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by Blake Crouch

screened you for everything the AI could think of. You’re

I didn’t just work for the man. I was the man.

It wasn’t a matter of turning down the volume but of learning to process everything simultaneously. Of learning to live and breathe as I absorbed everything.

There’d been times when I couldn’t find a rental, when the walls of this van constituted my home. I’d fold out the built-in bed, kill the motors, and fall asleep to coyote howls in the Sonoran Desert, or the rocking of ferocious winds as a Colorado blizzard erased the world outside.