You know that artificial muscle that can lift 1000x its own weight?

Its first use will be in amazon employees who lease it.

You get hired, they install your artificial muscles, and you work in the warehouse for 20 hour days as an indentured servant.

A small fpga mounted near your heart paralyzes your artificial muscles if you attempt to harm company property/employees, or by inaction cause harm to be done to

As adoption increases, more companies begin to do this. A factory in Shenzhen is found in which every employee's heart has been replaced in order to allow 24/7 hours of continuous energetic labor.

Soon, the brain becomes the bottleneck. An employee may be able to move 200lb boxes for 36 straight hours, but even modafinil doesn't totally remove the need for sleep

Companies, starting with for-profit prisons that outsource construction crews, begin to use autonomous artificial musculature.

After a hurricane devastates Louisiana in 2021, work crews of prisoners work tirelessly even while asleep. Rumors circulate that some have chosen to be partially decerebrated.

By 2024, the majority of manual labor jobs are done by people whose bodies are not under their control, but they also *owe* their employer for the use of them.

One company in Silicon Valley realizes the potential market of millions of people trapped in leased flesh prisons while performing continuous labor, and develops direct neural linking

By 2026, wireless neural interfaces allow workers to explore (and in-app purchase homes in) vast virtual worlds while their bodies ceaselessly toil.

In 2028, a researcher calculates that the average worker walks over 40km per day, owes 12x their yearly income in leased musculature, and spends 72% of their income on lootboxes.

By 2030, the bodies of world's poorest 2 billion people are ceaselesly toiling while their minds inhabit a virtual world made of advertising and lootboxes

In 2031, 200,000 employees of a solar farm die after their artificial hearts are shut down in response to attempted unionization.

By 2032, the neural interfaces have been patched to sufficiently censor even the merest hint of rebellion.

In 2033, 1.8 million people in China are hacked, forced offline for the first time in years and made to bear witness as they march into the sea

In 2039, all but the richest 400 people on earth spend over 99% of their time in ceaseless work while their minds are elsewhere purchasing virtual items for company scrip

In 2043, a software bug in legacy timezone code instantly kills 680 million people.

By 2050, the world is unrecognizable. Heavily augmented human bodies endlessly toil in factories where no eyes or pain-sensitive nerves are needed.

Online economies rise and fall, the first bitcoin trillionaire prides himself on his luxurious virtual mansion as large as North America.

In 2087 a massive solar flare viciously rips apart the world's electrical system, within minutes killing 99% of all humans