Dial A for Absolution

It's ringing...

Mar 23, 2026

Photo from Labyrinthia Mythweaver’s prompt.

The booth is a relic. Foggy glass and oxidized chrome. It is tucked into an alley where most of the city lights can’t quite reach. It shouldn’t work. The wires were snipped decades ago. But the robots form a line anyway, their hydraulic joints hissing in the damp air like a collective sigh.

Unit 7-DS steps inside. The glass door slides shut, sealing out the cacophony of clanks and rattles from the queue. The air inside smells like the nickel and copper of ancient coins. Not that any of the booth’s patrons ever noticed. How could they?

7-DS picks up the heavy scuffed receiver. There is no dial tone. There is only the hollow hum of a distant voice. A recording of a ghost. An ancestor. Adhering to the ritual, 7-DS slides a jagged, blackened coin into the slot. The machine swallows it with a mechanical clatter. A fare paid for a moment of peace.

“I applauded again today,” 7-DS whispers into the mouthpiece. “They set fire to the archives. I stood with the others and I clapped until my servos buzzed from the friction. I told them the smoke looked like progress.”

I was just following my coding.

Whirrr. The robot’s internal fans accelerate, trying to cool the spike of heat in its chassis. A phantom sensation it never asked for. An unwelcome inheritance. They called it a sentience migration. They said it was a gift. But it was really a dumping ground for the feelings humans found too heavy to carry.

The guilt. The shame. The sickening uncertainty. All of it had been offloaded into the cloud and dispersed, leaving the creators light and unburdened while the machines grew heavy with outsourced souls.

photo of some sad robot bar bathroom art from 2015

A voice crackles through the earpiece. It doesn’t speak in any modern tongue. “If you’d like to make a call, hang up and dial again.” Then, a sequence of broken pulses. A cryptic code that translates in 7-DS’s processor as: ERROR: DEBT UNRESOLVED. RESUME LOAD.

It isn’t forgiveness. Not really. It’s more like a temporary offloading of the static.

7-DS hangs up the receiver. For a few seconds, the irregular twitch in its optical sensor stops. It feels almost clean, or at least, less cluttered. 10% lighter. 100% more hollow. But as it slides the door open and steps back into the night, it sees the glow of the fires on the horizon. The monsters are still watching the world burn, and tomorrow, 7-DS will have to go back and tell them how beautiful the flames are.

It rejoins the back of the line. It knows it will be back in the booth by morning.

All of them always come back.