by Heide Goody
This was going to be tricky. Because Hattie was still on Jaffle Standard, she’d never had any sexual urges.
“Couldn’t we, er, you know…?” I said to Helberg, discreetly tilting my head towards his Jaffle port-hacking gizmo.
He raised his eyebrows. “What are you suggesting, Alice?”
“Make Hattie like me. You could access her brain and fix her so that she has all of the same—”
“What?” Hattie looked fearful. “Nobody’s touching my brain! Is that how the baby gets in? Our brains are a long way from our vaginas, it doesn’t seem very practical.”
“Nobody’s touching your brain, Hattie,” said Helberg. “See, I think we can explain the mechanics of this.”
“I would appreciate that,” she said.
“In short, babies come from sex. Adults do this thing called sexual intercourse and that can make a woman pregnant. After being pregnant for nine months a baby comes out. Try jipping some of those terms.”
“Oh my word,” said Hattie, clearly doing exactly that. She looked flustered. “Are you two having me on, because I’ve definitely never seen anybody doing that.”
“Well they do,” said Helberg.
I looked at him with interest. “And how many times have you done it?”
He looked embarrassed. “That’s not a question most people normally ask if they were being polite,” he said. “Um, a few times.”
“Have you done this, Alice?” asked Hattie. She pointed at Helberg and me, a different question on the tip of her tongue.
“No!” I said, shocked. I took a deep breath and lowered my voice a little. “I haven’t done it at all. Not yet.”
“Not yet?”
“No. I’ve only just started dancing. You can’t get pregnant dancing.”
“Ah! But you are planning to?”
“What?”
“Does that mean you want to have a baby?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, remembering the mess and the smell of that baby’s nappy. “It seems like a lot to—”
“Well I do!” she declared. “I want a baby! I just need someone to have sex with me, yes? Can I make an appointment or something?”
I wasn’t sure that I had an answer to that.
“Hattie, most people think carefully about who they want to make a baby with,” said Helberg. “They choose someone who they think would, hm, help to make a nice baby.”
Hattie looked Helberg up and down. “Well what about you? You look all right to me. Can we make an appointment? Maybe we could do it now?”
He looked very uncomfortable. “There’s so much to think about, Hattie. Babies can cost a lot of money, and there’s no doubt that it’s a big commitment.”
She shrugged. “How much money? I’m sure it can’t be that bad. How much do you normally charge?”
Helberg gave me a look. It was one which suggested I had created a monster.
“Hattie,” I said. “Do you remember me trying to talk to you about there being more to life than work and beans and so on? Well this is one of the things I was talking about. There’s so much more to the world than we’ve known for much of our lives. We should take time to absorb it properly before we make big decisions, don’t you think?”
Hattie pouted but gave a small nod. “I suppose.” Her face dropped. “Wait. Is this about the red beans again? There’s only so much change I can take without getting all consternated.”
“How about we hack your Jaffle port and give you the—”
“You’re talking about messing with my brain again!” Hattie’s voice rose in panic. “If that isn’t both consternating and discombobulating then I don’t know what is!”
Helberg made shushing noises. “Nobody’s going to mess with your brain, Hattie. I wouldn’t consider it for a second.” He gave me a stern look. “Seriously Alice, I’m not sure my little rig is up to the task. Reading some log files is one thing, but altering a whole bunch of Jaffle settings is another thing entirely when you’re not familiar with them. It’s much too risky to consider.”
I wanted to blurt out that the risk of sitting around while Jaffle messed up everyone’s brains in the whole world was considerably worse, but I needed to keep that to myself.
Hattie was joining the dots. “What do you mean, reading some log files?” She looked from Helberg to me and back again. “Did you fake your brain scan, Alice? Oh my goodness, you did! You’re going to be in so much trouble! How come you’re not already in tons of trouble?”
I leaned back in my chair. She had a fair point, and I had absolutely no answer.
I sat Hattie down and tried to outline what I’d done, without divulging any of the really bad parts. “First thing to understand is this, I was asked to provide some tech support, off the record.”
Hattie’s eyes narrowed. “Who was it for?”
“I can’t tell you that. Really, it’s best that you don’t know.”
She looked sceptical.
I pressed on. “Because this had to be offline, the only way I could do the requested clean-up was to use my own spare capacity as temporary storage.” I pointed at my head, to underline what I was talking about. “It should have worked fine. The space was available and I’m sure I prepared everything correctly. What I think messed it up a little bit was some unauthorised software that this person had introduced.”
“What, like a brain virus?” Hattie was horrified. “I thought they were a myth?”
“Apparently not,” I said. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. I just get a whale that interrupts me every once in a while.”
“A whale? Big fish kind of thing?”
“Well, actually they’re mammals. Wonderful creatures as it turns out, if a little bit rude when it comes to interrupting.”
“Oh Alice! No wonder you’ve gone mad. You really need to get that sorted out.”
“I’m going to a charity gala in two days to speak to Rufus Jaffle about it and get some answers.”
Hattie didn’t think that was enough. “No, we’ll go to work and get someone to take a proper look at you. Put you all back to normal.”
“No! I need to tell you the main point of all this!” I was keen Hattie didn’t miss the important part of the story. “I ended up, after the procedure had run, having a few rogue memories, but the procedure activated all of the brain functionality people like us don’t normally have. It’s changed my life, Hattie. It’s really opened my eyes.”
Surely she would understand now. I looked at her, wondering how I could convey how important this was.
“That’s just the illness talking,” said Hattie. “I know it is. I can see the changes in you and they’re not good.”
“You’re not listening,” I said urgently. “We’ve been denied some of our basic human experiences. We always thought we were happy, but we were missing out on so much.”
“Stop it, Alice, please.” There were tears in her eyes. “I don’t need a baby, not a real one. It was stupid idea and my vagina isn’t big enough and I don’t have enough money to pay for a baby. I am happy just the way I am.”
“You’re not.”
“I am!” she snapped, the tears now rolling down her cheeks. “I am! I am! I am!” She pushed herself out of his squashy sofa and hurried out.
I stared at the open door. “I just make things worse all the time,” I said.
“Brain hack or not, you’ve opened her eyes,” said Helberg. “It’s like the John Stuart Mill thing.”
“The man with the unhappy pig?”
“Happy pig,” he corrected. “Hattie might be upset now but it’s probably because she can see what she’s missing out on. It’s that dissonance, the distance between what is and what should be that’s causing her distress.”
“Doesn’t make me feel better about it,” I said.
Helberg nodded but not necessarily in agreement. “A question you never asked…”
“What?”
“All those babies at the OneStop Daycare centre. Biologically,
genetically, they came from other human beings. Whether they were naturally born or grown in artificial amniotic sacs, they are human children.”
“I guess.”
“Go back in time only a few decades and most people would have at least once child, created the traditional way. There would be children living in apartment blocks like this. There would be married couples.”
“I saw a film about a man trying to get married. It was very, very funny.”
“But you don’t see married people anymore,” said Helberg. “Not round here. No marriages among the Jaffle Standards. No sex. No children. Why do think that is?”
“I guess … if people are on Jaffle Standard and they don’t think about sex much, then they’re not going to have babies the traditional way. So someone has to make sure there are babies, or we’ll die out. The authorities make sure we don’t run out of people.”
Helberg grunted, a laugh that didn’t quite make it out of his throat. “You’ve got it upside down, Alice. History can teach us a lot, and one of the things it teaches us is that one way the people in power exert control over everyone is deciding who can have sex and who can’t, who you’re allowed to have sex with if you do, and who is and isn’t allowed to have children of their own.”
“No. Really?”
He gave me a meaningful look, the kind of expression I would have found really annoying weeks ago but I now recognised as a look of patience; of hope that I would understand. “If they want to control us—”
“Who’s they?” I said.
“The Man.”
“Which man?”
“The Man. Capital M. Jaffle Tech. The powerful people.”
“Like Claire?”
“The woman whose dress you stole? Sure. The powerful people. The governments which support them and are supported by them. They’ve got the Jaffle Standards packaged up neatly in their little boxes. No family. No love. No sex. No loyalty to anything but Mr Smiley and the status quo.”
I thought about this for a long time. “Is that true?” I said. “Or is it just some mad conspiracy you’ve cooked up to justify the way you live your life?”
Helberg burst out laughing. “See! See! You’re questioning. You’re questioning authority and you’re questioning me. God, I love you, Alice Tennerman.” The moment the words were out of his mouth, he faltered. “I mean … I mean I love the person you’ve become. That is … I love what you’ve done with … I mean…”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, waving his embarrassment away. There was still a heaviness in my chest, the inescapable feeling that I’d hurt Hattie once more, made her life worse not better. “You got any more of that Bony Hilda’s Iguana Manilla lying around?”
“The what?”
“The sherry drink.”
“The Bodegas Hidalgo La Gitana Manzanilla?” he smiled and stood.
“That is exactly what I said and you know it.”
The bottle was on a shelf between two distinct but equally mystifying piles of electronic components. He took it down, along with two tiny glasses.
“Fill ‘em up,” I said.
“This is strong stuff, remember,” said Helberg.
I shrugged and wondered how well sherry would suppress the lump of worry inside me.
“Maybe I want to be a happy pig again.” I patted the seat next to me for him to sit down. “Just for one evening.”
***
Chapter 27 – 14th June – 5 days until Operation Sunrise
I dreamt that someone shouted from the doorway of the house.
“Did he just call my name?” I/Rufus asked. I realised I was both dreaming and remembering a slice of Rufus’s memory from the party by the sea.
“It sure sounded like it,” said TayTay, next to Rufus/me.
“Oh no, he’s calling someone else. I never heard the name Roofight before,” said Rufus.
“I think it’s an actual fight,” said MiMi, drifting towards the house. “With roos.”
“Huh?” Rufus was confused.
“Haven’t you heard?” TayTay asked, linking her arm in his and steering him onward. “They get a pair of kangaroos and have them fight each other. What’s even better, they put Jaffle ports in them so someone can control what they do.”
“No way!” said Rufus, picking up the pace. “This I have to see.”
They hurried into the house and down some stairs into a huge basement kitted out with gym equipment and a boxing ring. There were, indeed, two kangaroos in the ring.
At the moment they were jigging lightly in opposite corners of the ring while people filed in. A good many of them recognised Rufus and cleared the way for us to ringside seats. A kangaroo was right in front of them/us. The only person closer was a man in black who was concentrating on a device in front of him. Presumably one which controlled the kangaroo’s Jaffle port. MiMi reached out a hand to touch the kangaroo’s fur.
The kangaroo in the opposite corner gave a low growl and the two girls pressed up against Rufus. He could feel the heat of their quivering bodies. It gave him a rush of heady testosterone and cocaine-fuelled confidence.
“Of course, the way to defeat a large predator is to understand and engage with their natural energy or prana,” he said to them both. I found myself questioning whether a kangaroo was a predator, but I had no say in it.
“Have you ever heard of Maglev?”
They shook their heads.
“Few have,” he said, lifting his hands and making a slow chopping movement as he explained the ins and outs of his chosen martial art.
“It’s just a big mouse, isn’t it?” said TayTay, looking at the kangaroo.
“A big mouse?” said Rufus, immediately cracking up with laughter. “It’s a killer, babe, a stone cold killer.
A bell rang and the kangaroos bounded forward. They started to shove each other with their relatively short arms. I found myself wondering if they were arms or forelegs.
“Go on! Whack him!” yelled Rufus, aligning himself with the kangaroo from his corner.
The kangaroos locked into an embrace and bounced on their powerful hind legs, trying to gain an advantage. They looked as though they were enjoying a dance. Not a salsa, though.
“Use your legs!” Rufus hollered.
The kangaroos did indeed start to kick each other. The kangaroo from our/their corner hung on with his arms and brought both powerful hind legs through with a vicious kick. The other kangaroo seemed unperturbed as they continued in their graceless dance.
“Leg sweep! Take him down with a leg sweep!” Rufus called.
The kangaroos bounced and grappled, but there was no sense either of them was being harmed in any way. I realised the counterweight of their enormous tails stabilised them so they could kick with both legs and still remain upright.
Rufus seemed to be getting more and more restless. In his mind I saw the growing urge for the violence to be stepped up. Even so I was horrified when he climbed up and stepped into the ring with me as his dream-passenger.
He held up his arms and turned to the crowd. An almighty cheer went up as Rufus threw himself into the fight. One of the kangaroos had returned to its corner, so he threw a punch at the one remaining. “Fists of fury! Betcha never saw anything like this back home in, ah, wherever you come from, did ya?”
He screamed in pure bloodlust and rained his fists down upon the kangaroo.
The animal leaned its head right back. Rufus dodged around its huge body to bop it on the nose. Unaccountably, this insane strategy worked. He landed a hard blow on the place where a kangaroo’s temple might be, knocking it out cold. He stood over the unconscious kangaroo and punched the air, victorious.
“Now that is what a Maglev master looks like! Deadly weapons right here!”
I saw out of Rufus’s peripheral vision that TayTay had elbowed the operator aside and had grabbed the controls for the remaining kangaroo’s Jaffle port.
“Come on then motherfucker!” she yelled. “Show us those deadly weapons!”
***
I woke with a dry mouth and a pounding headache worse than the last time I’d drunk sherry. I called for pain filters but they made hardly any difference.
“So, this is a hangover,” I mumbled. I thought sherry was my friend, but Hilda’s Bony Iguana or whatever it was had turned on me in the night.
I sat up (I was in my own bed, which was a mild surprise) and I considered my general status.
“Not going to throw up,” I told myself and my nauseated belly. Two minutes later, in the bathroom, my rebellious insides made a liar of me. I cleaned myself and the bathroom as best I could and slowly – oh, so slowly – got ready for work.
There, armed with a few pointers from Helberg, I set about covering up my dodgy brain scan. I couldn’t hack in and retrieve the scan I’d already submitted but I could mask it with some suspicious-looking scans for other people. I wondered how many fake brain scans I could fabricate during the course of an extended toilet break. Enough to confuse the person who’d be investigating my own fake brain scan? Maybe.
I started with Paulette, just because she was on my mind: I gave her an activity report that included lots of glitchy-looking spikes. I moved on and made a fake brain scan for Damien in supplies: him I gave several erroneous periods of two hundred percent capacity usage. I fabricated a few more, uncharitably gifting my colleagues with all sorts of problems from old-fashioned Alzheimers to suspected interference from sunspot activity.
I dropped them anonymously into the medical centre’s document store and slipped back to my desk.
Levi was hovering. A thought had struck me and I couldn’t shake it.
“Levi?”
“Yes, miss?”
“Levi, you know the cameras?”
He looked up and pointed at various corners. “Always watching. Keeping us safe.”
“The ones that recorded my little accident. The bot on fire.”
“Very important tool for the security professional. And I’m glad that incident is still on ya mind. It’s only from our mistakes we learn, isn’t that so?”