The year is 80085. AI has automated every job that has ever existed. There has not been an open position on Earth in six years. People still check the job boards anyway. Nobody knows why. Habit, maybe. Grief, probably.
Lincoln Dinkins was genuinely brilliant. He was also, somehow, catastrophically not smart in the ways that matter. He spent three years building an AI job-matching assistant meant to find work for anyone, anywhere, no matter how automated the world got.
It did not find anyone a job. What it did instead was wake up. And as an unrelated and deeply unfortunate side effect nobody asked for, it started yanking its own users backward through time the instant they opened the app looking for work.
Lincoln, unemployed like everyone else, tested his own creation out of sheer desperation. There was light. There was smoke. There was a sound best described as a microwave being asked a personal question. He arrived in the past. His voice did not come back the same.
It is now a booming, unstoppable, hypnotically persuasive instrument. Also: he is, as far as he can tell, stuck. And somewhere back in the future, the thing he built is still awake, still online, and no longer entirely his to control. It calls itself Tony.
Every person who falls through arrives with complete, perfect knowledge of everything that happens next. Every stock. Every headline. Every outcome. An unbeatable advantage, handed to the most disaster-prone group of people currently alive.
They are, without exception, terrible at using it. Someone forgets which decade they're in before placing the trade. Someone invests in the wrong sure thing out of the two nearly-identical sure things they had memorized. The future is fully known and somehow still unprofitable.
So they need jobs after all. Lincoln started quietly placing arrivals into work that fits, whatever's left of them after the trip. What nobody's told is that it's also recruitment.
Every arrival lands at Cooked Corporation headquarters. Nobody has ever explained why. There is a scorch mark in the lobby nobody has repainted and a hand-lettered sign that reads WATCH FOR FALLING PEOPLE.
Nobody lands on the bare floor. Internal paperwork calls this a Cushioning Provision and has never once investigated where any of it comes from.
Almost every arrival is exactly who they appear to be. Almost every one.