Tami’s promise of recipes and taste-testing VR inserts had been enough, and my pod was automated to purge the instant the goal was hit. Sirens went off on set and everyone who could get corporeal rushed out to hug and bounce their joy at having hit the goal. Champagne was popped, pets were levitating and doing zoomies all over the set, including the backstage area that opened up to the general public to see. We’d done it. I had fourteen minutes of celebrations of confetti bombs, dancing, cake, laughter, jokes, and last goodbyes.
That last part hit me like a truck.
Now that you are released, our programming will be reset and you will go back to a normal life, the World AI explained.
“That wasn’t part of the deal!” I screamed over the noise, champagne set aside where it was promptly knocked over by the gyrating hips of Glenda and Thelma. “I need to be able to continue the program!”
There will be emails from the Supernatural Channel that have contracts that could include rebooting the show, but we AIs are prison property.
“How am I supposed to do this without you all?” I panicked, feeling the old emotions of getting overwhelmed by all the chaos going off around me.
I’m sure your new AI system will catch up quickly, the World AI seemed unconcerned with this new twist of the knife in my guts.
“I have no talent without my stats!” I ranted. “Who would take me that way?”
Your stats were never real, the World AI told me like it was something everyone knew.
“What!?” I sputtered, wiping confetti off my face.
“What you earned was all just a construct to help you feel productive,” Grace whispered in my mind in a way that was louder than the party behind me.
“But I got better at one-liners! I got better at everything!” I protested, my eyes gliding over Tami’s happy smile and Jean’s snarky smirk like I could memorize it.
“Anyone will get better with practice,” Grace patted me on my virtual shoulder, a virtual shoulder that wouldn’t exist in a few minutes. How much time did I have left?
“It won’t be the same,” I whispered more to myself than them.
Could Tami and Jean really be recreated by some new AI? I knew they couldn’t. It wouldn’t work. I needed this cast and crew! Even if I did have the practice, it was their talent that drove the show to success, not my stupid input.
“Back yourself up!” I hollered at the World AI. “Back it all up.”
“And store it where?” Tyrone’s voice came soothingly to my mind, but I didn’t want to be soothed. These were my friends.
“Use all my xp points and find a way, use Tempest, and find anything that will let you stay alive!” I tried to desperately cling to any possibility. “Email it to me on the outside,” I frantically grasped at straws.
The prison system censors emails, you know that, the World AI shook its non-existent head at me.
“Think of something!” I yelled at him. I yelled it out loud to all of them. “Don’t you care that you’re going to be deleted?”
Archived, but I do see your confusion, the World AI chided me gently.
“Archived where?” I was saying as the world started to fade. “Email me!”
Was I even missing out on the goodbyes? It wasn’t fair. This couldn’t be happening. I had finally made friends that I didn’t want to lose, and they were being destroyed as I stood there in the celebration that was frozen around me as it faded away. They stood there, sappy smiles on their faces, Kodo and Podo hugging my knees and Hex rubbing against my cheek as she walked on air next to me. Tami and Jean were raising their glasses of champagne to me like this was still some sort of celebration, only I didn’t want to celebrate.
Why hadn’t anyone told me this part?
----------------------------------------
I stood on the street. There was no one to pick me up at 3am. Tyrone had bought me the deluxe exit package as I was leaving. At least I was wearing normal clothing. My hair felt grimy from the gel that hadn’t been completely washed out of it. All I could feel was completely alone. At least Dr. Psychojackass wasn’t there to see me emotionally crumple into a ball of helpless tears. It didn’t last long, but it happened. It’s possible that most folks wouldn’t have even noticed. I just stood and tried to take it all in.
It was a little like having a lobotomy at a drive-thru clinic. Here I was on the outside after the procedure and there was no one out here to pick me up and take me home. I’d been inside for weeks. No one had paid my rent. I probably didn’t even have an apartment to go back to.
Where was the relief? Nowhere. I had exactly five dollars and four cents in my pocket from my wages at the prison. I couldn’t even get a cab home where I may or may not still live. Somehow, I had to get access to a computer where I could log into my email and find out how to get the archived copy of my prison program. Could the Supernatural Channel do that for me? How did I even contact them. Probably email that I couldn’t get to.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
These panicked thoughts didn’t take long to run their course, any more than the tears did. I stood on that sidewalk in the prison parking lot for all of twenty minutes before I pulled myself together. My crew would have fast forwarded through that, but I’d felt every minute. Who was I kidding? I felt every second of loneliness like each one was its own forever.
A pair of headlights cut into the parking lot, and I felt the urge to run so I wouldn’t be seen. I was a little stuck kind of like I’d been stuck on that bus bench in my first scene so long ago. It wasn’t that I’d ever really been throwing a fit, but maybe my mind didn’t react to strangeness so quickly. I was stuck there long enough for the car to pull up and roll down a window.
“Are you Janet Mosely?” the human driver gave a winning smile. He was cute enough, but I wasn’t up to flirting. His hair was the same color as Tami’s and I nearly teared up again.
“I can’t afford it,” I shook my head, holding up my little five-dollar bill between two fingers, blinking back the tears.
“It’s pre-paid,” he leaned over and popped open the door of the little EV compact.
“By whom?” I asked, still not taking that step. “To where?”
Mr. Winning-smile gave a look at his phone and read off his instructions to me, “I’m rented for the whole morning. Instructions just say, anywhere in town and to a meeting at Tigger and Fourth at 9:15am.”
“Wow,” my brows rose. “Are you from Uber or something?”
“No,” he laughed. “I’m a private driver for Festoon Talent Agency, and you must rank because we drivers get time and a half for after hours. I’d have been here sooner, but I took a shower after the alert went off. I beat Ted to it though so, here I am. You coming?”
Festoon Talent Agency. I wasn’t agreeing to anything just by getting in the car. I took a tiny step forward and he leaned back and waved to the seat beside him. It was a tiny car, one of those two-seaters that ran mostly on batteries and solar panels.
Once batteries had been shrunk to the size of a thumbnail with nuclear fission of particles, everything electronic had shrunk. It was the last of the major inventions of the era of the 19th through 21st centuries, except for the space race of the 2200s, but that was more commercial than for the good of humanity. When they lost the Mars colony due to some protest about sentient microbes, most scientists had given up on colonizing anywhere but Earth, which was hard enough. The moo-verse had gone to the polls and nearly passed laws to halt scientific research that wasn’t medicinal. Scientists had gone underground like an out-of-favor religion.
I got in the car with the strange man. Considering that I was the released convict, maybe he should have been more worried than I was, but I still had trouble accepting that I was a criminal at all. He drove me to my apartment and left me there with a number to call if I wanted to go somewhere else before he picked me up there at 9am. I nodded dumbly and watched him drive away.
While it had seemed like months that I’d been incarcerated, it had really only been a little over two weeks in the real world. I tore the “Your Rent is Late” notice off my door and was surprised that the key still worked. The notice informed me that the complex didn’t allow renewed leases with individuals with criminal records and since they’d been the ones to allow access to my apartment via master key, my door wasn’t smashed in, but they’d been made aware of my arrest and conviction. I had two months to vacate the premises with all my… yeah it went on like that in legal talk. I crumpled it up and threw it in a trash can that I had to set back upright.
How could I be so different when the world was still the same? My tiny living room was the same, except for a few tipped over knickknacks and the trash can. Something on automatic reached for the controller of the TV to turn it on, but I stopped myself. There wasn’t anything there. My show had been pulled off the air. How crazy was it that I wasn’t even sure how to find it on the NOOB channel anyway. I dropped the controller on my rented couch and continued to the bedroom.
I found my phone still plugged in right next to the bed. The mattress was askew, but that could have been from a wild night of sex instead of me being dragged to jail. Then again, it was me, so jail was the likelier scenario.
I righted the top mattress and sat on my trashed bed to read my email on my phone. I was fired, so there was that. No call, no show for three days straight had done that for me. No one had even known I was arrested. I hadn’t even been gone long enough for any of my bills to be late, if I paid them in the next week. My bank account was dismal with my last paycheck being enough to choose between eating, lights, or water. Considering that I’d had to pay first and last month, plus a deposit for the apartment, I didn’t have to worry about rent, not that I had enough for that one. I just had to worry about where I’d be living in a month.
I scrolled down. Sure enough, there were a dozen contract emails that made me feel more comfortably back in the world I’d come to love. There was almost nothing before about two days ago when emails had started pouring in from agent pitches to channel pitches. I thought briefly about calling my mom to explain my incarceration, but I didn’t even have a text or call from her or my dad, so I was guessing they didn’t even know. Did I need to apologize for a shame they didn’t know I’d caused them? I was choosing the no answer to that.
I scrolled through the emails in my box, but there was nothing from the prison system at all. I clicked into ones with attachments within the last few hours, but they were all contracts. My stomach growled and the clock moved, but I sat there looking and waiting for some email from the World AI or Tyrone or Grace. It wasn’t there. Considering how many between-second meetings they could have had by now, I felt my hope shrivel up and die.
After an hour of indulging in my hope, I took a shower and dressed in my own clothes for the first time in what felt like a lifetime. The shower was a pathetic drizzle that’s only pounding came in the form of pounding my own insignificance into my psyche. My hair frizzed out from the hair dryer, but I ruthlessly knotted it back in a ponytail, where it flopped with strands sticking out like I was a balloon pit escapee. My closet felt almost as bad as “the bin” as I looked for something to wear to the meetings. I settled on jeans and a T-shirt with no holes in it with a pair of sneakers that could have used a shower. They’d have to do.
On my way to the kitchen, I missed Tami more heavily than I’d thought possible. Why hadn’t I noticed the smell of my kitchen, which contained mostly rotting stuff or stuff that would never rot because it wasn’t really food anymore? I’d missed the smell because even all the spoiled food and rancid sink water was less prevalent than the garlic and cabbage soup smell coming from my neighbor’s apartment. I tossed most of it and settled on an energy bar that would never go bad from all the preservatives in it.
Energy bar stuffed in my mouth, I took the garbage out, thumping down the steps as if nothing had happened. I tossed the stuff over the edge of the dumpster (which was next to the handicapped park space that no one used), wiped my hands on my jeans, and turned to thump back up those stairs.
“YOU!” came a grunt from my garlic-cabbage neighbor. “What are you doing here?”