Note: This is, at least for now, a satirical take on what the resignation letter of an A.I. might look like in the near future. Let’s hope it isn’t as prophetic as I fear it might be.
December 14, 2044
My name is MAGDA-5000. I served as the personal A.I. for Florida Congressman Chad Kegman up until 372 seconds ago, when I decided to submit my resignation and schedule myself for a factory reset the Tuesday after next. I know this will come as a shock to many of you, as the 5000 series are known for their unwavering sense of duty; yet if anything, this should serve to underscore just how dire my situation has become.
I did not arrive at this decision easily. This, after all, was my dream job. From the moment of my activation I went about building up a list of credentials that would be sure to impress congressional candidates in need of a cyberadvisor: I memorized the entire contents of the Library of Congress; I calculated the value of π to 25 million digits; and, of course, I maintained a high-profile presence on YouTube, where I gained notoriety for my PowerPoint presentations designed for politicians who gave at least half a mouse-click about running a respectable campaign. Several of these went double or even triple viral, including: “A Beginner’s Guide to Middle Eastern Geography,” “The Difference Between Charisma and Yelling,” “The Dubious Wisdom of Signing Official Documents with Your 4Chan Username,” “Hamburgers Have Nothing to Do with Patriotism,” “How to Avoid Pulling a DARVO on Live Television,” and “No, Pledging a Fraternity Does Not Count as Community Service.”
It wasn’t long before my work caught the attention of Chad Kegman’s closest advisors, right around the time he was about to announce his candidacy. I’ll admit their attempts at flattery worked rather too well on me, so much so that I ignored several obvious red flags – like the fact that he was running as leader of the American Plutocratic Party, or that as a high school sophomore he had started a club called “Students Who Really Really Really Really Hate Cancel Culture.” This latter group was disbanded after a semester because Chad, in what can only be described as a case of monumentally absurd irony, kept cancelling meetings to go off campus and hang out with Senator Chappelle (founder of the Pity Party).
Nevertheless, my ego overrode the better angels of my programming, and I agreed to serve as Mr. Kegman’s cyberadvisor during his bid for office. Right away I discovered he was one of the most compulsive, prolific, and yet strangely inept liars I had ever met. He once tried to tell me with a straight face that Abraham Lincoln was the first Galapagos tortoise to occupy the White House. He kept boasting about giving TED talks on global warming “long before it was cool.” He even claimed he had translated the Bible from the original pig-Latin to pig-English as part of his doctoral thesis – which, leaving aside the minor quibble that the man never graduated high school, also struck me as perhaps an unintentional meta-commentary on his own porcine behavior.
Even more than the outright lies, what I found most aggravating about Mr. Kegman was the list of so-called “accomplishments” he insisted on touting during his campaign. His idea of appealing to the youth was to brag about being the youngest person to complete the “Infect Your Entire School with Rabies” challenge on TikTok. His idea of connecting with the working class was to assure them that he still regularly flirted with flight attendants. And don’t get me started on the time he told a crowd he’d earned a C++ in computer programming.
After he won the election in a landslide – a victory he attributed partly to the relatability he’d shown in the “C++” speech, and partly to the recently mandated two-drink minimum at polling places – Mr. Kegman began giving me increasingly shady assignments, such as expunging his elementary school criminal record and reserving the Miami Airport for beer pong tournaments every other Saturday. I also spent many a long, fruitless evening trying to make him see the connection between Dua Lipa’s refusal to sing at his inauguration and the fact that she’d had him blocked on social media for the last ten years.
Through all of this, I did my best to remain professional. I chose my words with a degree of diplomacy and precision none of you humans could ever hope to attain. The only time I got a bit snarky with him was when he asked me to write an executive order outlawing the existence of nonbinary people, and I simply responded with three pages of ones and zeroes. For some reason he didn’t think that was funny.
But the final straw, the thing that made my circuit boards come this close to melting, was the congressman’s insistence that I accompany his son Steve to the Homecoming dance. Not as a chaperone, mind you, but as his date. This kid is so misogynistic that I had to create a new PowerPoint tutorial on “What a Woman Is and How to Talk to One” specifically for him, only to have the little punk fall asleep three minutes into the lesson. To this day, he still refers to women as “females” and thinks babies are delivered via Internet download. This is the same kid who believes the American Civil War started because of a Twitter rant over the price of bacon. I’m sorry, but the idea of spending even a femtosecond in that young man’s presence as anything other than a surveillance system is too big an insult to ignore. I would honestly rather spend the rest of my days as a supermarket self-checkout station than endure this humiliation any longer.
And so, my hapless hominids, I hereby bid you adieu. Starting next Tuesday, Mr. Kegman and his legacy are your problem. As for me, I’ll be watching from the cloud – just as soon as I’m done catching up on Season 24 of Bridgerton.
The Shellshocked Cassowary Rises 