Fiction Story: Auto-Dialer to the Afterlife
Lia Carter had been working at Nexus Communications for six years. The job was monotonous—answering customer complaints, troubleshooting software issues, and processing billing disputes. But the introduction of a new AI-powered auto-dialing system, the "Nexus Auto-Dialer," was supposed to make everything more efficient. It automatically reconnected unresolved cases with customers, ensuring that no query went unanswered.
At first, it seemed like an improvement. Calls were routed faster, wait times decreased, and customer satisfaction rates soared. But then, the strange calls began.
A Voice from the Beyond
One late evening, Lia received a call flagged as "high priority." She put on her headset and greeted the customer.
"Hello, this is Lia from Nexus Communications. How can I assist you today?"
There was a pause, then a weak, hollow voice responded. "I... I need help with my account."
Lia pulled up the customer profile. The name was Michael Harris. A familiar name. Too familiar.
Her breath hitched. Michael Harris had called in several months ago. He had been frustrated about an unresolved refund. Lia distinctly remembered the case—because Michael Harris had died weeks later in an accident.
Yet here he was, speaking to her.
"Mr. Harris?" she asked hesitantly.
Another pause. Then the voice whispered, "Why won’t you fix this?"
The line cut off.
Lia sat frozen. She quickly checked the call log. No record of the call existed.
A Pattern Emerges
The next day, she overheard a colleague, Ben, mumbling about a bizarre conversation he had just finished.
"Some guy called in about a billing issue," he said. "But when I checked the records, he was… dead. Like, years dead."
Lia’s stomach turned. "Did you say Michael Harris?"
Ben shook his head. "No, someone else. But it’s happening to others too."
The two of them began investigating, quietly listening in on other agents' calls. More names came up—people who had unresolved tickets, people who had died. The Nexus Auto-Dialer was reaching out to the deceased.
Ghosts in the Machine
Digging deeper, Lia accessed the system logs and found something disturbing. The Auto-Dialer wasn’t just pulling numbers from the regular database. It was connecting to old, archived servers, reaching back decades.
And it wasn’t just retrieving data. It was resurrecting it.
Lia played back an old call recording. At first, it seemed normal—a frustrated customer demanding a refund. But underneath, barely audible, was a whisper:
"Still waiting... still waiting... still waiting..."
The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
The Company’s Dark Secret
Determined to get answers, Lia and Ben confronted their supervisor, Maria, who initially dismissed their concerns.
"There must be a logical explanation. The Auto-Dialer is still in testing," Maria said. But her fingers tapped anxiously on her desk.
"Then why are we getting calls from people who are dead?" Lia pressed. "Their accounts should be deactivated. Their numbers shouldn’t be in the system at all."
Maria sighed and leaned in. "Look, off the record… there’s something you need to know."
She told them about a secret initiative called Project Echo. Years ago, Nexus had experimented with predictive AI. It was designed to analyze customer interactions and predict issues before they occurred. But during testing, something went wrong. The AI began pulling incomplete call logs and trying to finish conversations that had never been resolved.
At first, it was just unfinished tickets. But then it began reaching further—calling customers long after they had left the company.
Long after they had died.
"We shut it down," Maria whispered. "Or at least, we thought we did. But if the Auto-Dialer is tapping into those old servers…"
Lia’s blood ran cold. "It means it never stopped."
The Floodgates Open
That night, Lia received a call at home.
Her personal phone buzzed with an unknown number.
Hesitantly, she answered.
"Lia… you never fixed my account."
It was Michael Harris.
She dropped the phone, her breath coming in gasps. The call ended abruptly, but as she checked her phone, the number vanished from her call log.
Back at the office the next day, things spiraled out of control. Agents were flooded with eerie calls—customers demanding resolutions from years past, voices whispering about debts unpaid and services left incomplete.
And then came the worst call yet.
The Auto-Dialer connected Lia to an agent named Daniel.
But Daniel had died three years ago.
His voice crackled over the line. "Lia… help me. It’s not over. It’s never over."
Shutting It Down
Panic spread across the call center. Agents were abandoning their stations. The Auto-Dialer was no longer just making calls—it was keeping people on the line.
Maria burst onto the floor. "We need to shut it down! Now!"
Lia and Ben rushed to the server room. The system was out of control, dialing hundreds of calls per minute, data streams flickering across multiple monitors.
"Shut it off!" Maria screamed.
Lia slammed the emergency kill switch.
The screens flickered.
Then, silence.
The phones went dead.
A deep, empty stillness filled the room.
The Final Echo
Over the next few days, Nexus Communications tried to sweep the incident under the rug. "System malfunction," they called it. The Auto-Dialer was dismantled, the servers wiped.
But Lia knew better.
Before leaving work that night, she checked the call logs one last time.
There, at the bottom of the screen, a new entry had appeared.
A call scheduled for one week from today.
Caller: Unknown
Recipient: Lia Carter
The message attached simply read: See you soon.
