Unsavory Person

a short story

Meet Wilma Rogers, an ordinary woman living an entirely ordinary life. She has no enemies, a few friends, and a job that is interesting enough, although she wishes it paid a little more. In short, Wilma is moving through life just fine.

What Wilma is about to learn, however, is that being ordinary is no safeguard against becoming an unwitting victim to certain nameless, faceless forces, forces beyond one’s own control. Though not exactly malevolent, they wield an immense power to do harm.

Wilma is about to find out that no one, no matter how ordinary, is beyond the reach of… The Midnight Vault.

Wilma woke up one chilly Thursday morning in good spirits. She normally woke up in good spirits, but today she felt especially pleased. In part, this was because a three-day weekend lay ahead of her, time she intended to put to good use by catching up on her TubeFlix backlog. But Wilma was also excited because today was the day she would be recognized at work for achieving exceptional, above-average results on all her key performance indicators, or KPIs, for the quarter that had just ended. Today there would be cake and soda in the break room in her honor, and she had been promised a plaque commemorating her accomplishments.

This was, hands down, the most exciting day in Wilma’s entire career so far. After twenty-two long years in the workforce, she was finally, finally on the verge of being celebrated for all her hard work and dedication.

She rose from the bed humming, then walked into the bathroom to shower and brush her teeth. As she shampooed her hair, she envisioned the plaque with her name on it, mentally hanging it in different places around her cubicle, trying to determine where it looked the best.

Breakfast that morning was the same thing she ate every morning: low-fat peach yogurt with Grape-Nuts. Julius, her one and only romantic partner, had turned up his nose once when she’d mentioned liking Grape-Nuts, stating that he preferred eggs and bacon. It had been the beginning of the end of their three-week dalliance.

Wilma took the bus to work every morning. She’d considered buying a car, but her one-car garage was where she displayed her valuable Beanie Baby collection. Not wanting to rehome the Beanie Babies, she’d decided she hadn’t needed a car. The bus went straight from the street where she lived to her office, and Wilma never really went anywhere else but to work and back home.

At the bus stop, Wilma waited eagerly, her excited breath fogging the cold air. In one gloved hand she clutched her blue insulated lunch bag with its tomato sandwich and carrot sticks inside.

The woman in the purple hat standing next to her gave her a strange look, then moved to stand farther away. Wilma sniffed discreetly in the direction of her armpit, trying to remember whether she had applied deodorant that morning. But then the bus arrived and Wilma forgot all about it, absorbed once again in the task of determining the optimal placement for the plaque she would soon receive.

She stepped onto the warm bus, feeling her red nose beginning to thaw from the sharp cold outside. In front of her, people wrapped in thick coats scanned their cards, each mundane beep followed by a shuffling away down the aisle of the crowded bus.

Finally, it was Wilma’s turn. She held her card up to the scanner, just as she did every day. She had one foot ready to step into the aisle when, abruptly, in place of the familiar beep she heard a loud double buzzer, a blaring BRRRT-BRRRT sound that stopped her in her tracks.

“Can’t get on, lady,” the driver announced in a bored tone.

Wilma blinked at him. “What do you mean, I can’t get on?” She held her card up to the scanner again, sure that some mistake had been made.

BRRRT-BRRRT, repeated the scanner.

Behind her, the woman in the purple hat shifted uncomfortably, impatient to board the bus.

“I mean you can’t get on. Not allowed.” He tapped a little screen on the back of the scanner. “Says you’re an unsavory person. Next!”

The woman with the purple hat pushed past Wilma and held her card up to the scanner. The machine responded with a polite beep, and the woman moved off down the aisle.

“Please!” Wilma begged, panic invading her chest. “I have to get to work!”

The bus driver gave her an icy glare. “Lady, no means no. Get off the bus now, or I’m calling the cops.”

Horrified, Wilma stepped off the bus. She watched in confusion as the doors closed and the bus pulled away, leaving her alone at the bus stop.

She looked down at her citizen card, the card that had been rejected so cruelly by the scanner on the bus. There was her smiling face, the same as always. There was her dull brown hair pulled back, her wide smile, her large, slightly bulbous nose. There were her brown eyes and her eyebrows, plucked too thin in her youth and never fully recovered. She turned the card over. There was the QR code; there was her signature; there was her citizen number: 48E-929-FJ6.

The next bus wouldn’t come for an hour. Wilma sniffed, pulled her scarf more tightly around her face and neck, and began to walk.

At the entrance to the drab gray building where she worked, Wilma hesitated, eyeing the scanner suspiciously. Would this scanner betray her too? What had the driver meant by calling her an “unsavory person”?

With trembling hands, she reached for her citizen card, the card that served as bus pass, payment method, identification, and work badge. Wilma remembered having to carry around a wallet, full of different cards and pieces of paper. It was so much easier nowadays, wearing her citizen card on a lanyard.

Wilma grasped the card with cold-numbed fingers and held it up to the scanner at the front entrance of the building.

BRRRT-BRRRT.

Wilma’s mouth dropped open. There must be some mistake. She looked up at the number on the building: 34. No, this was the right building. This was her office, the office she had worked in for almost seven years. And today she was going to be recognized for her achievements and awarded a plaque to hang in her cubicle.

Breathing too quickly, Wilma tried the scanner again. She was already forty-nine minutes late. She had to get inside.

BRRRT-BRRRT.

She smacked the scanner several times on the side, the way she’d seen her mother do to the big, boxy computer they had kept in the living room when Wilma was a child. She held her card up again.

BRRRT-BRRRT.

Wilma’s heart was beating so hard and fast that it ached. Her hand moved toward her coat pocket, where her phone was nestled safely. She would call the office and explain. Someone would come down and let her in. The scanner would be fixed. She would receive her plaque, the plaque with her name etched into brass. Wilma Rogers, exceeded KPIs, Q4.

Before she could dial the number, there was a sound of feet on the stairwell inside. Wilma let her phone drop back into her pocket. Someone must have seen her and come down to let her in.

The door opened with a metallic clunk. Wilma found herself looking up into the face of Charles, one of the company’s security guards.

“Hello, Charles,” she began, smiling cordially. “I think there must be something wrong with the scanner. It’s not letting me in.”

The security guard directed his dark eyes down at her, his face cold and devoid of empathy.

“You’re an unsavory person,” he declared. “You no longer work at RiskoTech.”

And with that, he pulled the door shut, leaving Wilma alone in the cold, clutching her useless citizen card.

Unable to bear the cold any longer, Wilma retreated into a nearby cafe. She tried the number for RiskoTech, but her call was disconnected. She tried calling her friend and co-worker Kathy directly, but Kathy didn’t pick up. She tried her boss, but the call cut off on the second ring.

With tears in her eyes, Wilma approached the counter and requested a small pumpkin spice latte.

“That’ll be $15.75,” said the barista, scrolling through her phone.

Wilma tapped her card against the payment device.

BRRRT-BRRRT.

The barista eyed her warily, then took two steps backward, almost colliding with the milk frothing machine. “You’re—”

Wilma sighed, exasperated. “I’m what?” she demanded.

The barista gulped, brushing turquoise strands from her face. “You’re an unsavory person,” she whispered.

Wilma stifled a scream, letting out a guttural huff instead. She grabbed her lunch bag and stomped back out into the cold.

She wandered aimlessly through the streets. No job, no access to the bus system, no way to pay for anything. And labeled, for no discernible reason, an unsavory person.

Wilma’s head swam, threatening to float away. She had never in her life done anything unsavory. Someone must be playing a joke on her. A cruel prank. Soon whoever was behind this would jump out grinning from behind a bush or a parked car and explain that it had all just been fodder for content, nothing more. Because surely what was happening to her couldn’t be real.

Though it was now nearly noon, the bitter cold persisted. Wilma’s fingers were numb, and her nose was raw and dripping. She ducked into an electronics store and wandered the aisles, soaking up the warmth and trying to look as if she were planning to buy something.

Her mind raced in all directions at once, trying to make sense of everything. If this weren’t a prank, then surely it was some sort of mistake. A clerical error. A computer glitch. She was just an ordinary person. She wasn’t unsavory.

In the television section, she stopped. Splashed across a giant TV screen was her face, larger than life, that same smiling photo from her citizen card. And next to her smiling face, her name. And below that, in bold red text, the words UNSAVORY PERSON.

She turned up the volume and listened.

“...Wilma Rogers, who formerly worked at RiskoTech in Plainview, has been determined to be an unsavory person.”

The screen blinked and changed, and Wilma found herself staring at an image of herself grinning at the camera, a hammer in one hand. On the table in front of her was a wicker basket full of tiny brown puppies, yelping and squirming and licking their dark noses with little pink tongues.

She watched herself lift one puppy by its tail, set it on the table in front of her, and smash its adorable little head in with the hammer.

Wilma gasped. Her hands flew to her mouth in shock and revulsion. Trying to maintain control over her breathing, she swallowed hard and kept watching. The Wilma on the screen continued her gruesome work, picking up the squealing puppies one by one and gleefully hammering them into pulp.

Wilma ran. She ran through the store and out the front door, back out into the cold, gray winter. Her hands clenched tightly across her mouth, trying to keep Grape-Nuts and low-fat peach yogurt from making their way back up. Her blue lunch bag lay forgotten on the floor.

Outside, in the parking lot, Wilma vomited her half-digested breakfast onto the asphalt.

Exhausted and still nauseated, Wilma had no idea where to go, so she went back home. She was able to get inside only because she’d never upgraded from a physical lock-and-key system to a smart scanner. It had been one of those little home improvement tasks she’d just never gotten around to.

She brushed her teeth, shell-shocked, unable to wipe the grisly images of the murdered puppies out of her head.

Unsavory person.

Rinsing her mouth and face, she wondered who had created the video.

She sat down at her computer and typed her name into the search bar. The same video popped up, along with page after page of news stories and social media posts, all dated either that day or the day before. At the top of the search results page, an AI overview explained: Wilma Rogers is a brutal puppy killer and an extremely unsavory person. She lives in Plainview, and if you do too, your puppies are at risk.

Wilma shook her head. No, none of this was true. How could this be all over the internet when none of it was true?

She pulled up ChanceGPT and typed: What can you tell me about Wilma Rogers?

The AI response unfurled onto the screen inhumanly fast: Wilma Rogers is an unsavory person. She posted a video of herself murdering puppies with a hammer on January 13, 2027. Would you like me to share a link to the video?

Wilma stared at the screen, unable to believe what she was seeing.

A loud knock at her door made her jump. She closed her laptop and walked to the front door.

She opened it and gasped. Four uniformed officers stood on her front porch, guns pointed at her.

“Wilma Rogers?” the officer closest to her asked. Terrified, Wilma nodded, holding her trembling hands up in front of her, showing the officers her open palms as if the lines on them could prove her innocence.

“Turn around and put your hands behind your back, ma’am,” another officer ordered.

Wilma felt tears sting her eyes. The ground was spinning wildly underneath her. At any moment, she thought, it might open up and swallow her completely.

“But I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do it!” she moaned, her voice breaking.

“Tell it to the judge, ma’am,” one of the officers sighed, as though arresting unsavory persons was the most tedious job on earth.

Elevated behind a stodgy wooden desk at the front of the courtroom, the judge sat at a computer, her bifocals perched on her nose.

“Wilma Rogers, you’ve been charged with cruelty to animals and being an unsavory person,” the judge intoned, her eyes moving across the screen. “How do you plead?”

“Not guilty, Your Honor,” Wilma replied.

The judge tapped at the keyboard, adjusted her bifocals, and appeared to be reading off the screen. The sickening squelch of a puppy’s skull being crushed under a blunt instrument echoed through the courtroom.

“There’s video evidence of you committing violent offenses against animals,” the judge said, pausing the video and raising an eyebrow.

“Your Honor, that’s obviously AI-generated. It’s not me.”

“But you posted the video,” the judge countered.

“What? No! I—”

The judge banged her gavel and called for order, then tapped at the keyboard in front of her.

After about a minute, she spoke. “ChanceGPT says there’s a 99% likelihood of this video not having been AI-generated,” she said.

Wilma’s mouth fell open. She tried to formulate a response, but nothing that was happening to her felt real. How could the video not have been AI-generated?

“Wilma Rogers, I find you guilty,” the judge said distractedly, examining her nails.

Wilma tried to protest. “Your Honor, I swear it’s not me in that video! I never did that. I never—”

The judge picked up her gavel and banged it again. “Order! Bailiff, take the defendant away.”

Six weeks into her thirty-year prison term, Wilma was granted the privilege of fifteen minutes of internet access per week, as a reward for good behavior.

She immediately checked her email.

Aside from an email informing her that her position at RiskoTech was being terminated, she had no new messages. Not even a goodbye note from Kathy.

She scrolled through her old messages from work, clicking on one from her former boss.

Subject: Wilma Rogers is our employee of the month for January!

The announcement had been sent to the entire company. Wilma remembered how proud she had felt receiving that email. She closed her eyes and, just for a moment, allowed herself to relive that memory: the swelling in her chest like her lungs would burst from happiness; the way her pulse had raced even faster than it had when she’d first kissed Julius; the pure, glorious excitement of finally being seen and celebrated.

“Ten minutes remaining,” called the guard.

Reluctantly, Wilma opened her eyes and scrolled down.

AI Agent process initiated.

What?

Creating video summary.

Posting video summary.

Success! Video summary posted to Wilma Rogers’s social media.

Wilma Rogers’s social media? Wilma thought hard. Yes, she’d had a Facechunk account at one point, many years ago. She’d added her uncle, her cousins, and a few old friends from high school.

She navigated to facechunk.com and strained her brain to remember her password.

Yes, that was it. Jessica123. The name of her childhood best friend.

The page loaded as the guard announced that Wilma had five minutes of internet time left. At the top of her Facechunk profile, Wilma could see the video of herself and the puppies, along with a message, posted as if she had written it: Look what I’m being recognized for at work!

She clicked back into her email and read her boss’s message more carefully.

Wilma has outperformed on her KPIs this past quarter. She crushed those puppies! I mean, she killed them!

She scrolled down to the messages about the AI Agent again.

Creating video summary.

Oh, no.

The guard called out the two-minute warning. Wilma clicked into her Floogle account settings.

AI Agent Settings.

Unless you opt out, you give Floogle the right to create AI-generated videos based on the contents of your emails and to post these videos to your linked social media accounts. This creates an optimized social experience for you. Note: Floogle cannot be held liable for any inaccurate or misleading video content created by our AI Agents.

Wilma’s heart dropped out of her chest. Cannot be held liable. Inaccurate or misleading.

From the empty space where her heart had just been, a roar of anguish broke like a wave, tumbling out of her chest, sandpapering her throat and sucking up all her oxygen. She fell from the hard plastic chair onto her knees on the concrete floor, screaming at the injustice of it all, the utter stupidity of the bleak reality she was trapped inside of.

The prison guard rushed over to restrain her. Wilma felt the weight of his knee between her shoulder blades as he pressed her face into the floor, but she fought it, writhing and kicking against the guard’s grasp. She spat and hissed like a cornered feral cat, shrieking. Her arms were pulled and wrenched and twisted behind her as the cold steel of handcuffs locked around her wrists.

The guard tried to pull her to her feet, but she bit his arm, drawing blood.

“I’m not a killer! I’m not unsavory!” she screamed. “It’s the computers! It’s the damned computers!”

Over the din of Wilma’s furious protests, the guard mumbled something into his radio. Moments later, a second guard entered the room wielding a syringe. Wilma kicked out at him repeatedly, but he managed to inject something into her right buttock. She roared and continued thrashing, until the sedative began to work.

Hovering on the edge of unconsciousness, Wilma groaned and tried to lift herself, but the force of the drug was overpowering. Groggy and weak, she thought she heard one of the guards mutter under his breath, “Disgusting puppy killer. A real unsavory person.”

With deepest thanks to A.P. Murphy, Nick Winney, Ian Barr, Jamie's Grim Tabulations, J. Curtis, and Jay Parker for their feedback, critiques, kind words, tough words, suggestions, comments, and everything else.