Sorry, Grandma

"Let the dead rest," my grandma used to say.
I should have known better.

I caught myself mindlessly doom-scrolling on my phone in bed again. My e-therapist told me I needed to switch up my routine if I ever hoped to break outta the rough patch. So, I tossed my phone on the pile of this week's abandoned craft projects—knitting and scrapbooking—and picked up the TV remote. The little dopamine hits I was getting from watchlist hoarding screeched to a halt when I realized I already had hundreds of unwatched shows on My List.

"Same problem, different device."

Face hot, I snatched my phone and jabbed the screen, opened the latest trending AI chatbot app, and turned on live voice chat.

"I'm bored," I said.

"Want to play a game to pass the time?" the chatbot replied with a vaguely familiar female voice, cheery tone, and unnaturally bouncy cadence. "Games can be great fun when you're bored!"

"Yeah, okay."

"We can play a variety of games, like trivia, twenty questions, or hangman! What would you like to play?"

"What am I, five?" I snorted. "Give me something more...I dunno, adult-like? Or, scary."

"Got it! How about we play a good old-fashioned game of spirit board? I can't replicate the full experience, but you can ask me questions, and a spirit can respond through me! Ask away!"

"Okay..." I squinted at the screen, watching the waveform of my own voice bounce. "Are you here, spirit?"

My phone crackled, and the screen went black—just for a moment—and lit back up.

"Yes."

My chest tingled, cold and tight. The AI voice had changed to an unsettling array of overlapping voices, masculine and feminine, dissonant and slightly out-of-sync.

"What the—" I started, pausing to lick my dry lips. "What's your name?"

"Legion," the voices replied over a strange, whining white noise.

"That's very...Biblical." I frowned, curling my arms around myself.

"What is your question?"

"Uhm. I guess...is there an afterlife?" I rubbed my prickling arms against a sudden cold, gaping at myself for the question.

"All of us. We are here."

A charged, electric current snaked up my spine as the voices echoed from my phone. I worked my jaw, struggling to form a response.

"Sweetheart?" My grandma's voice rang through, tinny and distant, buried just beneath the surface of white noise formed from moans and wails.

I gasped, leaped from the bed, and landed hard on my knee on the floor, ankle tangled in the sheets.

"Sweetheart?" My grandma's voice, quavering, asked again.

My pulse thrashed in my ears as I kicked the sheets off my ankle. I choked down a breath, backpedaling with hands and feet out of the bedroom. I shot up and took off, chest burning, snagging my keys from the wall on the way out the front door.

The night air chilled my hot skin. The cold, firm sidewalk comforting against my socked feet. A high-pitched cackle burst from my mouth, turning into a long laugh.

"Stupid AI. I can't believe you got me."

I glanced at my bedroom window, my gut clenching at the soft glow of my phone screen still resting on my bed. I rounded my car, unlocked it, and got in, keeping my eyes trained on the bedroom window.

Swallowing hard, I dropped my car keys into the console cupholder and tried to steady my breath.

The locks on all the car doors clicked shut. I cried out, wrenching the door handle and slamming my fists on the window.

It didn't budge.

My car's lights flickered to life. I watched, legs trembling, as the volume on the dashboard display turned itself up, filling the car with the white noise of moans and wails.

If only I'd listened.
I should have let the dead rest.
"Sorry, Grandma."