Where Do I See Myself in 10 Years?

I sit down in front of the desk with a nervous jitter. The man behind the desk smiles at me with a friendly, rehearsed smile, ignoring my obvious anxiety.

He wants to get right into it after greetings are exchanged. First, the usual questions. I brace for it, I feel it coming.

"Where do you see yourself in 10 years, ideally?"

I detect that he's an honest man. I could give him the usual spiel. He'd see right through it. I decide to lay out the truth, and clear my throat before speaking in my most confident demeanor:

A forlorn restlessness compels me through through the chemical smog which fills my lungs with sludge and clings to every inch of my skin, acrid grease and silt, condemning my perception to unbearable filthiness, the ashes and oils of 7 billion dead souls aerosolized in moments, containing me like an extension of my skin.

A few days ago I was going to use my last remaining .22 round on myself. I spent too long working out the perfect angle and it got dark, so I went to sleep instead. The next morning I opened my eyes and I saw a lone flower atop a hill to the north, some nameless orange wild thing, standing up and reaching for the sun in defiance. I have thought of that flower every waking second of consciousness since then, savoring the memory, stretching it out, straining out all of the goodness and relief found in it, pushing myself through carcinogenic windstorms and fields of death with the image of those fiery petals like old sunsets in my mind's eye, all previous ego and identity dissolved in favor of the small orange flower, the whole of me, my only defense against the void which threatened to devour my sanity and erase all meaningful separation between me and the lifeless bones crackling beneath my feet.

I keep walking and walking and feasting on my mind's eye and the debris gives way to sullen plains, a subtle shade of difference from the colorless skies, perfectly flat and featureless, a non-place. After several days of walking the orange in my inner vision swirls before me and out of me into hallucinatory patterns, waves of forgotten color, my brain filling in the utter desaturation with memories which now seemed more real than than they ever did before. Sometimes I stumble and it all falls apart and I see only gray again and I curse myself for interrupting the visions, self hatred rising and falling in repeat with jubilation, the first feelings in months, desperately welcomed like the flower.

And then I fall to my feet and curl up and feel the warmth leave my body and I am beset by fantastic recondite visions, terrible geometry of ungraspable concept, leviathan metallic automata which exist in the space once occupied by Gaia, this is the fate of the industrial chrysanthemum, the death and rebirth of humanity. I weep in grief, in awe, in contemplation of this beauty at once utterly alien and intimately known, the chain from Eukaryote to Beast to Man to Machine unbroken and indivisible, these are my descendents. The finite limitations of my own perception batter me, acidic, enraging, to no possible relief. What are we to become? I will never know. They expand, and expand, and expand even more, entropy itself aghast at such foul and divine mathematics as these, the universe afire with the light of conscious intention, unstoppable consumption.

And then I die and it all moves on without me.

...

I didn't get the job.