[Originally
published by The Chamber Magazine, June 2021.]
I have been
trying to get help via the chatbot function of a certain airline. It is a very
straightforward request, requiring minimum human effort and research to fulfil.
After entering my name, I was told to “enter a valid name.” After getting my
nominal validity rejected for a second time, the only option was to return to
the main menu where the virtual assistant asked me what I wanted. Information,
I typed. “Enter your name,” it commanded and so again I did just that. Then it
told me to “enter a valid name” again! If Kafka, Phillip K. Dick, Edgar Allen
Poe, or Harlan Ellison were alive, they would have enough inspiration from the shenanigans
of artificial non-intelligence to write ten thousand more novels each. Does
anybody have the number of a time-travel agent offering one-way tickets back to
1980? Please PM if you do!
So went my
gut-angry Facebook post, posted in the angsty twenty-first century spirit of
emoting digitally. The post gained a few sympathetic likes, a few ROFL faces
(perhaps expressing some teasing recognition of my eccentricity) and nothing
more. The message, with its weary and cynical surface tone, never conveyed the
deeper, darker desperation at its core. It was read and disregarded in a few
seconds as the social networking site’s vast, fast flowing river of commentary carried
it off and away down the page-feed, submerging and obscuring it with equally
meaningless discourse.
It was October
2020 and ten days earlier, amidst the chaos and uncertainty of the COVID-19
global travel situation, I had been instructed by my employer in the Middle
East to return to the region to resume my teaching duties. More grim lockdowns were scheduled across the
U.K. and COVID marshals, orange bibbed enforcers of “social distancing,” were
emerging from the shadowy recesses of urban reality like the zealous descendants
of Cromwellian infantry policing a plague-filled London of the past.
Although all
flights were officially grounded between the UK and this country, both governments
agreed a very limited number of flights would be made available to repatriate expatriates
wanting to leave and vice versa. The university that employed me had mustered
all its influence to have its foreign faculty vacationing overseas placed on a
special permission to return list as “essential workers.” To get the one-way
ticket, I was instructed to contact a certain airline which would make the
arrangements. I was relieved by the news because at one stage during the summer
vacation, it had seemed as though none of us stranded faculty would be able to
return and would have our contracts terminated.
I clicked the link
to the airline’s homepage supplied in the message from my university’s HR
department. The busy landing page was packed with content. The top left area of
the page had a link to travel updates, while the top central area had a number
of informational drop-down menus on various flight-related topics. Most of the
page’s area was occupied by transitioning images depicting dependability and
satisfaction, from pilots and cabin-crew standing in unity, to glimpses of
exotic travel locations to planes in flight with captions such as “COVID
international flight regulations” next to their wings. I spent five minutes
scanning for a contact us link, which I found under the HELP menu. The
landline number and address flashed up on the screen and I dialled.
After just two
cycles of piercing ring tones the phone was answered by a cheerful recorded
voice welcoming me to the airline in Arabic first, then English. It prompted me
for my language preference. Then a female voice took over and offered a bewilderingly
long list of call path options. Flying had once been a simple experience, I
reflected while wishing the days of analogue transactions and people who
directly answered calls could be revived. I selected number 3, flight
reservations, and a third female voice, this time North American and
authoritative, told me that the call might be recorded for training and quality
assurance purposes. Then banal on-hold music followed. I listened for over ten
minutes, hearing the interrupting assurances that my call was important to the
company, and the reminders to wash my hands, wear my mask and keep my distance
with weariness. A virus-weary Britain wondered when friends could be met in
pubs again, and I wondered if I would ever work again. Then, I got the encouraging
change of tone and burst of optimism when I heard, “Hello?”
“Hello. I need to
make a flight reservation,” I said eagerly. “I know there are no official
flights, but I have special permission from the government to re-enter the
kingdom.”
“Yes. What’s your
name please?” asked the male voice.
I told my
interlocutor and was then surprised by the sudden interjection of a third voice
into the call, sounding garbled and metallic like when sound packets are lost
during mobile phone conversations. Some words were missing, but I heard:
“This one is
right. He has the right profile.”
“Excuse me?” I
replied, but the call abruptly dropped, and I was left with the familiar
high-pitched sound of a dead connection. I pressed the redial key and was
returned to the preliminary greeting menu, COVID precaution reminders, choices
and on-hold music. I waited for another ten minutes before hearing, to my frustration,
an all our agents are currently busy please call back later termination
message. I sighed and replaced the receiver, fearing that this process of
booking a ticket was going to become a victim of the year 2020. A doomed
mission infected by the virus of chaos and supreme disruption. I reminded
myself that I had a return timeline to obey and needed a booked flight quickly,
or I would soon be joining the millions of unfortunates whose livelihoods had
been burned to a cinder by this viral dragon’s fire.
I made a cup of
coffee and returned to the phone twenty minutes later, thinking that this break
would allow the obviously crazy volume of call traffic to subside. But I asked
myself, who would be calling the airline while the pandemic was at its zenith and
flights were officially cancelled? I redialled the number and got a duplicated
experience, the only difference being the inclusion of marketing messages
interspersed with the on-hold music and repeated please continue to hold entreaties
spoken like prompted parrots. I returned to the company website and noticed an
alternative customer service contact number in tiny characters hidden in the
corner of the landing page. I dialled it and got another variation of the
previous calling experience, this time ending with advice that I should call
another number which reproduced the same sequence and outcome as the previous
one.
After several
hours of being stuck on this dispiriting carousel, I tried the “contact us”
button which spat out social media links and invitations to “leave a tweet.” I
clicked on the company’s Facebook page and was confronted with a picture of one
of the airline’s 747s gliding through a clear sky over a crisp blue ocean.
Flecks of sunlight glinted off the water’s surface and the plane’s sleek
fuselage gleamed. To make contact, I posted a comment under the most recent
video ad in its news feed showing a relaxed looking family entering an airport
and checking in all smiles.
Dear XXXXXX,
Can you
please tell me the easiest way to get in touch with a customer service agent? I
need to enquire about flights.
I left my laptop
and went into town to do some errands and pre-departure shopping, for I expected
to be back at my desk in the Gulf imprisoned by Microsoft Teams and cornered by
docile, conniving students engaged in a lengthy educational charade shortly.
Truly, I regarded this return to online teaching as a form of spiritual
execution.
When I logged into
Facebook later that evening, I was annoyed to find no answer to my posted question.
In disgust, I looked at the buttons surrounding the company logo and a
prominent, bright blue one invited you to “Book Now!” for flights that almost
certainly did not exist—how could they with the pandemic? I then noticed the Messaging
icon next to it with interest.
As if telepathic,
the messaging app “greeted me” by popping out from the bottom of the screen. Was
this sophisticated bell and whistle going to actually help me, however? Would
it read and understand my sentences or just aimlessly respond with a vast menu
of pre-set answers retrieved from cloud servers slurping up electricity in
shabby data centres in the developing world? I clicked warily. I had experienced
interactions with these clot-brained programs that would have failed the Turing
Test and had Turing, from his grave, sending the programmers to Siberia for
hard labour with no hope of parole.
How can
I help you today Tom?
How on earth did
it know me? I typed I want to speak to somebody in flight reservations.
Would
you like to be transferred to a live agent? replied the app. Great,
I thought. I was just a cursor-click away from speaking with an intelligent human.
I clicked the grey shaded yes button and waited to be transferred.
However, only more
instructions followed.
Please
enter your name.
I shook my head at
the stupidity of the request, since clearly this supposedly intelligent technology
knew my name. However, I fed the app as directed, only for it to confound me
with its reply.
Please
enter a valid name.
“Are you joking?”
I asked the monitor. “This is my name!” I punched my moniker into the
keyboard again and the same result appeared synchronously.
Please
enter a valid name.
Agitated, I got up
and walked around my flat while contemplating this unexpected impasse that
threatened my progress. I wasn’t surprised, because I had suffered from faulty
interfacing software before. So much for AI, I thought cynically. I had only
contempt for cheerleaders of the colossal “artificial intelligence” cult
that seemed to be steering the world. Venture techno-capitalists, billionaires and
certain politicians were holding court in forums and TED presentations. They
were vomiting rhetoric about how technology, combined with a “reset of our
economic foundations” was going to deliver a sustainable utopia when the pandemic
had been beaten. I recalled the cliches of a former US presidential candidate
pontificating about how virtual currencies, AI and circular economies were
going to miraculously bring about humanity’s post COVID healing, like one of
those “magic swipe” mops sold on the cable shopping channels painlessly sweeping
away the poverty and suffering of the pandemic.
It’s a
digital world, moving at digital pace. Everything is moving faster—ideas,
people and goods.
I grunted
derisively at the politician’s enthusiasm. I certainly wasn’t moving at a
digital pace. I wouldn’t be moving anywhere except for unemployment if I didn’t
get on a plane shortly. I watched the chat-box warily, with all my trust now
withdrawn, waiting for its next capricious surprise.
I entered my name for
a third time, and the app frustrated me with different tactics when it
responded.
Would
you like to go back to the main menu?
My lips mouthed
expletives at the app. What should have been a routine request was becoming an
impossible one. I needed to complain to the company, but how could I do this
when no one answered their phones?
I redialled the customer
non-service numbers again and the same recordings told me how the calls
would be recorded for training and quality assurance purposes. After more long
periods of on-hold music, the recorded voice cheerfully told me nobody could
answer my call, but I could go to the airline’s Facebook page, it said, or
leave a Tweet.
Days passed. I
received harassing messages from my managers in the Middle East. Why hadn’t I
returned yet? The other English language instructors in my department had
successfully returned. What was I doing? Why was I stalling? I explained the
communication problems with the airline, but my manager responded with curt, sceptical
messages repeating that I should return as soon as possible.
I logged into
Twitter and located the airline’s page, which consisted almost entirely of
cyclical newsfeed advertisements. I posted a reply under a marketing montage which
implied that flights with the airline were profound, life-changing odysseys.
I need
to speak to a customer service agent urgently.
Hours later, I saw
to my dismay that my message had been shoved, unanswered, further down the thread,
which consisted of similar requests and questions from frustrated would-be
travellers. It was time to give the airline some blunt feedback, so I returned
to its Facebook page and deposited a complaint under the same “life-changing
journeys” ad.
You
have the worst customer service in the universe! Just how difficult do you
intend to make contacting a customer service representative?
I logged into
Facebook a few hours later and saw the following underneath my message:
Kindly
contact the concerned department to assist you thank you.
While I thought about
my next play in this imbecilic game, I saw a new message in my Outlook inbox. It
was from the university.
Dear Tom,
This is
to remind you that failure to report for duty to the university’s HR department
by November 1st could result in the termination of your contract. Please
return as soon as possible. The semester is about to begin.
I sighed at the
obtuseness of Brad, the bearded American millennial who ran our English
department with humourless heavy-handedness. What use was it even trying to make
him understand my progress was at the mercy of this infernal app?
As I sat at my
desk waiting for my laptop to boot the next morning, it occurred to me that this
hopeless, obstructive interface, along with its internet “accomplices” had
paranormal powers which seemed to feed off and thrive on the agitation it caused
me. There were also times during my futile exchanges with the virtual agent app
that I sensed a presence watching me from the other side of the monitor,
observing and monitoring my exasperation.
When I next logged
into Facebook, the airline had hijacked my timeline with a column of perpetual advertising.
Picture after picture of satisfied, grinning passengers reclining in business
class seats with drinks on their tray tables and photo-shopped clouds
surrounding their midriffs faced me.
“These bastards are
actually taunting me!” I muttered incredulously.
The CHATBOT app, as
if to mock me, popped open.
How can
I help you today Tom?
Foolishly, I was
lured into the hopeless interaction loop again, following the prompts, entering
my name, having my “invalid” name rejected, receiving the familiar,
demoralizing message that I had the option of being transferred to a customer
service agent only to be asked once again to enter my name-that-would-be-rejected.
I tried calling
again, but when I dialled the customer non-service numbers, a recorded voice
said that due to COVID19, the company was experiencing a very high volume of
calls. It added that the call would be recorded for monitoring and training purposes.
After five minutes of generic, melodious tunes the line simply went dead and
five redials later came the same result.
Vexed, I searched
online for reports of similar experiences from other frustrated would-be
customers. Perhaps there was a chat-board or forum I could use for help? However,
I found nothing. On the contrary, passengers had only glowing, enthusing testimonies
to give about their experiences with the airline in their ratings on the airline
review sites. Clusters of satisfied customers gave the company five stars
overall for its customer support. I must be experiencing this company in an alternative
dimension, I thought. To break away from this tiring mind-game, I went for a
walk in the park opposite my flat where the refreshing chill of an autumn breeze
and the enchanting air ballet of crisp brown leaves pirouetting calmed me. I
sat on a bench marvelling at this choreography of nature. It was primordial and
authentic, unlike the digital pest that was bothering me. I heard the faint, familiar
rumble of an airliner above and watched its wispy trail make snail-speed
progress across the sky. “That’s where I should be,” I muttered forlornly.
I got back inside
my flat and went to the kitchen to seek comfort in coffee. When I picked up my
smartphone, I saw a voice message from Brad in WhatsApp. Sighing, I tapped the
black arrow with uneasiness.
“Tom, I’ve just been
talking to the Dean and since the university has provided you with a means to
return, and that other instructors have managed to find their way back without
any difficulties or delays, the Dean of Faculty Affairs is giving you until
next week to get on a plane, get back into the country and report for your work
duties. I can’t buy you any more time I’m afraid. It’s up to you to get yourself
organized and get back.”
Exasperated, I
pressed the record icon, held the phone screen close and unloaded my exasperation.
“Brad! I am trying
to get back dammit but I’m dealing with an impossible airline that’s
impossible to get hold of in any way whatsoever. If it doesn’t answer my calls,
e-mails or Facebook messages then what the hell am I supposed to do? Its
chat-bot has been designed by a drivelling Satanic imbecile. Do you understand?
And since the university insists that I use no other airline I am stuck
going around and around with its nonsense.”
Not wanting to see
or hear Brad’s reply, I turned off my phone. He was certain to interpret my
response suspiciously, probably imagining I was looking for alternative work
somewhere in the napalm-scorched earth of the English language teaching
business’ post-COVID job-market. Brad ran our department and kept our online classes
of dubious educational merit running with banker-like efficiency. He made sure
that our paymasters were satisfied for the sake of his own superannuation and
wasn’t about to plead for more time or any sympathy on my behalf to a committee
of men with the empathy of chainsaws. If I wasn’t back within a week I would be
fired, and I would never see the severance pay I had accrued over a year.
I pressed the
power button on my laptop and faced its screen, with the hypnotic aqua-blue glow
of the rectangular Windows logo appearing like the spectral gatekeeper of this
CPU generated realm of stress and confusion. I surveyed Yahoo UK’s homepage
with exhaustion and ennui, skimming the click-bait with weary disdain. A C-list
celebrity from the 1990s was complaining that her 38 cup breast implants had
wrecked her career while one of her clones further down the huge menu of
ephemeral, mind-corroding dross was “opening up” about her unsatisfying
sex-life.
“Is nothing
private these days?” I asked the monitor and was shocked when the said
has-been, a former Big Brother contestant once briefly elevated to the “B-List”
for fornicating in a toilet with a Premier League “bad boy” footballer, winked
at me saucily.
I logged into Facebook
and surveyed my homepage. Hundreds of people, some of whom I’d met once three
decades ago or not at all, were simultaneously engrossed in the compulsive click-and-post
rituals of this abnormal virtual temple of sacrificed privacy and cannibalized life.
Some friends had posted breakfast photos, replacing the food they’d shared remotely
the day before with a muffin in exchange for the blue-thumbed payment of
approval. Others shared doctored images of politicians they didn’t like with
acerbic captions embedded while others ranted vengefully about the latest viral
social injustice. With each log in came the same string of strangers the
website was determined to connect you with. People you may know. Friend
Recommendations. People I never knew grinned mindlessly at me from the JavaScript
conveyor belt of social pot-luck offerings.
I needed a plane
ticket urgently but was no closer to the breakthrough of reaching the customer
service agents, who were unreachable beyond this impenetrable wall of faulty
high-tech software and deceptive web pages that shone, lit up dark rooms and
dazzled the eyes but led nowhere. The internet was becoming a mirage, and I was
now convinced the airline and its unreachable customer service agents simply
didn’t exist. Was the entire operation an elaborate practical joke? Or just a
nightmare?
The thought of
facing the chat-bot for another turn of merry-go-round depressed me but I
steered the cursor up to the Search Facebook box. My action didn’t feel
voluntary; it was as if something else had seized control as it typed the
airline’s name into the box and summoned the company’s page. The virtual helper
sprang up like a jack-in-the box.
How can
I help you today Tom?
Piss off! I
typed. Its endless tormenting had driven me to drink that past week, and the
stress that came with the increasing urgency to get my flight arranged had
prompted me to start smoking again. Squashed butts filled an ashtray on my
kitchen table, along with an empty glass pungent with the smell of consumed
whisky.
Well,
look who’s in a bad mood today!
I blinked and let
out a low grunt of disbelief, but almost in the very same instant the message
reverted to How can I help you today Tom? Perhaps my eyes had deceived
me. The insomnia of the previous two days had left me in a woozy, barely conscious
state where perception could be compromised. I was exhausted and wanted to go
and lie down for a couple of hours before facing this excruciating riddle again.
However, once again I sensed the app controlling me and forcing me to type the
same tedious plea to be connected to a customer service agent in flight
reservations. I obeyed the prompt to enter my name and watched the name
rejection message appear followed by the option to be returned to the main
menu.
I then typed the
message that opened this story, a summary of the company’s abysmal customer
support technology and my desire to step back in time to the off-grid era of
simpler transactions and no usernames, passwords or virtual mazes. After I had
posted the message, a new pop-up from the chat-box appeared.
You’re
getting flustered there. Relax. Don’t hate us. We’re your friends! We’ll
personalize everything for you. We’ll make your experiences unforgettable and convenient.
Then when I
screwed up my eyes and looked again the message simply said please enter
your e-mail.
“I give in. That’s
it,” I told the screen while waving an imaginary white flag. “You’re costing me
my job.” I clenched my fist and shook it at the screen.
Please
enter your e-mail.
“Oh, what the
hell! Have it!” With this, I gave my e-mail to the chat-box, shut down my
laptop and went into the kitchen to find the whisky and ice.
Later that night,
the weird, episodic dream I had was ominously symbolic of my recent experiences.
One moment I was hunched in front of the laptop, watching myself from above like
an astral traveller. I was struggling as with my real waking experiences of the
previous few days, banging in the futile letters of my “invalid” name into the
keyboard for the app’s spiteful amusement. Next, I was in front of the Great Sphinx
which, instead of being in its familiar Giza location, was situated in some
vast industrial wasteland surrounded by mountains of discarded technology—particularly
hard-drives and PC monitors—reaching high into the sky. Matted blood was caked
around the edges of the creature’s mouth that had the glossiness of real flesh and
not limestone. It turned its massive head and imposing jaws towards me. Its eyes
were disconcertingly human and incongruous with the monstrous body it
displayed.
“Tell me, weary web
surfer, when you can’t go forward to get what you seek, what is the wisest way?
Solve this riddle and you can summon human customer service agents at any time
you desire!” bellowed the animal in a stentorian voice that carried with it the
terrifying menace of millennia.
“I’ll pass on your
challenge,” I answered. As I turned to run, I saw a giant version of the
chisel-jawed politician from the NGO who’d been cheerleading on Yahoo for the
grand high-tech global reset emerge from behind an IT trash mountain. He gave a
macabre thumbs-up to the animal. I turned back towards the Sphinx and shouted,
“When you can’t go forwards, you need to go backwards!”
The monster purred
and its leonine head turned to me. “You’re right, clever man,” it said and
swept up, with one of its paws, several grey victims from the vast human feed column
in front of it. It chewed the bodies, covering the torsos with saliva as it
drooled over the morsels. Strangely, these people didn’t scream or resist as
they were eaten alive but went to their deaths with a kind of docile joy. I
wondered what riddle they’d failed to answer as the dream landscape underwent a
nebulous transformation and I was now in the reclining business-class seat of
the flight that I’d spent the last few days seeking customer service agents to
book. I was elated. Triumphant. I had finally secured my prize! My patience and
determination had been rewarded. I felt secure in this luxurious cabin, and the
glowing amber sunset emerging in the icy, desolate beauty of the Troposphere
outside my cabin window filled me with sleepy serenity. Android flight
attendants with mannequin faces brought me a meal of lobster and champagne.
“Now this is travelling
in style!” I said, noticing but not caring that my fellow passengers in the
spacious cubicle seats to my left and right were nothing but indistinct dark
blurry shapes. A question intruded into my dream consciousness, floating like
teleprompt text above the seat in front of me in upper-case.
HOW DID
I FINALLY MANAGE TO GET HOLD OF A CUSTOMER SERVICE AGENT AND MAKE THIS POSSIBLE?
Suddenly the
champagne in my glass tasted despondently flat. I looked down and instead of
legs of lobster there were, piled high on the plate, the bulbous chat-bot
messages all bearing the dreaded message of the last two weeks along with the WhatsApp
messages from Brad forming a hideous, inedible and excruciating topping. I
threw the plate up into air and the messages became emojis with malevolent
faces that floated to the floor like fragments of Satanic tinsel.
A threatening and ominous vibe took over the dream, and the passenger in
the adjacent seat to my left suddenly changed from a hazy, indistinct shape
into a clearly recognizable man. He was well-groomed with thick, slicked-back,
jet-black hair, delicate features, and rather prominent, crooked ears. However,
his most noteworthy features were his haunted eyes that were possessed by intense,
unbearable poignancy. When he turned and looked at me, a lifetime of torment
and regret possessed his gaunt face, imprisoning it in eternal anguish. His
dark, woollen three-piece suit was from another century, and he emitted a foul
odour suggesting a terminal disease. He watched me with a forlorn expression
for a while and then spoke in what sounded like German, which the dream
obligingly translated with floating subtitles.
“When I shaped
hapless Joseph K from the sloppy clay of my imagination and had him scramble
hopelessly through the pages of The Trial, I could not foresee that that
was merely a naïve taster of the future. A preview of the giant prison of all
souls that we’re sprinting towards. Our cells are being readied and we shall
occupy them happily with digitally induced non-resistance and entertainment being
the ultimate lock with no key. You can’t stop it. We will do the bidding of the
digital gods.”
Suddenly he started
to cough violently, clasping his chest as though it was going to explode. Then
a thick jet of blood and mucus spurted out of his mouth, covering his jacket
and some of his seat in a huge claret-coloured patch. When the fit stopped, I
passed him a napkin and he wiped his mouth with a shaking hand while the flight
attendants had disappeared.
“Thank you. This
is the COVID19 of 1924, ja? Accept your destiny with courage.”
With this he
vanished, and the cabin started tilting from side to side. I wanted to ask him
if this was dream turbulence, but then realised he was no longer there. The
plane lurched to one side yet there were no Hollywood screams in the cabin. An
oxygen mask dropped from the compartment above and when I grasped it, it spoke
in the familiar voice-on-hold, call-queue dulcet tone that I’d grown accustomed
to over the past week.
“Thank you for
your call, which is important to us. Due to the high volume of calls we are
receiving you may experience a longer than normal waiting time. Calls may be
recorded for training and customer service quality assurance purposes. You are
currently number twenty-five thousand two hundred and nine in the queue.”
I wanted to get
off this jinxed flight and out of this jinxed dream which was clearly a
spiteful psychic contrivance of the airline which sought to disappoint and
frustrate me both in wakefulness and sleep. However, when I reached for my seatbelt,
it had become a padlocked chain and in the next instant, I was confined in a
straight-jacket. On the in-flight entertainment screen, the Facebook page
appeared and the moment I thought about the chat-bot it too appeared, with its
speech balloon magnified many times showing a giant please enter a valid
name. Dismayed, I looked out of the window and saw that the plane had nearly
finished its descent and on the strip of field next to the runway PLEASE
ENTER A VALID NAME was painted in giant white lettering followed by PLEASE
ENTER YOUR E-MAIL. I woke up flustered and sweating.
Next morning, the
message How to enter your valid name was in my bloated Yahoo inbox. Its bold
lettering, denoting its unread status, beckoned my cursor. When I clicked it,
the following message appeared:
Dear
Tom,
We are
sorry to hear that you are experiencing difficulties trying to contact us. To
solve this problem, please enter your name into the chatbot backwards. If this
fix does not work, please contact us by e-mail and we will be happy to assist
you.
The message wasn’t
signed but the sender’s e-mail address at the top was a generic “do not reply” one.
So, this company’s inverted logic continues, I thought. It tells me to enter my
name backwards and then offers help through a do-not reply e-mail address. They
are amazing!
I struggled to
recall a notion from my nightmare that was germane to this, but there was
nothing tangible I could salvage from the dissolving residue of scenes and
impressions from the dream sequences. However, after some concentration I
latched onto something significant I had said, to a mythical monster, before a
calamitous journey on a plane had begun.
When
you can’t go forwards, you need to go backwards!
So that was it—reversal!
The inversion of things. Doing things backwards to get results. It was
certainly a principle that ruled this cretinous airline, but why on earth would
they tell me to do something as perverse as enter my name backwards into its
defective application? How would that work exactly?
Feeling
galvanised, but also wary, I arrived at Facebook and found my way to the airline
homepage. I didn’t even need to move my cursor over the message tab. The app’s
white column popped up from the bottom of the page.
How can
I help you today Tom?
It amazed me that
the application had such a poor memory for such an allegedly sophisticated
example of AI. The app predicted my moods, read my mind and anticipated my
decisions at the keyboard and yet it couldn’t remember the topic of our last failed
interaction?
I wrote my name
backwards in pencil first, to make sure each alphabet character followed in correct
order. As I did this, I heard a familiar prophetic sentence:
Our
cells are being readied and we shall occupy them happily.
But it was too
late to dwell on its cryptic subtlety because I had already typed out my name
backwards and hit the enter key. I was then, in the words of the Manfred Mann
Earth Band song, blinded by the light. It was a light that burst out of
the keyboard with the dazzling intensity of a supernova and filled everything
in my field of vision. I was in white space and felt weightless. In this
disorientating new infinity, I imagined this is what UFO abductees experienced
before the frightening extra-terrestrial doctors appeared.
It was icy cold in
this space, and I shivered, clasping arms around my naked torso. I felt the
solid resistance of something behind me. It was an invisible boundary. An edge
or wall in this mysterious, unearthly place. I backed into it and slid down
until I was nothing but a pathetic and disconsolate figure, abducted from the
three-dimensional world that was my home and to which I knew instinctively I
would never return. I was full of heavy terror. After an indeterminate period
of time, I heard a voice.
“Is there no way
out of here? Are we trapped?” asked an anxious female voice in a neutral accent.
“Yep. That’s it.
We’re done for,” replied a man with a similar accent, before adding, “We’re
part of the operating system now. Our bodies are gone. We are just virtual
ciphers processing commands.”
I called out to
them, but they did not answer. So, this was actually hell I had been lured into
and I had never imagined its entry portal would be a laptop computer screen. I
had to admit the ingenuity of it. The perfect concealment hidden in plain
sight. No darkness or fiery pits, just blankness and a bright void. My distress
increased; I had been denied the chance to say farewell to my parents and
friends before this abrupt and shocking end to my physical life. I had read
about the Gnostics and always been curious about their version of divinity that
came when physical mortality ended. Wherever I was, heaven was nothing like
this spiritually sterile world.
Then, the
vibration started. It was a low, droning hum which caused tremors in my muscles
to gradually increase. Suddenly, the visible colour spectrum appeared, which each
colour passing through me and causing a burning sensation. I was then pulled
forcefully forward and when I went through red the sides of an azure tunnel
appeared. Light shone through gaps in it and my consciousness alternated
between awareness and blankness at regular intervals, with 0 and 1 becoming a
binary cycle that represented my “birth” and “death” at split-second intervals.
I was now electrical current forced through circuits and a prisoner of the CPU.
Next, I was
propelled into landscapes of code and then dense bit-string oceans where I
drowned in commands. I was taken to sites where I was forced to execute commands
such as open pop-up windows to entice people in and rob them of their time and
activate code sequences of Trojan virus e-mails so that they could possess
vulnerable operating systems in one key stroke. My data enabled parasite and
scammer e-mails to bypass spam folder coordinates to maximize the chances of
their mendacious objectives succeeding. I upgraded malware and supported predatorial
software in its search for victims. The inter-dimensional intelligence directing
my back-end actions in the operating system was ravenous for human data and so
forced me to lure people onto social media sites and get them hooked on posting,
chatting and completing endless surveys and phoney petitions. It was my
responsibility to make sure that failure to engage with the web pages every day
left them feeling empty and depressed. My coding ran through game architecture
more addictive than crack cocaine. The victims offered their psychic veins with
gratitude, clasping their consoles like Pavlovian canines as the gameplay credits
and money flowed. Once hooked, our adrenalin addiction algorithm made sure they
didn’t stand a chance.
My nefarious work
continued. I blocked password recognition for people, frustrated their
financial transactions and helped construct gold-standard phishing sites. Sometimes
my 0/1 cycles animated grotesque pornography and stole the credit-card details
of the unwary, lust-driven fetish chasers. My form merged from one job to the
next and my assignments increased in their scope of wickedness and depravity. I
was soon doing jobs for the dark web titans, such as executing buy commands for
drug traffickers, terrorists and worse. While never totally happy in my three-dimensional
previous life, I had at least adhered to a moral code and lived with an untroubled
conscience. Now I was merely subservient software doing the bidding of demons.
From the other
side of the monitor, behind my curtain of pixels, I watched the vacant eyes under
the spell of the applications. We told them the future was digital and that AI
was extending its benevolent hand to take away humanity’s troubles. The giant
prison was nearly finished, and the cells were nearly ready. To my surprise, the
cadaverous face of the mysterious consumptive traveler from the dream plane
appeared before me in front of the monitor. He looked at me ruefully and shook
his head. Then a tear streaked down the gaunt cheek of his pallid face.
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