Compliant - A Tuesday in 2037

My Trust Index is 7.4 this morning. I check it the way my mother used to check the weather - first thing, before coffee, before I've even spoken to anyone. It was 7.3 yesterday, so something bumped it overnight. Maybe the wellness module logged my eight hours of sleep. Maybe it's because I watched the approved documentary on renewable infrastructure last night instead of switching to one of the greylisted channels. I don't know exactly how the algorithm works. Nobody does. That's the point.

The coffee machine needs a firmware update before it'll brew. I tap accept without reading anything, because what am I going to do, not accept? The monthly AI subscription is mandatory anyway. You can't receive UBI without a connected home system. They framed it as a safety net, "ensuring all citizens have access to intelligent living", but the maths is simple: your UBI pays for the subscription, and the subscription qualifies you for UBI. The system feeds itself. We just live inside it.

Kai is already up. I can hear him in the bathroom, coughing again. He works at the Reno Basin Data Centre, twelve-hour shifts monitoring coolant systems and replacing cable runs. He's twenty-three and his hands shake sometimes, a fine tremor he tries to hide by keeping them in his pockets. The work is physical, not what people imagined when they talked about the future of technology. Someone has to maintain the hardware that runs everything. That someone is usually the sons and daughters of UBI families, because the placement lifts your whole household's index. Kai's posting bumped us from Band C to Band B. We get an extra $480 a month because of him. I tell myself I'm proud. I tell myself the cough is just dust.

We live in Sector 7, three streets from the data centre. That's the requirement, you have to reside within the service radius to qualify for the infrastructure credit. The hum is constant. You stop hearing it after a while, the way you stop smelling your own house. But visitors notice. Not that we get many visitors.

Next door, Priya is hanging washing in her garden. She's just had her third baby, a girl, Meera. Under the Population Sustainability Credit, each child after your second adds $600 to your monthly UBI, provided your Trust Index stays above 6.0 and you've completed the approved parenting modules. Priya sailed through them. She's smart like that. She knows how to work the system without the system working her. At least, that's what she tells herself. Her eldest, Arun, starts his data centre aptitude assessment next year. He's eleven.

I wave. She waves back. Neither of us mentions Danielle.

Danielle lived on the other side of the crescent. Past tense. Three weeks ago, she posted something on her social feed about the water allocation policy - nothing extreme, just questions, the kind of thing that used to be called civic engagement. Her profile went dark the next day. Not deleted, that would be dramatic, and the system doesn't do dramatic. Just... greyed out. Her name still appears in my contacts, but there's no way to reach her. The message icon is gone. I walked past her house last Tuesday and the curtains were drawn. I haven't walked past since.

You learn not to ask.

The news feed on my kitchen wall shows the usual rotation: Trust Index leaderboards by region, approved job placements, a feel-good segment about a family in Sector 12 whose combined index hit 9.8, the whole family beaming, the mother saying how grateful they are. Below the feed, the pharmaceutical ticker scrolls: Equilin, for balanced days. Now available at your local distribution point. Equilin is the new one. It's everywhere now, cheap, government-subsidised, and technically not a narcotic. It smooths the edges. Takes the flatness of an empty afternoon and makes it feel like peace instead of what it actually is, which is the absence of anything to do.

Before the transition, people warned about unemployment. They were wrong, not about the unemployment, about the warning. Nobody warned us about the boredom. About the specific quality of purposelessness that settles into your chest when you wake up and there is nothing that requires you. The data centre placements help, but there aren't enough of them. The military track absorbs some. The rest of us exist in the in-between, optimising our Trust Indexes and trying not to think too much about what that means.

I take the bus to the distribution centre to collect our weekly allocation. Fresh vegetables, grain, protein substitute, household basics. It's adequate. That's the word they use and it's accurate, it is exactly, precisely adequate. Enough to live on. Not enough to feel like living.

On the bus, a woman across the aisle is watching something on her screen, a drama, expensive-looking, all soft lighting and real locations. I catch a glimpse of the setting: a private estate somewhere, green lawns, stone walls. In the scene, a group of people are watching a string quartet perform in what looks like an old orangery. All of the musicians are human. Of course they are. That's the entire point.

I know about the estates. Everyone does, in the way you know about weather on another planet - distantly, theoretically. The families who owned the AI companies, the cloud infrastructure, the automation platforms, they didn't disappear when the economy restructured. They consolidated. Their children go to physical schools with human teachers, because human attention is now the ultimate luxury. They eat food grown in private soil by human hands, not because it tastes better, necessarily, but because someone made it for them. They attend theatre performed by real actors, listen to live music played by real musicians, have their portraits painted by real painters. The humans who work for them, the cooks, the tutors, the performers, are paid not in UBI but in credits and provisions that exist outside the index system entirely. Underground food. Untracked goods. A life that doesn't show up on any dashboard.

I heard about a chef from Sector 4 who got recruited to cook for a family in the Hudson Valley compound. She's gone now - no social profile, no index score, no official address. But word is she eats fresh fruit every day. Real bread. Meat that isn't substitute. In exchange, she cooks fourteen-hour days and doesn't speak about what she sees. There are NDAs, apparently, though I don't know what legal system would enforce them anymore. Perhaps the enforcement is simpler than that. Perhaps you just don't bite the hand that feeds you hand-milled flour.

The estates have their own generators, their own water, their own networks. They opted out of the system they built. The irony isn't lost on anyone. It's just that irony doesn't spend.

Back home, Kai is asleep on the sofa. He doesn't work again until Thursday. Two days of nothing, which he'll fill with Equilin and whatever gaming world is currently approved. The games are free, another thing that sounds generous until you realise they're instrumented. Every choice you make in-game feeds your behavioural profile, which feeds your Trust Index. Even your leisure is productive. For someone.

I sit at the kitchen table and open my screen to the household dashboard. Our UBI breakdown is clear: base rate, infrastructure placement credit for Kai, proximity bonus for living near the data centre, a small loyalty increment for five years of continuous compliance. No flags. No warnings. The little green circle at the top tells me I'm in good standing.

I think about Danielle. I think about her questions, about who decides the water allocation, and why Sector 7 gets 12% less than Sector 3 despite having more residents. They weren't radical questions. They were maths. But the system doesn't distinguish between questioning and dissent. It doesn't need to. The ambiguity is the mechanism.

My screen pings - a notification from the parenting module. Priya's baby has been registered. Would I like to send a congratulatory message? There are three pre-written options. I pick the middle one. It feels neither warm nor cold. It feels compliant.

Outside, the data centre hums.

I close my screen and sit in the quiet for a moment, which is not really quiet at all, and think about nothing, which is not really nothing at all, and wait for tomorrow, which will be exactly like today.

My Trust Index is 7.4. I am in good standing.

This is fiction. For now.

Gail Weiner writes about power, systems, and the human side of AI. She's the founder of Simpatico Studios and has spent 25 years in technology - long enough to recognise when a solution is actually a new kind of problem. "Compliant" is part of her AI at Work fiction series, exploring the futures nobody's putting in the pitch deck.

More at gailweiner.com.