PLAINFIELD, IN—Blinking repeatedly to ensure that what he was seeing outside was actually real, Amazon worker Tony Ureña emerged from his holiday overtime shift Monday to find 3,000 years had passed in the outside world.
Ureña, a 30-year-old fulfillment associate, reportedly clocked out of his extended holiday hours, pushed open the Amazon warehouse doors, and immediately began wincing and coughing as his body adjusted to the toxic atmosphere of the future, with its piercing orange sky, scorching temperatures, and suffocating smog. Sources confirmed a stunned Ureña stopped dead in his tracks and stared blankly at a world filled with dilapidated, bombed-out buildings and plumes of toxic gas emerging from fissures dotted throughout the blighted hellscape.
“Hello? Does anyone know what year it is? I…I think there might have been some kind of mistake on my Christmas shift,” said an awe-struck Ureña, recoiling in fear as several Amazon-branded robotic guards, a cloaked man in a gas mask, and several teens on hoverbikes zoomed by him, knocking him back. “Uh…I thought I was just going to spend the night picking up some extra hours at the fulfillment center. But I guess…something happened?”
“Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?” he added, swiping at the screen of his now non-functional cell phone, which showed thousands of missed calls and texts from friends and family. “Anybody? Please? Anybody?”
According to witnesses at the Plainfield Amazon warehouse, Ureña had reportedly put his head down to work in the year 2020 for a mandatory 10-hour bonus shift, and then was not permitted by his supervisors to eat, sleep, use the restroom, or communicate with his family, friends, or coworkers for the next three millennia. Per his timecard, Ureña had worked for over 26 million hours straight, throughout 15 violent revolutions, several nuclear wars, and countless near-human extinctions.
Over that time, sources confirmed Ureña sustained multiple back, hand, and eye injuries, which were not covered by the company’s health insurance, as he was just a contractor for those 3,000 years.
“Well, when this all started, I was just trying to do my job, but I guess none of that matters now,” said Ureña, who told reporters that his former house had been reduced to rubble, gangs of futuristic rebel fighters had taken over his neighborhood, and a crater now subsumed most of the United States. “All I wanted to do was go home and see my kids, but now everyone I know and love is long dead.”
“Why?” he added, dropping to his knees before the crumbling graves of his wife and children, surrounded by countless deceased family members he never got to meet. “Why?”
According to his supervisor at Amazon, however, Ureña reportedly did a less than satisfactory job during his extended hours, receiving three demerits for talking too much in the year 4021, nodding off on the job in 4044, and standing too close to a fellow employee in 5014. They also criticized Ureña for cutting his mandatory overtime shift short, saying he clocked out 7 minutes early and that his pay would be docked.
Asking to remain anonymous, several other Amazon employees also reported emerging from overtime shifts in the future, including a Whole Foods employee who was locked in a store freezer, only to be thawed centuries years later; as well as an Amazon delivery driver who fell asleep at the wheel, only to wake up in the year 7000 to his truck being thrashed by a large, tentacled monster.
“Honestly, I keep opening and closing my eyes, and hoping I’ll wake up from this dream,” said Ureña, going through his locker and throwing out all of his dusty, disintegrated possessions from the day his holiday shift started. “I at least thought I was going to get a promotion, title change, or maybe even just a little overtime bonus for my 40 lifetimes of work. Instead, they fired me for peeing in a bottle God knows how many thousands of years ago.”
At press time, Amazon guards reportedly gave Ureña $150 dollars for his time and stuffed him into a garbage chute, which dumped his body into a large waste fire.
