Next week will mark the unofficial start of the holiday season for many online shoppers, whether this means you’ll be skipping out after Thanksgiving dinner to look for deals, hopping on your laptop on Black Friday to avoid the long lines at physical stores, or taking advantage of your high-speed connection at the office (for those that still work in offices) on Cyber Monday. 

With the continuing surge in online orders expected this year, a big question will be how many packages will be delivered through robots, drones or self-driving vehicles over that “last mile”, where a package leaves a sortation center to get to a customer’s house.

With all the talk about the metaverse, the 2000 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash that popularized the concept has been in the news. Reality has also been catching up with other key ideas proposed by its author, Neal Stephenson. 

The book paints the picture of a near-future where the pizza business had been taken over by technology-heavy corporations, including a totally legit CosaNostra Pizza, Inc. Deliverators are a sort of katana-wielding DoorDash driver on steroids, driving souped up, battery-powered cars. “Your pie in 30 minutes or it’s free” is the promise, prompting customers to want to lie about when they placed their order.