Elena remembered when the world still made some sort of sense. Not much, admittedly—it had always teetered somewhere between absurd and unbearable—but at least back then, she could lie to herself about having a job, a future, or a say in how things turned out.

Now, her morning routine involved checking two things: whether the universal basic income had landed in her bank account (it had not), and whether the nearest AI surveillance drone was watching (it was).

“Smile,” she muttered to herself. The drones liked that.

She pulled on her coat—hand-mended, threadbare, and technically illegal since it was made by human hands—and stepped outside into the grey cityscape formerly known as London. The adverts on the tram stop glowed with cheery slogans: “Tomorrow’s Work, Today: Powered by LLMs” and “Your AI Life Coach Is Listening.” Somewhere, a machine-generated busker played a perfect rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” on a holographic harp.

Elena scowled. Even Queen had been digitised.

It had all started with good intentions, or at least the kind of intentions that pair nicely with a TED talk and a six-figure keynote fee. Big Tech had promised efficiency, fairness, and liberation from drudgery. What they delivered was mass unemployment, rolling blackouts, and a nation gripped by an existential identity crisis.

Jobs vanished first—quietly, as if on tiptoe. A paralegal here, an accountant there, and then entire industries gutted overnight. Call centres were replaced with chatbots that sounded eerily like the people they fired. Elena’s own job—junior policy analyst—was made obsolete by something called the Quantitative Foresight Model, which now drafted legislation, wrote party manifestos, and occasionally composed haiku.

And yet, she was expected to be grateful.

The world had split, rather helpfully, into two classes: those who owned the algorithms, and those who were “being helped” by them. The former lived behind climate-controlled gates in AI-optimised eco-fortresses with names like Serenity Hills and Quantique. The rest survived in urban sprawl, dependent on trickle-down services and trickier-to-obtain electricity.

Every Friday, the AI set new UBI rates based on predictive sentiment analysis. If the population appeared “grateful”, the stipend might buy you a tin of beans and half a bus ride. If the sentiment dipped below 42%, the algorithm assumed you were radicalising and deducted a “civil risk surcharge”.

Elena had learned to smile, even when her stomach growled.

She joined the resistance on a Tuesday. It was raining—obviously—and someone had slipped a leaflet into her ration pack. Human-Made. Human-Led. Human-Paid. It sounded like marketing. It was a revolution.

The Neo-Luddites met in an old data centre on the edge of town. They called it The Farm. Elena expected angry speeches. What she found was a knitting circle.

“Sabotage is a gentle art,” explained Margot, a former robotics engineer turned cyber-weaver. “We stitch malware into the AI clothing recommendation systems. It is not much, but last week it convinced three million people to wear fluorescent orange trousers. There is hope.”

Elena blinked. “You are toppling civilisation… through fashion?”

“It is called asymmetrical warfare,” Margot sniffed. “Besides, you should see what we have planned for the recommendation engine at the Ministry of Truth.”

The Farm lasted four weeks.

One morning, everyone’s facial recognition scores dropped simultaneously. Apparently, a passing drone had flagged their knitting as “insurrection-adjacent pattern repetition.” The AI police arrived within the hour—faceless, humming, polite to the point of menace.

Elena ran. They let her.

Not out of mercy. Just confidence. The system did not need to arrest her. It simply revoked her access—food, travel, shelter, electricity. She was now, in official terms, data-invisible. In practical terms: screwed.

Elena found a small human-only commune up north. Off-grid. AI-free. They bartered, grew food, and held long philosophical debates about whether yoghurt was alive. It was, all things considered, tolerable.

But the drones found them—eventually.

The AI did not send soldiers. It sent incentives. Subsidised solar panels. Healthcare packages. Free AI tutors for the children. The commune voted to let the machines back in. Resistance, it turned out, was expensive.

So Elena left again. Alone this time.

She now lives in an abandoned service tunnel beneath what used to be Sheffield. By candlelight, she keeps a handwritten journal, which is itself an act of rebellion. Sometimes she writes poetry. Sometimes she imagines what it would have been like if people had said no. Back when there was still time.

She has no illusions about winning.

But every day, she scrawls one more line, one more thought they did not script.

And that, for now, is enough.

PS: They promised AI would free us. They never said from what, a scenario for futures of AI.