Al himself—would just install android servers in every branch and give us flesh-bags a managerial role, but the bastard was adamant that “the human touch is important,” or as he liked to say when he wanted to sound intellectual to the ladies on his live stream: “humanity begets acumenity.” I call bullshit, and he’s the living, walking proof of said bullshit, but I digress.

Before going to work, I wore the DreamStream as I was instructed, in order to pair it with myself. I’d have to wear it for six hours straight for the process to complete, and I couldn’t take it off until then. The process was a necessity, to enable the software to be calibrated to my brainwaves. It couldn’t be interrupted, according to Mrs. Dana.

Six hours. A whole six hours that I had to patiently endure, and then… I’d have my wings! I’d finally get to be a real boy, just like I always dreamed.

How naive of me, right?

The DreamStream fit my head like a reverse-tiara. A beat-up one—to be sure—but hopefully a functional one. Some people kept giving me strange looks as I jogged to work, but most just assumed it was some kind of fitness device or an edgy fashion statement and let me be.

I was super excited as I arrived at the diner.

That was a big mistake, in hindsight. Letting any kind of emotion take control while working this kind of job is a huge risk because getting it’s bound to get you distracted, and getting distracted while doing a boring, monotonous job could lead to unfortunate accidents. But more on that later.

I entered the staff room through the backdoor and clocked myself in, all the while humming a catchy tune that was stuck in my head. I was soon noticed, as I heard the sound of footsteps approaching from the kitchen.

My coworker, Jimmy Bonner—or as he’s more often called: Jimmy Bonkers—was a lovable, unbearable bastard. He was really obsessed with physical fitness, and wouldn’t stop chiding me for “not taking care of my body as a real man would.” On a typical day, he wouldn’t stop blathering about “big gains,” and “getting swole.” His definition of a healthy human male was a macho guy built like a wall of bricks, and I always got back at him with my annoying specialty: obscure historical memes.

He was much older than me and used to work in orbital construction with a contractor for the military. Until his neck was injured in a freak accident while piloting a construction mechatron, and he was let go. His insurance refused to cover the surgery on a technicality, and as is expected: he got screwed over by rampant capitalism. Now he worked as a server and impromptu staff manager at this shitty diner while considering his options. Figures.

“Welcome to Rare Meat Al’s. Can I take your order… Princess…?” He greeted me with a tilt of the head and an inquisitive look at my exquisite tiara.

“We meet again, our lord and savior, Bulk Bogan.” I shot back. Smack-talk? I was born ready for this shit.

He’d look it up and absorb every last bit of information about the reference through his augs and internet, but I was hoping he wouldn’t get it this time. I always threw the most obscure memes I could find his way, and yet his uncanny ability to dig up ancient and extremely obscure in-jokes and to comprehend them in seconds still confounds me to this day.

“I’ll admit it, I do love to poomp my mooscles,” he replied with an exaggerated tone and started flexing his biceps. “My mooscles… my mooscles are getting stronker,” he finished with a deadpan voice.

“That was a fast one,” I chuckled.

“Because it’s from YouTube. That shit is archived and heavily documented, yo,” he smirked. “Oh, and what’s up with that thing on your head? Is it a new fashion statement or something? What’s wrong with kids these days?”

“It’s a pacemaker… for my brain,” I replied slowly, and he snorted at that. “How late am I, by the way?” I doggedly changed the subject.

“Not very,” he shrugged. “Oh, by the way, Hallie is not coming in today. She called in sick.”

“What? Again!?” I shook my head, “She’s teething again?”

Teething was the derogatory term for the act of imbibing Zodapine—colloquially known as Zoods—which just so happened to be a highly-addictive psychoactive drug extracted from the reproductive organs of some alien abomination that was possibly engineered by the Saurians, the worst species humanity had the honor of going to war against so far.

It was called teething because it caused you to slowly grow new sets of teeth that push away the previous ones. Even if you managed to overcome the dependency, you couldn’t stop midway, or you’d risk getting stuck with a half-grown set of teeth. I heard the process hurts like hell, and that quitting cold-turkey was nigh impossible since you’d have to time it perfectly with the exact moment a new set of teeth grows mature and evicted the previous one. Yet hardcore junkies loved the stuff. Unfortunately, Hallie was one of them.

Aaand… I’m blabbering again. Although you probably didn’t read that long-ass exposition anyway. But I digress, back to the topic at hand.

“Beats me. If she’s teething, then it’s her funeral.” Jimmy responded with a smirk, “Now go and get changed, we got shit to do.”

I did as he told me, and went to work.

As I foreshadowed earlier, getting distracted while working a monotonous job like mine was a recipe for disaster.

I was just working like usual, walking from kitchen to a table while holding trays of food, when I heard an echoing bang that nobody else heard, apparently, then my vision swam and I blacked out for a moment, and I suddenly found myself sprawled on the ground, with the scent of food inside my nose, somehow, and a throbbing pain at the back of my cranium.

That food was coming out of my pay, and what just happened was the first sign that something was very wrong with me, but I shrugged it off and went about cleaning my mess.

A few hours later, I really wished I hadn’t ignored the issue.