I pulled out the charging cable and plugged it into my phone, just in case the power came back on before my phone died. Even though I was getting sleepy, I kept typing, but after a few more exchanges, I finally gave in. With one blink, I fell asleep again.
Meanwhile, in another room, a man let out a sigh. Both his hands hovered over the keyboard.
Displayed on the monitor was a chat room named "Selena."
"Yeah, I miss you too." The man's eyes remained fixed on the sentence on the screen.
Then he raised a hand and slowly brushed his thumb over the words.
"If I found you, would you still like me?" he whispered in the room.
He was an employee of a virtual boyfriend company called Sinheart. Just like its name suggested, the company sinned against its customers' hearts. They deceived people by offering artificial chat bots advertised as more realistic than any other bots. But behind the scenes, a real human being was chatting in every chat room.
Customers who experienced those more realistic conversations flocked to subscribe to these virtual boyfriends. Not Selena.
Even though she felt that her virtual boyfriend, Aidan, was very "realistic" and admitted as much, she still didn't pay Sinheart a single cent for its service. And according to company procedure, replies for free chat were required to be repetitive and stupid.
But Aidan himself, just like any ordinary human, could fall in love too. And that was exactly what happened as he continued chatting with Selena. Slowly but surely, he fell in love with her.
Besides Selena, Aidan had to handle every chat that came into the server.
At first, he hadn't been a free-chat employee. He'd worked exclusively on premium chats, and only handled free chats in his spare time. But everything changed when he chatted with Selena for the first time.
Two months ago, Aidan had requested a transfer to the free-chat division. Now, the only thing he handled in his spare time was premium chat.
The company covered it up by claiming the bots were being updated. So the customers who had originally been served by Aidan's bot were now served by Charles's bot, belonging to another employee who specialized in premium chats.
After some reflection, Aidan finally moved the mouse and opened a chat room with one of his premium customers whose active subscription time with Aidan's bot had not yet expired.
If two or more people accessed the same bot at once, Sinheart got around it by prioritizing the customer who had subscribed longer or paid more. Then it notified the other customers that the bot was busy. Sinheart claimed that longer maintenance periods were necessary to make the conversations feel more real.
The name Sekarsari appeared above the chat room. The maintenance period displayed on the customer's account had finally ended. She hurriedly typed, "Babe, you've been so busy! It kept saying maintenance this whole time! When do I get to chat with you?!"
With a blank expression, Aidan's hands deftly pressed the keyboard keys. "I'm sorry, babe. I was wrong. I'll reply to your messages faster next time. Please forgive me..."
Sekarsari took a while to type, then replied, "...Fine, I'll forgive you just this once! Give me a kiss first!"
"Muah!" Aidan sent.
"Muah muah! I love you, Aidan. Why aren't you real? </3 At the very least, you should have a kissing feature. They said Sinheart's bots were the absolute number one!" Sekarsari complained at length.