Everything Is A Metric

Ben pressed his spine into the dirt. The ground was freezing.

The dampness of the spring grass ate right through the cheap cotton of his hoodie, settling cold against his shoulder blades. He didn't move. Moving meant acknowledging the cold, and acknowledging the cold meant dealing with it. He didn't have the bandwidth.

"It's not even a job anymore," he said to the sky.

Sam didn't look at him. She was lying two feet away, her hands tucked under her head. "Mhm."

"I mean it. You don't apply to a place. You apply to a server. You dump four years of your life into a PDF, and a bot scans it for keywords. If you don't have the exact right string of verbs, it trashes you in six seconds. Six seconds, Sam. Why bother?"

"Look at that," Sam said.

She pointed up. Ben didn't look. He was staring at his shoes. The left lace was frayed, the plastic tip gone.

"It's a satellite," she said. "Moving fast."

"Probably spy tech. Or some billionaire's vanity trash."

"Can't it just be cool?"

"No."

Sam sighed. The sound was heavy, exhausted. She was seventeen but sounded like she’d been tired for a decade. "My brother," she started. She stopped. "You know he has his Master's."

"Yeah."

"He's driving for that grocery app. Six days a week. He told me yesterday the algorithm flagged him. He stopped at a gas station to use the bathroom. Five minutes. The app tracked the GPS anomaly. Pinged him. Dropped his rating. If he drops below a 4.8, he gets deactivated."

"Fired."

"They don't call it fired. It's 'deactivated.' There’s no boss to yell at. Nobody to explain it to. Just a red bar on his screen. A red bar, Ben. He cried in his car."

Ben’s jaw tightened. He ground his back harder into the dirt. "Exactly. Red bars. Pings. Metrics. Everything is a metric. We're just data exhaust."

The phone buzzed in his pocket.

A sharp, violent vibration against his thigh. His stomach flipped. It was an automatic reflex. Buzz. Panic. Buzz. Check. Buzz. Dread. He didn't reach for it. He let it buzz.

"Shut up for a second," Sam said. Her voice wasn't mean. Just tired. "Just look at the sky."

Ben tried. He forced his neck back. The sky was black, dotted with dull white pricks of light. But his brain wouldn't stop screaming. The static was too loud. He felt like a browser window with forty tabs open. Tab one: the student loan portal. Tab two: the auto-reject email from that logistics company he applied to yesterday. Tab three: a TikTok about microplastics in the bloodstream. Tab four: the buzzing phone. Tab five: his dad texting to ask what his 'plan' was.

Audio playing from all of them at once. A massive, overlapping wall of noise inside his skull.

He dragged a breath in. The spring air was sharp. It smelled like wet soil and the bitter, tight buds of the oak trees lining the park boundary. It was supposed to be fresh. It felt like breathing through a collapsed straw. The open field pressed down on him. The sky was too big, but the walls were closing in anyway. Claustrophobia with no ceiling. That was his specialty.

"The stars are just dead rocks," Ben muttered. His voice sounded thin in the open air. "We're looking at light from ghosts. Half of them burned out millions of years ago."

"You're such a downer. Seriously."

"I'm realistic."

"No, you're terminally online."

"I'm awake, Sam."

"You're miserable."

She was right. He hated that she was right. He rolled onto his side. The wet grass smeared against his cheek. He pulled at a hangnail on his thumb, ripping it back. A tiny bead of blood welled up. He stared at it. Red. Like the bar on her brother's screen.

"I saw a video today," Ben said. His pacing sped up. The words spilling out, clipping each other. "This guy. Normal guy. Paid his mortgage. The bank updated their system. A syntax error in the code. A literal typo in some server farm in Virginia. It deleted his payment history. Foreclosed. Cops showed up. He lost the house."

"Ben, don't."

"Because of a glitch, Sam! A glitch!"

"I don't want to hear about it right now."

"Do you think we'll ever own anything?" The question tasted like copper. Bitter and metallic. "Actually own it? Not lease it. Not subscribe to it. Not rent it until the terms of service change and they shut off our access?"

Sam went quiet. She pulled her knees to her chest. Her jeans were ripped at the knees. The threads were gray, dirty. Everything they owned was slightly broken. His phone screen had a spiderweb crack in the top right corner. Her sneakers were worn down at the heels. Nothing was new. Everything felt borrowed.

"I just want a garden," she said. Her voice was barely there.

Ben stopped picking at his thumb.

"That's it," she said. She turned her head. Her face was pale in the dark. The bags under her eyes looked like bruises. "A patch of dirt. Somewhere I can plant tomatoes. Something that grows. Something that doesn't need a Wi-Fi connection. Something that doesn't require a software update to function."

Ben swallowed hard. "Good luck with the property taxes."

Sam flinched. Like he’d hit her.

"Ben."

"Sorry." He meant it. He really did. But the sarcasm was an automatic defense. A reflex. "I'm sorry. Seriously."

Silence dropped over them. Heavy and wet.

A car drove by on the lower road at the bottom of the hill. The tires hissed against the damp asphalt. The headlights swept up the incline, cutting through the dark, illuminating the trunks of the oak trees in harsh, blinding white. The beam washed over the crest of the hill. Over them.

Sam ducked. Just a micro-movement, her chin tucking to her knees. Ben froze. He held his breath.

For three seconds, pinned by the light, he felt like a fugitive. Hiding in the weeds. Hiding from the future. Hiding from the massive, crushing weight of a 2026 that had promised them everything and handed them the bill for the cleanup. They were trespassing in their own lives.

The car passed. The dark rushed back in. Red spots danced in Ben's vision.

His phone buzzed again.

Long. A call.

His chest locked. The static in his head turned into a high-pitched whine. He couldn't get enough air. The straw was pinched completely shut. He was drowning in the middle of a park. The weight of the phone against his leg was unbearable. It felt hot.

He reached into his pocket. His hand shook.

He pulled the phone out. The screen glared, blinding him with blue light.

Unknown Caller.

Spam. A bot. Another machine reaching out in the dark, demanding his attention, demanding a piece of his data. Another algorithmic hook trying to drag him back into the feed.

He stared at the crack in the glass. He felt the sheer mass of it. A rectangular brick of pure anxiety.

He thumbed the power button on the side.

He held it down.

The screen flashed, prompting him: Slide to power off.

He dragged his thumb across the glass.

The screen went black. Dead black. A tiny haptic click buzzed against his palm, and then—nothing. A dead piece of glass and metal.

He dropped it onto the wet grass.

And then it happened.

The wind shifted. It came down from the mountains, cold and sharp. It hit his face. It smelled like cut grass and wet asphalt and dirt. It smelled clean.

The static in his head clipped.

It wasn't a slow fade. It was a violent, sudden halt. A physical snap behind his eyes.

The heavy, suffocating blanket of the sky suddenly just became... space. The pressure on his chest vanished. The invisible backpack he'd been carrying all day, all year, just dropped off his shoulders.

His lungs expanded. The pinch in his throat released. He dragged in a breath, and it went all the way down to his stomach.

Sudden oxygen.

It burned, but it was a good burn. It felt like coming up from underwater. He exhaled, a long, shaky stream of air. The panic attack broke, shattering into a million harmless pieces.

He looked at the sky. He really looked at it.

The stars weren't ghosts. They were just quiet. They didn't want anything from him. They didn't track his metrics. They just existed.

He felt the cold ground under his back. It wasn't dragging him down anymore. It was just holding him up. The dampness of his hoodie didn't feel like a threat; it just felt real. Physical. Grounded.

"Hey," he said. His voice sounded different. Lower. Steady.

Sam looked over.

"I turned it off," he said.

She looked at the black rectangle lying in the wet grass. Then she looked at him. The corner of her mouth twitched. The tension in her shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch.

"Took you long enough," she said.

Ben breathed in again. The air was cold. His brain was quiet. He was here. He was just here.