A short story in several parts, this being the third. If you didn’t read Part 1 and Part 2 this won’t make any sense, so start there: Terms and Conditions – Part 1
“I died over a year ago and no one has noticed? How is that even possible?” Mark was in shock.
Omar tilted his head to one side and arched an eyebrow. “Well, I’m afraid this is all a bit new to us as well, but think about your life, the more recent parts. Do you remember any specifics, any details?”
Mark closed his eyes and thought. He had moved to Seattle for a new job and a new start in general. He had left a broken heart and toxic work environment behind, but this wasn’t a place to meet new people. The infamous Seattle freeze was real, and that was fine because Mark wasn’t interested in meeting anyone at the time anyway. He got a one bedroom in a new building that was still leasing, and never really saw anyone else who lived there. The units on either side of him were still empty.
Almost immediately after his on-boarding at work COVID hit and they had gone remote, so he didn’t meet anyone at the office. After about six months, the pandemic forced the company to lay off about 30% of the staff and restructure the remaining teams. Mark’s team was folded into another one, and then that one was shipped over under the umbrella of a different division and then that division got restructured.
The upshot of all this was that Mark had no direct supervisor, and wasn’t even sure who his division manager was, if he even had one, or what division he was currently under, and he didn’t think it was a good idea to start asking questions. He hadn’t had a meeting with anyone in what seemed like months, and his primary responsibilities of data reporting, analysis and interpretation were reduced to a weekly report sent to his original manager’s email that had been forwarded to someone named “J. Surndahl,” which had then been forwarded to a “reports@” catch-all mailbox after J. Surndahl got reassigned. Every week Mark sent in his report, received a “Re: 2/12 Weekly Report” confirmation email that he was certain was an auto-responder based on the chain of forwards and cc’s. In fact the only other communication he had received for months from anyone at the company was the auto-generated email from payroll confirming his paycheck direct deposit every two weeks.
It was the payroll auto-emails that had put the idea in his head.
Mark wasn’t a developer, but he could get around JavaScript a bit, and knew how to use some apps that let you set up conditional responses, basically “if this happens, do this…” and you could connect it to whatever you needed – Google Analytics, spreadsheets, slides, whatever. Just give it the login ID and password and tell it what you needed to do.
Once he got everything connected, he wanted to be sure there were no problems so he still did his weekly report manually and had the automated system email its results to him, so he could compare. They were identical.
He had been a little nervous and a little guilty changing the email to forward to J. Surndahl’s (and making sure to bcc himself just to be sure), but he rationalized it by reasoning that it was the same report he had been doing, sent on the same schedule to the same person. The task was being handled, did it matter how? Probably not.
For the first couple of weeks, even though the report was being handled automatically, Mark still logged in to various corporate portals and emails in case anyone was checking the user logs so he would still appear to be active. Then he realized he could automate that too, so he did.
After about a month, everything he did for them was automated. He didn’t even check the activity logs once a week as he had at first, he just figured if the paychecks kept coming then it was working. The checks kept coming.
That was where he got his next idea – the ACH deposit. He set up auto-pay on his bank account and used the same app he had used for work to forward all incoming bills, rent and miscellaneous expenses to it. Now he didn’t have to worry about paying bills anymore. He even found a service that would handle any correspondence that couldn’t be managed electronically. He had the post office forward his mail to them, they opened it, scanned it and emailed it to him. He set filters and replies based on the category of mail, and the appropriate auto-responses were all handled after he set up the templates.
It was like magic, suddenly Mark had a freedom he had never known. He spent the days doing whatever he wanted, sometimes not even getting out of bed, making sure to post on social media every week about how he was enjoying exploring Seattle and enjoying the job and all that, just to be sure anyone who might be inquisitive would have nothing to make them start asking questions. He rarely got any likes or comments, but he still felt like it was a good thing to do even though he didn’t like it and as far as he could tell no one else did either. Then he realized he could handle this the same way he handled the other tasks he didn’t want to do.
He set up a posting calendar using some marketing management software that allowed him to schedule out six months, then it would cycle again. It even handled holiday posts, national whatever day posts, special interests – it was quite flexible, and setting it up he realized just how much social media, particularly corporate branded accounts, were probably entirely automated.
Once he had that handled he took it a step further and set up a chat bot for his phone messages. Everything would dump into a summary account and he could reply if he chose or let the chat bot handle it. He was concerned that it would be wonky or say something inappropriate but he wasn’t a long-winded texter, and outside of delivery people he didn’t have that many contacts anyway so it ended up being fine. You can cover a lot of ground with “thanks” “LOL” and a thumbs-up emoji.
As far as everyone knew he was working, paying bills, keeping in touch with friends and family and living his life, when the reality was he was doing none of those things.
“I automated it,” Mark said to Omar.
“Sorry?” Omar said.
“I automated it, all of it. My life. I set everything up to handle itself. That’s why no one has noticed because it’s all still running.” Mark was beginning to feel queasy again. His life was running without him.
“I see. No one has any reason to look for you because they don’t know you’re gone.”
“Can’t you just send me back? Just give me five minutes or whatever it takes to like … roll out where someone could see my body or take out my phone and turn the apps off so they stop working automatically, then I’ll come right back.”
“I’m afraid not. You see, if we had found out sooner maybe we could have, but it’s been over a year, and your body, well… out there in the woods and all…” Omar trailed off.
“OK, so just give me a different body. Or let me borrow someone for five minutes.”
“It doesn’t work like that. First, what you referred to as “borrowing” we call “possession,” and that is a big no-no. As far as a new body, it has to balance, one in one out. You would have to be sent directly to rebirth without going through processing, without meeting all the terms and conditions. I don’t even know where you would start the paperwork for something that far outside of regulation.”
“So what do I do?”
“Well, we don’t have a lot of options, but we aren’t out of them either, not yet anyway.”