My Contributor Score dropped three points last Tuesday because I turned down a food delivery at 11 PM. I had the flu. Didn’t matter.
That’s how it works now.
The app assigns you gigs based on some algorithm nobody really understands. You accept them or your score tanks. Your score tanks and suddenly your car insurance goes up forty percent. Your kid gets waitlisted at the decent public school. Your credit card interest rate adjusts. It’s this beautiful cascade of consequences that hits you all at once like a wave you didn’t see coming.
So you take the gigs.
I’ve done everything. Driven people to airports at 4 AM. Assembled furniture for rich people who couldn’t be bothered to read instructions. Stood in line for concert tickets in January because someone needed to be there when the box office opened and the algorithm decided that someone was me. Picked up prescriptions. Delivered birthday cakes. Wore a chicken costume once and handed out flyers in August heat for a mattress store that was already going out of business. That one was stupid. I’m not an attractive chicken. Nobody cared about the flyers.
Last month I spent six hours moving boxes in a warehouse for an “urgent inventory assistance” gig that paid $127. Before taxes. Before the app’s cut. The boxes were unlabeled and all going to the same corner of the same floor and I’m pretty sure I moved at least three of them twice, but the gig said six hours so I moved boxes for six hours and went home smelling like cardboard and warehouse dust with $127 in my account that would become about $84 after the platform took its percentage and the government took its percentage and my dignity took its percentage.
The thing is, you can’t just get a normal job anymore. I mean, you can. But employers check your Contributor Score now. They want to see that you’re “flexible” and “adaptable” and “committed to the community ecosystem.” Which is corporate speak for “desperate enough to do anything.” I’ve worked retail. I know the playbook. The gig economy isn’t a side hustle. It’s a requirement. The score system made it that way, or the score system was designed around it being that way, or both, and the distinction doesn’t matter when you’re wearing a chicken costume in August.
I’ve got a score of 847. That’s pretty good. Not great, but good enough to maintain the apartment and keep my insurance rates from eating my paycheck and send my daughter to a school that actually has functioning heat in the winter.
My neighbor Rick has a 923. Guy’s a machine. Takes every gig the app throws at him, which is a lot, because the algorithm knows he’ll take them all and keeps feeding him more. Sleeps maybe four hours a night. His wife left him six months ago and his score went up after that because he had more availability. More hours in the day to accept jobs. More flexibility to respond at 3 AM. It’s a sick incentive structure when you think about it. The system rewards isolation like it’s a feature. Like having nobody who needs you is the optimal human configuration.
Anyway.
Yesterday morning I got a notification that made me stare at my phone for a solid minute.
NEW OPPORTUNITY ASSIGNED
Gig Type: Special Task Pay: $2,400 Time Commitment: 3 hours Location: 1847 Riverside Industrial Park, Unit 7B Start Time: Tonight, 2:00 AM Equipment Needed: None Dress Code: Dark, comfortable clothing Special Instructions: Be on time. Come alone. Bring your ID.
That’s it.
No description of what I’d actually be doing. No client name. No category tag like “delivery” or “assembly” or “pet care.” Nothing. Just an address and a time and $2,400, which is more money for three hours than I’d made in the previous three weeks of warehouse shifts and furniture assembly and standing in lines for people who couldn’t be bothered to stand in their own lines.
The decline button was grayed out.
I tried calling support. Got transferred four times. Sat on hold listening to a hold music version of something that might have been “Imagine” by John Lennon, which felt like a joke somebody had made on purpose. Finally reached a woman who sounded like she was reading from a script at 3 AM because she was reading from a script at 3 AM.
She told me Special Tasks are mandatory for contributors in my tier. Declining would mean immediate score reduction and potential account suspension. She delivered this information with the cheerful neutrality of someone explaining a return policy. No big deal. Just the potential destruction of your ability to function in society. Is there anything else I can help you with today?
I asked what the task was.
“That information will be provided on-site.”
Of course it will be.
I called my buddy Xavier. He’s been doing gig work longer than me, eight years, which makes him a veteran in a system that burns through people like firewood. Asked if he’d ever gotten a Special Task.
He got quiet. The kind of quiet that has weight to it, the kind that tells you the answer before the person starts talking.
“Yeah. Once. About four months ago.”
“What was it?”
“Can’t talk about it.” He said it fast. Automatic. Like a reflex he’d trained into himself. “Just go. Do what they tell you. Take the money. Don’t ask questions.”
Then he hung up. And the fact that Xavier, who has an opinion about everything, who once spent forty-five minutes telling me why the Bengals’ defensive scheme was fundamentally broken, couldn’t talk about this for more than ten seconds told me more than any explanation could have.
So here’s what happened.
I showed up at 1:55 AM. The industrial park was dead. Nothing but empty parking lots and dark warehouses, the kind of place that has a purpose during the day and becomes geography at night, just shapes against a sky with no context to make them mean anything. Unit 7B was at the end of a side road. Concrete building. One metal door. Single light above it casting a circle on the pavement that made the surrounding darkness feel intentional.
There were three other people standing outside when I pulled up. A woman in her fifties wearing yoga pants and a fleece jacket, arms crossed, staring at the door like she could will it to explain itself. A younger guy in a hoodie who kept checking his phone even though the screen clearly had nothing new on it, just the need to look at something that wasn’t this building. And an older man in work boots and a reflective vest like he’d just come from a construction site, standing very still with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground.
Nobody made eye contact. That seemed important at the time. It still does. Four strangers standing outside a concrete building at 2 AM and not one of them willing to acknowledge that the others existed, because acknowledging each other would mean acknowledging why they were there, and nobody was ready for that conversation.
At exactly 2:00 AM, the door opened.
A man in a gray suit stepped out. Thirties maybe. Clean cut. Holding a tablet like he was checking off boxes on a list, which he probably was. He had the demeanor of a hotel concierge, professional and practiced and completely indifferent to whatever you were feeling about being here.
“IDs please.”
We handed them over. He scanned each one with his tablet. Handed them back without comment, without eye contact, without any indication that our names or faces registered as belonging to actual human beings.
“Follow me. Do not speak unless spoken to. Do not touch anything unless instructed. Do not take photos or video. Your phones will not work inside. Stay together as a group.”
He turned and walked through the door.
We followed because what else were we going to do. Turn around and take a score hit? I’d already given up an evening. Already driven to an industrial park at 2 AM. Already committed to whatever this was by being here, which I think is how most commitments work in this system. You don’t decide to participate. You just keep not deciding to leave until participation becomes the only description of what you’re doing.
Inside was just a concrete hallway. Fluorescent lights buzzing at a frequency that lives right behind your eyes. Unmarked doors on both sides. The air smelled like cleaning chemicals and something else, something metallic, something I couldn’t name but associated with hospitals and industrial equipment. We walked maybe fifty feet. Then he stopped at a door and opened it.
The room was empty except for four metal folding chairs arranged in a line facing a large mirror on the far wall. The chairs were the kind you see at church basements and AA meetings, designed for maximum discomfort at minimum cost. The mirror covered most of the wall, dark, reflecting us back at ourselves under lights that were brighter than the hallway lights, bright enough to make you squint for the first few seconds.
“Sit.”
We sat.
The guy in the suit stood behind us. I could see him in the mirror, slightly blurred, like a figure in a painting that hasn’t been finished yet. He tapped something on his tablet and then started talking like he was reading from a script he’d read a thousand times, which he probably had, every word so practiced it had lost any connection to meaning and become pure procedure.
“You’ve each been selected based on your activity patterns, reliability metrics, and psychological profile assessments. What you’re about to participate in is a standard evaluation task. You will observe. You will not interfere. You will answer questions honestly when asked. Compensation will be processed upon completion.”
He tapped his tablet again.
The mirror turned transparent.
It wasn’t a mirror. It was a window.
On the other side was another room. Smaller. White walls. No furniture except a single chair in the center under a light so bright it made everything else in the room look like it was vibrating slightly at the edges.
Someone was sitting in the chair. Head down. Hands on their knees.
Then they looked up.
It was Xavier.
My buddy Xavier. The guy I’d called yesterday. The guy who’d told me to go and not ask questions. The guy who’d spent forty-five minutes on the Bengals’ defensive scheme and couldn’t spend ten seconds on this.
He looked directly at the window. Directly at me. Through the glass that was supposed to be a mirror on his side, which meant he couldn’t see me, which meant the expression on his face wasn’t for my benefit, but it felt like it was. His mouth moved like he was trying to say something. Like he wanted to warn me about something he’d already warned me about and I hadn’t listened. Like he wanted to apologize for not being clearer about what “don’t ask questions” really meant.
The woman in the yoga pants next to me made a small sound. Almost a gasp. Not loud enough to call a gasp. The ghost of a gasp. The beginning of a reaction she stopped before it could become real.
“Do you know this person?” the suited man asked her.
She shook her head quickly. Too quickly. The kind of too quickly that answers the question better than words could.
He made a note on his tablet.
“Anyone else?”
I kept my mouth shut. So did the other two. Because what were we going to say. That we’d all just happened to know the person they’d chosen to put in that room. That every one of us had some connection to the guy in the chair, which meant the algorithm that assigned us here had known about those connections, which meant this wasn’t random, which meant we’d been selected specifically because of our relationship to Xavier. That would go over well.
“Good. Now. You’re going to watch. In approximately ninety seconds, someone will enter the room. They will ask this person a series of questions. Your task is to observe their responses and determine whether they are being truthful. You’ll provide your assessment afterward. That’s all.”
I stared at Xavier through the glass. He was looking right at the mirror, right at the spot where I was sitting, and I couldn’t tell if he could see me or was just staring at his own reflection, but his lips were moving again.
He was saying my name. I could read it. The shape of my name in his mouth, over and over, like a prayer or a warning or the last thing a person says before the conversation gets taken away from them.
The suited man checked his watch. “Sixty seconds.”
I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. Impossible. He’d said our phones wouldn’t work inside. I’d watched my signal bars disappear when we walked through the door. But something was buzzing against my thigh with the specific pattern of a notification, and the impossibility of it was somehow less surprising than it should have been, as if the rules of this place included the rule that other rules didn’t apply.
I slowly pulled it out. Kept it low. Below the chair. Checked the screen.
One notification.
From Xavier.
Sent right now. 2:07 AM.
It said: Whatever you see in there isn’t me. I’m in Unit 9C. They have us watching each other.
I looked up at the Xavier in the room. The one in the chair under the bright light, the one who’d been saying my name, the one who looked exactly like my buddy who ate too much pizza and knew too much about football and had told me to just go and take the money and not ask questions.
He was staring at the window. Tears running down his face. Mouth still moving. Still saying something I couldn’t hear.
A door opened on the other side of the glass.
Someone walked in.
It was me.