The Drone Class Citizen

The Drone Class Citizen (2016)

The drone woke up abruptly from the incessant buzzing of his alarm clock. Five fifteen in the morning lit up on its digital display. It was another routine workday morning in the endless cycle, exactly the same as the previous and upcoming one. Commute. Work. Commute. Eat. Sleep. Such would be his daily life from now until his last breath.

The drone brewed himself a cup of liquid stimulant in his tiny kitchen. He could not afford a more spacious dwelling - not that he would ever need it, or even have time to enjoy it. The drone worked upwards of seventy-six hours per week in order to survive. He had no time for friends, no time for family or acquaintances, and no time to dedicate to finding a mate. If he worked less than seventy hours per week he would be losing money because of the high cost of living in his residential area. The other six hours worth of income were for his savings, which he would need for health care emergencies, inevitably arising from the physical toll of working more than seventy hours per week. Sometimes he worked so intensely that it became a state of being greater than life itself.

After a quick breakfast of toasted bread and fried eggs, the drone went to his private vehicle. It was an old beat-down model of a sub-compact car. He could not afford to replace it. Not that he would ever have time to enjoy it even if he did - for most of his waking hours were spent working.

The drone drove to work while thinking about work. The tasks of the upcoming day would be exactly the same as the last, and yet he thought about them incessantly even when he was awake and not working (which was almost never).

The drone pulled into the parking lot of his company. He exited the vehicle and locked the doors, but deep down inside he knew no one would waste their time stealing this pathetic relic of his pathetic and irrelevant life. He rode the elevator to the fifth floor of his employer's facility, entered his employee identification number into the time clock, and he began to work at his station. He worked doing the same menial and repetitive tasks until the lunch bell sounded. This meant he would have a thirty minute break to consume his food so that he could have enough energy to continue working afterwards. He did precisely that, and then he continued to work.

He worked non-stop up until five o'clock in the evening. After that he drove to his second job, a much lower paying job, but one he needed in order to survive. And so until eleven o'clock at night he would work this second job to the best of his ability. There would be no lunch or dinner break here. He would have to sneak morsels of food out of his pocket while his supervisor's eyes were elsewhere. He needed these morsels of food for energy so that he could continue working his job properly. However, eating morsels of food while working there was strictly prohibited, and so he faced termination each time he did this. And yet, he had to break this job's conduct code because without the morsels he would not have the energy to work this job, and thus he would not have enough money to survive.

The drone continued to work hard each and every day.

And then one day, he died.