by Heide Goody
Hattie composed herself in the way that she does, by flapping a hand at her face as though she’s very hot. “I suppose you might call it an emergency.”
“Might I?” he said. “I might call ditch water coffee but that don’t make it so.”
“I needed to get some of my possessions to a place of safety because there’s been a bit of a problem at home.” She looked my way for the first time.
Now I knew what was in the boxes.
“May I take a look inside?” said Levi.
“Certainly.” Hattie opened the top of the nearest box and sure enough, it was filled with Smiley Tots. He picked one out and turned it over in his hands.
“Careful!” said Hattie.
Levi gave her a look. “I’m inspecting its safety labels. These are not certified as suitable for an industrial environment.”
“Of course they’re not, they’re toys!” said Hattie. “I just want to put them on my desk, as decoration.”
Levi paused. He knew very well that decoration of a desk was permitted. His gaze swivelled across the huge boxes before he looked critically at the desk. “I’m not sure they’ll all fit in the environs of the desk.”
“Oh, they will,” said Hattie with confidence.
“Hm.” Levi put the Smiley Tot down and looked at Hattie. “So what’s the problem at home? Anything I should know about?”
I tried to pull a subtle but meaningful face, but Hattie wasn’t even looking at me. “Alice has been a little careless with some of her recent activities. It not a suitable environment for the Smiley Tots.”
“Oh, dear. Trouble at the homestead, huh?” He looked across at me. He was wearing his disappointed face, yet I could see a hidden amusement in his eyes. “It’s our duty to make sure this is a safe and harmonious environment, is it not? Oh, yabetcha. I expect team members to park their problems at the door and look out for each other when they’re under my watchful eye.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” said Hattie piously.
My best friend hated me and was getting me into trouble at work for it. More trouble. The cleaning bot nudged up to the chair that I was sitting on. I kicked out at it. I’d always imagined these things as being Levi’s spies.
“Stupid spybot,” I growled.
Its canopy cracked in the middle, exposing some of its inner workings and it made a fizzing, sparking noise as it left. I wasn’t sorry.
***
When I got home that evening I ate beans and went to see how Chuckie Egg was doing. All of the doors were done now and the bot was working on the stairwells.
Helberg appeared from downstairs. “Took a few adjustments to get right.”
“I can see that,” I said, stepping carefully to avoid the paint streaking the stairs.
“I have something for you,” he said. I followed him to the office. He picked up a large piece of card. How old-fashioned! It was thick and had beautiful lettering upon it.
JAFFLE TECH’S
ANNUAL BENEVOLENCE GALA AND CHARITY AUCTION
IN AID OF THE
INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE ANIMALS
15th JUNE
“Is this an actual ticket?” I asked.
“It is an actual ticket.”
“How did you know I wanted to go?”
“I pulled a few strings to get hold of it after you mentioned how important it was to you.”
“Did I?”
“After your fourth glass of sherry.”
“Oh, right.” I said. “Was I … inebriated?”
“Inebriated? You were three sheets to the wind, O valued tenant.”
I marvelled at the ticket, felt its textured thickness under my thumb. “Wow. Thank you. You’ve no idea how much this means to me.”
“Oh, you were incoherently eloquent about it last night,” he said. “And now, Cinderella, you shall go to the ball!”
“Who’s Cinderella?”
It didn’t matter. I had a ticket to the charity gala, access to Rufus Jaffle, a chance to get answers to this chaotic mess my life had become and Operation Sunrise. I felt tears prick the corners of my ears in sheer gratitude at what Helberg had just done for me.
“Tears of joy?” said Helberg, hopefully.
I nodded and sniffed and attempted a smile before shaking my head. “There’s a very real chance I’ll get busted tomorrow for having more brain power than I’m supposed to.”
“Busted? How do you mean?” he asked.
“I’ve been avoiding a brain scan they insist on doing. I really need to present myself tomorrow and they’re bound to spot what’s going on. They’ll reverse it, I’m sure. I don’t think I can bear to go back to how I was. I certainly won’t be going to any gala.”
Helberg stared at me with a heavy sigh. “The tragic thing is if you did go back to how you were, you probably wouldn’t even mind. You’d sit and watch Smiley Time and be happy with it.”
With a chill I realised he was right. “No. That’s not right.”
“No, it is not. These brain scans, they must be a fairly standard report, right?”
I nodded. We dealt with them quite often. “Yes, there’s a capacity report, an activity report, an analysis of any serious failings, downtime or anomalies, that sort of thing.”
“Why not create a fake one?”
I thought for a moment. I could certainly rustle up some convincing content. “There’s one bit I couldn’t make up,” I said. “It needs to show a reading from the metrics chip on the Jaffle Port. If it’s not in line with previous readings, it will flag an error straightaway.”
“So get a previous reading.”
“Those are encrypted in storage, I can’t get to them without alerting the system.”
“Well,” he said slowly, “there is another possibility.”
I didn’t like the look on his face. “What?”
“I can hack your port, just to get a reading.”
“Oh no. Definitely no. Absolutely not!” It was a terrible idea.
He held up his hands. “Fine. If it makes you uncomfortable. Take your chances the scan at work will miss the massive upgrade you have somehow accidentally acquired.”
“No, it’s not that it makes me uncomfortable.” It made me very uncomfortable. “But look what happened the last time I meddled with the system. It’s got me in all sorts of trouble.”
He held my arms and looked me straight in the eye. “I think what you really mean is that it’s opened your eyes to a world you never even knew existed. A world that is filled with beauty and tragedy and so much wonder that you can’t wait to experience more of it. Or of course, you could go back to watching Smiley.”
I couldn’t argue with his logic. If there was a chance a fake brain scan could get me past this scrutiny at work and make sure I could hang on to my enhanced abilities, then I needed to take it.
“What would be involved in you hacking my Jaffle Port?” I asked.
“It will be a quick scan with some of my home-built equipment.”
“Show me.”
We walked through his office. Helberg used a stepladder to access a high shelf and he brought down a glass, cone-shaped object with electronics clustered upon it. It resembled nothing I had ever seen at Jaffle.
“It’s a little bit unusual,” he said, probably seeing my expression, “but I make equipment for my own use, remember? I don’t care what it looks like. The glass helmet is a re-purposed door from an old washing machine. It sits quite comfortably on the head and aligns the circuitry for accessing the Jaffle Port.”
I really didn’t want the thing on my head. I wasn’t sure if I trusted Helberg’s technical proficiency. Most of his bots seemed to work okay, but some were hopeless failures. More than that, I wasn’t sure if I trusted Helberg’s motives. He’d been helping me, there was no denying it, but I felt as though I was a project or a diversion. If I stopped being entertaining, would he be so keen to help? It wasn’t so long ago that he took all of my mone
y from me.
He looked at my face, perhaps detecting some suspicion. “Hey, I know you must be worried about this. I can’t make you believe me, but I promise I won’t do anything other than what I said. I’d suggest you could bring Hattie as a chaperone, but I’m not sure she’d approve of any of this.”
“Oh no, we can’t involve Hattie,” I said. “Right, let’s do this.”
He beamed. “Pop it on your head and I’ll calibrate the settings. Try to keep it still.”
“And, just to be clear, you’ve done this before?”
He hesitated. “Dozens of times. I have watched other open source port-engineers do this very thing. But, okay, yours is the very first head I’ve actually messed with.”
Messed with? “Can I have something to write on?” I asked.
He raised his eyebrows but passed me a pencil and paper from a drawer.
I scribbled a note.
To Alice in a few minutes’ time. If you suddenly and unaccountably want to have sex with Helberg, then he has messed with something in your brain and you need to punish him.
He gave me a hurt look. “I’m all for sex Alice, but not like that.”
“Glad to hear it.” I put the helmet on my head.
Whatever procedure Helberg ran, I felt nothing except the slightly uncomfortable weight of his contraption on my head. He lifted it off a few minutes later.
“All done.”
I shook out my hair. “Did you get the settings from the metrics chip?”
“Yup. Sending them to you now, so you can compose your own fake brain scan. Had you thought about adding in a small anomaly to throw them off the scent?”
“I had thought of that, yes,” I said. “We sometimes see capacity problems caused by environmental stress – like a change to routine. I think I’ll throw in one of those, but make it look steady and normal afterwards.”
***
Chapter 20 – 8th June – 11 days until Operation Sunrise
“You’ve got paint on you.”
It was the first thing Hattie had said to me in nearly twenty-four hours . To hear it was a stab of emotion in my chest. She still hadn’t forgiven me for staining her Smiley Tot, still could not comprehend that I needed to explore the new, unchained me. She was my very best friend in the whole world and it was wrenching to have lost some of that friendship. So to have her speak to me, directly and voluntarily, was wonderful. Even it was to point out a paint mark on my tunic as we walked into the Jaffle Tech building the next day.
I looked. There was a blob of brown paint on my tunic breast. It looked quite unpleasant but I didn’t have a clean spare back at home or time to go get one.
“I can sort that,” I said and took a detour to the supplies department.
“Hi Damian, I need to get a new tunic, can I pop down?” I asked.
“Sure,” said the helpful guy at the counter. “You can’t have it straightaway though.”
“But…” I pointed to the brown mark.
He pulled a face. “Have you been playing with dog poo again?”
“What do you mean again?”
He shrugged. “Word gets around.”
“It’s paint.”
“Paint?”
“Paint.”
“Paint?”
“Listen, can I get a tunic or not.”
“I’ll have to let the security staff know,” he said. “Orders from on high.”
“Levi, you mean.”
“It’s part of an ongoing investigation into a serious incident.” He did two lots of air quotes as he said it.
“Never mind,” I said. “I don’t want to create work for Levi.”
“You’re a very thoughtful person.”
“Who does not play with dog poo,” I pointed out as I left.
On our floor Hattie was going round her Smiley Tot enclosure and performing her morning routine on them: switching their positions so she could spend quality time with each of them. They were stacked three deep in what looked like a defensive wall around her cubicle, but Levi was unable to object because she had managed to get them above and below the desk’s surface. She was now able to take calls and tend to her Tots, which seemed to make her very happy. I thought about paintings of that Jesus baby in the art gallery and how happy a real baby might make Hattie. Maybe I’d have a chat about that with her later, work out a way for her to spend some time with real babies. Maybe rebuild our damaged relationship in the process.
I hurried to my cubicle and got settled in quickly so no one could see my unsightly stain. I got right down to the task of answering customer calls about their Jaffle Ports.
Mid-morning, I sent my home-made brain scan down to the medical centre and then, increasingly self-conscious about my stained uniform, went to the staff kitchenette to try and clean it. In my bag, I had the bottle of cleaning thinners Helberg had given me. I popped my bag on the counter and took the bottle out.
“Thinners,” I read, taking the lid off. “Do not drink. Inflammable liquid.”
It didn’t say I couldn’t use it on clothes. The smell was pungent, and I hoped I wouldn’t stink all day after using it.
I dabbed a little bit right on the edge of my tunic. It didn’t melt. I sloshed a good quantity onto the paint stain and dabbed at it with paper towelling from the dispenser. I could see the paint was softening, so I added some more.
“Alice, could I have a word please?”
I turned to see who it was, knocking over the thinners. It sploshed about on the counter. I grabbed the bottle before hardly any had run out and set it upright.
“Ah, right. Yes?” I said.
It was the beautiful woman with the big eyes from the medical centre. “Your brain scan,” she said.
“Yes?”
“It’s highly unusual for someone to commission one privately.”
“Did you find a problem with it?” I asked, expecting the worst.
“What do you think?”
I met her eye. “I think it was absolutely fine.”
“It was,” she conceded. “It’s just unorthodox. Who signed off on the deviation from procedure?”
I glanced across the counter, and saw a puddle of thinners was spreading towards a nearby toaster oven. I pulled more paper towelling from the dispenser and mopped it up. I breathed a sigh of relief, trying to make it look as if I was conscientiously cleaning up the kitchen, rather than doing anything suspicious.
“Alice,” said the medical centre woman.
“Sorry, yes.” I dropped the paper towels into the bin, along with the bottle of thinners. I’d have to get some more later.
“I’m really not sure whether to refer this to my supervisor.”
“The whole thing has a perfectly reasonable explanation,” I said.
She waited, clearly wanting to hear my perfectly reasonable explanation. There was a lull in conversation while I tried to think of one. A cleaning bot arrived. From its cracked canopy, I could see it was the one I’d kicked yesterday, the one I had groundlessly declared to be Levi’s spybot. The association alone made me stiffen with guilt but I made an effort to keep my expression composed. The bot whirred as it clamped the bin in order to empty it.
“Rufus Jaffle requested my brain scan,” I said.
“Him? Or his secretary?” she replied.
“Yes, exactly. He has a … close personal friend training to do brain scan type things and Rufus – I call him Rufus – he asked me to go to him.”
“For practice?”
“Exactly.”
I thought it was a good effort. To uncover my lie she’d have to find Rufus Jaffle and ask him. I didn’t think she’d bother and I certainly didn’t think she’d be able to find him.
Clunk!
Woomf!
The first sound was caused by the bottle of thinners falling out of the bin and splashing liquid all over the bot’s exposed circuitry. The second was the entire thing being set alight by a spark. The bot’s programming clearly didn’t cover this s
cenario: its routing seemed to immediately go wrong. It careered across the office, spinning towards the desks.
I ran after it. I would tell Levi that I thought running was justified in the circumstances. The bot was getting close to Hattie’s desk. I kicked it over to stop it getting any further and whooped in triumph as I managed to stop its progress. I wondered where the nearest fire extinguisher was. I could soon put this out, and then I’d be celebrated as the hero who averted a disaster. I whirled in place, wondering why the people at the surrounding desks were all standing and staring. I looked across at Hattie who peered across the top of her Smiley Tot wall. She was gesturing, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying.
To my horror I saw the fire which had previously been contained to the bot was spreading outwards as the liquid drained across the floor. It edged towards the Smiley Tots, and I waved wildly at Hattie.
“Fire!” I yelled.
“Yes!” she yelled, and yet she made no move to get out from what would surely become her funeral pyre.
“Move! You’re on fire!” I yelled.
“No, you’re on fire!” she yelled back, pointing.
I looked down. Sure enough, my tunic bottom was aflame. While I’d been fixated on the flames heading for Hattie they had also been coming towards me.
Well, I’d cast myself as the hero in this situation and this was just one more obstacle to overcome. With a roar, I tried to rip my tunic off, but only managed to burn my hand. I unzipped my tunic and stepped out of it. That left Hattie and her Smiley Tot inferno. They were giving off a thick black smoke which made me cough. I lunged forward, burst through the wall of Smiley Tots and grabbed Hattie by the arm. I hauled her clear as the Smiley wall started to crackle with tall flames.
As we panted with the spent adrenalin, the sprinklers came on, the fire alarms howled and the smell of singed plastic replaced the choking smoke. Throughout the office, Jaffle Tech employees rose from their seats and moved in an orderly fashion towards the exits.
Levi appeared and looked me up and down. “Are you hurt?” he said.
I looked down at myself. Levi was staring, possibly because my clothes were either burned or discarded to the extent that I was very nearly naked.
