Keeping It Personal - The Remainder of 2025

I'm going to use the hell out of these AI
abominations!

As a teen, Marty Jr watched his father struggle to find employment after the big box store he managed closed for good on Christmas Eve, 2008. While the family never experienced homelessness during the Great Recession, money became a lot tighter. Some of his childhood friends moved with the families in search of work, while others unofficially moved in with Marty’s family on-and-off as their home lives became increasingly unstable. Junior managed to secure scholarships and Pell grants to pay for college, and while he wanted to study linguistics, he found he had a knack for computer language. After graduation in 2015, he found work at a cybersecurity company, and soon after met Tina, the woman he wanted to marry. By 2020, Marty Junior settled into a stable family life, a sense of security which had been torn away from him as a teen. 

Then his father died. Little brother Bobby showed up drunk at the funeral. Family drama ensued. Jillian had choice words for both brothers. Their mother had a nervous breakdown. It was a mess, but at least Marty had his job and wife. With a baby, Trey, on the way, Marty moved his mother into the granny shack behind their Ann Arbor home, and put his nose to the old grindstone. By 2025, Marty is 33, now a father of two, and a member of an Elks lodge. A true pillar of the community. 

The cybersecurity firm which Marty works for recently received a fat contract from a certain government defense contractor. They’ve been tasked with monitoring social media chatter for anti-government sentiments across Michigan and northern Indiana. While others at the firm express displeasure at the intrusive nature of this surveillance, Marty loses no sleep over it. When the firm’s AI software picks up on a ‘radical’ group chat involving immigrants’ rights activists seeking to warn communities of impending ICE raids, Marty dutifully hands that information off to law enforcement. In his mind, these groups will interfere with public safety, causing the kind of chaos associated with his little brother. As America continues to destabilize and 2025 draws to a close, Marty silently promises himself he will not let the floud winds battering the nation, to disrupt his home life.

Jillian doesn’t remember much before the age of five, but remembers with terrifying clarity her kindergarten teacher breaking down as a passenger jet crashed into a tall building on TV. After that, childhood became little more than a series of crises and threat indicators. Adults transformed from gentle protectors to vengeful gods, always shouting and never taking time to explain anything. By the time Jillian enters her tween years, the Great Recession gutted those gods, reducing them to pale husks of themselves. 

Jillian always with the good hair. In every timeline

The sense that her family life was dying combined with the teenage urge to leave, to explore. Jillian spent hours wandering the mordibund mall at the edge of town. running her hands along metal railings, inhaling the stale air in search of a taste of the lost innocence of what must have been a simple, or at least more optimistic time. In this temple to American consumerism, she listened to the hushed conversations of older kids about the before times. How beautiful the 90s must have been.

In high school, Jillian made the mistake of doing well on standardized tests. Offer letters showed up, enticing her to apply to this or that university. Her mother’s trembling hands gripped hers, imploring her to make something of herself. With her father’s health failing, Jillian heard in her mother’s desperate voice a clarion call; “This world is ill, and you must tend to it.”

Earning a pre-med bachelors only took Jillian three years, but she had a full scholarship, so she took a fourth year to finish a dual degree in French language and literature. But as the acceptance letters from medical schools flooded in, with them came cost estimates, and lighter offers of financial aid. Jillian began to dread those letters, until one arrived from a medical school in Quebec. Nervously, Jenny took an entrance exam in French, which she barely passed. Two years into med school, her father died. The funeral became, in her mind, a liberating event, for nothing tethered her to Michigan any more. She considered staying in Canada. 

But life comes at you fast, and by 2025, Jenny found herself wrapping up residency and opening a non-profit clinic in a poor corner of Ohio with her husband. Chris had a knack for business, and figured he would be able to make the dire economics of running a doctor’s office work. The newlyweds hired a few friends to help run the place and put out their shingle. While the clinic stayed (barely) in the black, their creditors informed Jillian the clinic’s debt had been sold to a private equity firm. The new bosses were not the same as the old ones, and soon demanded cost-cutting measures and fatter profit margins. They told Jillian that marginalized communities don’t turn a profit, and that her clinic needed to turn away Medicaid patients, as many were set to lose their benefits in the near future. The clinic New Years Eve party was a somber affair. 

Younger brother Bobby starts 2025 as he does every new year since his father’s death; young, dumb, drunk and in love. Or at least in some approximation of it. The lessons he took from his father’s funeral five years earlier have only been reinforced over the years; drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die. At least in adulthood, Bobby found a stability and joy which eluded him as a child.

That is a man's beard. No soi bois at the train yard!

The youngest of Marty’s kids, Bobby barely remembers his as a happy, healthy man. After the big box store closed, his father spent the next twelve years working himself to death. Quite literally. The loss of health insurance and the lackluster coverage available through Bobby’s mother’s employer, left him with untreated diabetes barely treated. And working. Always covering shifts at the burger joint he co-owned with an old friend. Bobby would pretend to be asleep when his dad would finally get home, or when he would leave early in the morning. After high school graduation, Bobby stayed at home, working odd jobs and temp jobs and jobs neighbors didn’t want to do. In the back of his mind, he suspected that if he left his mother alone for any length of time, she might disappear too. Then Covid hit, and he stopped pretending. Indeed, he rarely slept. The realization he’d squandered what little time his father had to give him kept him up at night. 

When his older brother sold the house to cover their father’s medical bills, Bobby moved in with a pair of high school buddies working in Detroit. Bobby sees the same set of friends, or interacts with them through online avatars. And he manages his love life through an online dating app. Everything in his life resides on his phone, but an event in early 2025 plants more than a seed of doubt in his head.

Marty Junior visited him in Detroit, and left a USB with Bobby. On it, Junior had catalogued and categorized the entirety of Bobby’s online presence for the past year. And around the thumb drive, he’d wrapped a note, asking Bobby if dad would have expected more from his favorite son.

The incident was almost enough for Bobby to pick up the phone and actually call his older brother. To call him out. But before he can work up the courage, as he scrolls through the online footprint of his life, an IP address catches his eye. Bobby begins digging, and discovers that his brother’s data collection routed through a server farm in Utah, and that the only data storage facility anywhere nearby, is operated by the NSA. Bobby always knew his brother worked in cybersecurity, but this revelation starts him down a rabbithole, kindling in him a sense of paranoia he didn’t know he had. 

Far to the south, in Memphis, Tennessee, Jenny’s granddaughter Allison starts 2025 in a much different place. Not just geographically, but much lower down the class structure from even perpetually-feels-broke Bobby. At 17, Allison spends this year twiddling her thumbs, biding her time until graduation in May. But after graduation, she has no prospects, no hope, no vision for any kind of future for herself beyond staring at the screen of a smart phone until she dies. Her mother Ruby lords the phone bill over her, demanding good grades and quiet from her daughter whenever she’s home. Allison cannot think of it as home, as the landlord vacuums up whatever spare money the family can scrape together. Grandma Jenny jokes that the man must live between their couch cushions, because he always seems to know when the three have any extra money in their pockets. 

"Generic white girl graduates generic high school"
AI is the future, man! I'm telling ya!

Allison graduates with decent grades, and toys with the idea of attending community college, but tuition keeps rising, and the idea of going into debt to pay for an education seems darkly funny to her. When her two friends ask why she doesn’t enroll too, Allison jokes that if she’d had to pay for the first twelve years of school, she’d be suing the shit out of the school district to get her money back. Then the trio get drawn back into endless scrolling.

On the longest day of the year, something snaps inside the young woman. The AC hasn’t worked at their apartment in weeks, and Allison hasn’t felt good all summer, and at once realizes why. Every summer, Grandma Jenny used to take her to a pool at least once. Allison hasn’t gotten to glide through the water in five years, and she’s sick of feeling hot and sweaty every day. So she dares her friends to follow her into the fountain at the park. The other two girls refuse, so to prove nothing bad will happen, Allison tosses her little backpack at them and jumps in. She gets in ten minutes of splashing around before a cop pulls her out of the lukewarm water.

After a perfunctory dressing down, the cop informs her that he’s not going to ticket her for being a dumbass. He says it in a way that implies Allison should be grateful, but instead it pisses her off, and she starts shouting insults at the man. Before he can decide if he’s going to arrest her after all, her friends drag Allison home, all the while chastising her for acting like a little girl. When she gets home and changes, Allison discovers that her phone was still in her back pocket for the swim, not in her backpack as she thought.

With no money to replace it, Allison realizes she will have to find something to do with her time, so she walks down the street and takes a job as a waitress at a fried-chicken restaurant. As the months go by, she saves up enough money to buy a new phone, but when faced with the price tag she balks. Something deeper in her changed since that day in the fountain. The lack of a smart phone gave her something she didn’t know she’d lacked - free time. When she walks to work, she can think instead of streaming a podcast. When she’s at home, she can read a magazine or, heaven forbid, crack open one of Grandma Jenny’s harlequin romance novels. Most of all, Jenny finds herself actually talking to people: people at the bus stop, customers at work, her friends, even, most embarrassingly, her own family. As 2025 draws to a close, Allison plans to take a road trip with her friends Dora and Tasha, down to New Orleans for New Year’s Eve. But the day after Christmas, she shows up at Dora’s house to find the half of the family missing. Dora and her two younger siblings are on their own, made orphans by zealous ICE agents. Allison and Tasha cancel their plans and help their friend try to locate her parents.