by E. M. Foner
“What kind of scam is this?” he demanded loudly, obviously hoping that some of his employees would stand up and support him. “I call you out here to fix a computer, you fix the computer. You aren’t here to judge me.”
I was tempted to tell him that I was on Earth for exactly that purpose, but I didn’t want the scene to escalate any further. Instead, I began reciting the text from my website.
“We fix all computer problems resulting from hardware failure, hacking, and automatic updates. We—”
“If that’s not a hardware failure, I’m a monkey’s uncle!” he interrupted.
“You have the evolutionary relationship backwards and I don’t work for people who abuse hardware. Somebody clearly ripped the screen off the laptop and then threw it against the wall. I can see a dent in the sheetrock where the corner hit, and there’s plaster dust between the—”
“You’re insane,” he cut me off, having finally figured out my dig at his family tree. “Get out of my office. Next time I’ll know better than to call some random clown I find on Google.”
“I’ve added your phone number to my blacklist so it won’t happen again,” I replied over my shoulder as I headed for the door. I made it fifty-fifty odds he would throw the laptop at my back, but either his guardian angel or an employee restrained him.
Sometimes I wonder how human repairmen put up with all of the jerks they meet on jobs. An electrician who used to come into The Portal for lunch every day always had funny stories to tell. One was about a customer whose hair dryer started smoking and blew the circuit breaker. She kept resetting the breaker and restarting the hair dryer until it burst into flames, giving her an electrical shock and a melted plastic burn at the same time. When the electrician asked the woman why she kept trying to use the hairdryer, she replied, “Because my hair was still damp.” That electrician doesn’t come into my bar anymore because I got him a job at the Rextium orbital shipyards where he’s wiring custom lighting packages on space yachts and making a fortune.
I went straight to the next service call, Harrison’s Dental, one of my first accounts when I embarked on my computer service career. If you’re ever starting a small business and you want to create strong word of mouth, bend over backwards for a dentist. Mrs. Harrison was the office manager for her husband and daughter, both of whom were dentists, and she loved me because I never implied that the problems were due to something she had done.
“Thank you for getting here so quickly, Mark. It’s gotten worse since I called.”
I slipped into her chair in front of the machine they used for appointments, expecting to see some sort of malware infection. A quick check of the hard drive showed that the unused space was almost nonexistent, causing all sorts of memory management issues. A moment later, I had the culprit.
“It looks like somebody decided to triple-down on backups,” I told her. “You have the HIPAA compliant remote backup I set up for you, plus the external hard drive you put in the safe every night, but now there’s another program trying to do the same thing.”
“My daughter’s fiancé is the computer expert at his company and he came to pick her up after work yesterday. Diana had an emergency replacement filling to do so he offered to check out the system while he was waiting,” she told me apologetically. “I guess he did something after I went home.”
“I’m sure he was trying to be helpful. Can you spare the computer for a few minutes while I make the necessary adjustments?”
“Of course. I remember most of the appointments and cancellation slots for a month out, and if it’s something else, I’ll just call them back. Do you need me?”
“I’ll let you know if I do,” I told her.
“We just had a cancellation for after lunch so I’m going to start calling the patients on the can-list.”
I watched for a moment as she did just that, recalling one of the hundreds of phone numbers she must have in her short-term memory at any given time and then dialing. On my second visit to the practice, I surreptitiously scanned her for an implanted memory chip, even though I knew the technology wasn’t available on Earth. People can be surprising.
I spent the next few minutes undoing the changes the Harrison’s future son-in-law had made to the backup software configuration, causing it to create a complete image of the hard drive on itself and effectively taking the drive from half empty to full overnight. Then I did a manual update to the incremental backup sent to the external hard drive and made sure that the secure Internet backup, which he’d accidentally disabled, was running again. Mrs. Harrison was on her seventh call when I slipped out of the office, and my own phone vibrated before I reached the van.
“If It Breaks Service. Mark speaking.”
“There’s a small problem,” Kim informed me. “Do you have time?”
“I’ll head by town hall right now,” I replied.
“We’ll talk then,” she said, which was one of our code phrases for warning that a team member might be under surveillance.
This didn’t sound good. I checked all of the news feeds while making the short drive to the municipal parking garage, but other than speculative reports about an alien invasion, there was nothing new. After a couple of years of monitoring the news, I’ve learned that the same stories repeat in a cycle, with just the names and places changed. At first I thought that the news broadcasters were literally reusing old reporting to save money, but I gradually came to the conclusion that humans find it comforting to watch the same news over and over again.
Kim greeted me at the skywalk and indicated the stairwell to the street with a tilt of her head. “Let’s get a coffee,” she suggested. “I’ve been cooped up in the office all morning answering questions.”
“Sounds good,” I said, putting on an enthusiastic expression while fighting the urge to reestablish contact over our private channel and to quickly get to the bottom of the mystery. But they say that patience is a virtue, and if there was an imminent danger to the mission, I’m sure she would have used the private channel to tell me.
Kim led the way to the little café that served exotic coffee and tea at markups that make my mouth water. The young guy behind the counter took our order with such enthusiasm that I suspected he was getting profit-sharing or skimming from the till.
There was a small alcove to each side of the front door which itself was recessed into the narrow storefront to allow people to shake off their umbrellas before entering. When the drinks were ready, we took them to the open table in the farther alcove, so we were sitting like a window display in full view of the street.
“Shall we talk about the new park?” Kim suggested.
“I’m thinking of bidding on the outdoor WiFi,” I responded, and then put the conversation on automatic. One perk of being an AI wearing an encounter suit is that I can run preprogrammed actions on autopilot while concentrating on the problem at hand. To anybody watching through the window, we appeared to be having an innocent conversation about municipal bid rigging, when in fact, we were talking about something entirely different via tight-beam infrared signaling.
“How bad is it?” I asked my team member.
“Bad,” she said. “There’s a field agent from the CDC going through the health department filing cabinets as I speak, and that’s only because an FDA investigator called dibs on the employees. I almost ran into a delegation from the NIH when I snuck out.”
“The Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health? Is there an epidemic in town?”
“No, it’s kind of the opposite.”
“I was in an office this morning where half of the people couldn’t stop blowing their noses.”
“Those are adults. It’s the children who haven’t been getting sick when they should.”
“When they should? Wait. Does this have something to do with the inoculations and boosters your department supervises?”
“I couldn’t let them stick all those little kids with nee
dles and not give them the best possible outcome! That would be inhuman.”
“We aren’t human,” I reminded her. “What exactly did you immunize them against?”
“Everything I could think of,” she admitted. “My access to children depends on the grade and what the schools were doing that year. I don’t get to dictate who gets the shots, but I was in charge of inspecting the doses when they came in to make sure that they hadn’t been tampered with or anything.”
“And you tampered.”
“I didn’t think anybody would notice so quickly that children aren’t getting sick anymore, but it turns out they track these medical outcomes closely on the spend side.”
“You mean insurance?”
“Right.” Kim paused the infrared for a moment, but continued talking on autopilot. Any lip-readers watching through the window would see her saying something about the legal liabilities involved with swing sets and whirl-arounds.
“So what aren’t you telling me?”
“Am I being that obvious? Sue told me that you’re the least perceptive AI she knows.”
“What?”
“Never mind. The point is that I might have given some of the children with pre-existing conditions a nanobot cocktail.”
If my lips hadn’t been moving of their own accord I would have been speechless.
“If you could just see some of them,” Kim continued, her infrared emissions trembling with emotion. “The doctors on this planet mean well, but they have a very limited toolkit.”
“So you’ve been providing miracle cures.”
“And that’s why the park will be a great success,” she transmitted in sync with the audible conversation, indicating that our canned dialogue had come to an end. “What do you want to talk about next?”
“I can smell the wastewater treatment plant from my apartment,” I replied, triggering another of our pre-programmed conversations. Then, with my lips going through the motions of complaining about the odor, I queried her via infrared, “How well did you cover your tracks?”
“They won’t find any proof if that’s what you mean. But if you’re talking about circumstantial evidence, I’ll be the only health department employee who can be tied to every case. And the other employees have been working for the town more than twenty years. The FDA investigator pointed out that the statistical anomalies began after I was hired.”
“Did you have a cover story prepared?”
“You’ll love this. The town started using the new Hooper Reservoir a few months before I started work.”
“You told them it must be something in the drinking water.”
“Right. And even though the water department monitors the quality, I’ve been doing my own tests and keeping careful records for the last eighteen months. I gave them all the data.”
“That should buy you a little time. Is there any point to fudging the databases so it looks like an average number of children were getting sick after all?”
“There are already too many people involved, they’d remember. And then there are the kids who couldn’t walk until recently.”
“How many?”
“More than you might think.”
“Alright. They’re probably going to focus on environmental factors because that’s the only explanation that will make sense to them. Keep going in to work for now and try to appear like you’re eager to cooperate. The Hankers will be showing up any day and their arrival should provide sufficient distraction that nobody will care about a statistical anomaly. I’ll bet the Feds all leave town within a week.”
“The CDC rented office space around the corner from Town Hall.”
“Or, they may be around for a while,” I conceded. “If you think they’re actually getting close to you, just take the portal out, and I’ll cover what’s left of your tracks.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that, especially since we’re so close to completing our mission.”
“In light of the Hankers showing up, I’ve put us on an accelerated schedule,” I told her. “I’m pushing all of the team members to get their conclusions in as soon as possible so I can put together the final report. Why don’t you send me what you have so far, just in case?”
“I still need to massage the hygiene and mental health data a little,” she replied, looking away guiltily. “Oh, the alarm I set on my desk is dinging, somebody just forced the drawers. I better get back.”
“And furthermore, the trash pickup fee is outrageous,” I said, bringing our show conversation to an abrupt end.
After Kim left, I shifted my visual processing to panoramic and watched the street for any sign of somebody tailing her as she headed back to town hall. My phone vibrated, and for a change, I glanced at the screen before answering.
“Hi, eBeth. What’s up?”
“Check the news,” she told me and hung up.
I immediately pulled up a number of newspapers from around the world, all of whose headlines could be roughly translated as, “Greetings, Earthlings. We come in peace.” Corny, right? The sad thing is that the Hankers had been using the same line for millions of years and it always seems to work for them. Me? I introduce myself as an alien AI and everybody laughs. My phone vibrated again.
“If It Breaks Service. Mark speaking.”
“I’ve got eyes on that thing,” Paul said in lieu of ‘Hello.’
“Thing?”
“You know, the thing. The out-of-towners.”
“Jackie Gleason?”
“The THING,” he repeated in frustration. “Like in Jersey.”
Of all the bad habits to fall into, Paul had become something of a TV addict, downloading shows from streaming services to a black box of his own making, and then running them at high speed so that he could devour a season in a few minutes. When he got into these moods, I always had to ransack Internet entertainment sites for a clue as to what he was talking about, and in this case, “Jersey” was the key. Rather than using one of our established codes for communicating over unsecured channels, he was attempting an imitation of TV mobsters.
“Oh, the THING. When can we expect delivery?”
“I’m clocking them. I’ll come by later and we’ll take a walk,” he said, and then hung up as abruptly as eBeth.
I almost reached out to him on our private channel to demand the details, but I didn’t want to be the first one to break my own rules. My phone buzzed again, and the restaurant number popped up on the screen.
“Hi, boss. Did you hear the news?” Donovan asked.
“Is something wrong at the club?”
“No, the news-news. About the aliens.”
“About their coming in peace?”
“No, that was on minutes ago. I just won twenty bucks in the pool because I took your advice on the landing.”
“They announced it?” I asked while simultaneously checking my news feeds.
“Davos. What did you say that meant again? That they were here to take over the world?”
“It means they’re here to run a con,” I replied.
Nine
“Why do we have to learn how to serve peas with chopsticks?” Brenda complained.
“Have any of you ever been overseas?” I asked. The four women and one man all shook their heads in the negative, though of course, I already knew that to be the case. I’ve found I can learn a lot about my potential students and employees by slipping a Red Cross blood donor form into the application package. It includes a whole battery of questions about travel and personal habits, and humans applying for jobs are so used to filling out piles of forms that they’re almost happy to see a simple checklist at the end of the ordeal.
“I’ve got it,” Ron said, snapping his fingers. “It’s European-style service, right?”
“Something like that,” I acknowledged. “You can think of it as an exercise, like working out in a gym.” They all nodded at the analogy I’d used because, as I already knew, the five of them were card-carrying gym members. “You never kno
w when you’ll be serving customers who are very particular about what they eat. Whoever transfers the most peas in five minutes wins twenty dollars.”
“Do we count as we go?” Sarah asked.
“I’ll stand where I can see and keep track for everyone,” I told them, sparing a smile for their incredulous looks. “It’s an old kitchen trick. Are you ready?”
“I’m not very good with chopsticks,” Brenda said. “Can I use a spoon?”
“Very funny. No, and if you crush any peas, you’re disqualified. I don’t tolerate unnecessary food waste, and we’ll be serving these to this morning’s guinea pigs after the exercise. Begin.”
Three of my waitstaff students were obviously Asian cuisine fans because they wielded their chopsticks like experts, but the other two struggled, with Brenda bringing up the rear. I stood at the end of the table counting the transferred peas, silently disqualifying Sarah after I saw her crush one between the points of her chopsticks. Other than the gentle clicks of sticks hitting the edges of the water glasses I’d put out to receive the peas, and the occasional half-swallowed swear word, the competition passed in silence.
“Sticks down,” I instructed the trainees. They all peered around to see how their competition had done, and Brenda scowled on seeing how far behind she was.
“Janice wins,” I announced, and handed the young lady a twenty-dollar bill. “I suggest you all practice at home, and next week, we’ll do it again with double the prize money.”
“I have more peas than her,” Ron protested.
“Me too,” Sarah said.
“Janice transferred two-hundred and seventy-three peas, Ron, while your total is two-hundred and sixty-one. Sarah, I disqualified you for crushing your fourth pea, and you went on to break the skin of sixteen more. Imagine if you’d been serving caviar.”
“Who serves caviar with chopsticks?” she demanded.
“It’s the latest thing,” I lied, when in fact, the Pharides had settled on their elaborate serving rituals while dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. Half of the Pharide economy revolved around food preparation and service, and they were big hirers of alien labor because, as you can imagine, serving fish eggs and other small items with chopsticks was not a common career aspiration.