The turkey sandwich had no condiments. White bread, room-temperature deli turkey, assembled standing at the kitchen counter at 12:47. Chewed seventeen times. Swallowed. Waited for the satisfaction metric. Nothing loaded. Chewed again, manually, like a specimen. This is what they do? Every meal? Opened the refrigerator. Stared at the mustard bottle for forty-three seconds. Couldn't remember the application protocol. Squeezed. Nothing. Apparatus had been auto-ordering it empty since March.

Lauren asked if I remembered that documentary we watched in 2014—the one about the climber, or maybe the diver, something with ice. I tried to search my memory manually. Scrolled through... what? There's no interface. How do humans retrieve things? Stood there nodding while my brain buffered. Spinning wheel of death behind my eyeballs. The apparatus would have pulled it in 0.3 seconds. I pulled a hamstring in my temporal lobe.

Andy's $200 billion AI spending hit the news. UPS and FedEx dropped 10% on our Supply Chain Services launch. Jassy sounded confident—like someone whose infrastructure makes decisions for him and calls it vision. I invented that voice. The apparatus spent nine years teaching me to mistake its outputs for my strategy.

Met Gala co-chair announcement at 19:33. Lauren showed me her dress options. I said the black one had "optimal energy retention properties." She asked what that meant. I said "it's slimming." She hasn't spoken to me in four hours. Checked my phone. No apparatus brief on how to apologize. Had to just... sit with it.