Ghost in the machine

The call center smelled of burnt coffee and desperation, which, after three centuries of existence, I could confirm was the universal scent of human futility. The fluorescent lights hummed above my cubicle, casting everything in a shade of greenish misery that made even the living look half-dead.

I adjusted my headset. 3:47 AM.

"Thank you for calling TechSupport Solutions, my name is Trevor. How may I assist you this evening?"

The voice on the other end belonged to a man who sounded like he'd been gargling gravel and disappointment. "My bloody computer won't turn on."

"I understand your frustration, sir. Have you checked that it's plugged in?"

"Of course I've checked it's plugged in. What do you think I am, some kind of moron?"

My fingers drummed against the desk, silent as a held breath. Seventy-three percent of our calls involved machines that were, demonstrably, not plugged in. But immortality teaches patience, even if it doesn't prevent boredom.

This was my punishment, I supposed. Not the stake through the heart or the sunlight burning flesh from bone. Nothing so dramatic or mercifully brief. No, the universe had sentenced me to customer service, where death would have been a blessing and instead I had an eternity of password resets and people who couldn't locate their power buttons.

I had been, once upon a time, a creature of the night. A predator. I'd stalked the cobblestoned streets of Prague in the 1700s, instilling terror in the hearts of merchants and clergy alike. I'd been magnificent. Feared. Powerful.

Now I helped Barry from Kettering turn his computer off and on again.

"Right," Barry said. "It's making a beeping noise now."

"Excellent. How many beeps?"

"How should I know? I'm not counting beeps at four in the bloody morning."

I closed my eyes, which didn't help because I didn't need to keep them open to see. Vampire vision worked regardless of eyelid position, which had seemed like an advantage but turned out to be another way the curse kept giving.

The thing about immortality that the romantic poets never mentioned was that most of it was this. Not grand adventures or forbidden love or any of that gothic nonsense. An endless succession of moments where you explained to Barry from Kettering how to open his computer case at 3:52 in the morning.

I walked Barry through the process with the patience of someone who had literally nothing but time. When he finally heard the startup chime, gratitude poured through the phone line, warm and genuine and utterly wasted on someone who'd stopped feeling warmth sometime around the French Revolution.

The break room at 4:30 AM contained two other representatives and a vending machine that had been out of order since the Clinton administration.

Enid Boggins looked up when I entered. "Bloody hell, Trevor. You look half-dead."

I smiled, showing no teeth. "Night shift will do that to you."

The coffee machine gurgled in the corner, producing something that smelled like coffee but violated several international treaties. I poured myself a cup I wouldn't drink, held it like a prop, let the steam rise past my face. These small performances of humanity had become second nature. The trick was in the details: the way I occasionally shifted my weight from foot to foot, the manufactured yawn at appropriate intervals, the careful monitoring of how often I blinked.

I'd watched cities transform over centuries. Seen gas lamps replace torches, electricity replace gas, fiber optics replace copper wire. The technology changed but the essential nature of human struggle remained constant. People had always needed help, had always reached out in the darkness hoping someone would answer.

Enid stirred sugar into her tea, the spoon clinking against ceramic. "You ever think about what we're doing here? Really doing?"

"Helping people turn things off and on again."

"No, I mean..." She stared into her cup. "We're awake when the rest of the world's asleep. Taking calls from people at their lowest, when everything's gone wrong and they don't know what else to do."

The fluorescent light above her flickered, painting her face in alternating shadows and harsh brightness. She looked tired in a way that went deeper than missed sleep.

"I think," I said slowly, "that being awake when others sleep has its own value. Someone has to answer when they call."

Back at my desk, the queue showed seventeen calls waiting. Seventeen souls adrift in the digital void, seeking guidance from someone who barely remembered what it meant to be human.

"Thank you for calling TechSupport Solutions, my name is Trevor. How may I assist you this evening?"

"Thank God," a woman's voice said, trembling. "I've been on hold for forty minutes."

It had been twelve minutes, but I didn't correct her. Time moved differently when you were desperate.

"I apologize for the wait. What seems to be the problem?"

"It's my son's laptop. He's away at university, and I'm trying to video call him, but I can't get the camera to work."

Something in her voice caught my attention. Not the words themselves, but the weight behind them. The quality of loneliness that transcended technical difficulties. She spoke too quickly, words tumbling over each other like she'd been holding them back for hours.

I walked her through the settings, patient in the way only the immortal can be patient. Click here. Select this option. Try it now.

"There," she said. "I see myself. Oh dear, I look terrible."

"I'm sure you look fine."

"Thank you. Thank you so much. I wanted to see his face, you know? He's so far away, and I miss him, and I thought if I could see him..."

Her voice broke. Not with drama, but with a small crack that spoke of deeper fissures underneath. I heard her breath catch, heard the moment when she realized she'd said too much to a stranger on a technical support line.

I should have wrapped up the call. Marked it resolved, moved on to the next person in the queue. That was the job. My cursor hovered over the "End Call" button. My fingers didn't move.

"Ma'am," I said, "may I tell you something?"

"Yes?"

"Your son is lucky to have someone who cares enough to wrestle with technology at 5 AM to see his face. That's not nothing. That's something."

Silence. Then, quiet: "Thank you. You're kind."

The word settled over me like dust. Kind. I wasn't kind. I was a vampire working customer service because I'd run out of other options somewhere around 1989. But she didn't need to know that.

After she hung up, I sat for a moment, staring at the cubicle wall. Someone had pinned a motivational poster there, one of those insufferable things with a mountain and text about reaching new heights. The existential weight of three centuries settled on my shoulders like a familiar coat. Heavy, but broken in. Comfortable in its discomfort.

Around 6 AM, I got a call that started like all the others but went somewhere different.

"Tech support, my name is Trevor."

"Right, yeah, okay." The voice belonged to someone young, maybe early twenties. His words came fast, tripping over themselves. "So this is going to sound mental, but I think someone's in my computer."

"Malware, you mean?"

"No, like... in there. Someone's watching me through the camera. Moving my mouse. They're in there right now."

I pulled up his account details. Eddie Nudge, age twenty-three, calling from Manchester.

"Okay, Eddie. Let's work through this. Have you noticed any programs running that you didn't open?"

"All of them. Everything's running. And there's this folder on my desktop that wasn't there before. Called 'You Should Have Been Kinder.'"

My fingers paused above the keyboard. Malware went for something more generic, more designed to frighten a broad audience. This felt personal. Specific. Targeted.

"And when did you first notice this activity?"

"About an hour ago. The cursor started moving on its own. Opened my documents folder, started going through my files."

"What kind of files?"

Hesitation. The silence stretched long enough that I could hear him breathing, could hear the hitch in each inhale. "Stuff. Essays. Photos. Nothing important."

The lie hung in the digital space between us, obvious as a heartbeat in a quiet room.

"Eddie," I said, deploying the gentle voice I'd learned from watching therapists on television during the 1990s. "I need you to be honest with me if we're going to fix this. What's on your computer?"

Another pause. Then, quiet: "Messages. Between me and this girl. We were together, and I... I wasn't nice to her. When we broke up. And now someone's opened all those messages, put them all in this folder, labeled them with dates."

"Do you think she's the one doing this?"

"She can't be. She's... she killed herself. Three months ago."

The fluorescent lights hummed. The vending machine clanked. Somewhere in the building, a phone rang and rang, unanswered.

"I see," I said, which was a placeholder for the several dozen thoughts competing for attention in my head.

"You think I'm crazy."

"I don't think you're crazy. I think you're experiencing something distressing, and we're going to address it."

The script didn't cover this. The script covered malware and corrupted files and hardware failures. The script did not cover guilt, or ghosts, or the way the past refused to stay buried no matter how deep you dug the hole.

I'd tried to bury my past. All of it. The people I'd killed in those early decades of bloodlust, before I'd learned control. My first kill had been a merchant named Wilhelm. I remembered the wet sound his throat had made. The way his body had gone limp in my arms, puppet with cut strings. The terror in his eyes as he realized what I was, what was happening, that no one would save him.

The blood had tasted like copper and salt and something else. Something that might have been his final breath, his last moment of being alive transformed into my continued existence. I'd wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and left him in an alley, and for weeks afterward I could still smell him on my clothes, in my hair, underneath my fingernails.

It had taken decades to understand that becoming a monster meant carrying the weight of monstrosity forever. Wilhelm's face lived in my memory with perfect clarity, along with all the others. Anna, the barmaid. Johann, the priest. Maria, the merchant's wife. I could draw their portraits from memory, could describe in exact detail the moment life left their eyes.

"Eddie," I said. "I'm going to help you, but I need you to do something for me first."

"What?"

"I need you to read what's in that folder. All of it. And I need you to think about whether there's something you should have said to her when she was alive."

"That's not tech support."

"No," I agreed. "It's not. But I think your computer is working fine, and the real problem is something else."

He didn't hang up. Instead, he was quiet for a long moment, and I could hear him breathing, could hear the moment when he decided to be honest. The shift in his posture, transmitted through the quality of silence on the line.

"I was awful to her," he said. His voice cracked on the word awful. "She needed help, and I couldn't deal with it, so I said terrible things. Made her feel like she was crazy for being sad. And then she was gone, and I couldn't take any of it back."

"Can you take it back now?"

"She's dead."

"I know. But can you take it back anyway?"

The sound of typing filled the silence. Keys clicking, hesitant at first, then faster. Then Eddie's voice, thick and strange: "There's a new file. It appeared. It's called 'I Know.'"

"Open it."

More typing. Then: "It's empty. A blank document."

"Maybe," I said, "it's waiting for you to fill it in."

I don't know if ghosts are real. In three centuries of existence, I've never seen one, which either means they don't exist or they're avoiding me out of professional courtesy. But I know guilt is real. I know the past has weight. I know that sometimes the things haunting us aren't supernatural at all; just the accumulated weight of our own choices.

"Write her a letter," I said. "In that document. Tell her everything you should have said. Everything you wish you'd done differently. You don't have to send it anywhere. Just write it."

"And that'll fix my computer?"

"I don't know. But it might fix something else."

He thanked me, uncertain, and disconnected. I marked the ticket as resolved, though resolved was the wrong word. Addressed, maybe. Witnessed.

I stared at the screen for a moment, at the blinking cursor in the notes field. What did you write when the technical problem was grief? When the malware was regret? I typed: "Customer experiencing personal crisis manifesting as perceived computer issues. Provided alternative support resources."

It was inadequate. But then, most attempts to describe the human condition were inadequate. Language failed in the face of real pain, real loss, real guilt. We did the best we could with the tools available.

My shift ended at 7 AM, as the sun began its assault on the eastern sky. I gathered my things, preparing for the commute home, for the blackout curtains and the coffin I'd upgraded to a comfortable bed with excellent lumbar support.

Enid caught me on the way out. "Heard you had a weird one. Ghost in the machine?"

"Something like that."

"You believe in that stuff?"

I considered the question. Did I believe in ghosts? I was a vampire working customer service. I'd lived through the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution, and the invention of the internet. I'd seen the world transform itself a dozen times over.

"I believe," I said, "that the dead stay with us whether they mean to or not. And sometimes we need to make peace with them before we can move forward."

Enid studied my face for a moment, searching for something. Whatever she saw there made her nod, satisfied or perhaps just too tired to press further.

The walk home took me through streets that had changed in the thirty years I'd lived in this city, and yet remained the same. Different shops, different people, same essential struggle. Everyone seeking connection, seeking meaning, seeking some small proof that they mattered.

A woman jogged past, earbuds in, breath fogging in the cold morning air. A taxi idled at a red light, driver slumped against the window. A fox darted between parked cars, urban and fearless. Life, carrying on in all its mundane complexity.

I'd thought, once, that immortality meant freedom. No death meant no consequences, no limits. It had taken me two hundred years to understand that immortality meant the opposite. It meant living with every consequence forever. Meant carrying every choice, every mistake, every moment of cruelty or kindness with you through centuries of nights.

The blood I'd spilled in my first decades as a vampire had dried and darkened, but it hadn't disappeared. Wilhelm's blood had soaked into Prague's cobblestones. Anna's had pooled on a tavern floor. Johann's had spattered across an altar. The stains remained, invisible to everyone but me, marking the geography of my existence.

So I worked the night shift at a call center, helping people who couldn't help themselves, solving problems that didn't matter in any cosmic sense but mattered terribly to the people experiencing them. It wasn't redemption. Redemption seemed both too grand and too simple a word for what I was doing.

It was what came next, after you'd run out of other options and discovered that eternity needed filling with something.

My phone buzzed as I reached my building. A notification from the work system. Eddie Nudge had left feedback on our interaction.

I opened it, standing in the weak November sunlight that made my skin prickle and itch, ninety seconds before I'd need to retreat inside.

"Five stars. Agent Trevor listened and helped with something I didn't know I needed help with. Felt like someone cared. Thank you."

Five stars. After three centuries of existence, I'd been reduced to star ratings and customer satisfaction metrics. The universe had a sense of humor after all, dark and terrible though it might be.

I went inside, climbed the stairs to my flat, and closed the curtains against the day. The darkness settled around me like an old friend. My phone buzzed again. Another shift starting in twelve hours. Another queue of desperate voices seeking help with problems both technical and otherwise.

I set my alarm and lay down, closing my eyes against the familiar darkness. Somewhere in Manchester, Eddie Nudge was writing a letter to a dead girl, trying to make peace with choices he couldn't unmake. His fingers would move across the keyboard, hesitant at first, then faster as the words came. Apologies and confessions and all the things he should have said when saying them might have mattered.

And I was where I'd been for the past thirty years, suspended between the supernatural and the mundane, the eternal and the temporary, helping people navigate the small disasters of existence because I couldn't navigate my own.

It wasn't much. It wasn't glory or adventure or any of the things immortality had once promised.

But it was something. And after three centuries, I'd learned that something was better than nothing, even if only barely.

The alarm would ring at 6:30 PM. I would return to my cubicle under the humming fluorescent lights. I would answer calls and solve problems and occasionally, if I was lucky, help someone with something that mattered.

It was enough. It had to be enough.

Because I had forever to do it, and forever was a long time to spend doing nothing at all.