by Heide Goody
***
Chapter 14
I sat and thought about how I could get up to the executive floor to see Rufus Jaffle. I made a list on my wipe-clean notepad.
roof
helicopter
ladder
elevator
rope
steal pass
Obviously some people had legitimate access to those floors. There was Rufus himself, his secretary, probably service personnel like cleaners, caterers, and maintenance engineers. I paused and thought for a moment about the outlandish story I had told Hattie. It reminded me I actually did need to go and get another tunic, but the germ of an idea was starting to form.
At the end of my shift I went down to supplies. Someone called Damien was on reception.
“Hi Damien, I’ve been sent down by Rufus Jaffle to pick up some uniforms.”
“Have you got the requisition paperwork?” he asked.
“No, he said that this is off the record.”
“Jaffle did?”
“Rufus Jaffle, yes. And he said Damien would be sure to be discreet.”
“He mentioned me by name?”
“He’s the boss. He knows about you, Damien.”
“Sweet. So what do you need?” Damien grinned with pride.
“I need a set of coveralls for a maintenance engineer and a tunic like this one,” I said.
Damien shrugged. “He’s the boss. Yes, he is.” He led me into a storeroom. “Any idea of the sizes that you need?”
I gestured to myself. “Oh, you know, average. Probably about my size, I’d say. I’ll need one of those caps and one of those tool bags too.”
In the bathroom I changed into the maintenance engineers coveralls and put on the cap, shoving my hair underneath. Everything else went into the tool bag. I walked up to reception.
“Got a call for the exec floor,” I said, attempting to disguise my voice. Both of the receptionists peered anxiously at me.
“Have you got a sore throat?” asked the male receptionist.
“Um, what?”
“I can get you a glass of water if you like?”
“Your colleague is over there, just getting in the elevator,” said the female receptionist.
“Is he?” I said and sprinted for the doors.
As the doors closed, the real engineer turned and looked at me. “Not seen you before,” he said.
I looked up at him. Part of me wanted to get back out and admit my mistake, but I’d got this far and I really needed to get to Rufus Jaffle. I needed to blind this man with officious superiority. I decided to cast myself as a female Levi and see where it led.
“There’s a very good reason for that,” I said. “If quality spot checks are done by co-workers they are often found to be inaccurate. You ever been quality spot checked before?”
“Uh, no.”
“Right. It’s simple enough. I will give you some time to do the job, unhindered, and then you will answer any questions I might have about the quality of what you’ve done. Understand?”
“I think so,” he said. “Sorry? Who are you?”
“I’m a ghost,” I said. “A silent observer. You have to act like I’m not even here.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Smart man. You’ll do fine, I’ve no doubt. Now what’s the job?”
“Conference room window hydraulics are not working.”
“Good. Well you get along and fix that and I’ll inspect another task from last week.” I looked straight ahead as the elevator doors opened.
“Oh, what task is that?” he asked.
“I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation,” I said and stalked down the corridor towards Jaffle’s office.
I waited until the engineer had disappeared before knocking on Rufus Jaffle’s door. There was no reply. I tried the handle and found it unlocked. I went inside.
“Hello?”
There was nobody there. There was no luxury drone on the balcony beyond the glass wall. As I scanned the room I realised it was unchanged since my last visit. Not just unchanged, it was untouched. The tea cups were still on the tray, unwashed. The chairs were still tilted back from the clean-up job. I shook my head at my own naivety and my foolish assumption that Rufus Jaffle would be in the office every day like a regular person. He’d probably be off somewhere doing rich person things, attending extravagant parties and making important decisions on behalf of the workers at Jaffle Tech.
So if he wasn’t here, maybe I could find a way to contact him. I jipped the local area to see if there was anything accessible via my Jaffle Port but the security here was as tight as could be expected.
I could always ask Jaffle’s secretary, Florence. Or Cremona, or Milan, or whatever. Hadn’t Rufus said she was a European princess?
I went over to the wall to look for the hidden door to the secretary’s office. The wall appeared to be seamless. Long way round then, I thought.
Out in the corridor I walked to the secretarial office. The door was locked. I knocked.
“Milan?” I hissed through the door. “Your Highness?”
There was no response. The elevator dinged. I glanced back. A group of people, all in suits, stepped out. Jethro Henderson at the forefront. I turned quickly to hide my face and moved away down the corridor.
They followed me!
I picked up the pace and dodged through the first open door. It was a conference room, luxurious contemporary seating arranged around a long table which looked far too large to be practical. Around the walls, pieces of Jaffle Tech from the company’s long history were displayed in glass cabinets.
By the window, the engineer was working on a sticky hinge.
A bot-trolley detached itself from the wall, and jipped my Jaffle Port to ask if I wanted anything to eat or drink. The body of the snack-bot was a warming cabinet that held plates and the top was arranged with glasses of drink and bitesize snacks.
I waved it away. The engineer glanced round at me.
“Silent observer,” I reminded him. “I’m not here.”
He smiled and nodded.
The door handle turned. I near leapt in alarm. The suits were coming in.
I ducked behind a cleaning bot standing in the shadow of display cabinet. The cabinet held some sort of insect mounted on a card which read, 2009 - the first wireless flying insect cyborg demonstrated at a conference in Italy.
I was just in time. The door opened and people walked in.
“So, make yourselves comfortable and I’ll take us through the agenda,” said Henderson. “Hey, you!”
“Sir?” said the engineer.
“Whatever you’re doing, get out.”
The engineer silently gathered his tools and made his way round the long table to the exit. He looked at me, squatting in my hiding space. I made a frantic slicing No! gesture with my hand. He tapped his nose and winked.
“Not even here,” he said.
“That’s right,” said Henderson closing the door behind the engineer.
I was trapped in the room with them. I made myself as small as I could.
“Operation Sunrise has been given the green light for implementation,” said Henderson.
“Rufus signed off on it?” said a man, surprised.
“He did. Michael here witnessed it. So, we just need to put it past the rest of the board and we go live in fifteen days. Five pm on the nineteenth.”
A hand (from my position, I couldn’t see who it belonged to) waved for a drink and the snack-bot trundled over.
“We four need to be crystal clear about our business objectives,” said Henderson, “and make sure that everyone knows the success criteria for their area of responsibility. So as I run through each area, chip in.”
There was the clink of glass and a crunch of eating. The cleaning bot next to me rolled out of its position towards the table.
Crumbs, I thought. With the cleaning bot gone, my hiding place was barely any hiding place at all. Any one of the people at the table jus
t had to look round and they’d see me squatting on the floor.
“First of all,” said Henderson, “let’s touch on political liaison and media response. Jessica?”
“Thanks, Jethro,” said a suit. “If you’d look at the screen…”
There was a change in the room’s lighting. All eyes would be on the screen. I slipped from my hiding place and crossed the short distance to the window curtains. They were long and billowy and, if I stood perfectly upright and pressed myself flat, I’d not create a noticeable bulge.
“We know some people are uncomfortable with change,” Jessica was saying. “There are politicians and opinion makers outside our control. We have to win them over by pointing to our past successes. Blindness eradicated, the dementia epidemic reversed, our unarguable role in education and law and order. This is Jaffle Tech’s image and Jaffle Tech’s legacy. Believe me, we still have a lot of brownie points. We keep punching those messages home and, if anyone starts to badmouth Operation Sunrise, it’s going to sound like sour grapes and groundless doom-mongering.”
There were approving noises. I worried that my feet might be visible under the very bottom edge of the curtain. I tried to angle them sideways without falling over.
“And remember,” said Jessica, “we only need to worry about public opinion until the roll-out is complete. By reducing customers to a lower level of functionality, we expect levels of satisfaction to be consistently higher. Happy voters are what the politicians want, after all.”
“Are we rolling out the plippers at the same time?” a man asked.
“The same day,” said another voice. “We’re going to deadcat Operation Sunrise with a distribution of plippers to all law enforcement bodies in the country. The plipper technology is already covered in the last set of user Ts and Cs. Everyone has already given their consent.”
“Everyone?” said another.
There was mild laughter. “Everyone on Jaffle Enhanced and below, Marcus,” said Henderson. “Don’t worry. You’re not about to get plipped.”
Plipper. Plipped. The words meant nothing to me.
“Mind if I just close the blinds?” asked someone.
I froze. The curtain rail began to move. My new hiding place was unbunching and about to be less than useless. I signalled the snack-bot to bring me a drink and as it drifted over, cancelled the order. I dropped behind it.
The snack-bot rolled away and I rolled with it. As I passed the far end of the table, now directly beneath the screen but away from the gaze of the suits, I crouched low and let the snack-bot go on. Instinctively, I took a crispbread snack from its top as it left.
“How extensively have the plippers been tested?”
“The test labs have run through eight hundred different test scenarios and the plippers have performed perfectly. Have you all seen it in action? No? Oh, I should. Let me…” Henderson went quiet as he sent off a communication.
I broke off a crumb of crispbread and dropped it on the floor. The cleaning bot came over to silently vacuum it up. I broke another crumb and cast it a little further away, towards the door. The cleaning bot moved on, me with it.
“I can imagine there will be moral objections to plipper technology,” said Marcus.
“Why?” asked Jessica. “Do you know how many people die each year in this country while being arrested. Even non-lethal tech such as Tasers causes up to fifty deaths nationwide. With the implementation of plippers, that number will effectively drop to zero.”
There was a knock at the door. I peered round the edge of the cleaning bot, and I saw Levi walk in. I guessed he was seeing it for the first time, as his eyes took in the size of the space and the ostentatiousness of the furnishings.
“Hi Levi, good of you to join us,” said Henderson. “Would you be kind enough to carry out an ad-hoc security check on the room?”
I was about to be busted. Levi wouldn’t have to look very hard to notice me.
“Yes, sir, happy to help.” He walked briskly around the room. As he came along the edge of the table he simply looked down and saw me. I pulled a face, attempting to convey this wasn’t what it looked like and could he please not give me away.
“And now the plipper,” Henderson said. There was a soft push-button click.
Levi lifted a hand to point. I could see his mouth starting to form a sentence. Then he dropped to the floor like a rag doll.
I stifled a gasp. Was he dead? No, he sat up slowly, his face slack and vacant. His eyes were open, but they saw nothing. I realised with horror that he was now an Empty. The plipper that Henderson had pressed so casually had instantly taken his brain function down to the most basic level.
Henderson put a device back down on the table. “Well, I think we can be satisfied by the response time,” he said. “Marcus, we’ll need to monitor that carefully as rollout progresses, make sure it remains sub-second. Yes?”
“Sure. And what do you want to do with him?”
“We’ll get him back onto his regular level after the meeting,” said Henderson. “He’s no bother to anyone there.”
I had to get out of the room. I broke further crumbs for the cleaning bot and kept pace at its side. I needed to make sure it moved consistently – it would definitely draw attention if it slowed or stopped. Levi had left the door open a little when he’d entered – thank goodness – and the cleaning bot and I slipped through the gap. I rushed to the elevator.
***
Chapter 15
Curtains.
I lay in my bed listening to the morning sounds of Hattie carrying out the day's cleaning tasks. Today was curtains, according to her rota. Every fortnight without fail they were all washed, dried and ironed. She’d be in here shortly if I didn’t get up.
I lay there, listening to the huffs of a woman for whom happiness was a clean home. I thought about my situation and Operation Sunrise (whatever that was), about plipper devices and the dead Empty look on Levi’s face. If there was any danger that my new abilities would be taken away – and I was certain there was – then I had to squeeze the most out of them while I could.
I rose, went to the wardrobe and looked at Claire's dress. It was magnificent if impractical. I could really do with finding some other clothes that were as colourful, clothes which I might be able to wear more regularly. I put on a tunic and went to find Hattie. She had finished loading the washing machine, and now had a pair of Smiley Tots in her arms. She was nuzzling them against her face.
“Good morning Alice,” she said. “We were about to come and wake you. The twins are lively today.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“I think that perhaps they want to watch Mr Smiley. What do you say twins?”
“They look, um, chirpy. It's because you take such good care of them.”
“Who wouldn’t want to love these babies? Such adorable Munchkins.” Hattie made enthusiastic if alarming chomping noises at the Smiley Tots. “Now, you sit down with the twins and I’ll work around you.”
“Actually, I want to go out and buy some clothes today,” I said.
Hattie gave me a long hard look, making sure I noticed it was long and hard. "You don't need to buy clothes," she said.
“I don’t need any, no.”
"All of our tunics are free.”
“Yes.”
“We get given them.”
“Yes, but there are other clothes, not just tunics.”
“I don't understand."
“I just feel like getting something different. Something with a bit more colour.” I tried to act casual, as if this wasn't a major departure from normal behaviour.
Hattie narrowed her eyes at me. “When’s your brain scan?”
“That’s got nothing to do with it.”
“You might have a brain virus.”
“I don’t have a brain virus.”
“Have armed criminals stolen your tunic again?”
“No.”
“Maybe they made you say that. Blink twice if you’re being
forced to do this.”
“I’m not being forced to do this.”
“You blinked.”
“That was an ordinary blink,” I said. “People blink.”
“Maybe they made you say that too. Blink twice and—”
“I’m fine!” I insisted. “It's just that I'd quite like a change.”
“I don't like change,” grumbled Hattie.
I had beans for breakfast. I hadn’t got hold of any bacon, and my research indicated that bacon, once extracted from the pig, needed to be kept cold in a fridge and cooked using a cooker. We didn’t have either of those things and I wasn’t sure Hattie was ready for that sort of upheaval in our apartment.
I left on a mission. What I’d told Hattie was partly true, I genuinely did want to get some more clothes, but what I really craved was colour. I went outside, spent ten minutes talking to the oblivious Empties on the kerb and then called a car.
“Take me somewhere colourful,” I said.
“Destination not recognised,” said the car.
“Take me to the flowers,” I tried.
“Do you want to go to a flower market?” the car asked.
I didn’t know what that meant so I jipped it. Lots of flowers. Retailers and buyers. I jipped some images. “Yes!” I said.
I watched the changing cityscape as we drove to the flower market. It was an uneven patchwork of houses and apartment complexes, segments of colour and no colour. I reckoned I could bet where the folks on Jaffle Standard lived, in buildings of sludgy beige and grey. The houses of those on Jaffle Enhanced and Jaffle Premium betrayed their owners with the painted detail on the walls or colourful curtains fluttering at the window. Hattie worried constantly about the cleanliness of our curtains, but she never considered their plainness or their ugly putty colour was a problem.
The car pulled up outside a gated area. I couldn’t see any flowers, but when I got out I thought I could smell something. I walked into a huge building with high ceilings. There were rows of little enclosures with tables and displays that were covered in flowers. There were so many different sorts of flowers, in so many colours.
A woman looked up from her counter. “Are you lost?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve come to look at the flowers.”
