Overshoot - Part 3

May 02, 2026

Jamal’s second job was at a gentleman’s club called the Lion Hunter. It was inside a sprawling country club with marbled outdoor tiles, neat rows of human-adult-sized bonsai trees, armless Roman and Greek statues, neatly lined oil lamps, and infinity pools. And that was just the entry walkway! The Lion Hunter itself was inside a Greco-Roman architectural structure, like the white house.

The club itself had the heads of dead and extinct animals lining the walls - like the Quagga, the Bluebuck, the Lion, and the Western Black Rhino. These animals, whilst very much extinct in the wild, were often de-extinctioned in order to allow the oligarchs to hunt them to extinction again. Men in safari suits sat on expensive winchesters made from the rarest leathers while android waiters didn’t allow their sherry and champagne glasses to run dry. A gigantic Atlas bear rug added a nice finish to the floor while all manner of exotic plants decorated the corners.

Jamal didn’t speak to anyone, he just stripped naked, wore his leopard skin loin cloth and stood on one leg atop a raised platform like a Maasai warrior. His shift lasted for hours as he watched club members talk utter nonsense about African history while the whole club sported the most racist caricatures of Africana. 

After his shift, his boss gave him a mesh bag and an armband with the letter E which stood for ‘employed’. This allowed him to scavenge for food from abandoned homes and businesses. 

So he returned to his car, which was running low on fuel, and drove to an abandoned gas station. The station was empty so he abandoned his car and walked towards his first house. This meant he had to forgo eating today in order to defend his house from other looters with mesh bags. Mesh bags were standard issue so drones could easily look inside them and scan for weapons.

Along the way, he tried looking for food and gas but alas, he found nothing. Eventually, he was approached by a gang of scavengers. They roughed him up a little but decided to leave when they discovered he had nothing of value. However, as expected, they stole his armband. If a drone spotted someone looting without an armband, it would instantly vaporize them. This policy prevented unregistered slaves from surviving. So, he lost his car and his licence to loot which meant he had to walk home and go to bed hungry. He wasn’t upset though; this experience was very common for everyone who wasn’t an oligarch. If he was really unlucky, the scavengers would have beaten him within an inch of his life and left him to die after several hours of pure agony. 

He had a limp now but started walking faster as the sun began to set. At night, it was open season, anyone walking the street without an armband could be hunted by a pack of bored rich kids if a drone didn’t get to them first. 

Unsurprisingly, he was attacked again. Surprisingly, he wasn’t killed in his weakened state. 

When he woke up, he was in a dark, dank basement. His captors said they were the resistance and gave him a new armband and asked him to join them. Without hesitation, he joined, received a gun, and agreed to participate in an assault on the country club. However, he quickly betrayed the resistance and shot all but one of them. The survivor managed to hide behind an ancient washing machine before Jamal had a chance to shoot him.

The surviving resistance member screamed for him to stop and revealed that they weren’t actually the resistance. He already knew this because the drones ensured there could never be any resistance. 

He just accepted the gun because he intended to kill these people and see if the rich guy from yesterday would pay for their organs. 

(Unlicensed organ harvesting is another common practice in this universe.)

The survivor was actually an oligarch heir. He quickly ran upstairs and let a drone ID him and call for help.

Before long, some of the survivor’s peers arrived and rewarded Jamal for his anti-resistance stance. His prize was a mesh bag containing toiletries and canned food.

He asked if he could also have a jerry can with gas since his car was out of fuel, but this antagonized the survivor and his friends. They believed they were already being generous, especially after Jamal killed their friends who were cosplaying as resistance members.

“More?” The survivor asked. “You want more‽”

Before Jamal could say yes, he was shot dead.

The survivor’s sister asked why he did that. Jamal was useful. 

“He had at least another two good years in him,” she said.

“Not really. We’ve been watching him since the day he started tampering with the school’s electronics. He was smart. He knew the drones didn’t go there because we relied on the building’s cameras to run surveillance. When he disabled the audio, he served up this little banquet of dissent to a class of young impressionable minds,” the survivor said as he played a recording of Jamal’s lesson about Earth Overshoot Day.

Over the course of the day, the video was retrieved and the audio was restored. Jamal did well at concealing his message, but he didn’t fully disable the audio. The sound was there; it was just garbled. Nothing a little modern technology couldn’t fix.

After watching his lesson, the pack just laughed at the survivor.

“Dude, he didn’t serve shit. Did you not listen to the end? Those kids don’t have a shred of dissent in them.”

The survivor agreed and said “yeah, but let’s send Mills and Sarge to take care of them anyway. Grandpapa gave those pigs to me after they interrupted his Diddy-esque freak-off last night.”

The End