Nigel found the newsstand in the usual spot and Jiffy happily accepting money from people as they bought the morning newspaper. The difference today was the abundance of people buying papers and staring wildly at the front cover, pointing and exclaiming.
"Amazing isn't it? Who would've thou—"
"—always knew this would happen—"
"—bloody weather—"
"—yaknow, my aunt Ettie passed away last year, I'm thinking of digging her up just to make sure because if all this—"
"—act of God—"
"—nervous ducks, I heard—"
"Nigel!" exclaimed Jiffy.
Nigel stopped his eavesdropping and handed Jiffy his coffee with a smile.
"Aw, thanks, lad, couldn't half use it today with business what it is an'all."
"What is all this, Jiffy? I must be out of the loop," said Nigel, feeling a little left out.
Jiffy gave Nigel the kind of look that only the old can give to the young, as if everything they said is completely ridiculous.
"Well, it's the news, innit? The worldwide phenonem-phemoneon—thing."
Nigel shook his head. "I'm not with you."
Jiffy leaned heavily on his walking stick and snatched a newspaper from a surprised-looking man about to purchase it. He stuck the front page in Nigel's face and waved it about a little for emphasis. The headline in large black print stared back at Nigel: The Dead Live!
All other news for the day seemed inconsequential due to the severe outbreak of not dying. Nigel skimmed the newspaper while Jiffy spilled his coffee and swore as only old people could. He finally got bored with verbally abusing his own customers and turned his attention back to Nigel.
"Are you going to buy that paper or what?"
"Sorry, Jiff, this is all new to me. Fascinating, isn't it?"
"You youngins’ always walking around with your bloody eyes closed, I suppose you were out on the pull all night?" asked Jiffy, leaning toward what he hoped would be an answer that would help him live vicariously, but contentedly through the rest of the day.
Nigel handed the paper back to him. "Actually, I was hanging upside down off a building this morning."
Jiffy shook his head and made a tsk-ingsound that sounded more like a pigeon pooping.
"You kids today with your new fads, hanging off buildings upside down, I ask ya! In my day, there was none of that, we were respectable folk back then, hard working, too. I walked myself to school 'cause there were no buses, not like today. It was a long walk an'all, through the snow in winter, through the rain in summer, uphill, both ways. Don't know how good you've got it, you lot. Ungrateful little—"
"Jiffy?"
"What?"
"Do you really think the dead aren't dying?"
"Maybe. No one's dropped dead at the newsstand yet, but it's still early."
"Has any of the news shed light on any possibilities?"
Jiffy rubbed his chin as his sixty-nine-year-old brain quickly recounted all the news he'd read that morning.
"Seems all there is are possibilities, and theories, lots of theories. It's probably some big joke. Some bugger probably got drunk in a pub, argued with a lamppost, and started the whole thing." Jiffy chortled at his own reckoning, which also, for some odd reason, sounded more like a pigeon pooping.
As close to the truth as Jiffy was, Nigel felt none the wiser and decided he should get on with the day, and bid farewell to his old friend, who again advised him, in his own idiom, that hanging off buildings was just plain stupid. Nigel managed to leave before Jiffy launched into another rant bashing the teenagers of today to anyone who would listen.
Dead not dying. Things like this just didn't happen very often. Occasionally, strange things would happen in London's West End, but it often just turned out to be a bunch of theatre actors trying to express themselves and certainly never anything of this magnitude. There was, after all, still the case of Mrs. Jones' cat to take care of, and all this dead people not staying dead business wasn't going to disappear anytime soon.
Nigel's intelligent mind chose that point to spring to life, as it often did. He quickly worked over the possible reactions, reasons, and consequences of such events. But then he abruptly stopped himself as he decided it wasn't worth the effort quite yet. He might as well get this whole possessed cat thing out of the way first. Figuring out the world's problems was one thing, but a possessed cat was something else entirely.
First things first.
Celina sat on the kitchen counter and finished off another tub of low fat yogurt. She had grown bored of trying to get out and so she decided to break into the kitchen, something that proved a heck of a lot easier than trying to get through the security doors. Celina's anger flared when the kitchen door refused to open when she simply turned the knob, and it took a bit of encouragement and some light pummeling with a heavy chair to convince it otherwise. She persevered, much to the desecration of the kitchen door, and found herself rewarded with the yogurt that was her primary reason for coming to the lunchroom in the first place.
Her cell phone chirped to life as it sat in the garbage bin in the lunchroom. Celina ignored the incessant beep. Chances were the call was probably just the video store again and she wasn't of a mind to talk to them. Instead, Celina let her thoughts race back a couple of years, stumbling here and there over memories of a failed romance and several calls from her mother complaining about her lack of grandkids, before it ground to a halt at the memory she was looking for.
Artificial intelligence seemed so remarkable and so full of possibilities when the research began, but now it all seemed so confusing and dangerous. Artificial intelligence was exactly how it sounded, an artificial mind that wasn’t actually alive. It was fake. False. Synthetic. Non-natural. Simulated. Not real.
The first attempt to create AI began with computers. Every household computer had its own AI to a point. It sensed when a virus was present and it could obey commands. But the command part was where the fatal flaw laid; it needed an action to produce a reaction. There was no way a computer would turn itself on just for the hell of it.
Majestic Technologies, in order for the Santa Claus Project to work, needed to go one step further. Celina and her team tried to produce a computerized brain that could operate independently and make its own decisions. The brain would need a host, so they built a host. A small host, just in case it got out of control. No point in creating a host that resembled a ten-foot gorilla and then have it go berserk, killing thousands. And so the world's first fully functional AI unit was born in the form of Betsy the Hamster.
Betsy the Hamster blinked to life at 7:30 a.m. on March 7, 2009. A remarkable success; Betsy instantly began to walk around. She looked up at her creators and blinked a few times. Then she awed the scientists as she began to talk. Simple stuff at first; she recited the alphabet, and then numbers. She identified colours. She went on to recite poetry; she hummed a few bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. She delineated the uses of quantum mechanics in relation to light speed and navigational trigonometry. She moved on to define life on planet Earth and started to explain the reason that all the ducks in the near future would begin to suffer from severe nervousness.
At 7:33 a.m. on March 7, 2009 Betsy the Hamster exploded into several thousands of small pieces. About ten minutes later, the disappointed scientific team figured out why Betsy had blown herself to bits. There wasn't a computer on Earth that could hold all the information of the world and process new information at the same time. The several thousand small pieces of Betsy the Hamster agreed and proved the point.
The Majestic Technologies robotics team admitted that they might have been aiming a little too high for their first try. Unfortunately, eccentric billionaires demanded results of their highly paid research teams, and when Neville peered into the plastic container that once held mayonnaise and was now the new home of Betsy the Hamster's remains, he simply snorted and told everyone to do better. Except for Celina, whom he winked at on the way out.
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Five minutes after Neville left, the research team decided that testing new units and computers would take way too long so they decided to skip the testing altogether and move straight on to the main phase.
Diagnostics drawings for the elves began the very next day.
Seven.
Nigel noted that the colour of Mrs. Jones' house, a sordid light green, made it stand out from the rest of the sickly, hospital-cream-coloured houses attached to it.
The street had recently fallen into chaos, as Mrs. Beatty from two doors down had woken up that morning after being dead for a full hour and a half. People had been lining up at her front door since the event to ask her questions about the afterlife and to see if she needed a cup of tea.
Tea had long been a highly favored drink of the British. They fought wars over it, attributed miracles to it, and once, a religious crusade, just a small one, had been launched over the lack of tea in a small Welsh village. With the world in chaos over no one dying, the logical thing for any British person to do was to sit down and have a nice cup of tea, offer tea to others who were not drinking tea, chat warmly about tea, and maybe have a scone, too.
Nigel inferred from the incessant laughter that Mrs. Beatty was having a whale of a time and, according to the handwritten sign hung on her garden wall, had even started charging five pounds a person for entrance into her house. Nigel fought the compulsion to join the lineup, continued up Mrs. Jones' steps, and gave her door a somber yet authoritative knock.
The somber yet authoritative knock received a response in the form of the ominous sound a shotgun makes when being cocked. Nigel's suspicions about the sound proved true two seconds later, when there came a loud bang and the sordid light green door exploded out into many sordid light green bits of wood, leaving a gaping hole.
"Take that, you furry bastard!" came the screech from inside.
Somewhere in between the knock at the door and the explosion of said door, Nigel had stepped aside and stood pressed firmly up against the wall. Suddenly, the head of a four-foot-tall old lady stuck her head through the two-foot-wide hole in the door. She looked around wildly before looking at Nigel, who smiled back politely.
"Did you see him," she said, "did you see him?"
Nigel was surprised that such volume could come from such a small head encased in a knitted woolen bonnet. Nigel flashed his badge.
"Detective Reinhardt. You are Mrs. Jones, I presume?"
"Ms. Jones. Mizzzz! Did you see him? He's going to come back for me, you know? He told me he would," said Ms. Jones with a hint of alarm. Her eyes scanned the street like a weasel looking for dinner.
In his mind, Nigel rolled his eyes; physically he continued to fix his gaze on the deranged old woman.
"I don't suppose you'd like to hand me the shotgun?"
Ms. Jones thought about this for a while before answering a resolute No, then asked if he'd like to come in for a cup of tea, proclaimed that he seemed to be a nice young man, and then apologized for almost blowing his head off. She unlocked the door and let Nigel in.
The people standing lined up outside Mrs. Beatty's house had been busy staring disapprovingly at the hullabaloo. Comments like, "No respect for the dead," and, "Always trying to be the centre of attention," got thrown around.
On closer inspection, Nigel found that Ms. Jones was actually shorter than four feet. She was more like three and a half feet. The word elf wandered through his head but didn't feel right in relation to Ms. Jones, and so it left. Her small head encased in the woolen bonnet sat gingerly upon her shoulders, almost as if independent of the rest of her rather stumpy body. Her body moved and her head would reluctantly follow, as if resigned to the fact that it had no other choice.
Ms. Jones showed Nigel to the living room, a place that already had the smell of old lady poured into the very particles of every object in the room, right down to the hand-knitted doilies.
"So, Ms. Jones—"
"Mrs.!" she snapped. "Mrs. Jones! I was married for fifty-two years to our Arthur, God rest his soul."
"I'm sorry?" said Nigel completely perplexed.
"It’s Mrs. Jones thank you very much," she replied. "It was the drink that did him in."
"Arthur?"
"Hit by a Guinness truck coming home from the pub one night. He didn't drink Guinness, mind you, reminded him of drinking motor oil, he always said."
Mrs. Jones stared at Nigel as if waiting for a reply.
With the sudden change in recent world events, Nigel decided that this wasn't a big issue and he might as well just ignore it. Plus, the old woman was still nursing her shotgun. She looked very much to Nigel like an unhinged English version of Granny Clampett. A slightly confused and uncomfortable silence ensued.
"Oh, tea!" She shrieked and ran off to the kitchen. She left the shotgun leaning against her easy chair. Nigel thought it best if he moved the shotgun for the time being, so he hid it under the couch cushion he was currently sitting on. With any luck, she'd never notice it was gone.
Nigel closed his eyes and proceeded to do some breathing exercises he'd learnt from an ex-roommate of his. Beware the elf, flashed across the inside of his eyelids as Mrs. Jones scuttled back into the room.
"Here you go, I'm sure you'll like it," she said, passing a tiny, china teacup to Nigel.
"I'm sure I will." Nigel placed the teacup on the coffee table, took out a pencil and pad, and proceeded with caution.
Mrs. Jones settled back into her easy chair and sipped her own tea. The lack of a shotgun at her side momentarily escaped her notice.
"The report that you filed with Scotland Yard was a bit on the sketchy side. Just for the record, I don't suppose you'd like to elaborate a bit?"
Mrs. Jones shuffled herself around in her chair.
"Well, it was all very strange," she began, "I’ve had that cat for six years and he's never said bugger all before. Then two nights ago, he wouldn't shut up."
Nigel shot Mrs. Jones a calm glance, which she returned instantly with a stubborn glare.
"Go on."
"Well, I was coming back from the Hare and Hound; we have a nice little darts competition going with the sewing circle girls from Notting Hill."
"That's the pub on Rhodes St.?" ventured Nigel.
Mrs. Jones snorted at the interruption.
"Yes. I came home earlyish because I had to feed Fuzzbucket."
Nigel wrote down the name Fuzzbucket, then began to wonder whether he'd heard her right.
"I'm sorry. The cat in question, the one you say is possessed by the devil, his name is Fuzzbucket?"
"Yes, Fuzzbucket. When I got home, the cheeky little bastard was sitting at the kitchen table eating a chicken I'd been defrosting for Sunday lunch. Said he'd got hungry and decided to cook himself some food. And then he told me to go out and buy him some cigarettes."
"This must all have come as quite a shock to you. What happened then?"
"I told him that it was most unnatural for him to be talking and smoking all of a sudden like that. And that he should stop doing it, and then I asked him who he thought he was."
Mrs. Jones suddenly began to look around the small living room. She was missing something and couldn't remember what.
Nigel caught the searching look and quickly urged her on.
"So what was his reply?"
"It was most peculiar. He looked me straight in the eye and proclaimed that he was the Prince of Darkness, the Devil himself, and that he'd come to wreak havoc on the Earth. And then he babbled something about small robots, and flocks of nervous Australian ducks, and then told me that he would be borrowing my cat for a while and that he'd come back for me one day so I'd better watch out."
"Humph," said Nigel uncomfortably. At his last testing, Nigel's IQ measured at over 200. And then, at another point it measured at 76, just because he felt like being stupid that day. He had always been smart, and he knew how to spot a liar. What disturbed him was that everything Mrs. Jones said, as far as he could tell,
appeared to be completely true.
He decided to adjust his seating position. Whether it was Nigel's movements, or whether it was just meant to be, the shotgun under the couch chose that moment to fire off. The pellets ripped half the couch apart and destroyed some lovely little ceramic pots that had been sitting on the fireplace. They were souvenirs from a little seaside town in the south of Wales called Tenby.
"Bollocks," exclaimed Nigel as Mrs. Jones' heart gave out.
She clutched at her chest and died right there on the spot.
"Bloody hell! A castle!" exclaimed Jeremiah for the one-thousand-seven-hundred-and-eighty-second time as he swam around his bowl. But then it hit him, a tingling feeling somewhere behind his eyes. A feeling that he may or may not have had before, because he couldn't remember. It felt familiar, but uncomfortable. A phrase popped into his head. He tried to hold the thought; he swam to the bottom of his tank and pushed his coloured rocks around, trying to make a memory of what he saw.
Then he couldn't remember what he had been doing. He wondered why the rocks at the bottom of his tank formed funny letters.
"Most peculiar thing for rocks to do."
Jeremiah looked around the bowl, forgetting the rocks. "Well, well, well, look at that," he said, "there's a castle in here!"
There were some feelings that just couldn’t be explained. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t make head nor tail of them. Nigel had one of those inexplicable feelings while he sat sipping his tea, a smoking shotgun on his left and a dead, yet, funnily enough, happy-looking old lady on his right.
Death, the Devil, and the Goldfish Page 5