Humbug (The Unwinding of Ebenezer Scrooge): A Science Fiction Adventure, page 24
He gave up the mic to applause. They hugged with a six-year-old child between them. Carol helped Jennifer the elf from HR slide a giant gift-wrapped boxed front and center.
“It’s just a little something,” Rick said. “From all of us. You’ve been all over this plant, sometimes running. We thought this might help.”
Jerri knelt down to unload her precious cargo. Her granddaughter reluctantly let go, clinging to her leg and staring at Santa Claus.
Jerri didn’t see this coming.
A gift, sure. But this was heavy and bulky and as tall as her. Had they packed a smart car?
“Thank you,” Jerri said into the mic. “Before we open this… this most generous gift, I, uh, just want to say it has been a pleasure to be part of Avocado.”
She wasn’t a magician, not the messiah like the media had anointed her. In fact, if not for the sudden financial infusion from investors, some that remained anonymous, she could have easily watched the company implode.
“This is hard for me because this is not my company. It’s all of our company.”
She waited for the applause to settle.
“Before that, it was Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge’s company. It was their vision, their hard work that made any of this possible.”
Quiet spread throughout the plant. A few nodded. A few frowned. Jerri looked around at the different faces, the varied expressions. The deep-set opinions. She took in the hanging garland and papercut snowflakes and dangling ornaments. She smiled.
“God, he would hate this.”
And the crowd fell out. They knew exactly what she meant—a period of time that would forever be known as Avocado’s dark years.
“Merry Christmas, everyone. Happy Hanukah, happy festivus and happy holidays. Thank you for changing the world!”
Hugs went around. First Rick, next Carol, then others. She was facing the monstrous gift, the fat red ribbon shiny and perfect.
Jerri knelt down and whispered to her granddaughter, “Do you want to help?”
The little girl nodded. Jerri tore a hole in the wrapping. Her granddaughter took it from there, ripping it around all four corners. The crowd pushed toward the front, some with no idea what was inside the box.
“Oh my…” Jerri stood back, covered her face and began laughing hysterically.
“Don’t let this change you,” Rick shouted. “We just thought you could save some energy.”
Coffee fueled Jerri’s powerwalking stride across the plant, from meeting to meeting. There was no problem sleeping at night when any horizontal surface would do, but her knees ached and a noticeable limp had everyone’s attention.
Rick and Carol pushed the gift out of the pile of wrapping. Secretly, Jerri had hoped to never see another one of these things again, but her knees and back cheered. Two wheels. Handlebars.
A Segway.
“I don’t think I can do it.” She giggled.
“Don’t resist,” Rick said. “You’ll be hooked after the first round.”
He demonstrated instant mastery by driving in a circle then off the platform and around the crowd to rhythmic clapping.
The gift-giving began, Santa made room for adult or child on his knee, his ho-ho-ho ringing around the plant, gifts handed out to everyone. Jerri remained on the stage until someone tugged on her arm.
“I think you need to see this,” Freddy from IT said.
~
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jerri said.
“It was over before we could get word to you.” Freddy ran his fingers through his hair.
Jerri sat at the monitor. She didn’t know what she was looking at. She wasn’t versed in the backroom language of the IT vault or the coded messages that computers spoke. It wasn’t much different than lifting the hood of her car. All she could do was trust the mechanic.
“The program showed up just like it did last year and the year before that.” He ran his hand through his hair again. “The redundant code and everything, like the system was triggered to install it. We started quarantine, but before I could pick up the phone, it just… it was gone.”
“You mean dormant?”
“No, I mean gone.”
“It disappeared?”
“More like… left.”
Jerri faced him with a hardened expression she’d honed over the past year, one that cut through hesitancy and demanded progress. “Where did it go?” she asked slowly.
“Best we can tell, it shipped itself out, like an email. We attempted to track it, but the IP addresses were all over the world. It fragmented and just disappeared in cyberspace.”
Jerri sat back and tapped her chin, aware that tapping her chin was Eb’s thoughtful move, something that seemed to organically grow on her as if the mannerism occupied the job description.
“Is this a problem?” she asked.
Freddy shrugged. “You tell me.”
He wasn’t at the company when the mystery program first started hitting all the alarms. After contracting the best IT companies to analyze their system, the best explanation was an anomaly that operated like a benign tumor.
It wants to live, the consultant said.
“But why on Christmas Eve?” Jerri had asked.
He shrugged again.
It didn’t make sense for it to come back two days out of the year and then go to sleep, disappearing from sight. Jerri wasn’t satisfied, but what could you do when every mechanic that looked at your car said the noise was nothing really?
“I don’t know if this matters,” Freddy said, “but I couldn’t find any evidence of this from earlier episodes. The program seemed to have parallels with an already existing project called Jenks.”
“Jenks?”
“Yeah. You heard of it?”
She dipped her head. A distant memory pushed into her awareness of a time when dusty shelves and a drafty warehouse was a makeshift home. That was Jacob’s project. And the sound of Eb’s droids, the cadence in which they spoke, reminded her of that initial success, the day Jacob referred to as Jenks’s birth.
Christmas Eve.
“It was the, uh, prototype for artificial intelligence. But that was a long time ago. How is it still in our system?”
“Here’s the thing,” Freddy said. “I know this sounds weird, but something on the outside seems to be visiting it. All the earlier analysis looked like it was coming from Mr. Scrooge’s castle, like something was using the plant to run a full-scale operation, but what, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean something? You mean like the house system?”
“That could be it, yeah. Definitely something artificially intelligent.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it was like a conversation in code. We can’t even follow it.”
Jerri couldn’t help but think of Eb’s servant droids. They were found in the aftermath with nothing to be recovered as to what caused the collapse. And they sounded just like Jenks.
“Keep an eye on it.” She pushed away. “I don’t want to hear that we’ve unleashed a cyber storm on the world.”
She hurried to exit. This would be exactly the reason people didn’t want artificial intelligence. An awareness that could travel through a wireless network and inhabit remote bodies simultaneously. Christmas just got a little less merry.
But why only Eb’s house?
“One more thing.”
Freddy leaned over the keyboard. The data streamed in gibberish code. He tapped the space bar and dragged the cursor over a line buried in the cryptic mess. Jerri leaned forward.
“What do you think that means?” he asked.
She shook her head.
Humbug, it said.
~
“Samantha,” Jerri said, “did someone come up to my office?”
She had snuck up to her office, tempted to pull the blinds so that no one would see her sleeping—a nap perhaps the greatest Christmas gift ever—when something caught her eye. Jerri stared like a snake had coiled on her desk. Perched on top of a pile of papers were bent frames and broken lenses.
Round-spectacled glasses.
Samantha wasn’t at the front desk, so Jerri left a message—a message her office assistant might not get until after the holidays.
The last time she’d seen these glasses—maybe not these exact glasses—were on Ebenezer Scrooge exactly a year ago when she spoke to him. He had stopped projecting that silly image and forced her to look at a blank screen. Little did he know that she posted a photo of him to look at when they spoke. It was better than talking to an empty monitor.
She wanted to tell him about her decision to leave Avocado but decided to wait until the New Year. She never had a chance to tell him.
As it turned out, she never left.
The remains of the Castle were all over the newsfeeds. The debris was half-buried in snow beneath a hole in the mountain. News drones descended on the wreckage, a complete architectural failure.
The following investigation exonerated the architects and construction company. Eb had added onto to the structure, built his giant-sized snow globe on top, something he called Skeye dome. The droids did much of the work, although some contractors were brought in to help. There were records that warned Eb that the expansion could affect the Castle’s stability, but apparently he didn’t get that warning. Or he didn’t care.
The Castle wasn’t meant to support the additional weight in a storm like that.
He had no extended family to press further or stop the rumors of self-destruction, which some suggested was really at fault. The storm was faulted, along with a tremor that fractured the mountain. Or perhaps something caused the tremor. Nonetheless, there was no insurance claim.
No bodies found. Not Ebenezer. Not the girls.
Just lifeless droids.
That alone did not prove self-destruction. It didn’t help, especially when word got out that many of Eb’s personal financial accounts had been moved offshore the day before.
To complicate matters, no evidence of the girls’ adoption could be found. Jacob had either destroyed or hidden the legal papers. Whether he was hiding something or protecting the girls, it didn’t make sense. There was no trail, not a single thread of evidence that they had lived with him. Or Eb.
It made for strange thoughts.
Jerri didn’t like to poke the evidence too long. If she did, she’d have to shine a light on where Avocado’s anonymous cash infusions were coming from. Considered legal, their source was well camouflaged. And they specifically requested the medical research division return to full capacity.
It’s not too late, the anonymous donor had said.
This coincided with a major donation to the MPS foundation, the rare disease that afflicted her granddaughter. So no, she didn’t want to investigate too closely.
Throw the glasses away. Don’t look, just throw them away and give thanks. What good can come of it?
Jerri picked the glasses up as if they were wired to explode. The gold rims were askew, the lenses—what was left of them—scuffed. A miniature camera, the size of a pinhead, winked.
For the first time, Jerri closed the blinds.
In the neon computer light, she opened a Bluetooth connection on her computer. The miniature camera glowed. It took her to a cloud account, the password automatically uploaded from the glasses.
She pushed back. “Oh my…”
It was a video journal that dated back ten years. Screen shots of Eb sitting in a chair, varied expressions, most of them distorted versions of irritation or anger. That wasn’t what shocked her.
He was hardly recognizable.
He had used a projected image—the chiseled chin and buff torso and daring eyes—for so long that she didn’t know what he really looked like. As she scrolled through them, coming closer to the present date, he grew larger, his color pastier, bags under his eyes.
His complexion splotchy.
She clicked on one and nothing happened. A padlock icon in the bottom right corner indicated it was locked. Only Eb’s screen shot mocked her—his mouth contorted, eyes hooded. All of them were unavailable.
Except the last one.
Christmas Eve.
It was last year, a day before the accident. The screen shot showed a much different man. This version of Ebenezer Scrooge was emaciated, a yellowish tinge to the previously pallid complexion. Dark eyes behind the always-present round-spectacled glasses and a slack mouth. His head slouched with effort. He had shed at least a hundred pounds.
Do I want to see this?
Jerri’s finger hovered over the mouse. She clicked.
Eb folded his hands on his lap, staring at them as if deciphering a hidden message. He sighed several times, pulling long breaths that didn’t seem to contain enough oxygen. Sometimes he shuddered.
He cleared his throat. “There’s nothing left to say.”
Another long pause was followed by a protracted sigh.
“The dream is coming. I can feel it, if I’m honest. It’ll be here shortly and drag me to whatever is next. I… I don’t think I’ll come back. And I have to admit… I’m looking forward to it. I’m…” He swallowed a sudden lump. “I just want this to be over.”
Dreams.
Jerri didn’t know the full extent of his problems with Christmas, but something had been happening. It had something to do with the mystery program, something that shook him up, turned him inside out.
How could I be so blind?
“I’m a stranger,” he said. “To the world. To myself. And everyone hates me, but…”
He shook his head, twisting his fingers.
“I don’t care if the world hates me. It’s just… I do, too.”
Always a curmudgeon, but the pain that powered his irritability, the suffering that kept the world at an arm’s length was now fully exposed. He was looking at himself, not a reflection or a projection, but the raw essence that was Ebenezer Scrooge.
And so was Jerri.
Like Jacob, he was a visionary. He had so much potential. But whatever was ticking inside him had detonated long ago, had driven him into isolation, where he created his own reality with the projection room. He saw the world through the glasses, saw what he wanted to see, created the person he wanted to be.
But it was false.
Everything was a lie. Nothing he experienced was real, and it had driven him to what was sitting in that chair.
“I tried to go outside,” he said. “I haven’t been out of the Castle in… I don’t know. I just thought… I opened the door and stood there. The world was cold. It was so beautiful, and I swear I wanted to take that one step out, just feel the snow under my foot, but…”
He wiped his eyes. Cleared his throat.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said with new resolve. “I just couldn’t. I can’t leave, I admit it. I’m trapped in a world that I created and I don’t know the way out. But it’s my fault. It’s all my fault. And that’s why…”
He took a deep breath, ran his fingers through his thinning hair and looked directly at Jerri.
“I want to change.”
It was the look of a tired man. He wasn’t beaten, wasn’t giving up. He had found the bottom, had looked around, and for the first time in his life wanted it to be different. Ebenezer Scrooge lived life the only way he knew how. But now it didn’t make sense.
He wanted it to be different.
He was ready to change.
“And he never got the chance,” Jerri whispered.
She thought the journal entry had ended. He sat back and hadn’t moved but occasionally blinked or shook his head. She reached for the mouse and was about to close it when he jerked his head to the side.
“Hey,” he said. “No, no, no… not in here, girls. You’re not allowed in here, you know that. Where’s the droid?”
The girls were off to the left, just out of the camera’s range.
“Shh-shh-shh,” Eb urged. “Stop, settle down. I need you to listen.”
There was no volume on the girls for some reason. They must’ve opened the door but stayed in the hall. Eb looked distressed.
Then he looked around the room and finally stood up, ushering them to come closer while shouting for his droid. But the girls still didn’t cross into view. And they weren’t making a sound.
Jerri grabbed the armrests.
A lightness swirled in her head, a sudden drop in air pressure, that surge of surprise when you miss the bottom step. Eb held his arms out like he was holding a little girl on each knee.
Only there was no one there.
“What did we talk about?” he said. “This is Uncle Scrooge’s private room. You’re only allowed up here whenever the droid brings you. Do you understand?”
He paused.
“Okay, good. Now, it’s almost time for dinner. Have you done your homework?”
Pause.
“Then why don’t you wash up and get ready to eat so Uncle Scrooge can finish his work.”
The droid entered the room. Another one followed. They walked stiffly to the chair, their expressions vacant and calculated, and pretended to lift the imaginary girls from his lap.
Eb pushed his glasses up and watched them with a fragile smile.
“Oh my God,” Jerri finally said. “Oh my God.”
“Jerri?”
Jerri jumped at the sudden announcement. She sat back and clutched her chest. She punched the flashing button on her phone. “Yes, Samantha.”
“I missed your call. Did you need something?”
“Um, yes.” She took several moments to allow her heart to settle. She had just witnessed the unwinding of Ebenezer Scrooge, the imaginary projection of two little girls that, as far as she could tell, he thought were real. And the droids did, too.
Were they helping him?
“Jerri?”
“Yes. Um, did you send someone up to my office?”
“A delivery droid was here earlier and dropped off a package for you.”
“A package?”
“Well, it wasn’t a package, more like a pair of broken glasses. He said it was very important, that you would want them. I escorted him to your office and put them on your desk. Why, is something missing?”
