On the last Friday of the month of June, 2030, at precisely ten o’clock at night, the same Samaritan on the other end of the phone greeted the same caller from Cardiff with the same words as before.

And like the last seven nights, the caller asked to speak to the same operator immediately, and pacing around his studio apartment in a sloppy circle, received the same information that it was not an appropriate use of the service; they could not provide out personal information of their operators.

Suddenly, and like the last few nights, the same crowd as before gathered behind the private studio accommodation, Futures, and loitered noisily, their voices carried by the secondhand smoke up to each studio apartment on that side through their open windows; it was always a nuisance to the residents, especially for the sick man on the 3rd floor, who was afraid that the reason his operator was not available was because she too was in a crowd on a Friday night.

The operator on the phone repeated the warning from his superiors, the tone of which betrayed a sense of superiority over the assumed social position of the caller; his deep, masculine voice had such an elevation of pitch that the caller could not interpret it any other way than a personal attack on his worth as a human being. However, he was well acquainted with what those of lesser intelligence than he thought of people like him, for he had spent the last two and a half decades as the black sheep of whichever community he was a part of. He dismissed the man’s well-meaning advice to get a life and hung up the phone, bitter that the woman he had been talking to for the past four weeks had abandoned him.

The crowd's clatter and increased concentration of the tobacco smoke intensified his loneliness and anxiety so much that even though the weather was tortuously hot, he shut the window, which hardly alleviated the assault on his senses. So much was his distress that he could take it no more and shut himself in the bathroom with his phone pressed to his ear, dialing the Samaritan hotline again for the third time that night.

It was two o’clock when she finally answered. The voice on the other end belonged to a woman, and this was enough to satisfy him. His harsh and heavy huffs drowned out her light breaths. He held his breath to let her speak, waiting impatiently for her to begin the script.

He imagined her as a moderately tall, slim blonde of around twenty, with big blue eyes, and a round face as white as the moon; as long as she was blonde, however, he had no qualms about her background, for her personality was loving and caring and reminiscent of his ex-girlfriend.

“Hello, Samaritans can I help,” said the woman on the other end of the phone, “you’re speaking to Julia, is there something that I can call you by?”

“Bailey,” replied the young man, “is Bailey working tonight?”

“Oh,” she said, her voice flattened immediately, “it’s you. Listen, bud...”

“It’s important,” he cried.

“We are just volunteers at the end of the day,” said the young woman with a sense of frustration in her tone, “calling every night isn’t healthy, and neither is listening to you complain about your life, Rod.” The operator sighed, “Don’t you have someone to talk to? Friends? Maybe they can help.”

“Please,” he begged.

“Look, sir, this service is so you can talk to someone about things that are bothering you. You’re taking up someone else’s spot who might actually need someone to talk to. I’m going to hang up, okay?”

“Wait,” he gulped suddenly, “I’m...suicidal.”

Julia swore under her breath, clenching her fists. “You’re feeling like life isn’t worth living? Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” said Julia, stifling a yawn. She looked up at the ceiling with her bloodshot eyes and blinked several times, thinking her contacts were coming loose. She leaned back in her chair and let her head flop freely, and took a deep breath before adding, “Do you have any friends to talk to about this?” She exhaled loudly.

“Bailey’s been really helping me out with this over the past few weeks, and I wish I could talk to her,” said the caller with an air of faux concern. “Did something happen to her? I think I’ve said something that might have offended her, and perhaps that’s why she isn’t speaking to me anymore.”

Julia narrowed her eyes and tilted her head in suspicion, “No, that’s...” she shook her head slowly, her eyes refocusing on the screen before her, “We are all trained here to deal with the same type of problems.” They drifted to the bottom left corner of the screen, where the digital clock was supposed to be located, but all she found was a grey empty bar, littered with giant meaningless icons.

“Now that I think of it, she did mention that ever since she got back from Geneva, she felt sick with something.”

“That’s what she told you?” she said, clutching her headset and pressing it tighter to her ear. Then, turning to speak to someone else in the room, she said, “When does Bailey’s shift start?”

The man began to reply, and at once his voice was drowned out by the sudden whine of the door, and then the squeak of several office chairs. Julia, however, was the first to greet the woman who had just entered the office.

“What time do you call this?” Julia said half-jokingly. She clasped the end of the microphone jutting out from the earpieces of her headset and mouthed the words, “help me.”

“And I’ve been thinking about how I’ll go about it,” blurted the young man nonchalantly, inserting himself into the conversation.

Julia swiveled back around and reentered her cubicle.

“Yeah, you’re right,” replied Rod, who sounded more excited with each passing second, “humans need relationships to survive, and relationships keep us sane. What I do not understand are those with relationships and yet call themselves depressed; that is why I am trying to talk to Bailey.”

At that moment, as her antique mechanical keyboard clicked, clacked and scratched under the sharp juts of her fingers, Julia muttered under her breath absentmindedly: “You’d have to pay me to put up with your --”

She then quickly swiveled her right wrist, flipping her palm to the ceiling, which communicated to the computer that her hand was now the system’s three-dimensional pointer, and flexed all five of her fingers.

“Maybe there is a way to make some money...” As these last utterances escaped her mouth, the pixels once contained within the thin bezels of the computer monitor tunneled backwards half a metre, extending into a vibrant three-dimensional display, the objects therein floating gently, yet contrasting harshly, among the dull black leather furniture of the office.

Then, as if Julia had suddenly forgotten all about the man waiting on the line, she flexed and contracted her fingers, jolting the spherical icons side to side as she navigated the company’s database. A smile gingerly spread across her face, the corners of which reached almost the whole way to her eyes. Her heart was frantic with glee.

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“Bear with me,” she said quietly. She continued to finger the air as she searched the database.

“Okay,” the young man said with a note of apprehension. “Is everything alright?”

The transparent globes raced in and out of view as she navigated the near endless categories littering the bespoke architecture, each containing millions upon thousands of data, until she landed upon the one she wanted.

She struck violently the air with her index finger. “Sorry, about that. I just had to give Bailey some time to set up things,” she said, the whites of her eyes glistening with textual information. “Now, could you just confirm your whole name, date of birth, highschool and current address for me, please?”

“What?” Rod stammered, sweat dripping down his creased forehead, “What’s this about? You’ve never asked me this before. I thought this was an anonymous line.”

Julia placed a hand over her mouth and stifled a laugh, perceiving the caller’s frustration, “I have to make sure that you are not a spammer.”

“A spammer?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“A spam caller,” Julia clarified, rolling her eyes. “Once you provide me with those details, I can safely transfer you to my colleague, who --” she craned her neck and looked over her shoulder, “who, as a matter of fact, is just logging into her terminal now. Looking at my system right now, I can see that there’s a lot of incoming callers who want to speak to a Samaritan.”

The caller said nothing and waited in thought. He gulped and lifted the phone from his ear, which was red and burning, and gazed into the toothpaste-splattered mirror with a tinge of doubt, spurred on by the underlying shame which nestled deep in his core like baby tapeworms, and he hovered his thumb over the red button at the bottom of the screen below the touch-keypad.

“Rod Beasley,” he said finally. “C420, Futures, London Road...Cardiff.”

Julia did not waste time with a goodbye. She jabbed the air several times, punching in the information she received into a tiny box in the corner of her screen, and with the giddiness of a child up to no good, she sent the email, while Bailey two cubiwhacles down, held her head and groaned into her desk. She was several years younger than Julia, around twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, of soft and supple appearance, naive to her own beauty, a friend to all, an enemy to none; and this, in conjunction with having the most company awards for her service as a suicide prevention operator, which always ensured one is granted special protections and favours from upper management, made her as hated by Julia as she was loved by lonely men.

“Well, Rod Beasley,” said Bailey as she lifted her head, her wet, dirty blonde locks uncurling as forced herself to smile, “you finally have my attention. I have heard you have been asking for me for a whole week now. Don’t you know that is pretty embarrassing?” She spoke softly, and with a hint of sarcastic delight. The tears on her cheek had almost dried as she wiggled herself as far back as humanly possible in her chair, sinking effortlessly into his leather cushion.

“Sorry,” he said breathlessly, “it’s just that...I’ve been feeling pretty bad lately.”

“And the other operators weren’t good enough to help you?” she asked, concern ladening her voice. Her attention scattered at the incoming emails on her screen.

“No,” replied the young man, placing a hand over his raging heartbeat, which had suddenly started at the first sound of her voice, “they don’t have what you have.”

Bailey’s heart quickened; she felt it pull towards the caller. “And what is that? I’m not doing anything special. I am just doing what anyone else would do,” said Bailey, casting a glance over at Julia. “I want to help people by taking them as they are.”

“No, you are different,” said Rod, “no one speaks to me like you do.”

Bailey swiveled her chair slightly away from the rest of her colleagues, facing the wall to her left, and softened her smile. “Thank you,” she said breathlessly.

“Where have you been?” he inquired as his forehead rested against the hard wood of the door.

“Aren’t we supposed to be talking about your life?” she laughed softly, shifting in her seat.

“Well, yes, but a conversation is a two-way street. Is it not?” The young man smiled as he said this as if impressed he had come up with such a line himself.

“You are the smartest caller I have ever met,” said Bailey quietly, crossing her legs. She then glanced once again over her shoulder at her colleague, before continuing, “You have made quite the enemy in the office by asking to transfer from Julia: she gets quite offended when that happens.”

“Really?” said the young man, blushing bright crimson.

Bailey began fingering one of her caramel locks, which twirled around her white finger like chocolate syrup, and said, “But I do not understand why she did not just hang up.”

“Now that would be rude.”

“Maybe that is what I should do,” Bailey teased.

“I will just call back,” the young man said defiantly.

“Who says I will pick up the transfer?”

“You said it yourself: the job’s boring.”

“Ssh!” Bailey hushed, straightening herself in her chair. She flattened the creases in her skirt. “Sure, they give me a little leeway here and there, but still, I do not want to push it. I actually care about my job unlike you, and I am not going to lose it over a guy I have not even met.” She lowered her voice, and said, “I do not even know what you look like.”

“Well,” Rod smirked, “why don’t you come over and find out.”

She snorted, a smile widening on her lips, “You know I can’t. Even though I would like to.”

“Then why do you not?” Rod whined, his mind wandering to the worst possible scenario: Bailey was not actually interested in him but was using him for something. He had that same niggling feeling in his chest. She could not be trusted, he thought bitterly as images of the past haunted his mind once again.

“Well, to start with, I would not even have the time in the first place,” Bailey said, her hand brushing through her hair, “I have so many messages to respond to its crazy. I feel so overwhelmed and miserable myself.” Her eyes glazed over the office with a bored and flat expression.

“Messages?” said Rod, narrowing his eyes in jealousy. He felt a heat in his chest that only rose with each heartbeat. His fingers clenched tighter around the phone as he pressed it closer to his ear unconsciously as he brimmed with hatred. “Oh, yes, you are a popular woman, I suppose, being so beautiful and young,” he said, his lips pursed. “Scarcely do you step out of the door that you are greeted with the world’s attention. Tell me, how can a woman of your stature possibly know what misery is? It is ironic that you even work as a suicide operator.”

“Excuse me? I do not follow,” Bailey said, her dark, fuzzy eyebrows raised in confusion. She felt her own rise of anger flare in her chest but suppressed it instinctually. "Who is this about?”

“You are all the same,” muttered Rod as vivid images of a sexual nature flashed across his mind like a cinema reel.

“What? Rod how could you say that?”

“Nothing,” he coughed, and then added, his heart still beating manically, “it is just my interaction with Julia put me off is all.”

Bailey frowned, her wet, blue eyes gleaming with sympathy, “I know what you mean,” she said softly, chewing her lip.

“My life is terrible,” he moaned. “Where did everything go so wrong in my life?”

“I am worried about you,” said Bailey hesitatingly, a sudden chill running down her spine. “Have you done what I told you to do?”

“You need to remind me since it is has been such a long time since we have last spoken,” the young man replied bitterly.

“You are telling me that you have forgotten already? I told you to try and talk to your classmates to make some friends.”

“Friends? What do I need them for when I have you?” he said earnestly.

Bailey blinked with astonishment. She had never heard this kind of talk before, and she had heard a lot over the last few months as a suicide operator. This, however, was on another level. After a moment, she finally said, “But I am not...We are not...I mean -”

“We are not what? Friends?” the young man said with a slight sardonic smile.

“Rod...”

“You are my best friend, Bailey. Listen, while it is true that I do not have any friends, that is not by choice like you suppose. I am different from everybody else. Simply put, if I had friends, I would be unstoppable in this world: I would be extremely popular.”

“Who thinks like this?” breathed Bailey, exasperated at the words coming out of the young man’s mouth. “Rod -”

“But as it stands, I am alone, abandoned by the world at large. I am like a king that was dethroned unfairly,” said the young man triumphantly. “That is why I am not so bothered by the sayings and doings of others.”

Bailey knitted her eyebrows, and said, forcefully, “You should care what others think about you. Like you said before: we are social animals, after all. We need people to like us, Rod, and I have no doubt that there are plenty of people who like you for you. I mean, I like you for you. You sound like a good guy whose just been through some tough...stuff.”