My Future Self Wants a Refund
A product designer receives a return request from an older version of herself. The unwanted purchase is a public decision system she has not yet built, and thousands of citizens are listed as accessories.
ImagineYourBook writes a fresh draft from this idea.
How it begins
The customer wanted to return the city.
Nina read the support ticket again.
PRODUCT: CIVIC CHOICE SYSTEM.
REASON: NOT FIT FOR PEOPLE.
She had not built a civic choice system.
She had spent the morning arguing about the size of a button on a parking-permit form.
The attachment contained a receipt dated thirty-three years ahead.
Under purchaser, it listed her name.
Under accessories, it listed one hundred and eighty thousand residents.
Nina clicked the customer profile.
The face in the photograph was hers with deeper lines around the mouth and a haircut she hoped she would reconsider.
A new message appeared.
Before you ask, yes, this is ridiculous. It was ridiculous when I sent it too.
Nina looked around the studio.
Her colleagues were eating noodles, sketching icons, and trying to persuade a printer that paper existed.
She typed: Prove it.
The reply took a minute.
Open the blue notebook. Page eleven. You didn't tell anyone why you crossed that sentence out.
Nina did not move.
The notebook lay in her bag.
On page eleven, beneath a thick black line, she had once written a question about her father's rejected housing application.
What if nobody gets to say no without explaining why?
She had crossed it out because she needed to finish paid work.
Her screen chimed again.
That was the right question. We built the wrong answer.
A colleague called her name.
"Funding meeting in ten."
Nina opened the ticket's final attachment.
A presentation filled the screen.
Her current employer's logo sat above a promise to eliminate difficult decisions.
At the bottom, in small print, was a sentence she had not yet written.
HUMAN REVIEW AVAILABLE ONLY AT SYSTEM DISCRETION.
Nina closed the presentation.
My father's old application lay in the same drawer. I took it out before opening the meeting invitation.
Then she changed the support ticket's status from INVALID REQUEST to NEEDS A PERSON.
Your idea. Your book.
Keep the spark. Change anything.
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Outline and characters
Develop this idea
The older Nina should be a fallible witness, not an all-knowing moral authority. Keep the proposed system concrete enough that readers understand who gains convenience and who loses recourse. Time travel can deliver the warning while collective human choices determine the response. The ending should preserve oversight and alternatives rather than claim that one designer can permanently make public decisions fair.
- Nina receives a return request from her older self
- The product is a decision system she has not built
- Citizens appear in its inventory as accessories
- She tests the message through details unavailable to a prankster
- Her future self admits benefiting before resisting
- Present-day collaborators offer a slower participatory design
- A funder promises security if Nina ignores the warning
- She refuses a single authoritative prediction and consults affected residents
- The project is rebuilt with appeal, oversight, and meaningful refusal
- The future changes without supplying Nina a new guaranteed outcome
Characters
- Nina Saye, 34. Public-service product designer
- Nina Saye, 67. Future self requesting a return
Series possibilities
- A citizen receives a thank-you note from a future version of a public service that never launched.
