Also check out the excellent animation of this story in Love, Death & Robots. There's some other good Scalzi stories in there too, and other great stories (don't miss the episode Helping Hand[1] either).
[1] https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/helping-hand/
If you like this, it might be worth reading the posts that lead to him writing it:
First, the only slightly related Tax Frenzies and How to Hose Them Down [0], in which he uses the term Objectivist Jerky, which led to someone requesting that he write What I Think About Atlas Shrugged [1], which he summed up with "Indeed, if John Galt were portrayed as an intelligent cup of yogurt ... this would be obvious. Oh my god, that cup of yogurt wants to kill most of humanity to make a philosophical point! Somebody eat him quick! And that would be that." then the brief My New Problem [2]
[0] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/09/26/tax-frenzies-and-how-...
[1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/10/01/what-i-think-about-at...
A potent metaphor of the techno-"utopia", especially around AI, and what might happen by blindly giving up power to forces we don't understand.
I experienced this first via Love, Death, & Robots but honestly the short story hits much harder just as it is.
Should be tagged [2010]
Most of "The Road" absolutely kills me. But Scalzi wrote something that's etched forever into my brain:
“For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.” ― John Scalzi, Old Man's War