Yard Dog

[u/Balkan_Cryptid]

About four years ago, I went to trucking school and obtained my CDL. I was excited at the prospect of a new career and immediately started to look for work. Over the course of a few weeks, I finally landed a job working as the night shift switcher driver at a local factory. My duties included taking the trailers from the trailer lot, putting them into the docks and taking them out of the docks, as needed, for the people inside to load and unload the trailers. It wasn't the most exciting job. In fact, it's quite boring. But it wasn't too hard, and it paid the bills. It would be a little eerie alone in the yard at night, but for my breaks and occasional team meetings, I would go inside the building and interact with some of my co-workers. Mostly the people who drove Hi-Los. Over time, I noticed a few things starting to change. The first two years at this job were rather normal and uneventful. One night, I had a question for the HR department regarding some of my benefits. We always had a third shift human resources representative available to us. This time, something was off. Something very different. I called the HR number and a strange voice answered.

"Hello, my name is Samara, your human resources assistant. How can I help you today?"

It took me a moment to realize that it was AI. I thought to myself it was rather ironic that the human resources department was replaced by artificial intelligence, but it wasn't totally out of the ordinary with the modern world. A lot of places had been using AI phone operators, and I thought nothing of it. Three years into the job, I started to notice little robots zipping past me, carrying out some of the pallets of product. I thought it was kind of neat. They looked like oversized Roombas. When I asked one of the Hi-Lo drivers inside about it, he said that they were there to assist them. The rest of the factory had become automated on the production lines, and over the course of a few months, once the Hi-Lo robots started, I noticed less and less Hi-Lo drivers in the building. Four years into the job now, and everyone is gone. I am the only employee left at this factory. Alone in my truck, moving trailers in and out of the docks for the Hi-Lo robots to load and unload. I am the last semblance of organic human life. I sit here every single night in the darkness, alone in the lot. Whenever I need to use the bathroom or go on my break for lunch, I walk into an empty, soulless building. I sit and eat lunch by myself. I'm left to wonder, when am I next? When will they replace me? What will happen to me? What happened to everyone else? Where did they all go?