“I wouldn’t go in there, I was you,” Mabel rasped.
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni looked down upon Mabel, not unlike how Zeus must have once looked down at people living on Earth. Or, for that matter, like anybody who has ever ridden in an airplane. Thus does technology undermine the special place of the gods in the world. But, uhh, we were talking about a woman and her personal assistant…
“It’s my office,” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni reasonably responded.
“Oh, it may be your office,” Mabel stated, taking a funereal drag on a thick cigar, “but…he is in there.”
“Mikhail?” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni, hushed and irritated, asked. Mabel had stared down T. Boone Pickens when he stormed their offices with a platoon of lawyers. She had kept Bill Gates waiting for over an hour…just because she could. She had put George W. Bush on hold – the President of the United States! On hold! She feared nothing. Except Mikhail Lo-Fi.
Mabel nodded meekly. Brenda Brundtland-Govanni sighed. She had only had 12 coffees before coming in to work – she was barely awake. Still, no point in putting this off – it would only make things worse. “I’m going in,” she bravely stated.
As Brenda Brundtland-Govanni walked into her office, Mabel made the sign of the cross, which was odd, considering that she was Jewish.
“Ah, Brenda,” Mikhail Lo-Fi said as Brenda Brundtland-Govanni walked to her desk.
Mikhail Lo-Fi was a short, round man. There’s no way around it: he looked like a massive stomach with appendages. He looked like Humpty Dumpty. Not only that, but, if the rumours were true, the scars from the operations that gave Mikhail Lo-Fi all of his technological enhancements made him look like Humpty Dumpty after he had fallen off the wall and all of the king’s plastic surgeons and all of the king’s cybernetic technicians had put him back together again.
“What can I do for you, Mikhail?” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni asked as she more or less plopped (but in a completely professional manner) into the chair behind her desk.
“I’d like you to bring me up to date on the Bob Smiths schemozzle,” he told her.
“Not much to tell,” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni breezily stated. In the back of her mind, she was reminding herself: My desk. My office. My authority. Ha! Unfortunately, the lizard-brain even further back was laughing at her. Damn evolution! “Flo and Eddy are analyzing the Dimensional PortalTM as we speak. Darren is riding herd on the errant Bob Smiths in the North York warehouse.”
Mikhail Lo-Fi nodded to himself. “I would like you to appreciate that I have the utmost confidence in your ability to get to the bottom of this problem,” he began. Brenda Brundtland-Govanni immediately knew that this would not end well.
“It’s just that, well, the investors are getting restless,” Mikhail Lo-Fi continued. As he spoke, his voice, which at the best of times sounded like the scratching of two diamonds having sex, rose alarmingly. “They’re worried that, if this problem isn’t resolved before it becomes public, the value of the company will drop like a stooooooone.”
“I assure you, Mikhail –” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni tried to cut him off before his voice became an air raid siren. It didn’t work.
“And, you know, I wouldn’t be a one to bother, really, I wouldn’t,” Mikhail Lo-Fi continued as if she hadn’t opened her mouth, “only Minnie is having nanotech therapy for a nasty overbite, and it’s soooooo expensive, I simply cannot afford to lose the trust of the shareholders. I simply caaaaaaaan’t!”
The whine! The Lo-Fi Whine! It had turned Bill Clinton to jelly when Mikhail Lo-Fi was negotiating a broadcasting licence for ARNS TV. It had defeated Bill Gates, who had first tried to buy the Alternate Reality News Service, then, when that proved a non-starter, tried to muscle it out of the multiverse news business. Rumour had it that Mikhail Lo-Fi had had his voice box altered to magnify his voice’s natural alienating effect. Rumour had it that he had encouraged the circulation of the rumour that he had had his voice box altered to magnify his voice’s natural alienating effect. ARNS staff were divided on which rumour was worse.
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni promised herself that she wouldn’t dignify his tactic by putting her hands over her ears; her record for holding out was two minutes and 37 seconds. She felt that the fact that, at the time, she was on tranquilizers to dull the pain of a broken leg in no way diminished the achievement.
“I understand your pro –” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni started.
“Then, there’s the new AI for the house,” Mikhail Lo-Fi steampunked over her. “I can’t have guests over when the house has last year’s AI, Brenda. They would laugh at me. Laaaaaaaaugh! Aaaaaaaat! Me –”
Just as Brenda Brundtland-Govanni’s arms involuntarily moved towards her head, her intercom buzzed. “Ms. Brundtland-Govanni?” Mabel said.
“YES!” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni answered.
“Darren Clincker-Belli on line one.”
“I have to take this call,” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni told Mikhail Lo-Fi. She pushed a button on the phone.
“Oh, do you haaaaaaaaaaaave to?” Mikhail Lo-Fi complained.
“Darren, what’s happening at –” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni started.
“MS. BRUNDTLAND-GOVANNI!” Darren Clincker-Belli shouted on the speaker phone. “YOU HAVE TO HELP ME!”
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni lunged to press the button that turned off the speaker phone and picked up the receiver. After several seconds, Darren Clincker-Belli was calm enough to explain: “It’s the Bob Smiths! They’ve imprinted me!”
“What -?” she said.
“You know how baby ducks think that the first person they see is their mother?” he said.
“Baby ducks?” she said.
“Well, it’s called imprinting, and the Bob Smiths have done it to me!” he said.
“They think you’re their mother?” she said.
“Not exactly,” he said. “I was the first person they saw when they came through the Dimensional PortalTM. Now, they all want to be my best friend. They follow me around everywhere I go, asking if I want to go out with them for a beer. If I’m out of their sight for more than a few seconds, they start moaning about how alone they are in an indifferent universe, and I have to come back just to shut them up! Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to have to go to the bathroom in front of 127 versions of a guy from different realities?”
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni admitted she didn’t.
“Will this call be loooooooooong?” Mikhail Lo-Fi interjected. “I am a busy man, you know. Really buuuuuuuuuusy!”
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni started jabbing herself in the thigh with a letter opener she kept on her desk for the purpose. She found the pain helped her concentrate.
“Tough day?”
“You have no idea.”
After a moment, Brenda Brundtland-Govanni jumped out of her skin. She thought she had the entire janitorial closet to herself; that was the purpose of seeking refuge, after all, and, after 20 minutes of Mikhail Lo-Fi’s whining and Darren Clincker-Belli’s…also whining, refuge was what she desperately needed. Brenda Brundtland-Govanni couldn’t remember if she had the can of mace in her purse or if she had left it on the nightstand by the bed of the anonymous stranger who picked her up three days ago. She inched her hand into her purse on the off chance.
“Yeah, I always come here when I need a break from the hustle and bustle of the daily grind. I find it’s peaceful. And, dark. I guess that’s what makes it peaceful.”
Something in the Morgan Freemanuous voice stopped Brenda Brundtland-Govanni’s slow probing in her purse for a weapon. “Pops?” she asked uncertainly.
“Who else would you find in the janitor’s closet?” Dennis “Pops” Kahunga, the senior member of the janitorial staff, asked.
“What are you doing here?” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni asked back.
“I needed some industrial strength Lysol,” Pops Kahunga answered. “There’s a nasty reality leak somewhere in the Artifacts Hall.”
“And, you’re looking for it in the dark?”
“I know this closet like the back of my hand. Speaking of which, maybe if I turned it on…” A light slowly developed in the gloom, centering on Pops Kahunga’s hand. “Firefly gene therapy. Best medical intervention I ever paid for.”
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni looked into the big, black, puppy dog friendly face of Pops Kahunga. She decided to keep her hand in her purse because…because it was warm in there.
“Hear you got a problem with the Dimensional PortalTM,” Pops Kahunga said conversationally.
“We’re working on it,” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni tightly responded.
“Sure, sure,” Pops Kahunga agreed. “The thing you want to pay attention to is the squares.”
“There are too many in the company to keep track of,” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni bitterly bit.
“That would be true if I was talking about those squares,” Pops Kahunga amiably replied. “Actually, I was talking about the numbers of Bob Smiths being squares. The descending order is suggestive. Very suggestive, indeed. I’d give that some thought if I were you.”
The fact that Pops Kahunga referred to the squares meant that they were a significant piece of the puzzle; against the odds, all of the old people who worked at the Alternate Reality News Service really were wise. Brenda Brundtland-Govanni knew that this would be of great interest to Darren Clincker-Belli. She resolved never to be the one to tell him.
“Is there a reason,” Brenda Brundtland-Govanni mused, “that people named Pops never just come out and say what they mean?”
“You can’t be taught wisdom,” Pops Kahunga stated. “You can be lead to it, but you have to believe that it was all your own idea. People are funny that way. You understand?”
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni took her hand out of her purse, accidentally scraped it against something metallic and, wincing but not making a peep, opened the door and left the closet.
“Yeah,” Pops Kahunga said to himself, “I get a lot of that.”