Excerpt:
In “Forty-Seven Vacant Floors of Ur,” (author: T.K. Rex and illustrator:  Stefan Große Halbuer) Morgan Bernd is the third-to-last employed user experience writer in Silicon Valley — kept on just long enough to train the AI that will replace him. On his last day, he makes a decision that is completely human…

In the empty 47th floor of the downtown San Francisco headquarters of the social media company Ur, gazing down upon the sea of tents that crowded Sitlintac Park, stood the third-to-last employed user experience writer in all of Greater Silicon Valley.

Morgan Bernd didn’t know he was the third-to-last, but figured it was something around that since everyone else he knew had been laid off years prior and Ur had only kept him on to train the AI on the finer nuances of ensuring Ur users felt a sense of agency as they navigated the latest update to the legacy mobile platform.

He was like the mobile platform — useful only for the profits it brought in from retiring millennials, long isolated from the younger generation of novelty-obsessed Urverse vibe coders who saw it only as an embarrassing necessity in the age of personal drones — and he knew his time was near. News of the upcoming layoffs had already leaked to the press, as it always did, and by the end of the week he would no doubt join the millions of former creative professionals who now lived on California Basic Income.

His city had been a hundred different cities since he’d moved into his first apartment at Ellis and Jones, the summer between high school and art school. Ramen shops came and went like the fog, encampments sprouted on the sidewalks like delicate mushrooms in the first week of fall rain. Skyscrapers rose like the wild fennel in the empty lots, fenced high to make sure no one slept in them. And so Bernd had walked, from his home office in Mid-Market, all the way to the skyscraper he had never actually worked in, past the single desk attendant and her hovering drone, to get one last glimpse of this San Francisco, from the 47th floor.

There was no one up there. No one leaning against the rail of the open-air deck to gaze out at the Bay Bridge with a joint between meetings. No one at their desk with headphones bashing out last-minute code, no one twirling their hair and planning drinks with No One From Marketing, and no one biting their lip as they shuffled to the bathroom to cry.

He’d only worked for Ur six — no, seven — years, and there had been people in the office for big meetings, planning sprints, and crunches, but he’d heard stories of the pre-remote days, imagined that top floor when it was new, bustling with blandly-enthusiastic naivete, the old famous CEO who was three days younger than him strutting around in a hoodie, giving an awkward thumbs up to the old famous COO in her tailored navy suit as she made an important presentation to an important investor or some shit.

He’d never met them. He’d never wanted to.

He’d always — and only — wanted to make the lives of users just a little easier.

He pressed his hand against the wall of cool glass that stretched between his aging body and the crowded skyline. How many towers had stood this empty this long?

Far below his toes, in the long, floating quasi-rectangle of Sitlintac Park, were a thousand brightly-colored tents, and underneath the park, around the edges of the transit center, were a thousand more, and the edges of that blurred with the line for the East Cut Refugee Resource Center.

This was one of the better San Franciscos. Perhaps the best since the Spanish got here. 

In this San Francisco, the haze that lounged across the hills was from prescribed burns. The farmers markets sold less almonds, more nopales. The new seawall was still under construction, but at least it was under construction, and the industrial shorelines of the East Bay were in carefully managed retreat. In this San Francisco, the revolution, if not televised, had been livestreamed in a series of melodramatic public comment sessions on the city government website. Most of Bernd’s coworkers were now as ignorant about it as he had been about the assassinations of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone when he first moved here for art school.

And in this San Francisco, the people who had been displaced by the Colorado River Moratorium and the Gulf Coast Inundation and the Appalachian Fires and the extremists were all welcome — as strangers have always been in San Francisco, even when the government claimed otherwise — but now with intentionality and exhausted kindness and, eventually, a meal card and a tent. Homes were no easier to come by, but at least they weren’t arresting people for not having one anymore.

And the skyscraper headquarters of the Ur corporation — named out of cynical hubris — stood yet above it all, smirking and hollow and blue…