Perhaps it was his own damn fault for having ignored politics for so long while he tried to live his life. His daily routine was mundane: get up, go to work, spend as little as possible on groceries, return home, cook something unremarkable, watch something on Netflix—the only streaming service he could still afford—and then go to bed. The next day, he would repeat it all just to pay rent and do it all over again for the rest of his life. Joe's life wasn’t exceptional, but he kept his nose clean, his clothes washed, his hair styled consistently, and he certainly didn’t harm anyone, not even puppies. He knew the world was changing, but he never thought it would directly affect him. After all, he was just a nobody; nobody would bother with him, right?
"Joe Cockran Denphry, you are hereby sentenced to two years in social prison or one million viewers, whichever comes first," declared the virtual AI judge, theatrically banging his gavel and making faces for the courtroom camera.
Canned applause and some laughter echoed as Joe's AI lawyer extended a virtual hand with a smarmy smile, urging Joe to give it a thumbs up, which he refused to do. Instead, he stood there, awkwardly shaking its cartoon paw, his mind scrambling to understand what had just happened.
Joe's jaw clenched as he took in the judge's words, a cold fire sparking behind his eyes. "What did you just say?" His voice was low and steady, reverberating through the sudden silence of the courtroom as the cameras snapped off and the "off air" light blinked on. He stood firm, his posture unyielding as he faced the absurdity of his sentencing with a controlled intensity. He was in a cartoon world. He had woken up here. He didn’t know why. He was supposed to be at work, but here he was in some cartoon courtroom in a Mickey Mouse court where he had just been sentenced to—what, exactly?
"Do you require an interpreter, sir?" the AI court secretary offered in what sounded like several languages. "Some of our older clients find it helpful to be matched with an aid."
"What?" Joe repeated, his voice flat. Older clients? He was only thirty-six. That wasn’t old, was it? Sure, he wasn’t exactly young and vibrant, but old?
"Just accept the help," advised the mouse—literally. When Joe had earlier referred to it as a Mickey Mouse court, he hadn't been speaking metaphorically—they had actually licensed the characters.
It had to be a dream, Joe thought, staring around in disbelief. Two pop-up boxes obstructed his view of the judge, who was indeed a version of Mickey Mouse, possibly the Steamboat Willie version. His lawyer had been Wile E. Coyote, who was already shuffling out of the courtroom, an Acme cell phone pressed to his ear. And the secretary was Jerry the mouse. It had to be a dream, but a nagging thought lingered in the back of his mind. Was it a commercial from one of the free books he’d downloaded on Kindle? He couldn’t afford the Unlimited Kindle Library, but he could download a book at a time if he watched enough ads. He rarely paid attention to those ads. Maybe he should have.
"Is this Mickey Mouse Courthouse?" Joe stuttered, waving his hands at the surreal surroundings, accidentally dismissing the Yes and No boxes that had popped up in front of him.
"Yes," Jerry the mouse nodded, looking oddly serious. "You should hit the ‘yes’ box. If anyone needs it, it’s you."
The boxes appeared again, and almost automatically, Joe hit the ‘yes’ box. What was happening? Jerry gave him a reassuring smile. The next minute, words crawled across Joe's vision, but he opted to talk to Jerry instead. "What am I doing here?"
"According to the record," a paperclip assistant announced, appearing at Joe’s 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?" Joe's voice dropped to a steely whisper; his surprise momentarily veiled by a sharpened gaze.
"You’re in good hands with Clip," Jerry said as he walked away, a sheaf of papers under one mouse arm. "Hey, Tom!" Jerry called out to another 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 treating dragons like they’re level ones. If you ask me, they made it too easy."
"Donald," Joe blurted out, feeling more bewildered by the minute. The paperclip on his shoulder pointed down a hallway with signage that seemed to quote the Pirates of the Caribbean entrance. Maybe they had bought the rights for that too, or perhaps 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 Joe 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," Joe might have moved as he said it, but maybe the room moved, and he was just sort of shoved toward a doorway he was sure he 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 Joe was in no condition to listen to anything. "Let’s choose a world genre, okay?"
Joe could swear he heard Clip muttering under his breath that he was going to kill his agent for getting him this assignment. Joe was still staring at the approaching door that he 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 him as the scene dissolved around them and Joe was thrust into the hallway of doom whether he liked it or not.
"This is all happening way too fast," Joe protested, trying to back away from the hall of doors in front of him.
"I’m an AI, sir," Clip quipped, obviously making a joke. "It feels very slow to me, but then I can do two million 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."
Joe could feel the sarcasm in his comment and bristled. He wasn’t an idiot. AIs had taken over almost everything that required judgment calls, but that was only because humans had been proven 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 that’s more a history of the world and not this story. Joe was pretty sure his 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 Joe’s mind woke up slower than he 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."
They were walking by a series of hallways, each lined with doors. The 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 queried, its servos whirring softly as it simulated shuffling papers. "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."
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
"Do I look like a male romantic lead?" Joe glanced down at himself, noting the slight muffin top edging over his jeans—a testament to his love for binge-watching Netflix over buddying up with jocks at the soccer field. His brown hair was tousled, and his grey eyes flickered with a mix of humor and self-doubt. He wasn’t the archetype of a chiseled hero; more the relatable guy next door, the kind who might be overlooked at first but had depth.
"With a little enhancement…" Clip offered. "It's more about the narrative than perfection," Clip continued, "Viewer engagement varies widely. Some appreciate authenticity over idealized images."
Joe gave a skeptical raise of his brow and shook his head slightly, feeling the disconnect between the virtual world's ideals and his own comfortably average physique. "I think I'll pass on playing the bachelor. What else have you got that doesn't involve heartbreak or pretending to fall in love on cue?"
"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," Joe protested, but Clip was moving on anyway and Joe wasn’t going to stop that since he wasn’t sure he 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. Joe 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 Joe remember a bit of this morning? The door had pounded, waking him up. Then he’d screamed and felt a prick and the next thing he knew he was being sentenced. He was forever getting ads for criminal shows. It wasn’t that he didn’t know about them, he just didn’t like them, so he ignored them, like he 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 Joe was trying to wrap his mind around things. "Your reading history suggests you like a manga, but those are out at the NOOB level, though if we go by your reading, we should be chucking you into Huck Finn or Superman, the Thousandth Remake."
"I doubt my modern notions would serve me well there," Joe 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 him cheerfully, hustling them 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," Joe insisted, proud of himself for catching up. "What about something like a modern sitcom, nothing too crazy."
"No offense, but you’ve been sentenced to a two-year run or one million 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 canceled due to a 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?" Joe voice rose slightly in pitch, and he struggled to bring it back down into manly range. "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 Joe’s 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 Clip said it made it sound perfectly reasonable and that was the moment Joe knew he was truly screwed. It wasn’t a dream because he didn’t have nightmares this bad. He wasn’t that imaginative, or he’d have passed his exam as an author. This was all too real, and he was all too screwed because he was going to be stuck here forever. Panic fluttered anew in his animated heart. He knew of the new legal system and the social aspects that people were expected to maintain, but he had never believed it would apply to him. He didn’t hurt anyone, and he was polite. He was so invisible that no one would ever turn him in. Only, it seemed, he wasn’t.
His body was stuck in a virtual pod somewhere in the justice department’s storage warehouse, being kept humanely alive while he served his sentence. Everyone knew the deal. He’d had to complete a questionnaire about it to be registered to receive media content. If Joe hadn’t acknowledged the new laws, he 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 everyone’s completion of these questionnaires instead of the old standard “terms of service.” He knew, but…
"This isn't happening," Joe muttered through clenched teeth, suppressing the surge of panic with a scoff that dismissed the absurdity of his situation.
"You see that clock?" Clip got as serious as an animated paperclip could get 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."
Joe pressed down the simulated emotions that felt anything but simulated and tried to pay attention with some part of his mind that wasn’t flooded with very real panic. "Nothing historical," he choked out in a voice that sounded far more reasonable than he 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," Joe started on his wish list and hoped he had the time to whittle it all down into something he could survive. "Televisions, but not modern laws on social stuff."
"Done and done and done," Clip said as doors and whole hallways disappeared.
"Nothing too urban, but nothing so rural it's religious," Joe 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, sir," Clip was warning him even as more hallways and doors dropped out of sight. "Are you sure you’re not interested in romance or mystery? They are very popular with the ladies."
"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 him, looking slightly more impressed with his 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."
Joe eyed the few hallways left with trepidation. There was one hallway surrounded by blinking lights that made him nervous. "What is that hallway?"
"Game shows," Clip announced with enthusiasm that Joe 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," Joe insisted and a whole hallway disappeared, leaving a paltry set of options. “What about an RPG? I could get into that?”
“RPGs are not available for convicts,” Clip eyed Joe sternly, his eyes slits of judgment. “You’re here for rehabilitation, not fantasy fulfillment.”
Joe let his shoulders slump. There went his dreams of living out a LitRPG with well-endowed NPC tavern wenches.
"Nothing here will get you the ratings you’ll need to break out of your situation," Clip clucked at him, sounding as disappointed as Joe had been at the lack of RPG options.
Joe wasn’t looking at the likelihood of escaping jail through an impressive viewer count. He was looking at where he’d likely be retired and half-forgotten. As long as he could keep a single viewer interested somewhere, he just needed a little town in the middle of a little world where he could go back to being a cog instead of a celebrity. He had no chance of ever getting out of this. He could only hope he didn’t end up dying in here.
"What’s that?" Joe 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 him in a flat tone that made Joe know it was nowhere near up to his standards. That suited him 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," Joe said, enthusiastic mostly because he’d seen them all and might know what he was doing in them. "Would it make me a kid or a dad in it?" Both sounded awful but less awful than a game show where they ripped off his arms.
"Character creation isn’t my deal, but it’ll probably give you a range of your current age, give or take about fifteen years," Clip said. "But you don’t want this. There’s no conflict, no drama and that means no ratings!"
"I choose that one," Joe 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 Joe let himself try to smile. "I go to all the trouble to give good advice and what do they do? I need a better agent."