by Heide Goody
“Yes, yes,” I said, wishing he’d stop wittering in that leisurely way of his, like he was dispensing invaluable homespun wisdom. “The specific recordings of what happened, the ones Paulette showed me when I returned from being suspended. They didn’t … necessarily show the whole picture.”
“Faulty camera, you mean?” he said, taking a more serious tone.
I thought about how the footage specifically failed to show me starting the fire, only my efforts to put it out and rescue Hattie. Nor did it show me stealing the pipper and paperwork from the meeting room.
“It could have been a faulty camera,” I admitted. “I was just wondering if it was possible for someone to change the video, edit out bits that were—” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence without incriminating myself.
“Are you suggesting someone could tamper with security camera evidence?” he said, a look of naked horror on his face. “That would call into question everything this company stands for. It’s unthinkable.”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” I said. “Sorry. Silly me.”
A strange feeling, one I think had been stealing up on me for some days, took firm hold. For the rest of the day I did my job, but it felt like an act. Like I was a rebel, a subversive, a spy. I was working inside Jaffle Tech, acting like any of the support workers, offering help and guidance to the billions of Jaffle product users worldwide, except now it felt like I was playing a role. Inside I was something different. I was the maker of fake brain scans. I was the health and safety risk, always caught on camera but never exposed. I was the liar. I was the one who went to strange and unexpected places – food halls and flower markets and art galleries. I was the one who led innocents like Hattie astray, who interfered with Empties.
I was a virus in the system.
***
Helberg was waiting for me back at the apartment complex, actually waiting for me at the door to catch me when I arrived.
“You know, if I wanted a pet dog to greet me when I got home, I could buy one,” I said.
He didn’t smile. “I have to show you something.”
“If it’s another dance like the salsa, I don’t think I’m up for it.”
He didn’t reply, leading me silently through to his office. He had cleared junk from tables and shelves to make room for the pieces of paper he’d arranged across them. It was some typed document, long and full of bullet points and sub-headings.
“I worked on back-engineering that plipper device you brought to me,” he said, pointing to a bulky thing of soldered components and dangling wires.
“You’ve built your own plipper?” I was impressed.
“It’s just an adapted port, like a Jaffle port, really. Except its sole purpose is to link to another port, pretty much along line of sight, using microwave and locator tech, and then change the access level.”
I picked it up. Helberg’s homemade plipper wasn’t at all like the sleek little unit I’d stolen from Jaffle Tech. If the official plipper was a little gun, this thing was more like an ancient crossbow.
“So, you shoot and it just dials whoever it’s pointing at down to Empty?” I said.
“That wasn’t what I wanted to show you.” He turned and spread his arms at the papers all around him. “This is the document you hid the plipper in, the one you stole. I happened to read it.”
I went back to the document and glanced at the nearest sheet. “What is it?”
“It’s Operation Sunrise.” He said it with such glum solemnity that I felt a chill of fear.
“And…?” I said.
“It’s bad, Alice.”
“Bad how?”
He pointed at me, more specifically he pointed at my head. “You’re on Jaffle Standard. Or, at least you were. You’ve got relatively full access to your intellect, sense of judgement, your more unsubtle range of emotions, speaking, memory and writing, yeah?”
“Sure,” I said. “Although I can experience much more now.”
“Right. And above standard is Jaffle Enhanced. Morality, self-conscious acts and even an appreciation of music and other art forms. Move up one more and you’re into Jaffle Premium with access to notions of beauty, humour, sex and violence. Near total access to your brain’s functions.”
“You forgot Jaffle Freedom.” I knew my company products. I didn’t need Helberg to tell me what Jaffle packages were out there.
“The top layer,” he nodded. “Total access to one’s own brain function. To philosophise, attain self-actualisation, exert genuine free will over one’s own actions. That may indeed be where you are now, along with me and the rest of the three-percenters who don’t have a damned Jaffle Port fitted. This—” he gestured at the scattered document. “This is what happens when you allow people to buy total freedom of thought.”
“What happens?”
“More and more buy their way up the ladder. Did you know that Jaffle Premium was only created to make one more stepping stone between Jaffle Enhanced and Jaffle Freedom?”
“I did.” Which was sort of true. I remember it being introduced, although Helberg’s version wasn’t the same as I had been told.
“So now you’ve got more people buying their way to the top and nowhere else for them to go. No way for Jaffle Tech to get more money out of them. And so Jaffle are going to unveil their new product: Jaffle Sunrise.”
“As in Operation Sunrise?”
“Indeed.”
“And what is Jaffle Sunrise?”
“It’s exactly the same as the current Jaffle Freedom.”
I wrinkled my nose. “That doesn’t make sense. No one will buy a new product if it’s just the same as another one.”
“They might when they are told that Jaffle Freedom is going to have some restrictions placed on it, essentially bringing it down to the level of Jaffle Premium.”
“And Jaffle Premium?”
“Cascades down to the level of Jaffle Enhanced. And so it goes. Every user will be placed on the level below.”
“Jaffle Standard users all become like Jaffle Economy users.”
“More like Jaffle Lite, actually.”
I thought about the community service workers in their orange coveralls. Jaffle Lite: criminals and those heavily in debt reduced to bumbling, voiceless creatures with no inner life at all. Lights on but nobody at home. I was on Jaffle Standard or, at least, had been. Hattie was Jaffle Standard. I pictured us as those dead creatures.
“When are they doing this?”
Helberg shrugged. “Rollout could happen any time after the Operation Sunrise launch. That’s happening on the nineteenth isn’t it?”
“Five days time,” I said. “I need to tell Rufus Jaffle.”
“Rufus Jaffle must know about it,” said Helberg.
I shook my head vehemently. “I had access to Rufus’s memory. Henderson—”
“The Jaffle Tech CTO?”
“Him. He got Rufus Jaffle to sign the papers when he was injured, not thinking straight. He’d been hit by a kangaroo.”
“Did you just say kangaroo?”
“Rufus is patron of an animal charity, but he got into a fight with a kangaroo which would be very embarrassing. To cover it up, after Henderson made Rufus sign the papers he got him to—” I gazed in horrified realisation. “He got Rufus to wipe his memory of the event. Rufus thought he was wiping his memory of the kangaroo fight, but Henderson didn’t want him to remember what he’d signed!”
“Rufus would know full well what he was signing,” Helberg argued.
“He didn’t want to read it. And he was concussed. Henderson made him sign and had his memory deleted. I did that. I was the one who did that!” My breath came in ragged gasps. Hattie was going to be made into a Jaffle Lite user, no better than an Empty. And I was responsible! “We have to stop this,” I said.
“I would generally agree. We could tell the media but for the ninety-seven percent, Jaffle Tech controls your media access.”
“But if we could show people…”
“This document is only the proposal,” said Helberg. “Enough information for me to stitch the clues together. I could have faked something similar, given time. We'd need proof and no chance of getting it.”
“We have to try.”
“We have to focus on saving who we can save. I could hack Hattie’s port, maybe save her from the worst of it. I’d hope that your screwy brain is potentially immune.”
“I’m not talking about saving one person or two,” I argued. “Billions worldwide are about to have their lives ruined. Reduced.”
“And we can’t save them!”
“We could try!”
“How?”
I clenched my fists furiously. “I don’t know! I’ve only had the use of my brain for a few weeks. You’ve had your whole life! Think of something!”
“I don’t have to,” he said. “It’s not my problem.”
“You can’t mean that!”
“I’ve closed off my mind and life to the rest of humanity because I could see what was going on. I made myself into a sad reclusive little man. If anyone had asked, I would have told them what Jaffle Tech and its like are doing to the world. But would that have changed a damned thing? No! Now, you come here with your new la-di-da self-awareness and expect to be able to fix things. Without evidence of wrongdoing on Jaffle Tech’s part, you’re as helpless as me.”
I glared. “What kind of evidence?”
“What?”
“If we need evidence, what kind of evidence?”
He huffed with exasperation. “Documentation. Proof that the top executives are colluding in something that they know crosses an ethical borderline. Failing that, backdoor access to Jaffle Tech’s code so we could bring this thing down from the inside. It doesn’t matter. It’s the kind of stuff you aren’t going to be able to lay your hands on!”
I stood up straight and raised my chin haughtily. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”
He laughed cynically. And just when I was starting to like him.
“I’ll do what I can tomorrow,” I said.
“You’re going to the gala tomorrow.”
“I can do both. Work, then gala. I can multitask.”
“You’re a fool, Alice Tennerman.”
“And you’re a coward,” I said and marched out.
I went upstairs to my apartment, along the landing of brightly coloured doors, painted by Helberg’s little bot. I went to my apartment seeking Hattie. Wanting only to throw my arms around her and tell her I loved her, and if there was any way I could save her from being reduced to something less then she already was, then I would give my life to achieve that.
Instead, I found her packing. I was too stunned to hug her or tell her anything.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m moving out.”
“Was it something I said?”
“Yes,” she said in a bright upbeat tone. “Or it was something you showed me.”
“What?”
“Babies.”
“Babies?”
“Yes,” she said and stopped for a moment to look at me. “I want a baby.”
“Listen, I know you do and—”
“And I need money and a better position and possibly even a Jaffle upgrade.”
“You do?”
“And I know how to get that.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “The North Beach arcology.”
It rang a bell. “Where Swanager and Pedstone went?”
“An integrated living solution community. They pay you to live there. Enough for me to afford art-i-ficial in-semi-nation.” She said it like she’d just learned it. “I’m going to have a baby.”
I was astonished. Was I happy for her? I couldn’t tell. “How does that even work? They pay you?”
“Something about a more simplistic lifestyle. Living in tune with the needs of society and environment. It saves money and resources so they can actually pay us to live there. I jipped the terms and conditions. There was only one unit left and a car is on its way to collect me— Oh! It’s here.”
She stuffed the last of her belongings into her pod case. I saw how she stuffed the singed head of Smiley Tot Derek in there at the very last. No reverence or love for the little doll’s head. Hattie had changed. I had changed her, but now she was moving on with her own life.
She turned to me. Now, I hugged.
She blinked tears from her eyes. “It’s…”
“I know,” I said.
“It’s been really weird,” she said.
“I guess,” I said.
“You’ve been weird.”
“Definitely.”
She sniffed and wiped her eyes. “But you’ll come visit when I’ve settled in.”
“Without a doubt,” I said, firmly.
I walked down with her to meet the car.
***
Chapter 28 – 15th June – 4 days until Operation Sunrise
The day of the gala.
Helberg might have been a coward but I wasn’t going to let Jaffle Tech reduce me, Hattie and everyone else on their lower packages to little more than mindless animals. I needed to fight them. The way I saw it, that involved either making the public aware of what Jaffle Tech was about to do to them with some incontrovertible evidence or, failing that, stopping Jaffle Tech’s servers from disseminating the latest updates. Either way, it involved gaining access to the innermost levels of Jaffle Tech’s system.
“Forget it Alice, I can’t break into Jaffle,” said Helberg, when I went to ask him for help that morning. “They have some of the most advanced security systems in the world. If I had time I might be able to find a back door, but there’s no way I’ll be able to get in and delete things in a few hours. The odds are stacked against me. You’d be better off wishing for a meteor strike to take out their servers.”
“You could at least try.”
“And spend the rest of my life in prison? Or forcibly fitted with a Jaffle Port and turned into an Empty?”
I scowled. “Some help you are!”
He gestured at the documents spread out around his office, at my stolen dress hanging from a door which he’d just had cleaned for tonight’s gala, at the homemade plipper gun next to the original I’d stolen from work, at the flaky pastries he’d laid on for breakfast.
“Yeah, no help at all,” he said sarcastically. “Do not do anything stupid today. You have a party to go to tonight and the CEO of Jaffle Tech to meet. If you meet him and if he remembers you and if he cares one jot for the rest of humanity then plead your case with him. Do not jeopardise that by doing something monumentally moronic, Alice.”
I snatched up the Jaffle Tech plipper, spun on my heel and stormed out. Dramatically, I hoped. I wanted to show my contempt with a dramatic exit. If I had been able to think of a way of doing that and taking a flaky pastry with me at the same time, I would have done.
I rode alone in a car to Jaffle Tech. I hoped Hattie had settled into her new apartment and whatever the weird set-up there was it would enable her to finance having a child. Hattie might not have been the most intellectual of people but I missed her company enormously. She was the rock of my life, tethering me to some kind of normal, even if that normal was beans and Mr Smiley. Without Hattie, I had no company but my own thoughts.
I wasn’t going to do something stupid at work. I certainly wasn’t going to do something monumentally moronic. I was going to do something clever. I was going to sneak back up to the executive levels of Jaffle Tech (I’d been up there twice before; it shouldn’t be difficult), find some way of getting access to Jaffle’s secret files and shut things down. If that meant doing a bit of hacking or taking someone hostage at plipper-point, then so be it.
There was no point going to my cubicle. Fixing things was the goal today. Best to get right down to it.
I walked into reception slowly, eyeing the people getting into the elevators. I needed a superior-looking exec-type, or maybe another eng
ineer. Maybe even a cleaner. Did they have human cleaners on the top floors? We just had bots on ours. Would human cleaners be a step up or step down from bot cleaners?
A woman who looked like she belonged in the upper ranks of the company walked towards the ranks of elevators. I sped up to intercept and join her. I was already prepping a story in my head about the cleaning bots on the top floor needing a manual check-over. Yes, it was conceivable that someone in a support worker’s tunic could be involved with that.
I had timed my interception perfectly. The doors were sliding open. We would step inside, one after the other, as natural as anything.
“Alice?”
I looked round. Paulette was approaching across the lobby. I faltered. The woman slipped into the elevator. I could dash in after her.
“I hoped to catch you on your way in,” said Paulette, closer now.
“Oh?”
The elevator door closed, the opportunity had passed.
“Could we have a word?” said Paulette.
“Word?”
Paulette smiled. “That clarification interview we spoke about.”
“Oh. Yes.”
Paulette turned and walked away. I felt compelled to follow.
“We?” I called after her. “‘Could we have a word’?”
Paulette offered no reply. I put my hand on the plipper in my pocket and followed.
We entered a room in a portion of the building I’d only ever been in once before: the day of my interview with Jaffle Tech. The interview had been brief. There’d been a few formal questions, a bit of a chit-chat and then a look at my Jaffle rating. I’d had a very impressive Jaffle rating back then. Along with my noted brain efficiency, it was enough to win me the job. I very much doubted this interview was going to conclude with a new job offer.
Paulette gestured to the people already sitting in the room. I recognised both of them: the beautiful large-eyed woman from the medical centre and Estelle, the senior human resources partner. When Paulette sat they were arranged as a panel of three facing me.
“Oh, this is, um, formal,” I said as I sat.
Paulette simply nodded.
“This is an investigatory interview, Alice,” said Estelle.