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Many New Yorkers who have lost jobs due to the pandemic have turned to the gig economy to make ends meet.

Stasha Gumienny is one of them. She works for DoorDash. She’s a “DoorDasher” on top of her full-time job as a school administrator. She’s been dashing since September after she lost her second job as a restaurant hostess last year.

“I was really feeling the hit of not having that second job,” said Gumienny. “I had visited the food pantry a couple of times.”

As a single mom, losing that second income was tough.

“I was in a low. I was really getting nervous,” said Gumienny. “I had a couple financial meltdowns. I kept seeing the DoorDash availability on Indeed, and I said, ‘You know what, what do I got to lose?'”

She’s not alone.

According to DoorDash, nearly two million people became door dashers from March to September of 2020.

According to ride-share app Lyft, 20 percent of their drivers said that they drove more during the pandemic because they were laid off or had their hours cut due to COVID-19.

With DoorDash’s flexible hours, Gumienny usually dashes on weeknights and weekends. She leaves her first job at 3 p.m. and starts door dashing by 4 p.m., all so she can make it home to her daughter in time for dinner.

“I do sometimes feel guilty because I’m giving up those Saturdays and Sundays during prime play hours to be with my daughter, but I also know that I’m modeling for her what it takes, and what I’m doing,” said Gumienny. “And she’s learned the quality of a dollar.”

Each delivery can bring in about $6 to $10, and those deliveries add up.

“That might not seem worth it to someone, but if you do this three times a night, or a week, and maybe one weekend, you’re going to see almost $200,” said Gumienny.

After just two hours on the road, she’s done for the night and heads home to make dinner for her 11-year-old daughter, Hannah.

“This is why I wouldn’t want to DoorDash past 6 o’clock. Hannah’s doing homework, and we try to get a good night in,” said Gumienny, as she prepared dinner for the night.

She does this multiple times a week, a grueling work day all to make life a little easier for her and her daughter.

Stasha works in a school M-F but several days a week after work and on weekends she door dashes to make extra cash. She’s not the only one. According to Door Dash, 1.9 million people became door dashers from March-September of 2020. @SPECNewsHV pic.twitter.com/kqenvBNPec

— Olivia Leach (@OliviaLeachNews) March 1, 2021

Ray Tincelli, a good-humored, pot-bellied, middle-aged guy with a “’70s mobster” vibe and money troubles, is looking for a new gig. His day job as a courier for a sketchy lost baggage company isn’t cutting it. Played with hangdog charm by Dean Imperial—he looks like Jeremy Piven gone to seed—Tincelli is a brusque Queens dude who could be imported from any number of prestigious cable dramas. For these reasons and more, he’s the offbeat, magnetic center of Lapsis, the funny and surprisingly humane new science fiction indie from first-time feature director Noah Hutton.

The grubby world Ray inhabits looks like ours, but the details are slightly skewed. Ray’s younger half-brother Jamie (Babe Howard), a once-hearty hiker, is now sidelined with a mysterious chronic fatigue syndrome called Omnia. This syndrome is widespread enough that there’s an entire scammy cottage industry around treating it, and Ray is hoping to get his brother into a treatment center. After his courier job is kaput, he seeks advice from a slippery neighborhood character named Felix (James McDaniel), who hooks Ray up with a “cabling medallion” as long as Ray promises to share a cut of his profits. A twist on a taxi medallion, the cabling medallion is a black-market ticket into the world of “cabling,” a bustling new line of contract work where “cablers” spend their days stringing yards upon yards of fiber-optic cables through wooded areas to attach to large metal boxes plopped in forests. It’s all in service of quantum computing, a new information superstructure that has taken over the globe. According to Felix, they’re paid handsomely for their troubles. And so Ray goes forth, into the woods, huffing and puffing his way toward the enigmatic boxes and potential financial freedom.

Lapsis, which is currently available on VOD, is a film in the tradition of lo-fi sci-fi, a genre of independent, dialog-dense science fiction without high-budget spectacle. Think Robot & Frank, Primer, or Being John Malkovich. Or think Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, another satire about the gig economy set in a slightly alternate, slightly futuristic reality. Both are political parables, using genre to prod the callous excesses of capitalism. But while Sorry to Bother You is balls-to-the-wall bonkers, Lapsis is a gentler outing, unspooling its story through long hikes in the woods.

The mechanics of cabling make little sense, but the film isn’t concerned with explaining the logic of its quantum computing empire. The setup is as arcane to the average person as bitcoin mining, because the details don’t matter. What matters is that it’s the newest iteration of grunt work in a global economy reliant on low-paying, no-benefits contractors for human fuel. During his first week on the job, Ray doesn’t learn a thing about what plugging the wires into the boxes actually achieves; what he does learn is that the cabling underclass is justifiably and mightily pissed off—and that the cabling medallion he used once belonged to a notorious former cabler known as “Lapsis Beeftech.”

He learns even more once he strikes up a friendship with Anna (Madeline Wise), a seasoned cabler attempting to organize her coworkers. The cabling company uses tiny doglike robots as pacers for its human workers; if a robot passes them on the trail, it can steal their route and take their money. They’re the bane of the cablers, who scheme to derail the little machines, and the brainchild of the original Lapsis Beeftech. Anna helps Ray trap one of the pacers, and they become confidants. And despite his best efforts to keep his head down and continue earning, Ray is quickly embroiled in a larger plot to find the original Lapsis and instigate a worker revolt.