YEAR: 2047

Television screens filled Metamatics Makati’s customer support floor. They displayed superheroes flying through urban cityscapes, men and women embracing each other, dragons battling lone swordsmen, werewolves, starships, and other unoriginal crap. Their flashing colors lit up the cubicles like police sirens, reminding the employees hunched over their desks of how trapped they were.

Ten minutes from my break was an eternity. Fortunately, I had ways to make my shift pass quicker.

“Thank you for calling Metamatics customer service,” my voice said on the call. It was convincing enough, injecting a cheerful tone I never used when talking to these customers. “How may I assist you today?”

In computer programming, you can think of a script as a program that executes other programs. I called this one Voice-Activated Customer Interaction Nullifier & Emulator, or VACINE for short because it inoculated me from angry customers.

The hardest part wasn’t making VACINE—I had a bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering (which hadn’t led me to a relevant job yet, whether by its fault or my own). No, the most challenging thing was getting VACINE to operate on my work PC. That took me months and a few interesting conversations with my boss. In the end, I disguised it as an operating system task, so the computer didn’t think anything of it.

A sharp, irritable voice belonging to a middle-aged American woman sliced through the other end of the call. “I don’t understand this charge on my statement. It’s clearly a mistake!”

Here we go.

This was not my first encounter with a Karen, but I hated this one already. She seemed particularly wound up. I wondered if her Zumba class had been canceled or if she had just spilled her Cheerios all over her kitchen island.

People like her were the reason I created VACINE. I watched it open web pages, submit text to AI voice synthesizers, and play sound files. I had already recorded samples of my voice so VACINE could send those to these websites and get back convincing dialogue.

“Yes, ma’am,” VACINE replied, inflecting sympathy. “I see here that the charge is for the Tier 2 premium subscription you’ve had for over a year.”

Metamatics was the most popular streaming service by user accounts alone. Last time I checked, the company had 2 billion subscribers. Almost a quarter of the world’s population paid to use the service.

I, however, wasn’t subscribed. Metamatics offered every one of its employees a free Tier 2 subscription, but I hadn’t taken it. I would die before that happened.

Metamatics, Delta Reel, Intervid… I saw these monsters for what they were. Trillion-dollar conglomerates. Capitalist nightmare factories. They harvested fiction from Filipinos, stealing our interactions and claiming them as their own. They were a new breed of neo-plagiarists, mosquitoes of originality, leeches of creativity. They had run out of ideas with their unoriginal fiction, so they needed us to compensate.

“No, no, no! I never watch Metamatics!”

The thirteen months of charges on her account said otherwise.

I chuckled at her stupidity, thinking how petty it was to waste all this time evading a charge equivalent to 800 PHP a month. What was that, anyway? 10 USD? It would probably buy this Karen her Venti-sized Starbucks coffee. On the other hand, I could live off that for a day. 600 PHP used to be enough, and 400 PHP before that. All that changed when the Giants arrived.

“Hello?” the Karen yelled. “Hello! Where’s your supervisor?”

I checked my PC and found VACINE had crashed. This wasn’t a big deal, as once it was restarted, it could easily pick up where it had left off.

“No need, ma’am,” it said, with my steady voice. “I can help you with this. I’ll verify the details—”

It also knew when to stop talking if it was interrupted.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“I don’t care about the details!” The Karen’s voice rose. “You people never get it right!” She sounded like a bulldog ready to traverse the telephone lines and attack me. “Where are you even from? Are you in India?””

“No, ma’am,” VACINE said. “Our office is in Manila, Philippines.”

“The Philippines? I want to speak to an American! Do you know we saved you in World War II?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m aware.” I applauded its calmness.

“Don’t ‘yes ma’am’ me! If I-”

Her voice droned on, a relentless barrage of complaints and insults. I thanked God I didn’t have to speak to this woman directly. Even listening to her thinned my patience.

I glanced at the row of cubicles around me, each a small island of weary employees trapped in the same monotonous hell. Imagining they were as frustrated as me made it easier to endure the situation, reminding me I wasn’t alone in this misery.

I thought more than once about sharing VACINE with them. But if I did, Metamatics would eventually find out, and it wouldn’t help anyone. Besides, I couldn’t trust them not to point fingers at me when things got messy.

I couldn’t trust my coworkers for anything. Save for a few.

“Hey,” said a soft voice.

Shandel Hernandez—or Shay, for short—peeked over her cubicle. She had convinced our boss to let her pile her thirty or so Wattpad paperback novels in the spaces between her monitor and her cubicle walls. One of the towers of fiction teetered as she removed a book from the middle and started reading a random page. She bobbed her head as she read along, emanating the only positive energy in the room. When she caught my gaze, her dark eyes twinkled as if grasping an understanding only the two of us shared.

Then, I noticed what she was reading. Two young anime protagonist men stared back at me from the book’s cover, each with long flowing hair and swords twice as tall as them. I shrugged, only guessing what that book was about.

“Keep your chin up, okay, Jayson?” Shay thumped the book against her chest. Her long, dark hair caught in one of the pages. “Just do what these two do before going into battle. Breathe your nose slowly. Inhale. Exhale. You’ll feel better.”

“I think your anime protagonists could ‘breathe’ their way out of any trouble.”

“Tch.” She sneered, looking to her side. “Well, okay, but just remember, too, that Ilocanos have the strongest work ethic of all Filipinos, and if you’re working harder than one, that’s saying something.”

She referred to our friend Reggie, who hailed from the Ilocos Region of the Philippines. He was “on a break,” which usually meant stretching his fifteen minutes to double. This was easier for him to do than all of us, seeing as he had hacked his work phone into thinking he was still taking calls.

You see, even before the dawn of the Internet, there have been computers in everything: microwaves, refrigerators, washing machines, cameras, cars, watches, and all sorts of things. They are known as embedded systems, and they were Reggie’s specialty.

You need to know the hardware to work with embedded systems. That was Reggie’s specialty. He could write code at the chip level, but anything above, like networking, operating systems, or mobile apps, was my domain. I saw the forest; he saw the trees. Yin and Yang.

I still love what we called his script. Silent Login And Compliance Keeper for Extended Rest. Or SLACKER.

Reggie was slouching so low that he might melt into the floor. It was painfully obvious he was taking a nap. Thankfully, our boss still wasn’t back from lunch.

Renewed by Shay’s little pep talk, I returned to monitoring the call with tranquil numbness.

“Will you be paying for the charge on your credit card that we have on file, ma’am?” VACINE asked.

The line paused. I hadn’t heard the last thirty seconds of the Karen’s tirade.

She fumed. “Why, you piece of-”

VACINE, however, wasn’t the best at conflict resolution. Not yet. I’d work on that.

I cut her off before she could finish. “One moment, ma’am,” I said. “My supervisor, Ms. Santiago, just made it to her desk. She can assist you further.”

“Good! I would absolutely love-”

My AI must have pissed off the woman during the call, but no matter. I hit the button to transfer the call to Shay.

Shay was a good sport, thank God, and didn’t need a script like VACINE to tolerate Karens. I chalked it up to her social engineering expertise. Place a phone between Shay and her target; she could make anything seem true.

As if dozing off in a cinema during the previews in a movie theater, Reggie opened his eyes at the ring of Shay’s phone, yawning, stretching, and setting an arm behind Shay and me. He blinked at us, confused, then noticed the show was about to start.

Shay cleared her throat, straightened up, and donned her most authoritative tone. “Thank you for holding. This is Ms. Superv-I mean Ms. Santiago. How can I assist you?”

I leaned back and listened as Shay expertly navigated the call, defusing the Karen’s anger with an easy confidence I could never muster. It was like watching one of those con artist movies Metamatics churned out every week—entertaining but unoriginal.

Or, as my father would say, stream sludge.