I wake up in my bed and reach for my companion—the latest iPhone, charging beside me. With a single tap on the screen, I open the blinds, with another, I turn on the espresso machine, and with a third, I review the footage from my Ring camera. Once again, no criminal has tried to enter my fortress. Phew! You can never be too safe though, which is why my house is encircled by a state-of-the-art electric fence, and why I check the Nextdoor and Citizen apps religiously every morning. Besides the chill that creeps down my spine every fifteen minutes when I get a notification, I feel safer and more reassured than ever.

I get out of bed and start another optimized day. Next to my wall of self-help books, such as “How to Maximize Happiness,” sit my self-watering plants, all thriving without any effort on my part. In my former life, I’d waste anywhere between five to ten minutes a day pruning leaves and judging the wetness of soil, but now I use that time to get ahead on my next task—consuming every piece of news as quickly as possible.

Before I dive in, I take a second to bask in the heavenly silence. Over the past few years, all of the neighbors who threw parties and cookouts, with kids screaming and running around, grilled-meat smoke billowing, and music blasting late into the afternoon, have slowly shuffled out the area. Gone are the days of making awkward eye contact after having called the authorities on them to report excessive noise or a car parked half an inch too close to my driveway. Life has become so much more civil. Now the neighbor to the left of me lives abroad and vacations here once a summer, and the neighbor on my right . . . well, I’ve never actually seen them but surely someone has to be living there to take the Amazon packages inside.

I head to my living room and ask Alexa to summarize the news. Everything’s dismal for a lot of people but thankfully that doesn’t affect me. Next, I hop on my Peloton, draft my work e-mails for the day in ChatGPT, add items to my Instacart grocery order (no-contact delivery, of course), and cue up a true-crime documentary. But fifteen minutes in, I begin to have second thoughts about entrusting a stranger with my grocery shopping. What if they poison my food? Or worse, grab the non-organic version of my vegetables? Alas, I must go myself. No one in this world can be trusted.

I buckle into my self-driving car—armored with thick, cold-rolled steel body panels—and let it take me to the store. Thankfully, the same corporation that owns my car also owns this store and so it automatically charges me for everything in my cart and I don’t have to wait in line and interact with a cashier. So seamless.

During the drive, I instruct my A.I. assistant to send custom responses to all my friends’ and family members’ text messages. Some of them text back right away with laughing emojis. I guess my A.I. has learned to emulate my sense of humor. I smile, knowing how much time I must have saved today, unlike my ancestors who had to engage in the hours-long, monotonous task of corresponding with their loved ones. I look out the window of my impenetrable vehicle at people waiting at bus stops and eating in cafés next to potentially devious strangers. I’m grateful to sit back in my climate-controlled car, but I feel a little sorry for them and also for all the drivers around me who have to step on the gas and brake pedals in order to reach their destinations.

Back at my front gate, I scan my fingerprints and type in the code for my two-step verification. But, for the first time, it doesn’t work. My stomach drops. From the corner of my eye I see a shadow move behind me. My heart races. Maybe it’s just a tree branch. Or maybe it’s a robber? A serial killer? A homeless person? An illegal? Some stranger out to get me, like they all are? This is how all true-crime documentaries start. Ninety per cent of people are killed in front of their own homes . . . I think—I don’t know if that’s the right statistic. It’s from the summary of a book I listened to at 2x speed. I begin jiggling the handle and the shadow moves again. I type in the code more slowly. This time it flashes green! Breathing fast, I burst through the gate and run at full speed across my lawn to the safety of my stainless-steel appliances.

Before I can press the button on my air fryer to make salmon, my phone buzzes with an alert. It’s from my neighbor, and it reads: “WARNING! A stranger broke in next door. I called the police.”

Wow. All in less than a minute. The future is now. ♦