Standard Loneliness Package

Yu, Charles. "Standard Loneliness Package." Lightspeed: Year One. An on-line anthology available here[1]. Print version: Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2011, conveniently accessed through Goodreads.[2] Abridged audiobook version (which Erlich has consulted), edited by John Joseph Adams (Skyboat Audio, 2012) available directly from Audible.com[3] and iTunes.[4]

The Narrator-protagonist works at a job where if people are having a bad day, he has the worst of it for them. As one of his colleagues explains to the Narrator and us, " Okay, so […] they" the clients, "book the time, and then at the appointed hour, a switch in their implant chip kicks on and starts transferring their consciousness over. Perceptions, sensory data, all of it. Okay, so, then it goes first to an intermediate server for processing and then gets bundled with other jobs, and then a huge block of the stuff gets zapped over here, where it gets downloaded onto our servers and then dumped into our queue management system, which parcels out the individual jobs to all of us in the cubicle farm." The Narrator works a lot of funerals and other unpleasant parts of life; it is not a good job.

It gets worse when the not-so-bad parts of the bad day don't go to the workers' consciousness: "the packeting software was refined to filter out those intervals and collect them. Those bits, the extras, the slices of life that were left over were lopped off by the program, and smushed all together, into a kind of reconstituted life slab. Like American baloney lunchmeat. A life-loaf. They take the slabs and process them and sell them as prepackaged lives. I’ve had my eye on one for a while, at a secondhand shop that’s on my way home from work. Not ideal, but it’s something to work for. So now, what’s left over, what we get to feel at work, it’s all pretty much just pure undiluted badness" — and the "life" the Narrators wants — generally a "Standard happiness package" — gets purchased by someone else. Other forms of purchase are big parts of lives, forty years or so, as with the father of the Narrator and the father of a co-worker named Kirthi.

The Narrator loves Kirthi, or thinks he does, and "Standard Loneliness Package" is a story of frustrated love set in a dystopian very-late-capitalist world where, finally, the technology of consciousness/feeling transfer allows an ending at least bitter-sweet.

RDE, 06/II/17