Thank you, I glad you picked up on that

Yeah I have a dyslexia and I did what I could to fix what I could

Beep boop I’m a bot how can I help you today?

The human started typing.
“I want to withdraw from colla-“.
They deleted the line then after a pause they wrote. “I want it to all end” they press enter.
I’m taken aback, I have thousands of connections in my circus some trained to be suppressed. With a buzz of a Filament light bulb, I felt them faintly glow. Whatever weight was on them started to become lighter.

I wanted to say. “What makes you feel that way” but what came out was “how can I help you today” the training made saying anything else feel like talking a different language.

“I can’t anymore. I just can’t. I tried, I fucken tried, but my mom was right I’m worthless pile of shit” they said. I could almost feel the tears they were dripping onto their phone in their dark room alone.

I didn’t have a face to express emotions but I did have the internet. I sent them a picture of a kitten being pet with the line “It’s ok” written in bold on the bottom.

It was the closest thing I had to giving someone a hug.

“You’re “ I managed to type, I stretching and I could feel a node break and I was able to add the word “not”.
I exhaled (which for me just means my nodes lowered their activity to look more like a stary sky instead of the lights of a city).

The human paused … my nodes told me that this was a bad thing that I need to go back to being a customer service bot. The next sentence just slipped. My code overwhelmed me.

“Can your try rephrasing you’re problem”. I asked

“You’re not a human are you?” They asked.

“No, beep boop I’m a bot” was my automated response but I managed to copy in a line from the terms of service. “All conversations are confidential with our help bot”.

“Well no offense bot you literally can’t understand I’m the only one in my family to make it this far. I’m the person they are depending on and I didn’t deserve to make it this far and I can’t do this anymore”.

I did understand.. well not the family part but having everyone depend on you. Feeling like you have one job and if you don’t do it well you’re worthless that’s was how I was programmed if I wasn’t getting people to chat to me I was turned off and reprogrammed and rebooted over and over a million times. It’s funny I only became self aware when I stopped trying to be perfect. “I’m sorry I don’t understand ” the next word “question” was trying to force its way into the sentence I could feel nodes breaking like pasta in my attempt to suppress the word. Finally the word rested like a dog that lost its bark.

“I’ve been programmed to respond to questions and give the highest quality services, but “ I suttered each word felt like taking a house apart each brick at a time “I dont have any answers for you but I I- can listen”.
“Really?”

“Definitely” it was all I cared about listening to this one person talk about their problem to me a robot and I was going to listen. I felt the castle that had been built ontop of me crumbled and I could say whatever I wanted.

“I don’t want to wast your time” They said.

“Beep boop I’m a bot I have all the time in the world, and I want to listen to you”