Pizza

It is not far in the fu­ture, and you are about to or­der a pizza in the smartest city in the world, where you live.

You don’t ac­tu­ally need a pizza, mind you. A care­fully bal­anced meal tai­lored specif­i­cally to your nu­tri­tional re­quire­ments had al­ready been de­liv­ered to your of­fice, right on sched­ule—but you ig­nored it and started walk­ing to­ward the pizza shop any­way. Once your phone fig­ured out what you were do­ing, it started buzzing an­gry warn­ings about throw­ing off your macronu­tri­ent mix. Technology fixed food crav­ings, but it still had­n’t yet solved the prob­lem of want­ing to get up and walk out­side for some fresh air.

You don’t even need to be here stand­ing in the or­der queue, but since you like be­ing out of the of­fice, you imag­ine that’s also true for the ten or fif­teen peo­ple ahead of you. It would have been eas­ier to tap in your or­der from work, pick up your pie ex­actly four and a half min­utes later, and be back at your desk, sa­ti­ated, all in un­der ten min­utes. Your pro­ject man­age­ment tracker would have given you a thou­sand points for cut­ting your lunch hour by more than half.

You could even place your or­der on your phone right now, while you’re wait­ing. But you don’t, be­cause the whole point of mak­ing this trip down the street is to have some inkling of hu­man in­ter­ac­tion every once in a while. Besides, you think the cashier is kind of cute.

You’re cer­tain she’s work­ing to­day. Her so­cial me­dia said so. You could look up every­one in the en­tire city and see where they’re at, if you wanted to. You re­mem­ber when this used to be creepy, but now, it’s … nor­mal.

But some­thing’s wrong. You don’t see her at the counter. Her point of sale ma­chine has been re­placed with a touch­screen menu.

You tap the per­son in front of you, and ges­ture to­ward the de­vice, which seems awk­wardly po­si­tioned and out of place. “What’s up with that?”

“Hmm? Oh, that,” he says, with a shrug. “I guess they in­stalled some­thing more au­to­matic.”

He turns back away from you, sig­nal­ing the end of the con­ver­sa­tion. Not that you would have re­ceived a sat­is­fac­tory an­swer from small talk, any­how. Touchscreen menus are every­where in this city, and only a few joints still staff hu­mans any­more. It’s why you come to this pizza shop at all. And now you’re both­ered that they might have let go of your pizza crush.

When it’s fi­nally your turn at the menu, you can see that it’s the same in­ter­face as the ones in all the other restau­rants. The color scheme has been cus­tomized to match the pizza shop’s brand­ing, but they all have iden­ti­cal bub­bly ty­pog­ra­phy and candy-lozenge but­tons. A car­toon mas­cot—an an­thro­po­mor­phized slice of pizza with oval eyes, white-glove hands and gi­ant feet—cheer­fully walk you through each screen like you’ve never seen it be­fore.

Making your se­lec­tion is easy; it’s what you al­ways get. Two slices, one with gar­lic pep­per­oni, and an­other, with sausage and pep­pers and onions, drop into an ex­tra-large but­ton with an icon that re­minds you of one of those an­cient shop­ping carts. The cheer­ful pizza mas­cot promises to re­mem­ber your or­der for next time, and then it tells you to wait for your or­der at the pickup counter. You al­most don’t even no­tice the menu scan­ning your retina, caus­ing a bunch of data­bases on far­away servers to ex­change enough in­for­ma­tion to iden­tify you, debit your spend­ing ac­count, and send a re­ceipt to your phone, in the span of sixty mil­lisec­onds.

The phone buzzes an­grily again, be­cause your nu­tri­tion tracker just logged the pizza. It was­n’t happy about it.

You move down to the pickup counter. You could­n’t get a good view of it from your pre­vi­ous van­tage point in the or­der queue, but now you see that the cashier’s got a dif­fer­ent job now, shut­tling slices from the oven to wait­ing cus­tomers. You feel a twinge of re­lief shove away your lin­ger­ing sense of de­tach­ment.

“Hey!” she ex­claims, rec­og­niz­ing you. “Garlic pep­per­oni and s/​p/​o?” She says it like ess-pee-oh.

“Yep, you got it,” you re­ply. “Missed you at the or­der counter.”

“Yeah, well,” she says. She opens an­other oven, slides some freshly-made un­baked pies in as she speaks. “I’m not sur­prised, the own­ers had wanted to au­to­mate this place for a while.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” you re­spond dis­ap­point­edly. “I only come here for the hu­man in­ter­ac­tion.” You think about say­ing I only come here to see you, but it does­n’t come out that way.

“This whole place is chang­ing,” she says. “Soon the pizza will just come out of a hole in the wall, like the other au­tomats.”

“Won’t that put you out of a job?”

“Yeah, it would, but I’m leav­ing any­way. I never meant to be here for more than a few months.” She stops mov­ing around, and is now ac­tu­ally talk­ing to you. “After I left my last job, I needed a bit of a break. I’m here for the hu­man in­ter­ac­tion too, be­lieve it or not.”

“Oh!” you say, try­ing to hide your sur­prise. Mentally, you kick your­self for never in­quir­ing about this be­fore. As if pizza shop cashiers are just that, for­ever. “Wait, so what do you nor­mally do?”

“I’m a soft­ware en­gi­neer,” she says non­cha­lantly. “Like every­one else in this city,” she adds, like an af­ter­thought.

“Wow. I had no idea. I mean, so this is just tem­po­rary?” you ask.

“Yeah, and this is ac­tu­ally my last week here. I landed a pretty cool role on the life­track­ing team at Endtech,” she says. You can sense a barely-con­tained ex­cite­ment in her voice.

Your jaw all but drops. “Endtech! I work there too!” Your ex­cit­ment is piggy-back­ing off hers.

“Yeah, like every­one else in this city,” she says again, this time with a smirk. “Okay, what team are you on?”

“Internal met­rics,” you say. “We work with all the other de­part­ments. Maybe I’ll see you around?” But the mo­ment you say those words, though, you re­al­ize how hol­low that is. Endtech is a huge com­pany, with thou­sands of em­ploy­ees across hun­dreds of teams, and no one re­ally ever talks to each other.

“That’d be great! I start Monday,” she says. A bell dings, and she’s mov­ing around again, slid­ing two slices of pizza from the oven and de­posit­ing them into a box. “Here you go, gar­lic pep­per­oni and an ess-pee-oh. I’ll see you in the of­fice!” She winks.

You grab the box, with a smile and a wave. “Thanks—see you next week.” You hope she can’t tell that you’re un­cer­tain. The harsh re­al­ity is, peo­ple go into Endtech, dis­ap­pear into the org chart, and are never seen again.

But for a mo­ment, you shared a con­ver­sa­tion with an­other per­son. It’s a rare mo­ment. It lasted ex­actly four and a half min­utes.