Humbug (The Unwinding of Ebenezer Scrooge): A Science Fiction Adventure, page 1
HUMBUG
The Unwinding of Ebenezer Scrooge
Tony Bertauski
¶
PRONOUN
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Copyright © 2016 by Tony Bertauski
Cover design by Humble Nations
Interior design by Pronoun
Copy editing by Pauline Nolet
Distribution by Pronoun
ISBN: 9781508044017
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Change : It does not happen in a single night.
PART I: THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS EVE
10:32 a.m.
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
PART II: THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS YET TO COME
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
PART III: THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
PART IV: THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
PART V: THE HAUNTING OF EBENEZER SCROOGE
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Epilogue
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CHANGE
~
IT DOES NOT HAPPEN IN A SINGLE NIGHT.
PART I
~
THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS EVE
10:32 A.M.
~
I’m running two minutes behind, so I’ll keep this entry short.
Jacob died this morning.
A massive coronary. Can’t say I’m surprised, the idiot doctors he trusted. A man with money should live to a hundred. To die before seventy?
Ridiculous.
The world does not know what it lost today. Not just a man, but a visionary. A force that could change worlds. A will that could move mountains. A mind that could transform dreams.
Tragic.
Listen, I loved the man. He was my brother in every sense of the word. We didn’t share a mother or father, but we were brothers nonetheless. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but who does?
But he wanted to help the world, period. That was it. That’s not a bad thing. He always said, “Ebenezer, I want to help the world. I want to help you.”
I don’t need help. On that account he was quite wrong. I am rich. But the world needs help, that’s a fact. So I am sad today. Very sad. The world should be, too.
And that’s it. Okay?
Good.
ONE
~
EBENEZER SCROOGE WATCHED THE rain bead on the mahogany lid. A nice coat of wax, he thought. Well done. Fitting.
The rails were platinum, the inside lined with maroon velvet and a luxurious five-star mattress. No expense spared. Eb would’ve preferred something more reasonable—Jacob Marley wasn’t going to see it, after all—but his dead friend’s estate paid for the final resting place, so why sweat the details?
Waste of money, that’s why.
The attendees were crowded beneath the tent, hugging each other for warmth and comfort. Rain pooled on the sagging canvas roof, dripping over the edge.
Outside the tent, a flock of black umbrellas protected the attendees gathered beneath the gray sky. They wiped their cheeks with tissues, holding each other close. Eb had shed one tear that morning. Considering he hadn’t shed one since he was in diapers, a single tear was quite an episode.
If you asked him.
“We gather here today…” the preacher began.
The attendees wore black suits, black dresses. They wore pearls and furs, shiny shoes and sparkling earrings. Black veils and black hats. Eb wore a shiny tracksuit with two white stripes down the sleeves and legs and a round pair of spectacles that slid down the oily slope of his nose.
Very few in attendance were family because Jacob Marley had none. Except Eb. And he wasn’t family, really. Not by blood, anyway.
These people were members of the Southern California community, representatives of charities that had received Jacob’s goodwill; they were business associates and politicians.
Jim Thompson, CEO of Medicine Today, his unnatural tan defiant beneath the pallor of a wet umbrella. Marianne Clark, editor of Wired Brain, looking stylishly gaunt with a touch of gray in her bangs, heels spiking the soft earth. John Pendergrass, director of Body and Technology Research, with his age-appropriate wife touching the corners of her mascara-rich eyes.
They were all there.
They mourned the loss of a man that was “taken from his earthy vehicle too soon,” the preacher preached. The crowd agreed and praised the Lord.
They were phonies.
They stole glances in his direction. He didn’t praise the Lord out loud, oh heavens no. They looked at him because they were curious, judgmental. None of them consoled him for the loss of Jacob, his brother. Well, like his brother, the media corrected, often.
They were curious and unsympathetic because of the unusual figure that stood among them. It stood six feet tall, its skinwrap dull gray. Its trench coat, black and unusual for an android, was cinched at the waist. A top hat covered its head, quite silly. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the face.
It wasn’t the requisite eye holes and bump of a nose; there was no slot for a mouth where someone might insert a coin. That was last year’s model. Eb had the most current servant droid, one that looked almost human.
He’d invented the droid, after all. Well, it was mostly Jacob. Eb helped.
Eb was at the funeral, but not in California. He was in Colorado.
It was absolutely unacceptable, in any culture or social status, to bring a servant droid to the burial. Eb didn’t bring it, he sent the droid in his stead.
The newsfeeds were going to have a fit. They were going to skewer his callousness and question the poor decision-making, but he had his reasons. Not that anyone would understand. He had mourned that morning, shed that tear. They didn’t see that.
In an attempt to appease the inevitable gossip, the dull gray droid projected Eb’s features on its face rather than its own, as if Eb was standing at the foot of the casket, a tanned, square-jawed man. Unshaven. Grief-stricken.
Eb was neither unshaven nor grief-stricken. He didn’t have a square jaw. If he did, it was hidden beneath multiple chins and a blotchy complexion. While the servant droid endured the rainy, cold season, Eb stood quite still in the dry, toasty projection room as the events unfolded around him as if he were actually there. Only dry. And warm.
He wasn’t just there in spirit. He was there in every sense of the word. Just not in the flesh. The newsfeeds could debate all they wanted whether flesh or presence was more important at a funeral.
It was presence.
Eb raised his hands and rubbed his cheeks. The droid, connected to his actions through the sync suit, echoed his movements, patting away tear-streaked cheeks. Eb squeezed his eyes shut and practiced crying. It came so easily that morning, but lasted less than a minute. Now his sobs were dry and rehearsed, thick with sarcasm. He couldn’t remember the last time he cried.
Maybe he forgot how.
Crying was for little kids and weak-minded individuals. Eb was neither. It didn’t matter that his attempts were disingenuous. His projected expression would be altered. The attendees would see a sincere expression of grief on the servant droid’s face, where tears rolled as plump as rain, where he wiped them away and blew his nose in a white, embroidered handkerchief.
Sandy Kaufman, CFO of St. Mary’s Children’s Hospital, was outdoing him with the wailing. Eb brought up the volume of his grief, including sniffling and sudden, “Why, Lord? Why, why, why?”
It only drew more stares.
How do they do it? I’m dying to sit down and they keep standing and standing and the preacher keeps preaching. How many times do we have to praise him? Jacob Marley was my brother, but come on, people. Just because he’s going in the ground doesn’t qualify him for sainthood. He lived quite an unselfish life, okay. Honestly, it was remarkable. But you don’t rise to the top of the technology world without splitting a few lips.
Jacob wasn’t shrewd, but he could be ruthless. Only Eb saw that side of him. But Eb saw a lot of things other people didn’t see.
When the service ended, some of the attendees shook the droid’s hand. Eb reached out. The pressure was simulated inside his glove as they embraced. They were offering condolences to a dull gray droid with his face projected at them. And it wasn’t really his face.
Hilarious.
A door opened twenty feet to Eb’s right. The edges of the doorway curved along the domed projection wall, a squarish space carved from the dreary scene. A dull gray droid—an exact duplicate of the one shaking hands with the preacher now—walked into the room. This androgynoid wore a tracksuit similar to Eb’s, the sleeves pushed up to the elbows.
As far as Eb was concerned, all droids were mindless servants that followed their programming. Tell them what to do and they did it because they were idiots. Jacob had begged to differ, arguing they had a personality that closely mimicked human behavior. They were still morons, simple as that.
Dum-dums.
“Auto,” Eb muttered.
Disconnected from Eb’s sync suit, the mourning droid continued to run the grieving program, freeing Eb to walk around the projection room.
“The news,” Eb said. “Give it to me good.”
“I don’t feel good about this, sir.”
“First of all, you don’t feel. Second, that wasn’t the question. So go, now. Give it to me.”
“This was not Jacob’s wish, sir.”
Eb clawed the air, tendons stretching. “Did you or did you not do what I asked? And let me remind you the wrong answer gets you a one-way trip down the tumbler.”
“But—”
“Zip.” Eb snapped his fingers at him.
He really didn’t want to recycle him. Servant droids were insanely expensive. Eb had more money than half the world, but there was no need to be frivolous. Unless someone deserves it.
“Yes?” Eb said. “Or no?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re sure?”
“I am, sir.” The droid cocked his head to the side. “I am here to help you.”
“I won’t turn on the feeds and hear Jacob Marley willed his ownership to the Boy Scouts of Antarctica, will I?”
“No, sir.”
“Complete and total and one hundred percent of Avocado, Incorporated, now rests in the name of Ebenezer Lennox Scrooge?”
The droid paused. “Yes, sir.”
“What? Why’d you just pause?”
“I didn’t use your middle name, sir.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because you don’t use your middle name, sir.”
Maybe a ride down the tumbler was in order. But then he’d have the same conversation with the same droid personality in a different body. There were seven of them, a hive mind sort of personality that would one day cause all of his hair to fall out.
“Never mind.” Eb propped his elbow on his protruding gut and tapped his spongy chin like he was hammering a finishing nail into place. “Jacob wouldn’t use my middle name, either. The lawyers will make it right.”
A smile dug into the droid’s flexible cheeks.
Eb tapped his jelly chin, never once reaching above the space where a dimple might reside. He rarely touched his face without washing. But in a rare lapse of judgment, he removed his round glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“Are you crying, sir?”
“No.”
But he was, sort of.
Joy gushed from his stomach, a geyser of warm emotions that had reached his face, almost leaking from his eyes. Almost. Avocado, Inc., was his now. He couldn’t remember crying twice in one day.
To be fair, he couldn’t remember much about his childhood.
A line of grieving attendees was still waiting to shake the droid’s hand, a few standing at the coffin with their heads bowed in hopes this unfortunate event wouldn’t change their altruistic relationship with Avocado, Inc., once owned by Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge but now owned by Eb and Eb only.
A crocodile smile crept over his face.
He twisted the obsidian ring on his right hand, something that could be mistaken for a wedding band. An identical ring was on his left hand. He swiped his hands like a magician.
The funeral scene winked out.
The dome-shaped projection room went to sleep, the generic walls arching overhead. These were the moments Eb felt like a cooked goose beneath a serving dome.
“Avocado!” he shouted. “Come on down!”
The curved wall shimmered. A giant avocado appeared; a thick stem curved at the top, the word avocado—all lowercase letters in off-white—situated in the Buddha belly of the leathery fruit.
Colorful furniture appeared, original designs that conformed to every position the body could imagine. Jacob had insisted the kooky chairs and couches be arranged in an open office environment, a feng shui thingy that promoted progress by failure, thinking outside of the box. Eb was only interested in the progress part. The rest of it was stupid.
And failure was the wrong direction.
“Where is everyone?” Eb said.
“Many are attending Jacob’s funeral, sir.”
“Not all of them.”
“It’s also Christmas Eve, sir.”
Eb glanced at his wrist, pretending to see a watch. “It’s not even lunch!”
“The holiday has begun, sir.”
“Bah!” Eb couldn’t think of a word to express his contempt for such excessive year-end celebration. What could capture the guttural disgust he felt when employees—people he was paying, for crying out loud—flaunted excess in his face?
“Bah, unacceptable!” That’s not it. “Call them back. They’re paid to work till five o’clock.”
“Many have left town, sir.”
“They have laptops, right? It’s kind of what we do; have them log in and work. Text them or message them or call the police, I don’t care. I want every minute accounted for. You think I’m an ATM machine?”
“That’s redundant, sir.”
“What?”
“ATM machine is like saying automated teller machine machine, sir.”
“You think this is a joke? That it’s funny?”
Eb snapped his fingers and pointed in the droid’s face. He walked the perimeter of the room, the spongy floor oozing between his toes. Tap, tap, tap on his chin. He passed projections of pumpkin orange loungers and seaweed green coffee stations and eggplant purple treadmill desks. Empty, all of them.
The avocado logo dimly lit the far wall.
“We’re not an art studio,” Eb muttered.
“Jacob felt this environment fostered innovation, sir.”
“I’ll tell you what it fostered—Peter Pan syndrome. There’s a child-sitting room over there if you don’t have a babysitter. Over there is a coffee bar for lattes and smoothies. And there!” Eb pointed at the back room. “Ping-Pong. I mean, come on! Is this a joke?”
There were times when the projection room wasn’t big enough to contain his rants. The illusion of space seemed endless. He often forgot he wasn’t actually in the Avocado plant and banged his head on the curved wall. But that was the point—to be there without actually being there. To believe he was outside when he was inside. It was all the beauty of living life in the safety of his home.
He adjusted his round spectacles.
“I want it out,” he said. “All of it.”
“Sir?”
“This ridiculous furniture! Burn it, drop it off a bridge, I don’t care. Get it out!”
“But, sir, this work environment has proven effective. Avocado was ranked Fortune 500’s number one innovative technology company.”
“We can be better.”
“What is better than number one, sir?”
“Number one A, just do it. All of this touch-feely weirdness is embarrassing. I look at it and just want to unzip my skin. Don’t even sell it, just throw it out. Wait, scratch that. Put it on eBay, all of it. Use reserve pricing.”
“I suggest we run your requests through predictive modeling, sir. These sweeping changes will greatly affect morale. I would expect widespread defection of some top-shelf talent.”
The droid stepped next to Eb. The musculature writhed in his calves and flexed across his shoulders. His tracksuit was unzipped between the shapely pecs. Tension rippled his forehead as he cocked his head, a bird searching for a worm.
“Gone, Dum-dum. All of it.”
“And replaced with what, sir?”
“Good old-fashioned desks in straight lines, not one of them crooked. I don’t want to hear about freethinking. We run this company like a watch from now on. This is a business now. We do it my way.”
