Behind Our Irises by Tlotlo Tsamaase (Africafuturism, 2020) opens with the unemployed female narrator getting a new job—but one which later has a catch:
Every eye in our firm runs surveillance programs behind its pupil. Connected through the authenticated enterprise cloud network to the central servers of the Firm. Able to detect corporate theft, infraction, abuse of work assets and more. Much more. I knew about the eyes but I only noticed the holes in our necks, stabbed into the jugular, into the carotid artery in that unsurveilled split second when my black pupils blinked silver and then back to black as the company automatically upgraded me. In that fraction of a second, when all their restraints loosened, I tried to scream.
The story charts the narrator’s journey from unemployed to intern to nanotech-injected corporate slave—an in-your-face and nuance free anti-capitalist tale (“Each one of us a well-oiled cog of the workplace machine”, etc.) which unconvincingly over-dramatizes the dystopian aspects of corporate jobs.
* (Mediocre). 4,300 words. Story link.