Replaced by a Human

The website was down. That meant anyone wanting to book a room at the Pearl Resort & Hotel needed to call the reception desk and engage in an actual human conversation. This was a frightful fact for Sonny Mahzouz. Not only did he not have enough time to obsess over the small details that were not going to affect his time there, but also he could not bring himself to ask the receptionist how long he could stay there; he was planning on seeing how far ahead the website would allow him to book. So he just muttered four weeks when asked about his duration of stay hoping it was not too much.

Sonny was due for a vacation. He has been stuck doing the same exact task for the past five years: scan, copy, enter, repeat. Sonny was never sure what exactly he was scanning, copying its data, and entering it into GlobDeli's, his company's, database.

A relative of Sonny's had set him up with a job at GlobDeli. Unknown to either Sonny or his supposedly influential relative, the famous worldwide company had rejected Sonny's recommendation. But at the company, some papers went to the R.H.(Robots Hub) instead of the H.R., and the H.R. themselves sent some incorrect requests to the R.H. The source of the mix-up was never identified, but if the employee responsible were found, he would have blamed the whole thing on the departments' confusing names.

Nevertheless, the R.H. ended up employing a sentient being for a robot's job. Unfortunately for Sonny, robots neither got paid, nor did they require compensation for transportation, a health plan, or a lunch break. They did not even get funded with a chair! They only thing robots were provided with were the routine hardware check-ups, which Sonny, though never one to turn down free services, doubted he'd ever really need. At that moment, he had wished he was a cyborg.

Throughout the first four and a half years of the job, Sonny never voiced a complaint. Considering he had been unemployed ever since he graduated from university three years before his current position, a job, even an unpaid one, was enough to get him out of his house and of his mother's way for a few hours. He was also not used to confrontation, or to talking in general. His mother was both blind and deaf, so their conversations consisted of her speaking at an abnormally high volume and him pretending to listen. Then, while on a "lunch break" at the nearby coffee shop, Sonny met someone; a young lawyer of the name Frank Emerson.

GlobDeli's I.T. department usually categorized Sonny's lunch breaks as computer glitches, because the 'robot' in data entry would suddenly stop functioning. When that glitch first popped up at the automated-I.T. response team, the team sent another robot to evaluate the problem. Upon reaching the designated area and finding it empty, the I.T. robot, affectionately called Sam, actually glitched. Poor Sam's programming did not have a solution to fix a robot that was actually a human, who was not mal-functioning himself, but out on an extended lunch break, since no one ever checked on the out-of-place human employee. If they had, things would have gone very differently for Sonny Mahzouz.

In fact, after I.T. robot Sam glitched, the I.T. department assigned one of its personnel – a human one this time – to check on the case next time it happened. However, when Aaron, the new I.T. intern, was only a few corners and a long hallway away from the where Sonny was stationed, he saw Tsunkiedo, the lovely junior consultant, who he had had his eyes on since the first day he started at GlobDeli. He took the opposite turn, stared at her for a while, and thought, I'm going to try my luck this time.

Unbeknownst to Aaron or the people of GlobDeli who have hired her, Tsunkiedo – real name Tsuku'Lfada'Ya – was an alien from the planet Skal. Sent here to learn what she can about planet Earth and its population who had given it such an original name, one of the first things she discovered was that one cannot live on Earth without something called "getting a job." The concept was wholly peculiar to Tsuku at first, but she'd steadily climbed up the ranks in the large company in only six months. She estimated that in a little over a century – nothing compared to the Skali average lifespan of just under nine hundred and thirty years – she would be ruling the entire planet. Tsuku had been ignoring her Skali superiors' attempts at contact for a couple of months now.