The eating takes me back. Back to the time before my billionaire, to the dark days when I’d given up on working, or even looking for work. Back then I’d buy a family pack of white bread and polish the whole thing off by noon. I’d pick up a sack of Yukon Golds and boil them down to a dish most people would call “mashed potatoes,” but let’s be real, the way I made it, it was mostly cream cheese. I would nestle into my reading chair with a pot of cream cheese potatoes, along with a fat science-fiction novel, and that was my Saturday night. I’d look out the window and see delivery drones and self-driving shopping carts loaded with consumer electronics, and I’d wonder how anyone could afford anything anymore. I certainly couldn’t. I was paying for food with debt. Bread, potatoes, plus the odd rotisserie chicken, the kind that comes in a steamy plastic clamshell with paper handles and smells so good you can’t resist. I’d tote my clamshell to the checkout line and wait for the robot clerk to scan my face. It was sort of fun watching the AIs bid in real time to acquire my purchase. Interest rates on the checkout screen would spin like reels on a slot machine—40, 30, sometimes as little as 25 percent. Meanwhile, other AIs bid on options for the interest payments. Some went long, some went short, and I was left to skate by on ever thinning ice. I knew a reckoning would come one day, but in the near term I had my chicken. And that, I figured, was all the happiness I could afford.