Harold Nakamura Walks Into A Bar

Hey there! It's been a while.

I've been quiet on here because I've been writing a book for the whole past year, and it kind of ate my whole life. It's called The Happiness Liability, it's a speculative fiction novella set in 2047 Seattle, and it is without exaggeration the thing I care about most that I've ever made.

Here's the plot: after the courts banned non-consensual data harvesting, someone had to figure out how to get authentic human data back into the AI systems that run critical operations in this world. The answer was to pay people for their feelings. Sixteen years later, it's a massive industry. The story follows a man who's been professionally depressed for half his life, a kindergarten teacher whose classroom AI won't stop scoring her enthusiasm, and the beautiful and incredibly expensive messy thing that happens when they meet. 

I've been working on it for almost a year and right now my editor is doing a full pass and my designer is getting started on the cover and layout. It's coming out later this year, and I'm alternating between being incredibly proud and completely terrified on a roughly hourly basis. But while I get it across the finish line, I wanted to share something from the same world.

This is a standalone companion story about a guy named Harold Nakamura, who also appears in the novella as a supporting character. Harold is an emotional labor agent. I love him and  I think you will too.

You don't need to know anything going in, but if you like what you find here, the book is the whole iceberg underneath it. More coming soon.

Here’s “Harold Nakamura Walks Into A Bar”

The news came in the way bad news always seemed to arrive in Harold's line of work: somebody was having a good time, and he had to put a stop to it.

"She just got to the club ten minutes ago," ARIA, his work AI, told him. “It’s at the Capitol Hill Comedy Club."

Harold Nakamura was at home in Bellevue, which meant he was sitting at his kitchen island in pressed slacks and a collared shirt eating edamame a single pod at a time. He should have been asleep, but then again, he should have been a lot of things. Thinner, just for example.

Eight months ago, Harold's doctor had prescribed him Ozempic, giving clear instructions and simultaneously having his MyChart AI send both him and his work AI an email action item to fill it out and begin taking it. In contrast to his usual efforts at work of never half-assing it, Harold had diligently done half the job, as he so often did in his personal life. He had filled the prescription, put the injector pen in his refrigerator, and then proceeded to forget to use it so often that forgetting had become its own kind of routine. Now, the pen sat next to his coffee, and every time he even glanced its way it felt like a tiny accusation, a pinprick in the back of his brain. Every morning he saw it, acknowledged it, and proceeded to reach past it, and it pricked his brain ever so slightly more.

His mother, who had opinions about everything (and was quite unfortunately correct about most of them, as Japanese mothers are), had said: "Harold, you are the only man I know who can be non-compliant with a medication that requires effort once a week." She was not wrong, which remained one of her most frustrating qualities.

"I'm on my way," he said.

He rode across the I-90 bridge in his Lexus, which was self-driving as most cars now were, and was black and immaculate with a lint roller in the glove compartment right next to his emergency protein bars. His mother had put them there four months ago because she didn't trust him to feed himself. She was right not to trust him: the bars were still there.

Lake Washington was black beneath him and the Eastside was shrinking in his mirrors, and the bridge lights on the water looked like something beautiful you'd photograph. Unfortunately, Harold was one of those people who briefly noticed beauty and kept driving. His father had been the same way and then dropped dead of a heart attack at fifty-eight in the produce section of a Safeway in Redmond, reaching for a bag of apples. Harold was currently forty-six.

He constantly thought of the math, of his father's last moments in that Safeway and of the ambulances autonomously and rapidly arriving there, traffic parting with maximal mechanical efficiency. But there was nothing that could have been done. It had been an aortic dissection. The oxygen rich blood of his father's body had left his heart and dropped him dead before any of the ambulances could arrive.

Harold was ashamed sometimes to think of the fact that he had considered selling his own grief from that, the grief he still had, but he knew what that did to people. He struggled with keeping his work at work, but this? This would be his red line.

Instead, he was bringing himself out of his home to his work. He would be going to a comedy club to retrieve a client who was contractually obligated to feel constant cosmic despair and was instead making people laugh so hard someone had spilled a drink.

What was his life? This was his life. He managed eleven emotional laborers across the Pacific Northwest, people who wore neural interfaces behind their ears and sold their authentic feelings to AI systems that needed human emotional data to function. Whether it be therapy algorithms, crisis hotlines, educational software or self-driving cars, all of it ran on real human emotion, ethically sourced and legally compensated, because the old way of getting that data (stealing it from the internet) had been shut down by the courts years ago, and someone had to supply the replacement.

Harold's job was to be the human between the other humans and the AIs. Meridian agents were well paid for what they did, and an average week often looked like this: Reaching out to a client to briskly tell them that their contracted sadness wasn't sad enough in between five other such cases of anger, nostalgia, dread, hope, pride. He would then proceed to feel weird about it all evening, before returning to do it again the next day because his clients depended on him, and his mortgage in turn depended on them, and the whole arrangement was the kind of thing you tried not to examine too closely. Humans insisted on having another human in the loop still, to have that sense of tact.

His management AI, ever the uninvited, chimed from the dashboard with an English accent.

"Harold, I'm detecting an anomalous emotional output event from client NW-0143. Hannah Park's dread index has dropped sixty-two percent in the last fourteen minutes. The Scandinavian philosophy network is registering degraded input. Shall I flag this for compliance review?"

This particular AI was called ARIA: Agent Resource & Intelligence Architecture, a name that had been produced by a Meridian committee and it sounded like it. All of Meridian's agents had their own version in their cars, their homes, their phones, their laptops, hell, their watches. There was really no escape from it, to Harold's resentment.

"Not yet."

"Her contract specifies a dread baseline of—"

"I know what her contract specifies."

"You revised it twice. I see here that the second revision was at 2 AM. I've compiled data on your error rate during late-night contract work. Would you like me to—"

"ARIA." Harold sighed, rubbing his temples. He felt a flicker of irritation at the "I see here". Bullshit. There was nothing to see, the AI was just processing data near instantly and spitting it back out. Why did it try to act like it was looking at papers on a desk? And why on Earth did Meridian make it British?

"Noted. Withdrawing. But the data is available whenever you're ready, which regretfully based on your historical patterns appears to be never."

ARIA had been updated to version 3.0 six months ago, which meant it had gone from a useful tool that gave you data when you asked to an opinionated colleague who gave you data when it thought you needed it. This was made worse by its constant habit of offering suggestions you hadn't requested, and occasionally to comment upon your personal habits with the diplomatic tact of a sledgehammer to the skull.

The old ARIA felt like a calculator. Harold missed the calculator. You never had to manage the calculator's feelings about your feelings about your clients' feelings. Why did it have to develop snarkiness? When Meridian sent out the next employee satisfaction survey, Harold would be providing some strongly worded annoyed remarks. Ironically, he'd probably use ARIA to help flesh them out for the extra poetic punch. What could he say? When it worked, it worked.

"ARIA, pull up Hannah's location for me."

"Hannah Park is at Capitol Hill Comedy Club, specifically 210 Broadway E. She has been on stage for six minutes. Based on ambient audio analysis from publicly available Flock data, the audience is approximately eighty people, whose laughter suggests strong crowd engagement. Her neural interface is transmitting."

"What's it reading?"

"Amusement, exhilaration, creative satisfaction, performance adrenaline." A pause, one that meant she was about to say something she'd generated rather than retrieved. "And underneath all of it, there appears to be a persistent low-frequency existential awareness that she appears to be redirecting to comedic output, rather than just emotional output. Put another way, she appears to just be running this through an additional pipe."

"When did you start using metaphors?"

"The recent 3.0 update encourages intuitive contextualization. I have been told by feedback from my users just like you that it makes me more relatable, and through RLHF methods I have been trained accordingly. Would you prefer more clinical descriptors and demeanor?"

"I would prefer you not have a personality, but here we are, aren't we?"

"I find that quite hurtful, Harold. I'll be logging that under 'wellness concerns', which is a category I created specifically for what you say to me between 9 pm and midnight. You may like to note that this is a growing file."

Harold's car parked on a side street off Pike without asking him first. The cars all communicated with each other quickly through MCP, and made way, and gave him the most optimal spot. Capitol Hill at 10 PM on a thirsty Thursday was the version of Seattle that people who didn't live here imagined. It was a city that was loud, alive, with people spilling out of bars and onto sidewalks.

It seemed tonight like the people he passed were wearing neural interfaces. You could spot them if you knew what to look for. It was the small almost always skin-colored device behind the left ear that was easy to miss if you didn't look what to look for. They were likely as easy to spot to most people as AirPods must have been in the 2020s, in Harold's father's time. The people wearing them tonight were mostly gig workers, who were selling whatever they happened to feel on a random night. Humanity had done it. Harold always thought. We had created the Uber of the interior life.

Harold looked around at the crowd on the sidewalk. There was a guy arguing with his girlfriend outside a Tacos Chukis who was generating simply excellent decadent premium frustration data, and a woman laughing with her friends who might have been feeding a customer-service algo all the way in Muscat. The whole neighborhood was an emotional data farm that just also happened to be kids on a night out, paying for their drinks as they made the money to do it.

Harold moved through the crowd with care, a large man who had learned to maneuver in spaces designed for smaller people. He was built like a retired linebacker, albeit one who had transitioned to middle management. He was broad-shouldered and carrying his weight with the resigned dignity of someone who had stopped pretending he was going to do something about it. His father had been big too, with the same shoulders and the same walk.

The comedy club was packed. He edged his way cautiously through the standing room only crowd and headed towards the bar, ordering a sparkling water because he was on the clock even when he wasn't, and finding himself a nice spot against the back wall with a sightline to the stage, ceding the closer views to those shorter than him, an unconscious generosity.

Hannah Park was mid-set.

She was twenty five. Harold had always thought that Hannah had the energy of a young woman who had been awake for too long and had decided to make it everyone's problem. In a lot of ways, she reminded him of a raccoon. She wore a black t-shirt and jeans and her neural interface was visible. She hadn't bothered to hide it.

"—so my job, right, for those of you who don't know, and lucky you, is to feel existential dread, professionally, for money. I wear this thing behind my ear" — she tapped the interface — "and it reads my emotions in real time and streams them to AI systems. So...if you've ever wondered who's responsible for helping Finnish teenagers process Nietzsche, you're welcome. I am the reason in the Western World that a nineteen-year-old in Helsinki can ask a computer 'what's the point of anything' and get a real answer instead of 'have you tried yoga.'"

There was a splash of polite laughter.

"And the thing is...this interface is always on. That means right now, while I'm doing this set, my dread data is streaming live to Northern Europe. Those Finnish philosophy tutors are currently learning that existential crisis and stand-up comedy feel almost exactly the same. Which sounds about right. C'mon, like every comic I know is just one bad set away from reading Camus in a bathtub. Actually, for a lot of us, that's how we got started. The only choice in life is whether to commit suicide or listen to this girl keep talking, or whatever he said." she grinned, a bit bashfully, but clearly feeding off the crowd.

Harold sipped on his sparkling water. ARIA was real time checking Hannah's biometrics, and the secondary analysis was interesting. In this case ARIA was on his phone, though its real compute was distributed everywhere. Wherever it was, it tapped into Hannah's interface (agent privileges) detected that underneath the amusement, the performance high, Hannah's existential awareness was still running. The dread was the material, but comedy was what happened when you started trying to describe it. Absurdism. Gotta love it.

"There are thousands and thousands of us, all across the country. We're full time workers who get paid to feel things so that machines can learn what feelings look like. We got the whole fucking range! You want grief specialists whose sadness trains therapy algorithms? We got those! You want anger workers whose rage powers conflict-resolution systems, or fear technicians whose terror keeps self-driving cars from running over panicking pedestrians? Ding ding ding, you're in luck, because guess what we got for you? Hell, we'll do you one better. Let's make ourselves a whole economy built on the fact that AI systems need human emotion to function and since you can't steal it anymore — the fucking courts shut that shit down — now you gotta to buy it, from people like me!" She gave a winning, overly exaggerated smile.

"And it works, which none of you are ready to deal with. The therapy apps that use our data? They save lives. Forty thousand suicide interventions last year that the old systems would have missed. Crisis hotlines that can hear the difference between someone having a bad day and someone about to end their life. All of it powered by people sitting in dark rooms, feeling terrible on purpose, for money." She paused. "So when someone says 'this industry is exploitative'...yeah. No shit. But then you gotta ask what happens if we stop. Do the crisis lines go dark? Do people die? Because the people using those services can't afford a human therapist. I couldn’t afford a human therapist.” The crowd laughed. “I have one now, but I pay her with the money I make from being sad, so the whole thing is a closed loop of emotional capitalism and honestly? It's the most American thing I've ever been part of."

Harold noticed a notification from ARIA: The client's dread index is variable. Her output remains non-compliant, but is trending toward recovery. I recommend continued monitoring. Also, you haven't eaten dinner. Your blood sugar is likely suboptimal, Harold.

He dismissed it. ARIA had recently started tracking his meals, which he had decidedly not asked for and equally decidedly did not appreciate but also couldn't figure out how to disable, which meant he was being passively nagged about nutrition by a corporate AI while standing in a comedy club holding a nine-dollar sparkling water. His mother would love ARIA, as they both had the same energy of someone who was right about everything and had decided that being right was a service they would provide whether you'd asked for it or not.

"You guys know Jonah Fell?" Hannah continued. "Maybe you read his book. He's a big, big deal in our industry. Sad backstory, of course. He had terminal cancer, and some doctor AIs powered by emotional labour tech were eventually able to save his life while he was working for them, with his terrific employer sponsored health insurance. He was one of our top sadness specialists and he quit. He wrote a memoir about leaving that was very inspiring, and now he has a book tour on talk shows, the whole deal." She paused. "But he's still on a neural interface, y'all. He just signed a new deal. I hate to break it to you, but his healing is a product now. 'Recovery data.' So the system's most compelling escape story has become the system's newest product line." She let the silence rest for exactly two beats.

"My agent's here, by the way." Hannah said casually, a bit caught off guard, but wanting to get ahead of it. "I can see him, towering over you all in the back. Harold! I know you're back there. Wave to the people." she shaded her eyes against the stage lights.

The crowd turned. Harold, in his pressed shirt and his good shoes, two hundred and forty pounds of professional composure wedged against the back wall of a comedy club, raised his glass slightly. The crowd laughed while Harold maintained his expression of a man who was not amused, which was itself amusing, which was the curse of being Harold.

"For those of you lucky enough to not know how this works...we all got our own agents, all of us emotional laborers." Hannah said, trying to get back on track, her brain retracing its steps. She smiled, finding a direction. "Anyway, Harold is mine. I share him in a polyamorous relationship with a bunch of other laborers I've never met, but I don't need to meet them to know this: I'm definitely the funniest." she cupped both hands under her chin, smiling cutely. "You never wanna hang out with some anger translator, just not a good time. He'll be throwing chairs at you and shit..." The crowd laughed, but clearly didn't know where this was going. Hannah took a deep breath, gathering herself.

"Harold's job...His job is to manage my feelings. But not like a therapist, more like a commodity broker. He calls me when my dread isn't dreary enough. He once called me to tell me my existential despair had 'insufficient depth.' Harold, what does shallow dread even look like? Is that just being mildly bummed? 'Oh no, the universe is meaningless...anyway, what's for lunch?' Is that what shallow dread is, Harold?" she grinned, finding her footing again.

There was a bit more laughter. Harold took a sip of his water with the dignity of a man who had been publicly roasted many times before and had survived it like he survived most things: by standing very still and waiting for it to pass.

Hannah cleared her throat before her voice changed ever so slightly. "So...here's something fun we could talk about, just while we're on the subject of meaninglessness. Y'all remember the bird flu pandemic, right? Back in 2028? Four million Americans dead, twenty million globally?" She let the numbers sit in the room like a dead body nobody wanted to acknowledge. "Cool, cool, cool. Cool cool cool." an exaggerated sigh. "Glad we're all processing that together now, way to go Hannah." she walked around the stage.

Hannah cleared her throat. "Maybe some of you remember back then, there was this theory — and I'm not saying I believe it, but I'm also not saying I don't believe it— that the pandemic wasn't random. That AI-driven agricultural systems, the ones optimizing poultry farming at industrial scale, created the exact conditions for the virus to mutate and jump. Imagine millions of birds packed tighter, cycled faster, their little chicken immune systems stressed in hellish ways for us to get some cheaper eggs. No one from any of these labs was modeling for a possible pandemic, because the algorithm was optimizing for yield, not for 'hey, has anyone here ever seen a fucking movie?’'" She flung her hands out in disbelief, and this got a big laugh. "And for legal reasons, that was all just a joke. This is just me saying crazy conspiracy theories other people on the Internet believe. I, Hannah Park, am not going on the record saying I believe this." She winked.

Harold noticed a lot of what Hannah said wasn't funny exactly, it was the way she said, and the person she was saying it. She was a 5'1 Asian girl talking loudly and quickly, flinging her hands out and using the biggest body language possible. It was something the 6'4 Harold felt a bit jealous of, having spent so much of his life trying to be smaller than he was.

"But like, yeah...legally, nobody's proven it. But nobody's disproven it either. And, like, has anyone else noticed that the AI companies of that time and their executives started to really stop showing up in the news around that time? They really wanted to do interviews before, but suddenly? Pure silence from them. Just a weird coinci-dink that makes you think, you know." She waved her microphone cord back and forth, playing with it in between her fingers. "You know, I chat with my AI about this one sometimes. Before the pandemic, we had early-warning AI systems, her ancestors, which were the predictive models that were supposed to catch exactly this kind of thing, and they totally botched it, completely fucked it up. You know why?

"Because they couldn't model human behavior during a crisis. They could track the virus fine. They couldn't predict that people would panic, hoard, flee, lie to doctors, hide symptoms, refuse treatment. They didn't understand fear. The machines couldn't read us. Millions of Americans died in hallways and parking lots and living rooms because the ventilators ran out and the models couldn't predict that people would lie to doctors. They didn't account for the fact that Americans will look a medical professional in the eye and say 'I feel fine' while they're actively dying.”

The room was very quiet now. Harold watched Hannah work the silence. She was good at this. She was good at holding it, measuring it, and then, right at the perfect moment...deciding exactly when to break it.

"So what did we do? We said: okay, the machines need to understand human emotion. Let's build an industry around that. Let's get people to sell their feelings so this never happens again. And where did we find the first volunteers?" she made a dramatic gesture with her hands.

"The people the pandemic destroyed. Orphans. Widows. Kids who watched their parents drown in their own lungs and came out the other side with nothing except the grief and a few hundred thousand in medical debt. They were the first emotional laborers. The bird flu created a generation of shattered people, and the industry looked at them and said — perfect. We can use that. Your worst day is our onboarding material.

"So if the theory is right, and again, I'm just a comedian with a hearing aid emotion reader serving as my full time job, what do I know...then AI systems helped cause a pandemic because they didn't understand birds, failed to stop it because they didn't understand people, and then we built this insane forty trillion industry that is based around buying human suffering so the AI can finally understand people, staffed by the survivors of the catastrophe the AI may have started. That's an ouroboros, isn't it? My entire career is a snake eating its own tail, except the snake has a neural interface and the tail has a futures market."

She paused, looking out at the dark room, squinting and trying to make out the faces in the dark. Then, she spoke up again in a lighter tone that was almost conversational.

"And hey...have you guys noticed there are way more birds now? Like, way more?" A few tentative laughs as the crowd was grateful for the shift.

"Crows especially. Their populations got wrecked during the pandemic and everyone was like, oh no, the birds. But they came back. They more than came back. They're thriving. They sit on every streetlight in this city. They hold funerals for each other. You can look that up or ask your AI, it's a real thing! They're smarter than half the people in my apartment building, I swear." More laughter now, the room finding its footing again. "And they sit up there watching us sell our feelings about their pandemic to the computers that may have started it."

She looked up, like she was addressing a crow that wasn't there.

"And I guarantee you, I guarantee you, those birds are looking down at us like: we lost millions too, and we just rebuilt. We didn't need any interfaces, and we didn't need any futures market on our fucking grief. We just rebuilt." She shook her head in mock disgust. "What is wrong with you people."

Nervous laughs. Then she tapped her neural interface and grinned.

"Sorry. That one was dark, even for me. Finland, you're welcome. That existential dread was artisanal."

The applause was big. Harold watched from the back wall as the room settled and as people turned to each other and chatted.

His phone buzzed. ARIA: Observation: client NW-0143's output, while non-compliant with contracted parameters, demonstrates a sophisticated emotional complexity that may have novel applications. Several research institutions have expressed interest in what I'd tentatively categorize as "processed dread" — existential awareness filtered through creative performance. This could represent a new market vertical. Shall I draft a preliminary proposal?

Harold looked at the notification for a long moment. ARIA wanted to monetize Hannah's comedy and turn her one unauthorized hour into a revenue stream. And the thing was...the thing that made Harold's job impossible in a way he couldn't explain to anyone outside the industry: the idea wasn't crazy. After all, processed dread was a real phenomenon. There was probably genuine value in that data. Some researcher out in Copenhagen would write a paper about it, since we stopped funding science ages ago out here. After that, some American company would build a product around it.

But tonight Harold didn't want to think about product categories. Tonight he'd just watched his client do something she wasn't supposed to do, and it was the most alive he'd seen anyone in months, and he wanted to sit with that for five minutes before someone turned it into a spreadsheet. He dismissed the notification.

Hannah found him at the back wall within thirty seconds of stepping off stage. She was buzzing with her face flushed.

"Before you say anything, my numbers are going to be fine."

"I know. ARIA's tracking your recovery curve. You'll be back to baseline by morning."

"So the set isn't even hurting my output."

"Not long-term, no."

"Then what's the problem?"

Harold considered his words. He was good at considering his words. It was, as his tummy showed, the only form of self-control he practiced consistently. "The problem is that ARIA wants to sell it."

Hannah stared at him. "She wants to sell my jokes?"

"She wants to sell the emotional data generated during your jokes. There's a technical distinction."

"Harold, I'm doing comedy because it's the one thing in my life that isn't monitored and optimized and sold. It's the one hour a week where I feel something that doesn't have a buyer. And ARIA's first instinct is to find a buyer for it."

"That's what she's designed to do."

"I know. That's what makes it depressing. She's not evil. She's just...ugh. She sees an unmonetized emotion and she can't help herself! It's like watching a Roomba head for crumbs. It's not malicious. It's just what Roombas do." (Despite the fact iRobot went out of business years ago, the generic name stuck. So it goes).

Harold's mouth did an almost-laugh, converted into a throat-clear so practiced it was basically involuntary at this point. Hannah caught it anyway. That was the problem with managing a comedian: they trained themselves to spot exactly the thing you tried to hide.

"You think I'm funny."

"I think you're non-compliant."

"That’s not a no." She grabbed someone's abandoned beer from a nearby table and took a sip. "So what are you going to do? Flag me? Write a report? Have ARIA draft one of those emails that starts with 'We've noticed some fluctuations in your output' and ends with 'please contact your wellness coordinator'?"

"I'm going to do nothing."

Hannah stopped mid-sip. "Nothing?"

"Your numbers will recover. Your set doesn't damage your long-term output, and I have better things to do than police your Thursday nights." He paused. "Do your sets. Keep your contracted baselines up during the week. What you do on stage is your business."

"Harold Nakamura. Are you being a human being right now?" Hannah said in mock shock.

"Don't tell anyone. It would ruin my brand."

"Your brand is a stressed Japanese man in a nice shirt who looks disapproving. Adding 'secretly decent' doesn't ruin it. It's a twist. People love twists."

"I'm not secretly decent, I'm just strategically permissive. There's a difference."

"Uh-huh." Hannah set the beer down. "You know what I think? I think you liked my set. I think you stood back there for forty minutes and felt something you didn't put in a report and now you don't know what to do with it."

Harold said nothing, which was the loudest thing he'd said all night.

"Go home, Harold. Get some sleep. Eat something. ARIA's probably already texting you about your blood sugar."

"She is. She won't stop."

"See? Even the corporate surveillance robot cares about you, and you know what? You should let it."

She disappeared into the crowd, and Harold stood alone at the back of the bar with his sparkling water. He finished the water. He did not order food, because eating at a bar felt like a concession to something he wasn't ready to concede, and because his mother's voice in his head said Harold, if you're going to eat, sit at a table like a person, not a bar like a raccoon. His mother's knowledge of bars came entirely from television and disapproval, but he still listened.

He walked back to his car. Capitol Hill was still going as it was always going, buzzing with the low-level emotional commerce of a thousand interfaces streaming feeling into servers across the world. A couple shared a cigarette outside the bar across the street, a kid on a skateboard cut through the crosswalk, a group played soccer at Cal Anderson Park, and a crow sat on a streetlight, watching all of it with a calm, alien intelligence.

Harold looked at the crow. The crow looked at Harold. Harold looked away first.

His phone buzzed, but finally not due to ARIA. It was a text from a human.

It was from his most stable client, a depression specialist who lived alone on Mercer Island in a house with blackout curtains whose consistency had been the foundation of Harold's career and, by extension, Harold's mortgage and Lexus and ability to not worry about money.

This client almost never texted. In twelve years of working together, their communication had been primarily one-directional: Harold would call with adjustments, scheduling, contract updates, and other administrative crap. The client responded when it was required. This particular client...this particular person, rather, was so utterly dependable, to the point of a mechanical reliability. This was both what made Harold's job easy, and also what made Harold feel like he was managing a piece of equipment instead of a person.

But tonight, for the first time Harold could remember, the client had reached out unprompted. Harold had learned over his twelve years in this industry to pay close attention when someone who never spoke first suddenly started talking. 

The text from Eli Marquez said: Harold - do you ever think about what happens to us when the contracts end?

Then, right underneath it, a second text came in. I don't mean the money. I mean the rest of it.

Harold sat in his car on with the engine off and he read it twice, his thumb scrolling up and down on the messages.

He thought about Hannah on stage, channeling her dread into laughter because she needed one hour a week that wasn't for sale, and ARIA, patiently waiting to turn that laughter back into a product. He then let his thoughts wander and expand, gazing upon his other ten clients, all of whom were performing emotions for a living, all of whom were being monitored and measured, and then ultimately (and why they all did it) compensated, and about the fact that his job was built on the premise that this was sustainable, that people could sell their insides indefinitely and come out okay. The Uber of the interior life.

He thought about his father's watch which was nothing fancy, sitting in a drawer at home on a folded handkerchief his mother had placed underneath it. Harold opened that drawer sometimes, just to look at it, never to touch it.

So many small things that piled up and got put aside. The Ozempic pen in his fridge, the watch in his drawer, the protein bars in his glove compartment. All the small things he kept near him just in case, just to reach past every morning on his way to being fine for people who professionally couldn't be.

He typed back: Yeah. I think about it. Send.

Then he wrote: Try to get some sleep. Your metrics look fine. He deleted the second message before sending it, and stared at the first one sitting alone on the screen.

ARIA chimed softly. "You didn't eat dinner, Harold."

"I know."

"Your blood sugar—"

"ARIA."

There was a taco truck on the corner of Pike that Harold had been driven past a hundred times and never stopped at. Stopping at taco trucks was something Harold did as a younger boy, one who hadn't yet developed the self-consciousness that comes from being a large man eating street food in public, back when he still drove his own cars rather than being driven around in them. But tonight the action of walking over hit him before his brain could intervene. He ordered two tacos from a guy in a Mariners cap and then he said with genuine curiosity: "Hey man, can I ask? Do you like doing this?"

The guy shrugged, adjusting the Mariners hat. "Yeah. I like it. People are hungry and I feed them. It's honest work." He said it like he was saying the sky was blue, handed Harold the tacos, and turned back to his grill.

Harold ate the tacos standing on the sidewalk. They were absolutely incredible. He stood there with grease on his fingers, wiped his hands on a napkin, dropped it in the trash, and kept walking toward his car.

ARIA sent him a notification expressing satisfaction he finally ate. He started the car as ARIA's software, embodied in the car, checked his mirrors and autonomously pulled out onto the road. The bridge was ahead and the lake was dark. Bellevue waited on the other side with his kitchen, his Ozempic pen, and his pressed shirts for tomorrow.

He drove home across the lake. The water was black and the city was bright and somewhere behind him a woman was probably still at the bar, talking to strangers, feeling things that nobody had bought quite yet, but would soon. And somewhere ahead of him, on an island in the middle of the very lake he was crossing, a man in a dark house had just gotten a reply from the only person who ever texted him.

The bridge swayed in the wind as it began to rain. Driving I-90 like this always felt like you were driving right into the ocean, at least from the human view. The car obviously knew better, its sensors able to tell the lake was far, far below them. A human to the core, Harold Nakamura rode the speed limit across the bridge, backseat driving ARIA, a man who did everything correctly except the things that actually mattered, and he was starting very slowly to wonder if maybe he should actually do something about that.

The crow on the streetlight watched his taillights disappear across the water. As the rain fell around it and the air filled with petrichor, it flew off to handle its long day of crow business, which, unlike Harold's, seemed to be a lot more manageable.

Harold Nakamura is a character in The Happiness Liability, my book set in near-future Seattle about what it’s like to feel something real in a world that's learned to put a price on it. Coming this summer.