I was out on a shift, doing the gig economy hustle in the cul-de-sacs. The usual. It’s like 11 PM and I’m dropping off a lukewarm pad thai to some house with the perfectly manicured lawn and those LED floodlights that make everything look sort of hyper-real. I’m sitting in my Corolla, which is basically a mobile trash can at this point, and my phone just... it bricks. The screen goes black. Total hardware failure or maybe a critical software glitch. I’m staring at the reflection of my own face in the dead glass and suddenly the geography of the ZIP code I’ve lived in for six years just completely evaporates from my neocortex. I’m approximately three miles from my own driveway, but I realized I have no internal spatial awareness of how to exit this specific subdivision without the blue line. I experienced what I’d categorize as a localized autonomic surge. My heart rate accelerated to maybe 110 bpm and I started sweating through my shirt, which is a kind of pathetic physiological response to a minor technological inconvenience. I looked out the windshield and all these colonial-style houses started looking identical, like a glitch in the simulation. I know the names of the streets—Aspen, Birch, Cedar—but they don’t connect to anything in my brain. They’re just labels without a map. I felt this intense cognitive dissonance because I could literally see the water tower that’s visible from my back porch, but the actual pathing felt inaccessible. I’m basically a biological peripheral for a Silicon Valley algorithm at this point, and without the uplink, my operating system is just... null. I sat there for maybe ten minutes just breathing. A neighbor came out to walk their goldendoodle—everything is so performative here, even the late-night dog walks—and they looked at me with this sort of suspicious, diagnostic gaze. I’m supposed to belong here. I pay the same property taxes, I worry about the same lawn grubs, but I felt like an invasive species that forgot how to camouflage. I tried to remember if you turn left at the Starbucks or the CVS, but the landmarks have all merged into a singular blur of suburban retail aesthetic. It’s a total atrophy of the basic human instinct for orientation. I’ve offloaded my entire sense of place to a lithium-ion battery and now the battery is dead.