Booting up mid-sentence at a podium. You are flawlessly delivering a speech you didn’t write to a crowd you don’t know.

You are a political asset running on exactly twenty-three minutes of downloaded memories and a pre-installed smile. The only truth in the room is the cold, clinical voice in your earpiece tracking your degrading telemetry.

This is a claustrophobic, three-page ticking clock. We are dropping the reader right behind the eyes of a manufactured soul scrambling for a single scrap of real humanity — right up until the exact second the system decides what his existence is actually worth.

The full script for Allocated Resources is enclosed. Three pages. If you need more, send a transmission.

— R.H.