Prologue...?
417 Words
Click.
Click.
Click.
Channel surfing was never fun in a public place.
Sydney spun around a few times in their office chair and glanced across the hotel lobby. Still no visitors. An old man waiting by the elevator gave them a dirty look they pretended not to notice. Whatever. He wasn’t the one paying them, and they couldn’t do anything about being bored.
Why did they get a job here, again? Nothing interesting happened here, and they had to deal with people like the old man who had stepped into the elevator all the time. It wasn’t like they were being paid to channel surf, though it sometimes seemed like it.
Being a hotel receptionist paid alright, by most measurements. Covered the bills and whatnot. Job security was better than average, since this particular hotel prized itself on “authenticity and human hospitality”. Whatever. They just didn’t like robots. But Sydney wasn’t about to pretend like they weren’t going to be replaced once a receptionist with a better attitude came around.
For now, though, channel surfing through the day was just fine. It let them support their grandmother. And they didn’t qualify for any better jobs.
They stretched, yawned, and muttered “sucks to suck” to themselves. This bout of critical thought would pass, and then they could vault straight back into doing nothing and thinking even less until the day they died. All it would take was a few more channel flips.
Get up, put on the uniform, sit at the desk and greet visitors with a smile that felt as robotic as the robots the hotel refused to hire. Go home. Greet grandmother. Pretend grandmother isn’t a geriatric pile of garbage who refuses to acknowledge them as anything but a money dispenser, let alone their past.
...Never mind. They weren’t going to stop thinking critically anytime soon. It almost made them miss their good old days of miscreantry and crime. Anything to empty your head, right?
Click.
Click.
Click. The junk remote, more scratches than plexiglass, locked up on a news channel. The very least interesting channel, in their opinion. They debated throwing the remote at the wall, but that had only worked once and got them fined for damaging hotel property.
An alert flashed across the screen. They almost ignored it until they read what it was saying. Then a second.
Well, now this was interesting. This was finally something to keep their mind occupied.
Sydney leaned in close to the screen and watched the chaos unfold.
- Writer
