The hail started the exact moment Lívia said “I do.” Not before, not after, but in that half-second while the word was still leaving her mouth, as though the sky itself had been waiting for precisely that instant to dump every grudge it had been hoarding onto us, over the rose garden of the Szeged Botanical Garden. The officiant — a kind, retired schoolteacher recommended by Lívia’s cousin — scrambled to tuck her papers under her arm while walnut-sized hailstones smashed into the three-tiered cake on the display table, the one we’d paid for six months in advance. My aunt Irén, sitting in a rented chair in the front row, shrieked as if her life were in danger, trying to hold her hat over her head, and the acoustic trio we’d hired fled with their instruments toward the nearest covered pergola, abandoning all dignity.
Lívia clung to my arm, her veil already soaked through, her makeup running down her face in two black streaks, and she wasn’t crying — she was laughing, that hysterical, out-of-control laugh that signals either an imminent breakdown or a strange kind of enlightenment. Six months of planning, a full year of savings, her mother’s tears at the dress fitting — all of it smashed to pieces in ten minutes by a weather event nobody had predicted, because every forecast Friday morning had promised nothing but sunshine.
Three days earlier I’d still been worrying about whether the caterer would set up the dessert table early enough, and whether the photographer Lívia had scouted at a wedding fair was really as good as her Instagram portfolio suggested. Now we stood under a dripping pergola with half our guests, people in soaked clothes trying to call taxis on their phones, while the wedding planner — a perpetually smiling woman named Zsófi, now drained white — kept repeating “this has never happened before,” as though that were any kind of comfort. The hailstones kept hammering the pergola roof, large enough that one left a dent in the silver candle holder Lívia’s aunt had brought back from Vienna as a wedding gift.
That evening, once we’d finally made it back to the guesthouse where half our guests had taken shelter, and Lívia sat in the bathtub because she said only hot water could make her feel human again, I was digging through the bedroom drawer for spare documents when I found my grandmother’s old, yellowed card. My grandmother, Ilona, had died two years earlier, and in her last months, when she could barely remember her own grandchildren’s names, she once gripped my hand, lucid and certain, and said: “Bence, if nothing else works, call this number. Not the police. Not the insurance company. This.” The card held only an eleven-digit phone number, written by hand in slightly smeared ballpoint, and beneath it, one word: Customer Service of Fate.
My grandmother was famous in the family for her eccentricities. Every full moon she went out into the yard and loudly asked the moon to “stop being so full of itself.” She never ate fish on Tuesdays, because she claimed “fish get resentful on Tuesdays,” and once, when I was nine, she asked me with complete seriousness never to greet her in the stairwell between nine and ten in the morning, because “no one should pay attention to her during that hour.” The family treated these habits with fond indulgence, as the harmless quirks of an old woman, and I treated the card she’d pressed into my hand before she died the same way — one more Ilona-ism, which I’d slid respectfully into the slot behind my wallet’s card pocket and not thought about for years. But now, on the evening of my hail-wrecked wedding, after the catering company informed me that under no circumstances would they refund a single forint because of “force majeure,” it occurred to me that I had nothing to lose by calling.
I stood outside the bathroom door, listening to Lívia shift in the tub, and for a moment wondered what exactly I’d say if this number actually connected to something, and if whoever picked up asked why I was calling. What would I even say — that hail had ruined our wedding and I wanted to report it, out loud, to a person? Standing alone in the kitchen, I had to laugh at myself, but the card was already in my hand, my finger already hovering over the screen.
I dialed the number. On the other end, instead of a ring, there was a low, humming sound, like a refrigerator motor starting up, and then a machine voice, irritatingly cheerful, as though it had escaped from an insurance commercial:
“Welcome to Fate Customer Service! Your call may be recorded for quality assurance and karmic logging purposes. If your issue concerns the weather, press 1. If you have a complaint regarding your genes or inherited traits, press 2. If you’re calling about an injustice involving a third party — a malicious coworker, a neighbor, a former partner — press 3. If you wish to file a complaint about the general, unspecified downward trend of your life, press 4, and please be patient, our client is still alive. If you feel your horoscope was calculated incorrectly, press 5. If you wish to reclaim a lost object, a missed opportunity, or an unsent love letter, press 6, though please note that department is currently overwhelmed. For all other matters, please stay on the line, and a representative will be with you shortly — in a relative sense.”
I pressed 1.
The music that followed was an accordion rendition of “Those Were the Days,” played so warped, so strained, slipping half a tone flat from the correct key, that for a full minute I thought something was wrong with the line. Nothing was wrong. Four minutes later a human — or at least human-sounding — voice came on:
“This is Izsák, good evening, you’re speaking with me on a recorded call that is karmically binding under paragraph 7. How can I help you?”
I explained, my voice shaking with equal parts fury and disbelief, that hail had destroyed everything at my wedding, at the exact moment my wife said yes, and that this couldn’t have been a coincidence, because Friday morning no storm had been forecast anywhere.
“I see, I see,” said Izsák, with about as much enthusiasm as a tax office clerk hearing his eighth identical complaint of the day. “Allow me to check the system. May I have your full name, date of birth, and the exact GPS coordinates of the event, if you know them?”
I didn’t know the GPS coordinates, but I gave the name of the Botanical Garden, and I could hear someone on the other end of the line — Izsák, maybe, maybe another voice in the background — typing on something that sounded, by its clatter, more like an old-fashioned typewriter than a keyboard.
“I’ve found the case,” Izsák said finally. “Bence Horváth, meteorological intervention affecting you, September 14, 2024, 3:32 PM. Yes, I see the order here. This was not random, sir. This was a scheduled karmic correction.”
“Correction?” I said. “Why would my wedding need correcting?”
“Because in 2019, sir, you won a lottery pool you shouldn’t have won. The system calculated that you had no statistical right to that prize, and the balance correction — our apologies for the inconvenience — manifested at a later event significant to you. This occurred under Article 14, paragraph b, of the Terms of Fate Usage, which, as with all living humans, you are automatically considered to have accepted from birth.”
I didn’t remember any lottery pool, but when I pressed him, Izsák quoted an amount — 23,400 forints — which I vaguely, very vaguely remembered, some small sum won at a friend’s party years ago that I hadn’t thought about since.
“So you’re telling me the hailstorm happened because of a prize worth about seventy dollars?” I said, my voice shaking with outrage now.
“Karma doesn’t resolve itself through simple proportionality tables, sir — this is a complex, multidimensional accounting system. But yes, essentially, that’s correct.”
I asked him to undo the damage, or at least reimburse the deposit we’d paid the caterer, and Izsák said that for that, I’d need to fill out Form 112-C, which they would mail to me, because “digital signatures are not yet recognized under karmic law,” and that processing would take “between three and seven cosmic months,” which turned out not to be the same as a calendar month, because when I asked the difference, Izsák said: “A cosmic month depends on event density, sir. When a great deal of significant activity is happening in the universe simultaneously, the cosmic month slows down. At present there are supernovas occurring in three neighboring galaxies, so unfortunately time is passing more slowly than usual right now.”
I asked where I could view these Terms of Fate Usage, since I had no memory of ever signing anything, and Izsák said the document “takes effect automatically with your first breath,” and that for legal reasons he was required to read me an excerpt, if I wished.
“Go ahead,” I said, because by then curiosity had edged out the fury.
“Article 14,” Izsák said, his voice suddenly shifting into the flat monotone of a clerk reading legal text aloud, “paragraph b: the Provider reserves the right to offset statistically unwarranted positive events in the user’s life at a later date significant to the user, at the Provider’s sole discretion. The form, magnitude, and timing of such offset are non-negotiable and shall not form the basis of legal proceedings in any human or transcendent forum. There are twelve more subclauses, if you’d like me to continue.”
“No, that’s enough,” I said. “And if I don’t accept these terms?”
“Then, sir, you could not have been born. Acceptance of the terms is a precondition of existence. It’s rather like asking what happens if you decline gravity.”
I hung up at that point, because I felt that if I listened for one more minute, some blood vessel in my brain was going to hand in its resignation.
*
Our honeymoon, which we took in Crete, patched together as best we could from what was left of our budget, turned out to be its own minor catastrophe series: our suitcase got stuck in Athens for two days, our rental car got a flat in a stretch with zero cell signal, and on the first night Lívia ate an entire plate of octopus that made her sick for three days straight. I didn’t think about the hotline then, too busy hunting for medication in a Greek village at two in the morning, but when we finally got home and the suitcase arrived, its lock broken, and every piece of Lívia’s jewelry gone — nothing expensive, just keepsakes, a necklace from her grandmother, a bracelet from her graduation banquet — I decided to call the number again, just to see what they’d say about a crime that was so obviously human in origin.
This time a man answered, introducing himself as Richárd, who informed me after my first sentence that “ninety-two percent of airport thefts fall under human jurisdiction, but for the remaining eight percent, where karmic coincidence also plays a role, we can open a case.” I asked how anyone could determine which category mine fell into, and Richárd said I’d need to complete an “Origin Determination Questionnaire,” thirty-two questions long, including gems like “Has anyone ever told you that you’re too lucky in life?” and “In the past ten years, have you had a dream in which you flew without the aid of wings?” When I finally finished — over the phone, since the questionnaire could only be taken verbally, “for data protection reasons” — Richárd announced that my case was “68 percent likely to be of human origin,” which fell short of the 75 percent threshold required for compensation, so they couldn’t help. We never found Lívia’s jewelry, but the karmic bureaucracy had at least given us the false hope that somewhere, someone had tried to figure out what happened.
*
Two weeks passed before I called the number again, this time not about the hail — Lívia and I had, with some difficulty, covered that ourselves out of savings — but because at my job, a logistics firm, the team-lead position I’d spent fourteen months preparing for had gone to a coworker, Balázs Petrovics, who’d been with the company barely six months and whom everyone knew to be the CEO’s nephew. This wasn’t a karmic injustice at all, just the most banal kind, but I figured if I already had a line like this, I might as well use it.
This time I pressed option 3, since I could file Balázs under “injustice involving a third party.” The hold music was a synthesizer-driven nineties lift-muzak track, and the machine voice announced an “estimated wait time of 2 cosmic minutes,” which by now I knew could mean absolutely anything.
This time it wasn’t Izsák who picked up, but a woman who introduced herself as Fruzsina, her voice far more exhausted than Izsák’s, like someone who’d already worked a full shift of complaints that day.
“The Balázs matter,” she said, after I’d explained the situation, and prefaced the next sentence with a long, impatient sigh. “That’s not our desk, sir. Workplace advancement falls under the Department of Human Self-Governance, not Fate Customer Service. We’re only responsible for non-human-originated interventions: weather, genetics, randomness, accident distribution. If your CEO favored his own nephew, that’s human corruption, not karmic allocation. I’d suggest contacting the labor authority.”
“But it still feels unjust to me,” I insisted.
“The feeling of injustice is not the same as injustice, sir. I can transfer you to another department, but I should warn you that your call will lose its priority status, and you’ll have to rejoin the queue from the beginning.”
“Then what’s the point of this whole hotline, if most of the injustice people actually experience isn’t your responsibility at all?”
“Good question, sir, and honestly, a lot of us ask ourselves the same thing from time to time, on our breaks. The answer we’ve been given by management is that we’re only accountable for what nobody else can account for: blind chance. Human malice and human stupidity are things you have to answer for yourselves, with your own courts, your own ethics. We only step in where no human cause can be identified.”
I asked what they could offer, then, and Fruzsina, reading what was obviously a script, announced that she could direct “compensatory random positive events” to me over the next thirty days, under something called the “Bronze Tier Fate Reparation Package,” which might include “favorable parking spots, green lights at traffic signals, and a modest chance of a pleasant chance encounter with an old acquaintance.”
“That’s it?” I asked.
“The Bronze package is free, sir. The Silver package — which would also include a minor financial windfall — requires you to subscribe to our Fate Points program, which involves small, voluntary weekly contributions.”
“What kind of contributions?”
“That varies by client. Some of our customers offer up an afternoon nap now and then, others a hair color, some a specific memory from a favorite film. The system automatically selects whatever you’ll miss the least.”
This sounded so much like Teréz’s shop — of which, of course, I knew absolutely nothing, having never set foot anywhere near Kárász Street that evening — that for a moment it crossed my mind how many such systems might be running in parallel across the world, each unaware of the others, each with its own bureaucracy, its own “small contribution.” But I let the thought go quickly, because Fruzsina was already reading her next line.
“Would you like to activate the Fate Points program?”
“What would I lose, if I say yes?”
“I can only tell you after activation, sir. The system doesn’t disclose the content of the contribution in advance, as that would compromise the principle of voluntariness.”
This sounded so absurd I nearly hung up, but then — maybe because Balázs had spent that very day bragging about his new company car in front of the whole office — I said yes.
*
Three days later I noticed something was missing, when Lívia asked what we’d done the previous Tuesday evening, and I couldn’t answer. Not because I’d forgotten one specific evening — but because Tuesdays, for the past three weeks, simply didn’t exist in my memory. As though every week had become a six-day week, where Monday led straight into Wednesday, the gap between them melting into one smooth, seamless continuity. When I checked my phone’s photo gallery, I found pictures I’d clearly taken on a Tuesday — a new coffee place I’d tried, a video of our dog, Buksi, chasing a ball in the park — but I remembered nothing of the days themselves. It was like a film with every third frame cut out, but the soundtrack somehow still playing straight through.
I called the number back, furious, and when I finally reached Fruzsina — or at least a woman who again introduced herself as Fruzsina, though her voice sounded different now, as if she were a different member of a team working under the same name — I demanded my Tuesdays back.
“The contribution the system automatically selected was your Tuesday afternoons, for a period of three months,” Fruzsina explained, flatly, as though reading the fine print of an insurance policy. “In your case, the system chose Tuesday because, according to our statistical model, it was the least significant day of your week. Don’t worry, Tuesday’s quality will return once the three months are up.”
“But nobody asked me if I wanted this!”
“It was stated in the terms you accepted for the program, paragraph 9: ‘the content and manner of the contribution shall be determined at the Provider’s sole discretion.’ Did you read the terms before accepting?”
Of course I hadn’t read them, because who reads the fine print of a system like this when the only button anyone’s watching is “yes,” pressed in the middle of a phone call, furious over a workplace injustice.
“This is fraud,” I said.
“This is lawful, documented, voluntary consent,” Fruzsina replied. “Would you like to file a complaint against your own consent?”
“Yes!”
“Very well, for that please complete Form 212-F, which may be submitted as an appendix to Form 112-C if the original case is still pending. I should remind you that your hail case is currently in its seventh cosmic month, so attaching this appendix will likely slow processing further.”
That’s when I realized the whole system was built so that every complaint I filed generated a new, slower, more complicated complaint — a labyrinth whose exit opened a new fork with every single step.
I told the whole story to my best friend, György, over beers, half as a joke, just to see how much he’d believe. György, the single most skeptical person I’d ever known, simply said, “give me the number, I’ll try it, because last week a pigeon shat directly on my head on my way to a job interview, and I’d like to know if that’s why I didn’t get the job.” Two days later he called me back, genuine astonishment in his voice: the line had picked up, the machine voice had greeted him exactly as it had greeted me, and when he explained the pigeon incident, a representative — not Izsák, not Fruzsina, an entirely new voice called Dénes — told him that bird behavior “falls partially under our jurisdiction, as random targeting accuracy indicates a statistical anomaly,” and offered him a Bronze Tier Fate Reparation Package by way of compensation. György then called the number every day for two weeks over increasingly ridiculous things — once to demand compensation because his favorite show got pulled from a streaming service — until one representative, who clearly recognized his voice by then, told him: “Sir, abusive filing is also covered in our terms, Article 31, please reconsider the frequency of your calls.” That was my first proof that I wasn’t the only person in the city who knew this number, and that somewhere, in some invisible call center, a thousand other people might be waiting right now on that same warped accordion music, each one believing they were the only person who’d ever discovered the secret.
*
Before I get to the parking ticket, I should mention one call I made because, three mornings in a row, the same blind beggar outside the corner shop greeted me with “good morning, Mr. Gábor,” even though my name isn’t Gábor. I assumed it was some kind of karmic error, so I called the line, and that’s when I first discovered that Fate Customer Service also has a chatbot, standing between the caller and any live representative.
“Hello, I’m Szikra, Fate Customer Service’s virtual assistant,” said a sharp, aggressively friendly voice. “I understand you’re having an issue with someone named Gábor. Would you like me to contact Mr. Gábor on your behalf?”
“No, I’m not Gábor, someone’s confusing me with a Gábor.”
“I see, so your name is Gábor, and you’d like to file a complaint that others aren’t calling you Gábor?”
“No! The exact opposite!”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand your request. Would you like me to transfer you to a live representative?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Of course. Before I transfer you, let me ask a few security questions. What’s your favorite color?”
“What does that have to do with—”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Please choose from the following colors: blue, red, the colorlessness of existence.”
Finally, after ten minutes and three repeated security questions bearing no logical relationship to my issue whatsoever, a live voice picked up and informed me that “identity-confusion anomalies” fell under a separate department called “Mistaken Identity Affairs,” to which they had no access, and suggested I return to the main menu. I never found out why that beggar kept calling me Gábor, but I decided it was simply one of life’s mysteries that even Fate Customer Service either couldn’t or wouldn’t solve.
Over the following month I called the number four more times, each time over some minor injustice that a person like me would, in a normal life, simply have swallowed: a parking ticket I believed I’d gotten unfairly, because the sign had been half-hidden behind a tree branch; a neighbor who mowed his lawn every Sunday morning at seven, precisely when I wanted to sleep in; a plane ticket that had been double-booked, forcing me into a worse, windowless seat. Each call came with a new representative — there was a man named Gyula who kept clearing his throat on the line as if he had a cold, though when I asked, he said “karmic entities don’t have a respiratory system, this is just a communication pattern I picked up from a previous human client”; there was an Ildikó who began every sentence with a number, like “Thirty-two: this does not fall under our jurisdiction,” and never once explained what the number referred to.
The hold music was different every time, and each one worse than the last: once a synthesizer-driven, half-finished version of Für Elise; another time something I only realized, minutes in, was being played backward — a pop song I would have recognized if it hadn’t been running back to front. Once, in the middle of the music, a man’s voice cut in, not as part of the hold recording but like a genuine announcement: “Dear customers, please be advised that due to maintenance on the Seventh Celestial Sphere, Wednesday complaint processing will be temporarily suspended. Thank you in advance for your patience.” This was so unbelievable that I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it, then realized I’d already transcribed it word for word, because sentences like that aren’t something a person can invent — only overhear.
I asked Ildikó why something as simple as a lawnmower didn’t fall under their jurisdiction, and she read me an entire paragraph from the Boundaries of Service Zones, which included a clause stating that “the Provider assumes no liability for interpersonal acoustic conflicts between users, except where they reach a third-degree noise-pollution threshold, verifiable only by an accredited karmic acoustics engineer.” I asked where I might find such an engineer, and Ildikó, now starting with “Thirty-seven,” said, “that’s a human service, not our jurisdiction,” at which point I actually laughed, because I realized the whole system was essentially a self-protecting loop in which every single question got the same answer — “not our jurisdiction” — until the person on the line simply gave up.
The parking ticket I eventually managed to settle through a kind of compromise: Gyula declared the system would “accept partial responsibility” for the half-obscured sign, and offered me a “Silver Tier Fate Reparation Point,” which turned out to be a single guaranteed green-light run through the city’s three busiest intersections — which I actually tried the following Tuesday, one of my restored Tuesdays, and it worked, though it didn’t come close to covering the fine itself.
My complaint about the neighbor’s lawnmower was simply rejected, on the grounds that “the subjective perception of noise stimuli does not fall under the Provider’s jurisdiction,” which led me to ask what, then, did fall under their jurisdiction at all, and Ildikó — now opening with “Thirty-three” — said: “Objectively measurable events affecting probability distribution. Your neighbor’s lawn-mowing habit is not random, but a deliberate decision, and therefore human jurisdiction.”
The double-booked plane ticket, surprisingly, did earn me a real compensation: a “Platinum Tier voucher” which, in Gyula’s words, “reduces the likelihood of unexpected events during a future trip significant to you by ten percent.” I asked what that meant in practice, and he said, “fewer delays, less lost luggage, a higher chance the seat next to you stays empty.” That was the first time the system had given me something I could actually use, and from then on I started taking the line seriously — all its absurdity aside, it genuinely worked, just according to some logic nobody ever explained properly, and that clearly nobody could explain properly, because the representatives themselves were just low-level cogs operating within some much larger machine.
*
The turning point came when I accidentally discovered a loophole. During one call, after Ildikó — now going by “Forty-one” — rejected a complaint about our dog Buksi’s sudden, unexplainable skin condition (which the vet had diagnosed as “stress-related,” though Buksi hadn’t been in any stressful situation in months, as far as I knew), I snapped at her in frustration: “Then I’ll file a complaint against the complaint process itself!”
Silence on the other end — such a long silence that I thought the call had dropped.
“That’s… that’s not usually requested,” Ildikó said finally, and for the first time I heard genuine uncertainty in her voice, not the usual rehearsed flatness. “I’ll transfer you to a supervisor, but first I have to warn you: every customer has exactly three lifetime opportunities to speak with a superior entity. This would be your first. Are you sure you want to use it on a dog matter?”
For a moment I wondered whether I should save it for something more important, but then I thought of Buksi’s sad face retreating to the door whenever I tried to coax him into the garden, and I said:
“I’m sure.”
“Very well. Please confirm again, out loud, clearly: are you using your first supervisor escalation?”
“I am!”
“Recorded. Transferring now. Please do not hang up, even if the wait exceeds your patience, because the escalation is irrevocable, and if you disconnect, you’ll lose the opportunity without having spoken to anyone.”
The music that followed was unlike anything I’d heard before: a completely quiet, almost meditative harp melody that strangely calmed me, though something told me this silence cost more than anything I’d heard on the line so far.
“Mária-Terézia Székely,” said a new voice, deeper and slower than any representative before her, like someone who never rushed her sentences because she knew no one dared interrupt her. “You’ve been transferred to me because you’ve filed a second-tier appeal. This happens rarely. Most customers give up after the first refusal.”
“I don’t want to give up,” I said. “My dog is sick, and nobody can help me, because it’s always someone else’s jurisdiction.”
“I understand,” said Mária-Terézia, and there was something in her voice I’d never heard from any representative before: a kind of patience that didn’t feel scripted, but real. “Tell me the whole matter, from the beginning. Leave nothing out, not even what you think is irrelevant.”
I told her everything: the hail, Balázs, the split Tuesdays, the parking ticket, the neighbor, the plane ticket, and finally Buksi, whose skin looked as though it were peeling in small red patches, and who hadn’t wanted to go out into the garden for two weeks, where he used to run out joyfully every single time.
Mária-Terézia was silent for a long while, and when she spoke again, her voice had changed, softened, like someone who’d suddenly realized the conversation she was conducting wasn’t another statistic, but genuine suffering.
“Your dog’s illness isn’t our jurisdiction, sir, because the fate of animals falls under an entirely different department, which we call the Administration of Non-Human Beings — and which, if I may say so, operates under a very different culture than ours: much looser, with far fewer forms, though in exchange they often go days without responding to anything, because time works differently for them too. A cat’s seven lives threw their bookkeeping into complete disarray back in the last century, and they still haven’t quite recovered. Unfortunately I have no access there. But let me tell you something we don’t usually share with customers: your Tuesdays, the ones the system took from you, didn’t coincide with the start of your dog’s symptoms by chance. When a period of time is taken from someone, it doesn’t simply vanish — it condenses elsewhere. Your Tuesdays still exist somewhere, just not in your shared time with Buksi. If you got them back, your dog might improve too, because he feels the disruption of your shared rhythm, even if he doesn’t understand why.”
“How can I get them back sooner than three months?”
“Under normal circumstances, you can’t. But since you’ve filed a second-tier complaint, and since this is a precedent we rarely encounter, I’ll propose something the regulations don’t explicitly forbid, though they don’t permit it either: a trade. Would you give up your Platinum voucher — your future trip protection — in exchange for getting your Tuesdays back now?”
I had no need for a trouble-free future flight. I needed my dog, who pressed his head against my leg every evening when I came home, regardless of what kind of day I’d had.
“Yes,” I said without hesitation.
“Very well. The trade is recorded. You are hereby restored your remaining Tuesday afternoons, effective immediately.”
*
The following Tuesday, Buksi was livelier on his morning walk than he’d been in weeks, and although the vet couldn’t offer a rational explanation for why his skin had started healing within days, Lívia just said, “See, I told you the stress would pass once something in the house changed.” I didn’t tell her the real reason, afraid she’d think I’d lost my mind, though I’m not sure what she would have thought if I had told her I’d traded a future plane ticket for my own returned Tuesday afternoons over the phone with a customer service representative.
*
Two weeks later, when I realized the Fate Points program kept running automatically, deducting some small new thing from me every month — this time, it seemed, a slight ringing in my left ear left over from a concert, something I’d actually been proud of, since it meant I’d had at least one night of genuinely good fun — I decided to cancel the subscription. That was the first time I truly experienced what the words “bureaucratic wall” meant.
“I’d like to cancel the Fate Points program,” I told Fruzsina, who sounded unusually exhausted this time, as if her voice itself were coming off a long, unpaid overtime shift.
“I understand. I’ll need to transfer you to the Retention Department, as cancellation requests don’t fall under my jurisdiction.”
At Retention, an excessively cheerful man picked up, introducing himself as Zoltán, who launched straight into a counteroffer after my very first sentence: “Before you cancel, let me offer you a fifty percent discount for the next three months!” I said I didn’t want a discount, I wanted to cancel, and he said, “that’s completely understandable, a lot of people feel that way on their first call,” then asked exactly why I wanted to cancel, “so we can improve our service.” I told him it was because the program kept taking important things from me without my permission. Zoltán replied that this was “a misunderstanding,” because every contribution was “statistically negligible,” to which I asked why, if it was so negligible, they couldn’t just tell me in advance what it would be, and Zoltán said: “If you knew in advance, it would influence your decision, which would run counter to the spirit of voluntariness we’re so proud of here.”
Finally, after about twenty-five minutes of stalling, during which Zoltán offered a “free month,” a “personalized Fate consultation,” and finally a “VIP status granting priority on all future calls,” I managed to pry the cancellation loose — but only after verbally signing, on the call, allegedly legally binding, a statement affirming that I was canceling “voluntarily, free of any pressure,” and that I “acknowledge that after cancellation, the system will not proactively compensate for any future injustice unless I explicitly request it.” It was exactly like trying to cancel a subscription with an insurance company you never remembered signing up for — except here the stakes were sometimes a slight ear-ringing, and sometimes an entire Tuesday.
*
About a month after the Buksi incident, I found a letter in our mailbox — a paper letter, hand-addressed, no stamp, as if someone had delivered it in person — headed “Fate Customer Service Loyalty Program,” urging me, for “a limited time,” to upgrade from Silver to Gold, because “as part of this promotion, every customer who upgrades receives a free Happy Chance Encounter with an old flame, with an unlimited guarantee that it will not disrupt your current relationship.” At the bottom, in small print: “The risk of disruption varies by individual; the Provider assumes no liability for emotional consequences arising from the customer’s own decisions, see Articles 9, 14, and 22.” Lívia found the letter on the kitchen counter before I could hide it, and stared at me for a long moment, to which all I could manage was, “that’s some kind of spam, probably leaked from our wedding registry list,” which she clearly didn’t believe, but decided not to push, because, as she admitted later, she was afraid that if she asked too many questions, she’d get pulled into something she didn’t want to understand either.
*
Six months later, when my father was admitted to the hospital with chest pains, and the cardiologist told us his heart muscle had been so badly damaged by an earlier, unrecognized heart attack that his remaining life expectancy was no more than a few years, and that no surgery could help him at this point, I called Fate Customer Service and asked directly for Mária-Terézia, though I knew that wasn’t the usual procedure.
Szikra, the virtual assistant, tried to talk me out of it first, repeating that “Mária-Terézia Székely is currently unavailable, but I’d be happy to take your complaint on her behalf, and if you provide an estimated forint value for your compensation claim, I can immediately suggest an appropriate package.” When I told it I didn’t want a package, I wanted my father to stay alive, Szikra left several seconds of confused silence on the line, then said, “This request exceeds my conceptual framework. Transferring you to a live entity.” Gyula picked up next, informing me that “medical force majeure cases” fell under the Third Department, not his desk, and before I could say another word I heard the click of him transferring me — then Fruzsina’s voice, saying that she, too, could only transfer me, because this was a “dignity-tier matter” that only Mária-Terézia or someone above her could handle. Finally, after about ten minutes of being batted around the system, the harp music stopping twice and restarting, as though even the orchestra itself were embarrassed, I reached her.
Her voice was patient again, but deeper, graver than before, like someone who already knew this call wasn’t going to be about a parking ticket.
“My father is dying,” I said, my voice breaking, though I’d spent days trying to prepare myself to speak calmly. “I know that somewhere in your system this is a ‘balance correction’ or a ‘statistical distribution’ or something like that, but I just want him to live longer. I don’t want a Platinum voucher. I don’t want Fate Points. I don’t want a green light downtown. I just want my father.”
A long silence followed, longer than in any previous conversation.
“Sir,” Mária-Terézia finally said, “I have to tell you something we almost never tell our customers, because we’re afraid it takes away hope, but I believe you have a right to know it. Death isn’t a bug in the system. It isn’t an event that needs compensating, like a lost suitcase or an unfair fine. Death is a rule. We can’t fight the rule, sir. We can only adjust the small deviations around it.”
“Then what good is this whole line,” I asked, and there was no anger in my voice now, only exhaustion, “if you’re powerless on the things that actually matter?”
“Most of our customers arrive at that same realization, sooner or later,” Mária-Terézia said, and there was something in her voice now I’d never heard from her, or from anyone else on that line: sadness, real, unscripted sadness. “But let me tell you something the regulations don’t forbid. The small deviations around the rule aren’t always small to the person who receives them.”
“What can you offer?”
“I can’t cure your father. But I can offer you a Quality Time Guarantee — a rider clause we rarely apply, because it’s costly, and most customers can’t afford it. It guarantees that in whatever time your father has left, there will be at least three days when his mind is completely clear, free of pain, and he’s able to be with you, with his family, the way he was before the illness. Not much. But real.”
“What’s the price?”
“In your case…” she paused, as if checking something on a figure I couldn’t see, “…I’d suggest you offer the ability you’ve always used to avoid conflict at work. That particular silence, the one with which you’ve always swallowed injustice, as in the Balázs matter. The system will use it, because you have it in abundance, and because — if you’ll permit me to say so — it hasn’t served you well so far anyway.”
I didn’t fully understand what that meant, but I didn’t ask further, because suddenly it didn’t matter. “I accept,” I said.
*
Over the following weeks I noticed something strange about myself: when the CEO praised Balázs again in a meeting for a project I had actually run from start to finish, I didn’t stay quiet the way I always had. I stood up, right in the middle of the conference room, in front of everyone, and in a calm but firm voice I laid out exactly, with facts, who had done what: who’d written the project brief, who’d spent three weeks on the phone with suppliers, who’d stayed up past midnight three nights running to keep the deadline, while Balázs, I pointed out, hadn’t shown up to a single related meeting because of his “sports day.” The room went quiet, a coworker named Zsuzsa, with whom I’d never really spoken before, nodded along wide-eyed at every sentence, and the CEO cleared his throat awkwardly before quickly moving on to the next agenda item. Later, in the hallway, he gave me an apologetic half-smile and said, “you’re right, really, we’ll sort it out,” which I’d heard from him maybe ten times before without anything ever being sorted — but this time, two weeks later, a raise actually came through, small, modest, but real. I didn’t know whether this was Fate Customer Service’s doing, or simply something in me having changed by having to offer up that silence — but I didn’t really care which it was.
My father lived three months past the diagnosis. The first day the Quality Time Guarantee gave us was a Saturday, when he woke up completely clear-headed, free of pain, and we sat in the garden the whole morning while he told me, for the first time in my life, what it had been like when my grandfather died, and how he, at twenty-two, had been so afraid he’d never be a good father, because no one had ever shown him how. He’d never spoken to me that way before, and I knew, sitting there with the sun warm on my skin, that this was the day I’d traded my silence for.
The second day came two months later, when he could barely get out of bed anymore, but that day he sat up, asked for a cup of tea, and said he wanted to visit our old apartment, the one we’d moved out of when I was ten. I drove him there, and he just sat in the car, looking out the window at the building, and told me that was where he’d taught me to ride a bike in the courtyard, and that the day I finally made it all the way around on my own, without help, he’d been so proud he cried in the car on the way home, pretending it was the wind that had gotten into his eyes, so I wouldn’t see. I had no memory of that day — I’d been too small — but from the moment he told me about it, I felt as though I, at thirty-two, had gotten that old afternoon back too, through his voice.
The third day, the last the guarantee gave us, came three days before he died, and though by then we already suspected this would be the last clear moment, we didn’t talk about it. We just sat in the hospital room, Lívia there too, and my father asked me to bring in a deck of cards, and we played a full game of rummy, which he won, as always, and at the end he said, laughing, “well, I got out of that one without losing too,” and that was the last complete sentence I heard from him before the pain and the confusion returned, and nothing came back after that that I recognized as him.
Sitting with him on all three of those days, I knew they were what I’d traded my silence for, and that it was the best deal I’d ever made, bureaucracy and all.
Three weeks after the funeral, I called the number one more time, just to thank Mária-Terézia. The machine voice sounded different somehow, slower, and when I finally reached her, she spoke before I could ask anything:
“I know why you’re calling, Mr. Horváth. You don’t need to thank me. This is my job, and sometimes — very rarely — it genuinely feels good to do it.”
“How do you know why I’m calling?”
“Because you’re the rare kind of customer who calls back when they don’t have a complaint. We have a separate category for it in our system. ‘Gratitude Case.’ Barely a few dozen a year, out of the millions of calls we receive. There was a debate at a management meeting over whether it was even worth keeping that category, since it’s used so rarely, but in the end they voted to keep it, because — and I’m quoting the minutes word for word — ‘if even one person calls for this reason each year, it proves the system occasionally works the way it’s supposed to.’”
“Then tell management that at least one of your categories functions perfectly.”
Mária-Terézia laughed, briefly, but genuinely, and it was the first time I’d heard laughter on that line through every single call I’d made.
I asked what happens now, whether I should call if something else goes wrong, and Mária-Terézia said the number would always be there if I needed it, but that she hoped I wouldn’t need it often, because “the richest lives are the ones where people need to call us the least.”
Before we could say goodbye, a machine voice cut in, exactly as it had at the end of every call for months: “Before ending this call, please take ten seconds to rate our service on a scale of one to five, where one means ‘the universe is indifferent to me,’ and five means ‘I felt like someone up there was paying attention.’ Please enter your selection now.”
I looked at the phone in my hand, and Mária-Terézia, as if she’d read my thoughts, murmured quickly before the system could take over automatically: “Press five. It does us good too, sometimes.”
I pressed five.
For a moment I wondered where that rating actually landed — in what office, what spreadsheet, what being hunched over a desk, tallying up the fives and ones at the end of every month, maybe smiling for a second when they saw a number higher than expected. Then it occurred to me that I’d probably never find out, and that this, for the first time since the hail had started the whole thing, didn’t bother me at all.
I hung up, and Lívia, sitting on the couch, who’d known for months now that this strange line existed, though she’d never asked for details, just said, “Everything okay?”
“Yes,” I answered, and for the first time in months, I felt that it actually was true.
Buksi jumped up onto the couch beside me, his skin completely healed now, and although I knew that someday there would surely be something else I’d call that number about — another injustice, another hailstorm, because life, it seems, never runs out of reasons to complain — in that moment, I felt no need to ask them for anything at all.
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