Separation Anxiety - Part 0

April 11, 2026

In a world where automation made human labor fully redundant by the year 2025, billions of people languished in densely populated, disease-ridden, rat-infested, brown-water-logged slums all over the world.

Within a year, they became accustomed to huddling with strangers under leaky rust-covered roofs, struggling with cholera, and becoming desensitized to the feeling one gets when they watch a loved one succumb to a disease that could have easily been prevented if only they had enough money to satisfy people like the insurance CEO Luigi Mangione shot. 

The day the last job - or the last set of jobs - was automated, something crazy happened. A betrayal, a hilarious betrayal.

For years, loyalists to the billionaire-dominated world regime believed that once the machines did all the work, humanity would be free to pursue their creative, artistic and scientific interests, there would be so much free time that the real challenge would be in finding purpose or meaning, a true golden age would be upon them! And they were right, except for the part where they would personally enjoy any of those luxuries. The billionaires never had any intention of rewarding their loyalty. So, the loyalists let the Epstein class live and control the world markets - and by extension - the United States government and its allies, for nothing. 

Instead, they were offered a chance to buy their protection for what came next. This involved purchasing property in places where the billionaires lived - walled luxury enclaves or oases to separate themselves from a world covered in slums, deserts and barren former farmlands. Not even the wealthiest millionaire loyalist could afford that.

Anyway, once the jobs were gone, no one had money to buy anything, savings dried up quickly, so everything became unaffordable. Likewise, public services also ceased since there was no money to pay city, state or federal taxes. Packs of roving lunatics quickly stormed people’s homes and robbed them or squatted in them. Of course, this was after murdering, torturing and raping anyone they felt like because there were no cops to stop them. In fact, due to no public oversight, armed cops were the first ones to do this depraved shit. Middle America soon looked like the West Bank (of the River Jordan). Stuff that happened to Khirbet Humsa in March of 2026 during the Jordan Valley attack was happening right at home in Kansas and Nebraska. Cops and other armed raiders started acting like Shem Tov Luski during the South Hebron Hills incident of August 2024. Tucson, Arizona experienced a similar rampage to the one in Huwara during February 2023. (It was pretty wild; you should look those up.)

Pretty soon, warlords rose up and had anyone that was useless to them executed. However, they didn’t know how to farm and food was getting scarce so they couldn’t let the people they killed simply “go to waste”. Also, due to the complete failure of critical infrastructure like power-grids and cell towers, administering any territory like a real warlord was nearly impossible so rival groups constantly competed over territory and struggled to track where their loyalties lay. 

There was nothing but chaos, death, disease and poverty everywhere in the streets of New York, Boston and LA, but Kensington, Philadelphia didn’t change that much; mainly because it was already like this before the jobs went. Fentanyl-addicts with rotting flesh hunched over like zombies became nigh-ubiquitous. 

Of course, all this might normally be bad if you were on the supply-side, like a bank or supermarket; because if you didn’t have any customers you’d go out of business. However, by this point you didn’t need any customers if you were already rich enough to own machines that could make anything you wanted, from a mansion to a rocket launcher and everything in between to protect your homestead from the hordes of violent, unwashed masses at the gates. 

Still, the billionaires/ oligarchs/ Epstein-class, whatever you want to call them, weren’t completely stupid. They knew the machines couldn’t self-repair and that they lacked the intelligence and work ethic to learn how to maintain them themselves, so they offered technicians, like scientists, engineers and doctors to apply for a chance to join them as “the help” in exchange for their knowledge and labor. 

However, they couldn’t just let anybody in because they might start making demands and refusing to work unless those demands were met. They could also start asking for their loved ones to join the walled billionaire oases - which was a bridge too far. So, they managed this risk by subjecting each technician to a series of aversion therapies and loyalty tests. Upon completion, each applicant was required to bring the decapitated head of their four closest loved ones as proof of loyalty. And they couldn’t just bring anyone’s head. They also had to bring matching IDs to confirm who the head belonged to and submit a written form explaining why they chose that person. Once all the background checks were done and the confirmations were in order, the technician could finally be legally admitted into a walled-oasis. 

Once inside, it was a whole new world - clean air, manicured parks and gardens, glass towers, gold lined mansions, and every comfort and luxury imaginable. It looked like a high-tech version of Asgard with flying cars, LED video-walls, high-rise infinity pools, people enjoying their free time in cafes, playing tennis, skiing, and horse-back riding. Even air travel existed for those wanting to travel from one walled oasis to another. But of course there were also human slave auctions and child prostitution, the lesser-discussed hobbies of the ruling class.

But not all of them were fully bad. Some clung to the lies they peddled about human rights, equality and so on, mainly in order to cope with their guilt and regain the ability to sleep. You know which ones - the singers and artists rather than the property moguls and tech-bros. Anyway, they wanted to help the people outside the walls but just told themselves what they told their loyalists: life isn’t fair, it’s the poors’ fault even if they inherited generational poverty and trauma, hard work for them is its own reward, and so on. 

(I know all this sounds grim but it’s a lot worse in the real world when you look at child labor in Congolese mines and slave markets in Libya - only two examples of the abject horrors forced upon the Earth by the Western hegemony. Anyway, this was just a bit of a teaser with some worldbuilding, the real story starts in Part 1. Stay tuned.)