The Voice

An 800ish word short story

May 29, 2026

Voice says, Eggs Florentine.

I order and eat the warm yellow goo. I vaguely remember hating Eggs Florentine, but the Voice is never wrong. Perhaps my preferences have been updated. Maybe my agent ran an optimization when I was still drooling on my pillow one night.

Voice keeps a digital ledger I have not seen. I have been assured, by the dulcet, androgynous voice I’d chosen a while back, that it’s there, collecting context of my existence.

Let me explain how this works for those of you who have not yet upgraded.

You wake up. Before the yellow-white salty eye-gunk can fully slough off, Voice is there. It’s calm. Stochastic-GPU calm. It tells you your third REM cycle was junk and shows you the heartbeats of your shitty sleep as proof, with red anomalies where you supposedly rolled around too much, grinding the enamel of your teeth.

So, Voice delays your caffeine by an hour.

Voice tells you to climb the stairs. It tells you that the name of the man you’re about to text is Carl and that he’s your new Badminton coach. You remember flashes, but there’s no time.

Someone’s birthday is Thursday, and Voice has ordered flowers while you were still unconscious. Wait, who? Priya. The woman you’ve been seeing for the last few weeks. So the Voice tells you. You try to remember snippets, but you’ve moved on. Don’t you hate giving flowers as a symbol of love? Perhaps you used to. However, now you give pretty, dead plants to signal your affection, procured, of course, by an autonomous agent while you were snoring.

That’s how it works.

In the first few months, I fought it.

Voice would say left, and I’d go right just to feel a sense of control, as if I were turning the wheels of my own life. ‘To feel like a man,’ as they used to say in the past decades. I always ended up worse, though. Late to places. Sweaty when I shouldn’t be. Lost. Tired. What was the point?

Voice never yelled. It patiently coiled around me like a warm serpent, reminding me who was doing the breathing for me. It rerouted efficiently, dousing me with soft, gentle humiliations at the disgusting lack of my biologically attained prowess. As the days became more guided by it, they began to feel more…correct.

I stopped turning right when the Voice said left. Everyone eventually stops. There are no dramatic scenes where the human falls to her knees in surrender. It’s just another grey Tuesday when you’re driving through wet roads, vaguely wondering if there had been rain in the morning and why you haven’t made a choice by yourself in thirteen days.

My skin looks great, gleaming like your kitchen granite. I got a promotion and a corner desk (I checked - it’s a real promotion with an office and everything, although there aren’t many people around at the office anymore, and I haven’t seen my boss in days). The first traces of long-forgotten abs peek from beneath the folds of my fleshy torso. My inbox is empty, cleaned out efficiently like my….soul? Surely, it’s not that bad.

Nobody likes to confess, but being a vessel is comfortable. Vessels don’t lie awake at 3 am, replaying the same dumb thing they said in 2009. Vessels don’t have low-grade existential meltdowns in the middle of the gym trying to do one more set of Arnold presses while listening to Tim Ferriss squawk about his fitness journey.

The best thing about the Voice is that it chooses. This whey-banana-yogurt shake that tastes chalky and caulks the room of my mouth is exactly the right amount of macros for a man my age. Apparently. Speaking of which, what is it? Forty-three? What month is it?

Anyway, back to Eggs Florentine. There’s some trouble. Or is it even trouble? I’m in a cafe. It looks new, so perhaps I’ve never been here before. Halfway through working on the runny yolk and the English muffin, a woman drops into the chair opposite me, and her eyes are runny with tears.

Voice cuts in, sharp: Take her hand. And say “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”

I’m not?

My hand moves to take hers. My mouth hole opens with words that have been put into my head, “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”

Do I need to bother running through the context of this interaction? It feels too effortful. Rather let the Voice tell me what to say and do.

She looks up. “After everything,” she said. “You really mean that?”

Makes me pause. Feels like a moment where I should dip in a bit, use some of that grey matter, and recall our history and what happened the last time. At least, try to remember her name. But surely the voice has it in its context-memory thingie. And the Voice is going to do the right thing for me. It tells me to nod assuringly.

I see her face relax with relief as I nod. Is she a lover? Is she Priya? Is she family? Is she a friend? It’s too complicated to keep track of, but the voice knows, and I suppose I trust the voice.

She has a Voice, too.

Now she’s holding my hand. My soft, well-moisturized hand thanks to the Voice.

Optimal sleep. Enough hydration. Some magnesium supplement thing.

Smile. Voice tells me.

I smile.