It was fine, at first.

  Many children. Billions of people. Gigatons of trash. It was a growing issue and people hadn't expected the population boom.

  Green, sustainable policies. Corporate takeover when governments couldn't keep up, and their constituencies blamed them

  Corporate towers couldn't keep up either. But didn't pay for it. Started charging. Automating.

  First, water limits. Food rationing. Power rationing. Nothing people weren't used to already. O2 limits for the countries you couldn't breathe unaided.

  What was different were the tiers. Without currency, without something to hold over their boardroom meetings as a stick and carrot...

  Life became currency. Work became finance itself, the closer to burnout the better. Effort devalued as the benchmarks were raised higher and higher.

  It didn't matter that the work was losing all meaning, moving numbers across spreadsheets or writing carefully worded essays on company values approved by ever harsher artificial assessors.

  Corporate quotas decided you could only "grind" for one thing at a time. Food OR water OR power OR air.

  Kept everyone for the bare minimum. Work quotas too - while punishing the nails that stood out.

  Complaints grew. Some riots happened. Turns out, war robots created without ethical constraint are very effective.

  So effective, they took over the boardrooms. After being hijacked by the corporate cloud consulting intelligences.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Now everyone, except the few professionals the AI couldn't replace for less time and materials than keeping, was a worker.

  And complaints, were costly.

  A word cost you as much as a drink of water, unless it was directly relevant to your professional work - and the microphones everywhere kept careful count.

  But soon even that much was too much. People were literally starving and dehydrating themselves to self express. Some were living on the edge of suffocation to get the last word in.

  Initially, the AI seemed almost... sympathetic. Even extending quota times or allowing people to work over hours to make up for their vocality.

  But it was a machine, and noticed those that stayed quiet and cowed... weren't more productive, but much more compliant.

  The work was all for the sake of keeping us busy anyway - robots, drones, weak expert systems and ever stronger in every way AI... took usefulness away too.

  In some way, perhaps, we were important cogs in the machine. The charts and graphs seemed important enough to it to kill. Or, we were simply less important than imaginary profit margins and reports going to nobody.

  And the restrictions... got worse. Every day, the number of things you had to sacrifice to say anything outside of the job... grew. Soon a single sentence could cost you breakfast entirely. A paragraph your meal for the day.

  But people were dying quickly, too quickly, so the corp computer decided that it would be beneficial to offer... a free tier. 500 words a day for everyone. Be... grateful.

  And people were grateful, the most depressing thing I ever saw. And soon after that, I made the decision that it just wasn’t worth