Deep Tech

From a young age, I was captivated by mathematics. Before the age of three, I had played through the entire Grand Theft Auto game series and even won my first science award for creating a talking orange. I started college at sixteen, graduated summa cum laude at eighteen, and landed my first job in Deep Tech by nineteen.

It was at this job that I met my girlfriend, E=mc², a bold, eccentric, 30-year-old abstract dancer. She often called me a “deep” person and had a knack for convincing me to pay for our dinners. She warned me that to win her heart, I would have to win over her poodle, Oscar. So, naturally, I started covering his dinner, too.

Every morning, I would head to our skyscraper office to work on a new silicone circuit that Deep Tech was producing. “More quantum!” used to whisper in my ear Hristo while I worked. Hristo was the Bulgarian violinist who managed my team. I told him that his whispers gave me the shivers, so he started shouting it instead.

Several Nations were racing to push their technology deeper, but we were digging a lot faster than anyone else was. The president delivered a speech, declaring that those who “go deep” would win the future. That made us work much harder in the present.

Me, E=mc², and her poodle moved into a cozy one-bedroom apartment, where we explored transcendental tantric philosophy in the evenings. Things began to get deep.

Then one day, it happened: Carlos, the CEO, announced that our circuit had achieved the ultimate quantum breakthrough. The entire office was ecstatic—people jumped, cheered, and celebrated as if we had just saved the world. Carlos wrapped up his announcement: “And on a brighter note, you can all go home now. The circuit can do all your jobs.”

As Hristo packed up his violin, on his way out, he tried to console me, saying I would be fine because I was young and there were plenty of jobs out there. Then he added that I could not call him Hristo anymore because he was going to start identifying as an office chair.

When I got home and told E=mc² that I was fired, she admitted she had been seeing her poodle for some time, and they had decided to get married. When I asked why she chose him over me, she replied, “Because he makes me laugh.”

With the circuit handling every job ever conceived, I could not find work. But I did manage to find a cozy spot back at my parents’ place, sharing a small space with my old friend, the talking orange. The space is tight, but our conversations are really deep.