by Heide Goody
“Is this the one?” he asked the receptionist, pointing at me.
“I don’t know, sir,” the receptionist replied.
“Clean-up?” he said to me.
“I do,” I said.
“Good. With me.” He turned to the receptionist. “You. Let – ah, Alice’s section head know that she’s popping up to do a job on the exec floor and she’ll be back later.”
“What about me?” asked Hattie.
“What about you?” said Henderson as he led me away to the bank of elevators.
I turned and waved a brief goodbye to Hattie as the doors closed.
***
I had no clue exactly why I was in the elevator with this Henderson. As we rode up, I surreptitiously jipped in the company directory.
Jethro Henderson was Jaffle Tech’s Chief Technical Officer. I had to look that up too and when I did, I was impressed. He supervised the company’s engineering department and was one of the half dozen people who ran the company – the whole worldwide company! – on behalf of the board of directors and the CEO.
And he was taking me right to the top. The elevator was heading to the top floor, the realm of top bosses and execs that I never got to mingle with.
“I don’t want any delays to the project,” said Henderson.
“No delays,” I said. “What project?”
“The demand that we’ll create with Operation Sunrise will increase revenues across all of our main streams. Consumers, even reticent ones, will buy into it. Jaffle Tech gives them access to the world. They owe us everything. We’ve made gods of humankind.”
“Right. Gods.”
“Wait, no. We can’t afford to deliver late, do you understand?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” I said.
“What? Oh no, just someone standing nearby who thinks I’m talking to them. Now listen, I want a daily update report on this. Make sure that any blockers get escalated directly to me. Is that clear?”
Henderson made a gesture to end the call moments after I realised that he hadn’t been talking to me at all. I opened my mouth to explain, but Henderson silenced me with a wave of his hand and then the elevator arrived and he ushered me out. I had never been to the exec floor and it was startlingly different to the other floors. The carpet was very thick. It was so thick that I wondered briefly whether Levi would consider it a trip hazard. There were glass cases containing exhibits. I stepped across to look at one. There was a small piece of electronic circuitry with a label next to it.
2023: The first Jaffle interfaces used on human subjects exposed them to the sensory input from the eyes of a fly. This programme was closed down when subjects exhibited symptoms of PTSD.
“What’s PTSD?” I asked, but Henderson had already swept away down the corridor.
“It’s a simple clean-up,” said Henderson. “You do your regular sweep and clean and then get out, got it?”
I looked at him. He gave me a curt glance. “Are you talking to me this time?” I asked.
He stopped outside a door. “Who else would I be talking to?”
“Um.”
“In here. Make sure you do a good job.”
“Right.”
“Naturally, if you don’t, you will be fired.”
“Okay.”
I looked at the door.
Rufus Jaffle
“Oh wow, he’s got the same name as the company,” I said, turning to Henderson. He was already halfway down the corridor, speaking urgently to someone on another call. He walked like a man who had a lot of urgent calls to make.
I looked back at the door and knocked gently.
“Yo!” called a voice within.
I entered the room. It was much larger than I’d expected. If this room was on my floor it would contain a hundred people in cubicles. There was a wall entirely composed of glass doors and beyond that a wide balcony on which a sleek commuter drone had been parked. The room had strange colourful hangings on the wall, it was carpeted even more thickly than the corridor, and the furniture was big and chunky. The desk was larger than the whole canteen servery, and yet it looked as though it was designed for just one person. The person in question was lying back in a chair with his feet on the desk, his long hair trailing back across the headrest. There was a graze and fading bruise above his eyebrow, as though he had recently been in an accident.
I was, however, distracted by his clothes. Henderson had been wearing a suit. Suits were not something I came across very often – tunics, tabards and coveralls were the clothes of the regular worker – but I had seen people wearing suits. Rufus Jaffle wore something that looked like a suit, but the trousers were too short. They were so short that I could see his hairy legs up to his knees. Instead of shoes, he wore footwear that looked like the bottom part of a shoe held on with a couple of thin straps. Levi would have something to say about those.
“I’m Alice Tennerman. Henderson sent me,” I said.
“Awesome! Good old, Jethro,” said Jaffle. “Take a seat, Alice. Can I get you a drink?”
“Um.”
“A drink?” he repeated.
“A drink would be lovely,” I said politely.
“Power smoothie, probiotic milkshake or Himalayan herb detox?”
I played back what I’d just heard in my mind. I had no idea what those things were, even after a brief jip with my Jaffle Port. “I’ll have whatever you’re having, thank you.”
“Awesome.” He gestured to open a call. “Florence, can I get two Himalayan herb detoxes please? Then make sure I’m not disturbed for an hour, will you?”
A woman appeared through a door that I hadn’t even realised was there. She placed a tray on the desk and left, smiling at Jaffle.
“Florence, my secretary is an absolute diamond,” said Jaffle. “I call her my secretary. She’s actually a European princess. I picked her up in Cremona at an IFPA gala event for sea turtles or something.” He looked suddenly and deeply puzzled. “Or is her name Cremona and I met her in Florence?”
“I … I don’t know,” I said.
He waved to open a call. “Florence. Where did we meet? Uh-huh. And your name? Uh-huh.” He killed the call.
“Milan, it turns out,” he said, not making it clear if that was the woman’s name or where they met. “Cool. Now let me talk you through the tea. I think it would really help if our chakras were aligned before we start the procedure.”
“Procedure, yes,” I said. I looked around, wondering if there was anything obvious that needed cleaning up. Dog poo, for example.
“First of all,” he said, “the herbs are blended specifically for each person’s unique earthly alignment. What’s your date of birth, Alice?”
“Twentieth of January, twenty thirty-seven,” I said.
“I’ll just work out your blend.” He cocked his head as he studied his heads-up display and then spooned dried leaves from a rack of small containers that were on the tray into a pot.
He began to sing a soft mostly tuneless song.
“Mixing and mystery are part of their history. It’s the tea le-e-e-aves. The te-e-ea leaves, yeah?”
He poured hot water from a tall jug into the pot. “Now for mine,” he said and repeated the routine, although the leaves came from different pots and the song had a different tune, or at least lacked a tune in a different way.
“Good,” he said. “You should know that all of the herbs are harvested at the break of day, when their essence is considered to be purest. Now, we will steep the herbs to the sound of the singing bowl.”
He picked up a stumpy tool and stirred it inside a metal bowl on the tray. To my amazement the bowl started to make a loud noise. It sounded more than a little like being at home in the kitchen and hearing Hattie in the shower when she started singing the Smiley theme tune. Like that but really loud.
Jaffle closed his eyes and leaned back as he continued to make the bowl sing. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to join in. Instead I silently looked him up. I tried to
keep my composure when the results popped up. The very top of Jaffle Tech was a bit complicated. There was a board of directors and a CEO and then a cluster of people around the CEO. The Jaffles themselves, the Jaffle family, including one Rufus Jaffle, son of the company founder. This man with the singing bowl and the secretary who might have been called Florence or Cremona or Milan, and whom he had picked up in one of those places, pretty much owned the company, or at least owned as much of the company as any one person did. He was one of the super-rich. International philanthropist, advocate of space exploration, honorary president of the International Federation for the Protection of Animals. He was personally the sixth richest person on planet Earth. Maybe that explained the suit-like shorts. Maybe all super-rich people wore suit shorts.
Rufus Jaffle opened his eyes again. “Blissful sound, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Er, the procedure you mentioned?”
“Old Hendo didn’t explain?” asked Jaffle. “That’s why you have some light brown in your aura. It denotes confusion. Come child, sip your tea and I will explain.”
He pressed the tiny delicate bowl into my hands, carefully folding the fingers of both of my hands around it. I realised this was because the cup had no handle. How odd.
He picked up his own cup with the same gesture, and raised it to his mouth. It seemed like a very inefficient way to have a drink, but I copied his movements.
“So Alice, I asked Jethro to find me someone to help me with a brain tech issue. I need a delicate job to be done, and apparently you’re just the person I need.”
“Oh yes, of course,” I said, delighted to grasp onto something I understood. That kind of clean-up. That made sense. “I work in brain tech. Normally we do this on a call.”
“Yes, I guess you do, but listen and be guided by your inner voice, Alice.” He cupped an ear. “Can you hear it?” I strained my ears but heard nothing special. “I really appreciate your attending in person,” he said. “It will be a holistic experience, I can already feel it, can’t you? I need to make sure that this procedure is handled discreetly. It’s important to me that this is not logged on the system. The whole world can’t know that one of the heads of Jaffle has a brain virus now, can they?”
Brain virus? I’d heard of the concept of a brain virus, but mostly it was used as a cautionary tale or a hypothetical concept designed to promote healthy practices with backups and system flushes. A portion of everyone’s brain was taken up with housekeeping software to counteract such a possibility.
“Are you sure you have a virus?” I asked. “Where could you have got it from?”
“Oh, I’m sure,” he said. “I believe I got it from uploading an unofficial hack.”
I stared. “You’re a Jaffle and you put unauthorised software into your brain?”
“Wild, isn’t it?” he said with a small smile. “I wanted to be at one with a blue whale.”
“A blue—?”
“Whale, yes.” He made a long and low keening sound. “It’s been a long-term ambition of mine. I’m all about the animals. I’m like the chief spokesperson for IFPA.”
“The animal charity.”
“Right on, and I heard a rumour that someone had a download. Plugs you right into the live-feed of a whale brain. I mean, our guys in the labs are always working on new things, but this one just didn’t ever seem to make it to the top of the list. Something about low customer value and high production costs, if you can believe that? Anyway, when this guy claims to have it right there on a plate for me, what else am I gonna do, right?”
He suddenly pressed himself against a square blue wall hanging.
“Can you imagine that?” he said, and made the keening, honking sound again.
I nodded, although I was now very uncertain that I had understood correctly. “You wanted to know some more about blue whales?” she asked.
“No, no, no. I wanted to be at one with a blue whale. I wanted to swim with it, hear it call to other whales and listen to their reply. I wanted to understand what it is to be a blue whale.”
“Wow,” I said. “How... interesting. And did you?”
“Oh man, I did. It was the best. These magnificent creatures have such sights to show us, and such things to teach us. It was truly humbling.” He paused, staring at the ceiling in recollection. “But then I got the virus. It was sort of trippy and cool at first, but it’s definitely affecting my chakras and I need it gone.”
“And when you say it’s affecting your chakras, you mean – what exactly?” I prompted.
“Oh the usual. I feel unsatisfied with my life, as if I don’t know what to do with myself, and I don’t seem to be able to delete or re-edit any of my brain content. It’s almost always a blocked chakra when that happens.” He nodded. “I expect everyone gets the same from time to time. I also had really bad food poisoning, but I’m pretty sure that was from when I went out in the ocean to strain krill through my teeth.”
“Strain krill through your teeth.” I echoed with a baffled nod, resolving to look it up later.
“So, I want to get rid of the virus. Oh, and delete a couple of embarrassing memories.”
“And to get rid of the virus, we’re going to do what, exactly?”
“Hey Alice, I’m going to bow to your experience here. You’re the clean-up guru.”
“We could start with defragmentation and deep clean.”
“Whatever’s going to work. I gotta admit, I don’t really understand all of the terminology like clearing down caches and yadda yadda. Can we start soon? I’ll be fully aligned with my magnetic north at nine thirty. It would be a really good time.”
I turned the phrase clean-up guru over a couple of times and wondered if I was here because I had declared my competence at hand washing. No matter, it was much too late to back out now. I checked the time. It was a few minutes before nine thirty.
“Right,” I said briskly, forming a plan as I went. “The best thing will be if we take all your valuable content, copy it over to a fresh facility where it will be cleared of any contagions or malware and then we do a general scrub and then re-apply each sector, optimising storage and scanning for defects as we go.”
“And the non-techy version?”
“We’ll upload everything to the cloud, wipe clean and then copy it back a bit at a time.”
“Uh, gonna have to stop you right there, Alice. We can’t use the cloud. Remember, this must be off the record. I’m not taking my brain down to the local laundromat. You’ll need to think of something else.”
“Oh.” The standard operating procedure was ingrained in me, and it seemed very wrong to deviate from it, but this was Jaffle himself. It was his company who had set the operating procedure, so presumably he could override it if he wanted to. I wondered what alternatives there might be. “I guess we could use local storage,” I mused, “although most of the high capacity devices need to be checked out of stock, so we couldn’t do that. How about using organic storage from another source?”
“You mean another person’s brain?” Jaffle asked.
“Yes. A family member or someone you trust, perhaps?”
“Ooh, Alice, see my aura? Can you see it?” he asked, waving his hands and rolling his eyes.
“No,” I said, “I’m not even sure what an aura is, Jaffle.”
“Call me Rufus, please, won’t you? Well, Alice, you don’t need to be able to see my aura to know that it’s totally stressing out at the idea of involving a family member, ya hear me? Paris would kill me.”
That seemed a bit extreme, a whole city trying to kill him. Unless Paris was the name of another of his secretaries.
“We have to keep this just between the two of us,” he said and then gasped. “Here’s an idea! Why don’t we use your brain?”
“My brain? I—”
“You I said it should be someone I trust.” He came down on one knee in front of me, flicked his long hair out of his face and clasped my hands. “I trust you, Alice.”
I
couldn’t think of a reason why not. I could take myself offline for a short while so that I had all of my capacity at my disposal. I ran through the steps in my mind and decided that the whole thing would take around thirty minutes. I’d be back at my desk in plenty of time for the mid-morning peak call time, and then lunch with Hattie.
“Sure.” I smiled at him and went into my best customer service mode as I mentally worked through the preparations. “Of course we can do that. Now I’m going to switch us both to operate only locally and then I’ll jip an access request to your Jaffle Port. Just make yourself comfy and I’ll take it from there.”
Rufus beamed at me, jumped back in his chair and reclined it further, until all I could see were his dangling legs. I started to go through the protocols to make a full backup but redirecting the traffic to my own brain when Rufus sat up suddenly in shock.
“If you copy my brain,” he said, “will you become me?”
“No.”
“And I become you?”
“No.”
“Cos if, you know…” He gave me an oddly hungry look and held his hands out over his chest as though supporting a pair of breast. “We could…”
“It doesn’t work like that, Rufus,” I said. “It’s done with compressed data squirts and—” I sighed. “Let me show you.”
There was open projection equipment in the room. I cast up some images and copies of our live brain data as a holographic image in front of us. “This is your brain,” I said.
“Cool. It’s big, isn’t it?”
“It’s not actual size.”
“In the physical world, right. Spiritually though…”
“And this is your Jaffle Port.” A small patch was highlighted. “This gives you direct access to worldwide data and communications. It also organises redundant synaptic pathways and repurposes them for additional processing and storage.”
“More synaptic connections in the brain than stars in the universe,” said Rufus, dreamily.
“That’s what they say,” I said. “You have an astonishing capacity for data storage. Jaffle Tech take up some of that spare brain power with basic software, keeping everything clean and safe. If you’re on Jaffle Standard, like me – which, of course, you’re not – then some of the rest is utilised by outside systems, whether that’s analysing astronomical data, studying new genetic material or just keeping the trains running on time.”
