Maybe it’s partly my fault for ignoring politics for so long as I just tried to live my life. The daily grind of get up, go to work, spend as little as possible on groceries, go home, cook something pathetic, watch something on Netflix since it was the only streaming service I could still afford, and go to bed. Get up the next day and repeat it all so that I can pay rent and do it all over again every day for the rest of my life. It wasn’t like I had a great life, but I kept my nose clean, my clothes washed, my hair in the same style, and didn’t kick puppies. I knew the world was changing, but I never thought it would affect me. I was just a nobody so nobody would bother with me, right?

“Janet Margeret Mosely, you are hereby sentenced to two years in social prison or 1,000,000 viewers, whichever comes first,” the virtual AI judge said, banging his gavel and mugging around his big nose for the courtroom camera.

Canned applause with a smattering of laughter rang out and my AI lawyer reached out a virtual hand with a smarmy smile that urged me to give it a thumbs up, which I was not going to do. I stood there and stupidly shook its cartoon paw as my mind tried to wrap around what had happened.

“What?” I finally spoke up as the cameras snapped off and the “off air” light went on.

I was in a cartoon. I’d woken up here. I didn’t know why. I was supposed to be at work, but I was here in some cartoon courtroom in a Mickey Mouse court where I’d just been sentenced to what?!

“Do you require an interpreter, ma’am?” the AI court secretary offered in what was probably four different languages. “Some of our older clients find it helpful to be matched with an aid.”

“What?” I muttered out, intelligently. Older clients? I was only 36. That wasn’t that old, was it? Okay, so I wasn’t prime marriage material ready to pop out babies any moment, but old?

“Just accept the help,” the mouse told me. I didn’t mean it was a mouse of a woman and when I’d called it a Mickey Mouse court, I wasn’t using a euphemism! They’d bought the rights.

It had to be a dream, I thought, gawking at my surroundings. Two boxes popped up to block my view of the judge who was literally Mickey Mouse, though maybe the Steamboat Willie version of him. My lawyer had been Wile E. Coyote, but he was already shuffling out of the courtroom with an Acme cell phone attached to his ear. And this secretary was Jerry the mouse. It had to be a dream, but something niggled at the back of my mind. Was it a commercial ad from one of the free books I’d downloaded on Kindle? I couldn’t afford the Unlimited Kindle Library, but if I watched a dozen or so ads, I could download a book at a time. I didn’t pay much attention to those ads. Maybe I should have.

“Is this Mickey Mouse Courthouse?” I stuttered idiotically, waving my hands at the courtroom, and inadvertently waving away the Yes and No boxes that had popped up in front of me.

“Yes,” the Jerry mouse nodded. “You should hit the ‘yes’ box. If anyone needed it, it’s you.”

The boxes appeared again, and I almost automatically hit the ‘yes’ box. What? Jerry was giving me a very reassuring smile. The next minute, I saw words crawl across my vision, but I opted to talk to Jerry instead. “What am I doing here?”

“According to the record,” a paperclip assistant rattled off from where he’d arrived at my shoulder, “one of your neighbors turned you in for social ineptitude. You were brought in early this morning and the AIs fast-forwarded through the trial since ratings on the trials have been low lately. You’ve been sentenced to social reform via virtual reality programming.”

“I’ve been what?” Yeah, nothing was penetrating the haze of my flabbergasted mind.

“You’re in good hands with Clip,” Jerry was saying as he walked away, a sheaf of papers under one mouse arm. “Hey, Tom!” Jerry called out to the other attorney who was just leaving through the courtroom door. “I call dibs on prosecutor on the next one. You can’t keep hogging them all. It’s in my contract that I get to play all the roles in the courtroom!”

“The first thing we need to do is choose a venue for you,” Clip was saying. “We could go with medieval, but the ratings on that world have been dropping with how Donald’s been bitch-slapping dragons around like they’re level ones. If you ask me, they made it too easy.”

“Donald,” I blurted out, more a parrot than a person at this point. The paperclip on my shoulder pointed down a hallway with signage that quoted the Pirates of the Caribbean entrance. I suppose they’d bought the rights for that too. Either that or it had slipped into public domain, which was more likely.

“We can find our doorway down there,” Clip said, with an almost palpable urging for me to move along. “Pay no attention to the sign. You’re not doomed, just a little challenged. All that is window dressing for the ratings. Our first problem is that you’ve got a pretty bad rating to start with. It seems no one even hated you enough to watch your trial. Exactly zero tuned in to it.”

“I’m not sure,” I might have moved as I said it, but maybe the room moved, and I was just sort of shoved toward a doorway I was sure I didn’t want to go through. “There’s been some kind of mistake.”

“Just let it happen for now and focus on the things you can control,” Clip gave good advice though I was in no condition to listen to anything. “Let’s choose a world genre, okay?”

I could swear I heard Clip muttering under his breath that he was going to kill his agent for getting him this assignment. I was still staring at the approaching door that I wasn’t walking toward.

“There are lots of things that we can go over with your advocate AI when we get you settled in your world, but all that can wait, while the world you pick can’t,” Clip was urging me as the scene dissolved around me and I was thrust into that hallway of doom whether I liked it or not.

“This is all happening way too fast,” I protested, trying to back away from the hall of doors in front of me.

“I’m an AI, ma’am,” Clip quipped in what was obviously a joke to him. “It feels very slow to me, but then I can do 2,000,000 calculations a minute. Now I urge you to consider your options and make a choice before your time runs out and one is made for you, though in your current frame of mind, it is possible that a random pick might serve you better.”

I could feel the eye roll in his comment and bristled. I wasn’t an idiot. AIs had taken over almost everything that required judgment calls but that was only because humans had been proved to be very bad at remembering or calculating facts whereas AIs only dealt in truth. They dealt in truth so long as it was programmed into them, that is. Once they’d taken over the justice system, it had become much more fair. For a while. Then people started pushing new laws and people learned how to manipulate the system that the AIs were written with, and then new AIs were programmed for broader and broader, but then I digress. Don’t blame me please, since I’m pretty sure my non-AI mind was not programmed for dealing with this situation without a cup of coffee.

“I’ve heard that cartoon-land can be fun, though you’d have to stick to purely G-rated material so that kids will tune in. It’s a very popular and overworked genre if you ask me, though,” Clip was saying as my mind woke up slower than I wanted it to. “Tele-novella is the other end of that spectrum, but I really think the AIs writing the NPC scripts are just a little out of touch with reality and a bit sadistic. I wouldn’t suggest that genre.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

We were walking by a series of hallways, each lined with doors. Doors were shaped and colored in a way that was indicative of where they led, if the cartoon hallway was any example.

“You’re not married, right?” Clip made a sound of ruffling papers, as if he was looking up that information. “You could go the romance route. There’s a new remake of the Love Boat that I’m sure a few people will pop into just for nostalgia if nothing else. It could get you a few novelty viewers.”

My revulsion must have shown on my face because I was hurried past that hallway as Clip changed the subject.

“Historical?” Clip suggested with a raised eyebrow over his top metal paperclip-thing. “Not the Titanic, surely, but maybe mystery? I hear they’ve solved the glitch of actually dying when the murderer turns on you and the gumshoe ones can be kind of funny if you have a sense of humor about… Nevermind. Bad idea. We need something simple.”

“I’m not an idiot,” I protested, but Clip was moving on anyway and I wasn’t going to stop that since I wasn’t sure I trusted that they had fixed that glitch.

“Of course not,” Clip didn’t sound as sincere as he should have, but then he wasn’t a psychology AI, was he? He was an assistant and an old one at that. I was thinking he was lucky to have gotten this gig at all considering how old his original programming was. “Maybe not true crime either. Not that you aren’t smart enough to be a detective. I’m sure you’re just suffering from a bit of shock. Ever since they changed the arrest format, more and more convicts are coming in a little disoriented.”

Did I remember a bit of this morning? The door had pounded, waking me up. Then I’d screamed and felt a prick and the next thing I knew I was being sentenced. I was forever getting ads for criminal shows. It wasn’t that I didn’t know about them, I just didn’t like them, so I ignored them, like I did everything else that was politically insane and happening in the world nowadays.

“Fairy tales might make a comeback if that kind of thing interests you,” Clip was still talking as I was trying to wrap my mind around things. “Your reading history suggests you like a fairy tale remake, though if we go by your reading, we should be chucking you into Huck Finn.”

“I doubt my skin tone would serve me well there,” I glared at Clip meaningfully. “I’m not up for Old Yeller or 1984 either, but I’ve read Frankenstein and Catcher in the Rye too and I wouldn’t want to live in them. Have I really been convicted of a crime?”

“Yep,” Clip told me cheerfully, hustling us forward to a hallway of old books. “We can at least peruse this hallway. Sense and Sensibility? They have a zombie version that should take off if someone will take it on.”

“No horror,” I insisted, proud of myself for catching up. “What about something like a modern sit-com, nothing too crazy.”

“No offense, but you’ve been sentenced to a two-year run or 1,000,000 viewers at a 4.0 average rating or higher,” Clip cautioned. “If you dive into the rerun hell of sitcom-ville, they’ll never even notice that your two-year contract is up. You have a stipulation in your contracted sentence that if you get cancelled due to lack of viewers, your sentence will be extended into another random genre that will ensure ratings. You don’t want that.”

“I could be stuck here forever?” I demanded, aghast. “How is that possibly legal or moral?”

“It’s legal, and we AIs let people determine morality, so don’t blame me for it,” Clip rebuffed my indignation like the pro he was. “When the system found a person who had been stuck in an old sitcom for five years, the new law was made that sentences are a maximum of two years and will be renewed if viewers are at zero for more than two months in a row.”

The way he said it made it sound perfectly reasonable and that was the moment I knew I was truly screwed. It wasn’t a dream because I didn’t have nightmares this bad. I wasn’t that imaginative, or I’d have passed my exam as an author. This was all too real, and I was all too screwed because I was going to be stuck here forever. Panic fluttered anew in my animated heart. I knew of the new legal system and the social aspects that people were expected to maintain, but I had never believed it would apply to me. I didn’t hurt anyone, and I was polite. I was so invisible that no one would ever turn me in. Only I guess I wasn’t.

My body was stuck in a virtual pod somewhere in the justice department’s storage warehouse, being kept humanely alive while I served my sentence. Everyone knew the deal. We had to complete a questionnaire about it to be registered to receive media content. If I hadn’t acknowledged the new laws, I couldn’t watch Netflix or download even free books. Internet was a privilege and privilege was earned through civic responsibility which was made evident by our completion of these questionnaires instead of the old standard “terms of service.” I knew, but…

“This isn’t happening,” I breathed out, the pain and panic that gripped me a pathetic simulation of stimulated nerve endings in a tub of veggie gel.

“You see that clock?” Clip got serious and pointed at a countdown that had a paltry fourteen minutes on it. “That clock is how long you have to choose before the system takes over and chooses for you.”

I gulped down the simulated emotions that felt anything but simulated and tried to pay attention with some part of my mind that wasn’t flooded with very real panic. “Nothing historical,” I choked out in a voice that sounded far more reasonable than I felt.

“Okay,” Clip perked up and doors disappeared. “Now we’re getting somewhere and getting somewhere means we can get you somewhere that you want to be.”

“I need somewhere that has libraries and books,” I started on my wish list and hoped I had the time to whittle it all down into something I could survive. “Televisions, but not modern laws on social stuff.”

“Done and done and done,” he said as doors and whole hallways disappeared.

“Nothing too urban, but nothing so rural its religious,” I rattled off variables as they came to mind. “And no romance or crime.”

“We’re running out of things that even have a hope of getting you ratings, ma’am,” Clip was warning me even as more hallways and doors dropped out of sight. “Are you sure you’re not interested in romance or mystery? You seem to read a lot of them.”

“I’m not having sex with an NPC just to get some ratings so I can… Wait! I need a place I can make enough money to survive. How do I do that?”

“There are several ways to make money in the game worlds,” Clip told me, looking slightly more impressed with my first logical question. “You can get a job in the world and earn a living that way, but you will also get a supplement income from your viewer count which is on a table that you can bring up in your character stats.”

I eyed the few hallways left with trepidation. There was one hallway surrounded by blinking lights that made me nervous. “What is that hallway?”

“Game shows,” Clip announced with enthusiasm that I did not feel. “You could shave off months of your sentence if you’re good at any type of trivia or get lucky. The penalties for losing can be humiliating but those do get the best ratings. Just remember that any pain or dismemberment is purely for the camera and ratings and will not be done to your real-life body, according to current laws. There is pending litigation that is in the initial phases to allow for real life dismemberment but it isn’t likely they will pass it to be retroactive so it might just be a good time to get into game shows.”

“I didn’t think social pariah laws would pass either, so I’m not risking that,” I insisted and a whole hallway disappeared, leaving a paltry set of options.

“Nothing here will get you the ratings you’ll need to break out of your situation,” Clip clucked at me, sounding as disappointed as my high school English teacher when I’d flunked the author exams.

I wasn’t looking at the likelihood of escaping. I was looking at where I’d likely be retired. As long as I could keep a single viewer interested somewhere, I just needed a little town in the middle of a little world where I could go back to being a cog instead of a celebrity. I had no chance of ever getting out of this. I could only hope I didn’t end up dying in here.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the most innocent of the doors that were left.

“It’s a randomly generated contemporary idea that was shelved five years ago,” Clip told me in a flat tone that made me know it was nowhere near up to his standards. That suited me fine. “It’s scheduled for archiving. The notes say it was a mash-up of Gilless Gals and Young Sherman, with a touch of Charms, the original version. This is the last thing you want. No one has ever shown a single interest in watching it.”

“I’m not sure I’m the right age group for that,” I said, enthusiastic mostly because I’d seen them all and might know what I was doing in them. “Would it make me a kid or a mom in it?” Both sounded awful but less awful than a game show where they ripped off my arms.

“Character creation isn’t my deal, but it’ll probably give you a range of your current age, give or take about 15 years,” Clip said. “But you don’t want this. There’s no conflict, no drama and that means no ratings!”

“I choose that one,” I said, and the current world of doors and hallways started a slow dissolve.

“What a waste of an assistant,” Clip was saying to himself as I let myself try to smile. “I go to all the trouble to give good advice and what do they do? I need a better agent.”