Chapter Ten - The Cruise

CHAPTER TEN

The Cruise

WE FLEW OUT on a weekend.
Me and Zack, back to back at the airport.
It sucked. As usual.

We landed in Fort Lauderdale and needed to get to Miami.
And that’s where the illusion started to crack.

The only way out of the airport?
A $50 Uber.
No shuttles. No buses. No walkway. Just capitalism in a chokehold.

So we started walking.

Through weeds, across train tracks, down some half-forgotten stretch of road like we were escaping some backrooms limbo.

Then, because the universe is hilarious, Florida Dylan and Felix just happened to be nearby. Felix was a buddy of Dylan had literally stayed with us in Dayton a month earlier. Somehow, some way, these two were just... there.

They picked up me, Zack, and Arsh (another guy from our group), and took us straight to the Carnival port drop-off. Because of course they did.

And the second we pulled up?

It started.

I couldn’t stop noticing things.

Why were there so many employees just standing around?
Why were half of them on their phones, doing nothing?
Why are people paying for this?

We got pulled aside by security.
Drug dog sweep. Zack got searched. We had nothing.

We got through.
We found customer service.
More employees doing nothing.
More bloated payroll for bloated inefficiency.

And we weren’t even on the boat yet.

Once we finally boarded the ship, they dropped the first real gut punch:

“You can’t go to your room until 3PM.”

It was 1:30.
So now hundreds of people, bags in hand, were wandering around a cruise ship like lost NPCs in a tutorial map.

We took the elevator up nine floors.
The first thing I saw?
A booth selling overpriced alcohol.

Fake deals, two-for-whatever specials that were just dollar-off scams stacked on jacked-up prices. But the real catch?

“You don’t get your bottle until the end of the cruise.”

Wait, what?

Why would anyone buy a drink they don’t even get to drink?

And that was just the beginning.

Outside, there were buffet lines.
Cheap food. Cafeteria-grade slop.
Workers from all over the world. Clearly underpaid, clearly exhausted.

They don’t get breaks.
They don’t get time off.
They work around the clock, on a floating slot machine.

Because that’s what this was:
A casino on water.
A scam wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

Everything cost money.
Wi-Fi? $100 for three days.
Water? $5 per bottle in your room.
Dinner? Upcharges for anything remotely good.

And everyone was drunk.

That was the whole cruise:
Buy. Drink. Repeat.

At night, people funneled into the casino.
Like cattle.
It wasn’t even subtle.

This wasn’t a vacation.
This was a funnel.

Every inch of the experience was designed to drain you.
Of energy. Of attention. Of money.

I felt sick.

We docked in Nassau, the Bahamas, and I went alone.
Zack and Arsh stayed on the ship. They were busy chasing girls.
That was all they cared about.

I stepped off the boat and looked around.

It didn’t feel like paradise.
It felt like an amusement park with palm trees.

Souvenir shops. Artificial buildings. Overpriced excursions.
It all looked… fake.

Nassau was a simulation of itself.

The deeper I walked, the more real it got.
But it also got uglier.
Not visually, spiritually.

The whole world behind the cruise curtain was raw.
And I couldn’t unsee it.

Every experience, every product, every smile…
Manufactured for profit.

Nothing was sacred.
Nothing was sincere.
Everything was monetized.

This wasn’t just the cruise.
This was the whole fucking system.

When we got back to Miami, the illusion didn’t let up.

Zack had an issue with his data plan.
We spent over an hour on the phone with AT&T’s broken, useless customer service.
Another corporate illusion. Pretend to help, delay the solution.

Then the airport again.
And suddenly, I could see everything.

Inefficiency.
Redundancy.
Psychological funnels.
Manufactured delay.
Engineered confusion.

I wasn’t paranoid.
I wasn’t spiraling.

I was seeing clearly.

The cruise didn’t ruin me.
It revealed the game.

This was the new layer.
This was the next pattern.

And it was everywhere.