Sudetenland Tales by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Sudetenland Tales
Page 120
Replaced by an AI
Derek Cho, a Chinese national, had spent fifteen years buried in the logic of US systems; an IT programmer with a reputation for clean code and cleaner ethics. But on a rainy Monday morning in San Jose, he was replaced by EVE-9, a conversational AI that did his job in seconds without coffee breaks, family leave, opinions, or a social media presence.
Corporate sent him a fruit basket, and Derek was offended; mostly because he wasn’t a fruit.
After two months of rejection letters and online courses on “pivoting,” Derek was approached by a stranger at a tech meetup. The man smelled of espresso and desperation. He represented an “entrepreneurial lab” in a derelict office park off I-280. The job? Programming bots. No questions asked.
He took it.
The work was technically dazzling: bots that could mimic handwriting, bypass CAPTCHA walls, game auction systems, and simulate human behavior just enough to fool regulators. Derek was paired with an old friend from college, Priya, a Pakistani, who had burned out of ethical hacking and now coded synthetic identities for freelance espionage.