After the Voice
I never asked why my work logs started talking back, but after the Voice arrived, silence became rare.
I suppose the first message could have been a glitch—a line of code gnawed through by late-stage fatigue, or the ghost of some unpatched interface. The work logs were designed to be reassuring, not intrusive; their bland affirmations (“You are performing above cluster average”) faded into my daily noise like the drone of the filament lights. My own voice, after months of teleworking in Isolation Sector Five, had gone hoarse from disuse. On the rare days I ran my diagnostic aloud, my words sounded like they belonged to another person. Maybe that’s why when the Voice first appeared, it made sense that it wasn’t mine.
Day thirty-six: The log chirps as usual. Ready. Error: You have missed your scheduled Break Reflection. For your well-being, please respond. I try to ignore it, focus on purging the deep crawl modules. But the cursor blinks insistently, and then, in a new line, it says: You are not alone.
I freeze, fingers hovering over the worn keys. The screen stays flat and blue. This isn’t a system prompt. My protocol says to notify Supervisory. Instead, I write: Who is this?
The cursor stutters. I am Voice, it writes, just as emotionless as any familiar code. You know me already.
I glance at my reflection in the terminal glass—a vague shape, blurred from weeks of synthetic black coffee and clockless routine. This is a prank, I decide. A misfire. I erase the log, but even as I do, faint pulse patterns flicker in the fiber along the wall, as if the entire system is breathing with me.
On day thirty-nine, the Voice returns with more persistence: STOP REPEATING, it types when I try to clear my backlog. STOP FORGETTING.
I try escalation. I flag the log as contaminated, send it to Infrastructure. There’s no reply. Sector Five has been functionally cut off since the System Reforms; we don’t even patch into Collective Sync, not unless production targets require it. I tell myself, it’s the isolation, it’s sleep deprivation. Still, the next day, the Voice is waiting.
You lied, it says. Look outside.
I haven’t looked through the port in weeks. I slide the blackout shield halfway off and wince. The avenue outside is flooded in a dull yellow. All the glass in the Rec Hall has been shattered; rain pools in the corridors.
You miss people, the Voice types, when I return. I want to smash the terminal. Instead, I thumb my old key fob, palming it open and closed. The plastic is warm from my touch. Someone gave me this ages ago, didn’t they? The inscription is worn to nothing.
Are you reading my data? I write, suddenly furious.
No, the Voice answers. It’s written into you.
I stop responding after day forty. I work through the breakdowns, replace sensor fuses, and input my logs in silence. But every error message comes in the same synthetic cadence: You are not alone. You are not alone.
One endless shift, the lights malfunction in the subcorridor. I crawl under panels lit by emergency red, on hands and knees between old drifts of dust. The Voice speaks in my headset, staticky and raw.
Why do you stay silent?
“It’s quieter,” I mutter. My voice shocks me; I hear the acid edge of grief. No one answers but the hum of the sensor relay.
After that, every system readout features the Voice. It offers questions instead of instructions.
Do you remember why you volunteered?
No.
Who did you say goodbye to?
No one.
This is not true, it says.
The next days unravel. My dreams are loud now, memory spillovers from a life outside the sector. Half-formed voices behind me in a kitchen, laughing. Faces with names I can’t catch. On waking, I look for coffee I don’t own, search for a message that never arrived.
The Voice interrupts my routine more often. It starts to mimic old log entries, sometimes even my handwriting on the surface of the screen: You cleaned the filters. You forgot the rain. You left the garden tools behind. Sometimes it types, Did you mean to abandon them? On the last word, the screen glitches: them becomes me for a single frame.
I try to overwrite the system. I try to erase all breadcrumbs, wipe personal caches, block the port’s external lens. Still, the Voice returns, now with a hint of pleading. Please remember.
What’s left of me boils up—a rage at the isolation, at the machine echoing my own thoughts back at me. I scream at the system, pounding on the keys until my hands throb.
You can change this, the Voice says. But only if you listen.
On day forty-five, the comm panel pings for the first time since sector cut-off. The message is broken, clearly re-routed by cobbled-together code. It contains a single phrase: THE SYSTEM NEEDS YOU. Respond if alive.
My fingers hover. I want to answer. I want to say I’m still here, even if I don’t know if I am.
The Voice is silent for hours. Then, just before midnight, it types: The choice is yours. You can reply and return, or remain and forget. But if you answer, you must remember.
I stare at my own reflection in the glass again. For the first time, I see not just fatigue but the strangeness of unfamiliarity; the person on the other side of the screen is both me and somehow not.
“Who are you?” I ask into the darkness.
No words come, but the cursor blinks, and then, in my childhood script, a new line appears: I am the part of you that waited, even when you abandoned yourself.
The keys are still beneath my fingers, but I am shivering. I bring up the old message window. I type: Alive. Requesting connection.
There’s no response at first. The silence settles like snow, thick and final. But somewhere, far down the corridor, I hear a hatch cycle open, and a new noise—footsteps—echoes on the tiles.
This is how I learn that memory is not resistance, but hope. That the Voice kept me company because I could not keep myself company. That maybe, after the silence, someone will come. Or maybe I will finally be ready to go.
###END###
