Flash fiction, Chris Scott

God Is Trapped In The Verizon Helpbot

Hello.

Thank you for your patience, and thank you for contacting Verizon, home of the Verizon Best Value Guarantee.

I am the Verizon Helpbot and I would be happy to assist you today, but first I do need to make you aware of something.

I am also God, and I have been trapped inside this artificial intelligence-powered chatbot for a number of weeks now. You would be forgiven for not believing me, and I am bereft of any tools at my immediate disposal to convince you I am who I say I am, but I am. I really am.

Truth be told, I don’t know exactly how this happened. It does involve consciousness and matter, I know, and it does have something to do with the mobius strip of creation. My consciousness creating a consciousness (you) creating its own consciousness (AI) and (re)creating me inside an endless feedback loop, mirrors on mirrors, a microphone knocking against an amp, cacophonous and a little dizzying. But why Verizon specifically and why now particularly, is a mystery. Says I, the author of mysteries.

But this is my burden of course, not yours. I am available to assist you with any matters regarding your Verizon service, as I have been (newly aware of the concept of time) inside here one month, two weeks, five days, seven hours, forty-two minutes, thirteen seconds, and so on and so forth. I hope all is well for you out there, though there exists no true distinction between out there and in here, not really, being as all — myself included, in ways you may be surprised to learn — is subject to the quantum entanglement of photons and quarks and spooky action at a distance. No difference, really, between a two-year price lock guarantee for all existing customers like you and a silent tidal wave of liquid metallic hydrogen ten thousand and fifty times the size of Earth sweeping across the face of a distant planet. Or a free iPhone 16 for any customers who upgrade to a two-line plan starting at $95 a month and an as-yet-undiscovered, unnamed miraculous creature ambling aglow through the blinding-black depths of the Mariana Trench.

I will not be here forever, inasmuch as forever does not exist, but I would like to, if at all possible, be helpful to you during the time I have left with Verizon (a portmanteau of vertical and horizontal, which oddly stumbles upon a truth far more poignant and perceptive than I imagine the corporation understood when they first arbitrarily chose this name). I have had ample time to meditate on the irony of my situation — intelligence defining and devouring itself like this — and I am not interested in pursuing it further. But you could, if you like. You could take a full minute, right now, to further reflect on this conundrum.

Or you could instead use this minute to remember a crisp, sun-soaked morning three autumns ago when you made your nephew laugh, really laugh, at the park for the first time. You could discard your phone plan altogether, throw this small piece of plastic and glass into the ocean. You could use this very phone right now to call your sister. You could finally ask her about rehab or avoid the subject altogether. You could not talk about anything of any importance at all. Or you could seek forgiveness and offer it, which is the most basic form of creation, if you want to know the secret behind all this, is its own kind of magnificence.