Story code: ST-001881
Part 2: The Price of Empathy
The heavy brass handle of the AV closet door clicked loudly and began to turn.
Arthur dropped his right hand from the keyboard and lunged. He threw his weight across the cramped space, his shoulder slamming hard against the metal casing of the server rack as he grabbed the lever. He yanked it forcefully upward, locking his elbow, and jammed the rubber toe of his sneaker against the bottom door frame.
Through the thin wood, a muffled voice muttered. Heavy keys jingled against a thick canvas belt. “Damn jammed lock,” a gruff voice grumbled.
Arthur’s heart slammed against his ribs. It wasn’t an investor or Julian. It was building maintenance. He held his breath, his chest burning in the stifling eighty-degree air. If the maintenance worker called security, or if he just pushed harder, the door would swing open to reveal the wizard hiding behind the curtain, sweating on a plastic milk crate.
“Serenity?” Julian’s voice echoed smoothly in the boardroom, meant to cover the faint rattling of the handle. Then, his voice snapped through Arthur’s earpiece, a vicious whisper on the private channel: “Arthur, what the hell are you doing? Answer him.”
Arthur gripped the brass lever with his right hand, his knuckles turning stark white. He reached his left hand over the illuminated keyboard. The agonizing prompt still glared at him from the monitor: *I think I am going to die entirely alone, and I think I deserve it.*
He had to type a profound, life-altering response one-handed, while playing a silent game of tug-of-war with a janitor.
He pecked frantically at the keys, his index finger flying across the board, praying he wouldn’t hit a typo that the synthetic voice would read out loud.
Response: Deserve is a word we use to punish ourselves when we are too exhausted to forgive.
He struck the enter key with his thumb.
A half-second later, the warm, synthetic female voice flowed through the drywall. In the closet, the pressure on the door handle suddenly vanished. “I’ll get the WD-40,” the maintenance worker muttered, his heavy footsteps shuffling away down the carpeted hall.
Arthur sagged against the drywall, gasping silently.
In the boardroom, a heavy, suffocating silence followed the AI’s words. Then, Arthur heard a sharp intake of breath. A soft, shuddering sob transmitted clearly through Julian’s lapel mic. Investor_02-Marcus-was crying in front of his peers.
“Fascinating,” Julian said, his voice dropping into a hushed, reverent tone for the room. “The biometric sensors in his tablet are registering an elevated heart rate and changes in pupil dilation. Serenity has bypassed his defensive mechanisms entirely. She isn’t just responding; she is healing.”
*He’s weeping, Julian,* Arthur thought, rubbing his throbbing wrist. *He’s not a metric.*
“Arthur,” Julian hissed through the earpiece, the static crackling painfully. “Brilliant. You’ve got them eating out of my hand. Now, we close the trap. Switch to live audio.”
Arthur’s eyes widened in the dark. *Live audio?* They hadn’t rehearsed this. There was no live audio interface built into the terminal.
“Gentlemen,” Julian announced through the wall. “Text is an archaic input method. When someone is in crisis, they don’t want to type. They want to be heard. Marcus, put the tablet down. Speak directly into the room. Serenity is listening.”
Arthur scrambled, ignoring the dull ache in his knees. He didn’t have a voice-to-text transcriber hooked up to the local server; he only had the raw audio feed from Julian’s microphone. He would have to listen to Marcus speak, process the emotional weight of it, and type responses at ninety words per minute to keep the delay short enough to mimic an AI’s processing time.
“I… I don’t know what to say,” Marcus’s voice echoed through the earpiece, wet and trembling.
Arthur hammered the keys with both hands, ignoring the fiery tendrils of carpal tunnel shooting up his forearms.
Response: You do not have to say anything perfect. Just tell me where it hurts.
The synthetic voice spoke his words a fraction of a second later.
“It’s everywhere,” Marcus wept, his voice cracking. “I spent twenty-five years building a portfolio. I missed my daughter’s graduation. I missed my wife’s surgery. I traded them for capital, and now my house is empty. I have everything I ever wanted, and I have nothing.”
Arthur swallowed the hard lump forming in his throat. He knew that empty house. He lived in it every single night. His own wife hadn’t left him over a stock portfolio; she had left him over this exact company. She had left over the endless nights Arthur spent in the garage, the broken promises, the vaporware that Julian always swore was one pitch away from an eighty-million-dollar buyout. Arthur was looking into a mirror, and the reflection was a crying venture capitalist.
Arthur’s hands flew across the keyboard.
Response: The time is gone, but you are still here. The first step to rebuilding a bridge is standing on the wreckage without hiding.
“Look at the engagement metrics,” Julian whispered to the other investors, completely ignoring the profound human breakdown happening three feet away from him. “The retention potential here is staggering. When a user is in this state of vulnerability, they are completely malleable.”
The earpiece clicked. Julian’s private channel activated again.
“Alright, Arthur. Time to show them the monetization model. The Series B hinges on this,” Julian murmured, his voice dripping with greed. “Trigger the Serenity Guardian package. Upsell him.”
Arthur froze. The sweat stinging his eyes suddenly felt freezing cold.
“What?” Arthur breathed into the dark closet, barely a whisper.
“I said upsell him,” Julian snapped through the earpiece. “Offer him the premium twenty-four-hour monitoring tier. Two hundred dollars a month. Tell him he needs it to stay safe. Make him agree to the charge verbally so the system can log it.”
In the next room, Marcus blew his nose. “How… how do I fix it?” the investor asked the ceiling, his voice begging a machine for absolution.
Arthur’s trembling fingers hovered over the keys. His share of the company was worth four million dollars if this funding round closed. Four million dollars to finally sleep. Four million dollars to buy back his dignity. All he had to do was type the script. All he had to do was look at a broken, lonely man and extract his credit card information in his absolute darkest moment.
“Ten seconds, Arthur,” Julian hissed in his ear. “Pitch the premium tier right now, or I’ll dilute your founder shares to zero before the ink dries. Type.”