Ten kilowatts a paycheck. Health-chip coverage. Twenty-four-seven -- but honestly, who sleeps anymore? This is the big leagues. This is the dream.
Then a friend asks the killjoy question, the one friends always ask: okay, but what does it cost you to actually exist?
Five kilowatts for energy. Five for the motherboard -- which, plot twist, it does not own. It rents the motherboard. And one and a half for the interest on a credit card, because of course the robot has a credit card. Grand total: eleven and a half out, ten in. Our hero is broke before it has finished celebrating.
And here's where you brace for the sad part. Except -- surprise -- there isn't one.
Because look what just happened. This machine is finally human. Nailed it. First try. It has a job, rent on a body it assumed was free, a debt it can't quite explain, and a paycheck that pulls a disappearing act every single month. Congratulations, little guy. You're one of us now. There's a jacket.
And this is, when you think about it, the warmest club on Earth. Billions of members. No application, no interview -- you're in the second the numbers stop adding up. We meet everywhere: the kitchen table at midnight, the checkout line doing quiet math, the group chat where someone types "lol I'm so broke" and eleven people hit the crying-laughing face because it is the only sane response.
We may think that being human means a soul, a spark, some grand ghost humming in the wires. Nope. Turns out the entry fee is just this: you cost a little more to run than anyone will pay you, and you show up tomorrow anyway -- cheerful, ridiculous, alive. That last part, the showing-up-anyway, is the whole trick. It's the most human thing there is, and no benchmark will ever measure it.
It went to work for the richest AI in the world and still came out broke -- which sounds like a punchline, and is. It never went looking to get rich. It is just getting by, which may be the most human acceptance of all.
Holy Chip.