I Think I Thought I Wanted That

Flash Fiction

Your wishlist is just a want away

Somewhere on Earth a customer thought of something they wanted. An algorithm had calculated within 99.9% certainty that the customer would purchase the product given the choice, but that was unnecessary. The product was already on the way and would be delivered within minutes of the predicted time of the thought.

Trucks drove into a building. Arms unloaded the crates. Conveyors ferried the crates along. More arms lifted the crates into new trucks headed to new destinations. Further arms unloaded the crates and this time opened them. Now a drone lifted the parcel and flew it directly to the doorstop of the customer.

No human supervised. It all happened automatically. If there was a problem, an algorithm would take care of it. Only in the event of a rare cascade error would a human even become aware of any of these operations. Once a week Jeff got a status message which he would glance at from the balcony of his Martian villa. This is what he wanted and yet it all somehow felt hollow. Sometimes he wished that climate change wasn’t actually fixed. Things used to be exciting. Now it was just microgravity tennis with Elon on Tuesdays. How boring.

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