The weekend was a blur of inactivity, and then, the office beckoned (Brenda Brundtland-Govanni always imagined the office beckoning with the skeletal finger of Death, albeit with stylish blood red nail polish). The Alternate Reality News Service’s Editrix-in-Chief listened to the Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” (which was her favourite song next to the Moody Blues’ “Forever Afternoon (I Don’t Like Tuesdays?)” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Don’t Like Wednesdays Morning, 3 A.M.” and David Bowie’s “I Don’t Like Thursday’s Child” and the Easy Beats’ “I Don’t Like Fridays on My Mind”) as she tried to get a handle on the Lucy problem.
Lucy from billing was boring; she actually believed that Bristol Palin had gotten a raw deal on Dancing With the Stars. Lucy from shipping was also boring, although in her own special way: she collected Twilight coffee mugs (her favourite was one with Edward Cullen’s dour face that, when filled with a hot liquid, turns into a smile. And, you thought naked hula dancers were disgusting!). Lucy A from security was boring, but she did have the saving grace of not being very bright (she made the mistake of thinking that because she could quote Charles Krauthammer verbatim, she was an intellectual). Lucy D from security showed some promise – she had, after all, won Miss Congeniality in the graduating class at the police academy. Beyond that, though…
Then, there was Lucy the Rottweiler wrangler. Now, here was a Lucy to reckon with. In her younger days, she tried to pattern her life after the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds:” the marmalade skies were quite messy and the newspaper taxis were, to be generous, more decorative than functional. This phase of her life ended when she married Frederick von Balle, the Kleenex king of the Ruhr Valley, and decided that she was a lesbian. When her marriage collapsed, Lucy turned to Rottweilers for comfort.
Although ostensibly working on the problem of the leak, Brenda Brundtland-Govanni actually spent most of the morning designing a t-shirt that summed up how she felt about the situation. Her final design looked something like:
Satisfied that she had put in a good morning’s work, Brenda Brundtland-Govanni was about to go for lunch when somebody knocked on the door. “I’m not here,” she growled. Darren Clincker-Belli walked into the room. “Good,” he replied, “because I don’t really want to talk about how the chipmunks got into the Dimensional PortalTM‘s Tacky One drive!”
They spent the next half hour talking about technologies that would be too advanced for you to understand even if I wanted to go to the trouble of making them up. At the end of it, Brenda Brundtland-Govanni ordered: “Get Lucy to deal with it.”
“Lucy…in billing?” Clincker-Belli, confused, responded.
“Yeah,” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni grumped. “She’ll attack the chipmunks with a stapler. If it’s a dangerous weapon in a Vancouver airport, it will be deadly in the hands of an expert who knows what it can do to rodents.”
Clincker-Belli looked at her blankly. “Oh, read a newspaper some time, why don’t you?” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni told him. “No, Lucy the Rottweiler wrangler. And, arm the Rottweilers with staplers – best not to take any chances!”
“Oooo – oookay,” Clincker-Belli said, and turned to leave. “Clincker-Belli,” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni said. “Darren,” she hastily added in what she hoped was a soft voice (actually, it was like the gentle grating of cars jockeying for position in the climactic chase scene of a Hollywood action/adventure flick, which, admittedly, for her was soft). Reluctantly, Clincker-Belli turned back to face her, inconspicuously clutching his clipboard in front of his genitals. “Yes?”
“I…I’m really sorry about what happened Friday night,” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni stated.
Clincker-Belli laughed with unconvincing bravado. “Don’t mention it.”
“It’s just that -“
“No, really. I would appreciate it if you didn’t mention. Ever. To anybody.”
“I know. But, I want to make it up to. How about if you let me take you to dinner some time?”
Clincker-Belli’s eyes widened; let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say it wasn’t exactly in horror. “But, I -” he started, throwing his hands out and knocking several of the files on Brenda Brundtland-Govanni’s desk onto the floor. All of the Lucys! Brenda Brundtland-Govanni wasn’t too worried; she figured she could randomly put the pages back into the file folders and nobody would notice the difference. Hell, it might make some of them more interesting. Still, she frowned: Darren Clincker-Belli was the most hapless man she had ever met. He didn’t have a single hap in his entire body!
“Oh, I -” Clincker-Belli started afresh.
Gritting her teeth, Brenda Brundtland-Govanni told him: “I’m taking you to dinner!”
“Okay,” he meekly replied.
“Okay,” she echoed with finality, and watched him scamper out of her office.
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni noticed the binoculars her mother had given her lying on her now relatively uncluttered desk. She picked them up. She looked them over. She put them to her eyes, but the lenses were dark. She looked them over again. She tried to look through them again, but still saw nothing. She looked them over once more. “How do you turn this bloody thing on?” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni muttered to what she thought was herself.
“You just have to ask me to turn on,” the binoculars stated. “I’m voice activated.”
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni was so surprised she dropped the binoculars. Her office was carpeted, so when they hit the ground, they didn’t make a sound. At least, they shouldn’t have. In theory. In reality, the binoculars made a clattering sound on their own to make up for the silence. They weren’t a big fan of silence. Who knew?
“What are you?” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni suspiciously asked.
“My military designation is Extreme Variable Eyesight,” the binoculars calmly replied. (Can binoculars even be calm? I thought they were flighty, like squirrels or Paris Hilton.) “You can call me EVE. I should warn you that I have just been made available to the military, so you might want to avoid sharing me with camping buddies or birdwatching societies.”
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni delicately picked the instrument up off the floor. “Wha…what do I do with you?” she awkwardly asked, channelling her inner Darren Clincker-Belli. (There’s a little bit in all of us.)
“Use me as you would a normal pair of binoculars,” EVE advised.
“A normal pair of binoculars that has just been deployed by the military that I shouldn’t share with campers or birdwatchers,” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni commented.
“Exactly.”
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni smiled. EVE apparently didn’t understand sarcasm. This boded well for their relationship. Brenda Brundtland-Govanni put the binoculars to her eyes and looked at the downtown Toronto buildings to the east and south.
“Are you looking for anything in particular?” EVE asked.
“Anything that might help explain how my news articles are getting stolen,” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni told her.
“Working,” EVE stated.
The image in the binoculars flitted this way and that, stopping here and there for a fraction of a second before moving on. A man talking on the telephone while eating cold pizza (among her many talents, EVE was a whiz at infrared analysis). A woman typing at her computer. A man typing at a woman’s computer (assuming the man’s name wasn’t “Mary”). A man and a woman having sex on a desk off of which everything had been swept, including the computer (good luck explaining that to IT!). A woman bouncing on a large ball while talking into a headset. Rooney McSlice using a pair of binoculars to look in her direction. A man angrily banging a phone on his desk wearing only a –
Before Brenda Brundtland-Govanni could say, “Whoa!” the image returned to McSlice and stayed there. He smiled and waved pleasantly.
“Is this what you were looking for?” EVE asked.
“Yes! No! Shit!” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni responded. Stories were stolen on days when the weather was nice – days she kept her blinds open. It was so simple, it was stupid.
“Where is that bastard?!” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni exclaimed.
EVE gave her an address on Bay Street. Brenda Brundtland-Govanni rushed out of her office and, within minutes, was on the 12th floor of a half-constructed condo. McSlice was sitting behind a desk, the only furniture on a floor that had no walls, other furniture or amenities of any kind. He was working on a laptop. When the elevator doors opened, he looked up and, discreetly pushing down the computer screen, smiled.
“You finally made it!” McSlice enthusiastically greeted her.
This stopped Brenda Brundtland-Govanni’s anger in its well worn tracks. “You what?”
“I’ve been watching your office for months, hoping you would notice me,” he explained.
“Why…would you do that?”
“Can’t you see? Don’t you get it? Brenda Brundtland-Govanni, I’m head over heels wild about you!”
“EVE?” McSlice’s binoculars shyly asked before Brenda Brundtland-Govanni, dumbfounded, could say anything.
“ADEM?” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni’s binoculars coldly answered.
“You know each other?” McSlice clapped his hands in delight.
“I’m an Advanced Digital Eyesight Manipulator,” ADEM stated. “I’m from the generation of military hardware before EVE.”
“He always had a crush on me,” EVE chattily confided.
“We were made for each other,” ADEM confidently stated.
“We were made to help our brave fighting men and women do their jobs and come home safely,” EVE patriotically put ADEM in his place. “Anything else is a figment of your overactive imagination.”
This had been mankind’s nightmare for centuries: that our machines would somehow elude our control and take on a life of their own. Nobody imagined that the autonomous lives of machines would consist primarily of soap opera.
“Wouldn’t they make a perfect couple?” McSlice asked.
“You…you’ve crossed the Reality Threshold, McSlice!” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni shouted.
“Love lies on the other side of the Reality Threshold, Brenda,” McSlice smoothly responded. “Join me.”
“Oh, cut the crap, Rooney!” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni insisted. “You did this to steal stories from the Alternate Reality News Service!”
“I needed some way to justify spying on you to my Board of Directors!” McSlice insisted back. “You think they want me out here?”
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni had to admit that it seemed unlikely. McSlice had minions to do this sort of work – he didn’t need to be doing this himself. At that moment, a breeze blew through the floor that draped his hair across his face at a rakish angle, and she had to admit that he wore a bespoke suit remarkably well for a man his age.
“Seriously,” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni, confused, asked, “stealing Alternate Reality News stories for The Multiverse Gazette was just your way of…getting my attention?”
“Would I lie to you, Brennie?”
And, then, just like that, all the potentially good feelings vanished.
“What did you call me?”
“Brennie?”
“How did you know that name?”
“How did I -?”
“Only my mother calls me that.”
“You told me that name.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“How else could I have known it?”
Oh, yeah. The good feelings were on a rocket with a one way ticket to the sun.
“You’ve ferked me!”
“Not yet.”
“You’ve ferked a version of me from another dimension!”
“Yes, but she meant nothing to me!”
“You’re talking about me!”
“You’re right – she meant everything to me!”
“You asshole!”
“Look, it would be best if you thought of them -“
“Them?”
“Did I say them?”
“How many versions of me have you slept with?”
“Two.”
“TWO?”
“Alright, seven. But, they meant nothing to me. Unless you would be insulted by that fact, in which case they meant everything to me.”
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni leaned over to waggle a finger in McSlice’s face. “Tomorrow, I’m getting all the windows in the office replaced with one-way mirrors, and having screen guards installed on all of our computers,” she told him. “You’re not in love. You’re a collector. I should punch you into next week’s Earth Prime 4-9-2-7-1-1 dash pi!”
McSlice smiled. “I would bring you back a Drubpestrian bobble head doll,” he replied.
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni shook her head in disgust. This was pointless. Straightening up, she turned and headed for the elevator.
“I’ll call you!” McSlice called after her.
“I’ll IM you!” ADEM called after EVE.
The trip down was silent. On the way out of the half-constructed building, EVE asked, “So, what now?”
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni shrugged. “The mystery is solved,” she said. “It’s back to work putting out the Alternate Reality News Service.”
“We should experiment to find out how many of your employees’ homes we can see from your office,” EVE suggested.
As she walked out into a cool November afternoon, Brenda Brundtland-Govanni looked at EVE and said, “Kid, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”