Carol for Another Christmas (6 page)

There were an Asian face and two black faces as well. Most puzzling to find a crowd in any part of London containing all of these people in the same situation.

At least he did not seem to be lying in a closed coffin, ready to scratch at the lid like a character from the pen of some demented, drug-crazed poet, he thought with relief. Still, it was quite disorienting.

Momentarily, he was able to focus on one particular female face, which was looking at him as if she were a judge and he were Jack the Ripper.

She was otherwise an ordinary enough lady, not yet old, though her expression belied that impression. Her face, though round-cheeked, bore hard, thick eyebrows over what might have been lovely blue eyes, had they not been narrowed with suspicion. Her rosebud of a mouth was held in a thin line. Lines of deep discontent ran from nose to chin and furrowed her otherwise creamy brow as well. She at least was decently though peculiarly clad in what appeared to be a gentleman's shirtwaist and waistcoat, though her gender was readily apparent in the shirtwaist's conformation. Her hair was unbecomingly short and worn close to her scalp, its rebellious tendency to curl seeming to give her horns. She might be the maiden daughter of some particularly bleak clergyman, from the look of her.

“Who are you supposed to be?” she demanded in a growl at once dismissive and impatient. “Santa Claus?”

“Not at all, madam, although it's a flattering error. I am Ebenezer Scrooge, Esq. The late Ebenezer Scrooge, Esq. And whom, may I ask, have I the pleasure of addressing?”

“Tiny Tim, you idiot.
Not!
” she said, leaning toward him, an extremely unpleasant look slitting her eyes into chasms of glacial blue scorn. “You know very well who I am. I am Monica Banks. If you're the ghost my brother's ghost was talking about, funny he didn't mention me, don't you think? If you are a by-product of my own stress overload, then I invented you and you have to know who I am. If you are, as I suspect, an elaborate hoax, then I am your boss and I am not amused and would like to ask if you think you're such a hot dog that a New Year's deadline leaves you spare time for freelance work. Not to mention that you're in violation of your contract. That could be expensive for you. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

And with that, she stabbed a finger toward Ebenezer, and it was as if she had slammed a door in his face, for he no longer beheld her or the room in which she had been.

“Well!” Scrooge said to himself. “Monica Banks is certainly a rude young woman.”

“And this is news?”

Scrooge was suddenly looking into the craterous pockmarks of a bespectacled young man. This one had the decency to wear a shirt open over his underwear. No necktie or cravat, no waistcoat or jacket. His eyes were distorted by the spectacles so that they appeared very large and almond brown. His black hair was cut into a bristle all over his head. This was the Asian gentleman. Scrooge had never actually exchanged words with anyone of that race.

“Good day to you, sir,” he said.

The Asian gentleman, little more than a boy actually, jumped up immediately and ran to the door of his room to call out, “Hey, you guys. That glitch we saw on the screen a few minutes ago! It's back, and it
talks
.”

Scrooge took the opportunity to look about the room. It was a small and quite ordinary room. Well, perhaps not entirely ordinary. A window showed that although it was very gray outside, it was not yet dark. Raindrops splashed against the pane. He saw no fire, nor even a small grate to hold one. The interior was lit, quite brightly, not by candles or oil lamps but by some sort of glowing glass orb that gave off light as steady and bright as sunshine. The door had glass around it, and affixed to this glass were the tattered remnants of many small, paneled drawings. Scrooge tried to examine them, and found he was prevented by a barrier of some sort that would not allow him to fully enter the room. Curious.

The young man returned, this time with many of the faces Scrooge had first seen, peering over his shoulders.

“Wow, look—it
is
back. Not on my screen yet, Curtis. What did you do to get it to come up again? Phenomenal full-screen video,” a young woman with wild blond curls said.

“So what do you call it, man?” asked a fellow with a dark beard and hair slicked back into a horse's tail.

“I dunno, John. It just zapped into the middle of my coding. I hope I didn't lose everything I've done in the last twenty minutes.”

“Well, see if you can get back to what you were working on.” This suggestion came from a portly man the color of strong tea.

“What? Have you flipped, Phillip?” the Asian man addressed as Curtis asked. “Make it go away? This is interactive TV, man. Listen to him.”

“A demo date is sacred. Haven't you been listening to Miz Money talking? Whatever this guy is, he ain't code. Shut him down,” Phillip said.

“Killjoy. I don't get to have any fun. But okay. So, nice knowing you, dude. I'm escaping now. Bye,” Curtis said, stabbing at a button.

But this time, Scrooge resolved not to be put off or have the door slammed in his face. “Here now, you,” Scrooge said in the voice he'd used to strike terror into the hearts of tenants and clerks before his transformation. “I'm tired of this rudeness. You have a few questions to answer before I'm done with you!”

“Hey! I hit Alt-4 and nothing happened. That should have closed his program.”

“Whoa!” John said, scratching his beard thoughtfully. “It won't let you out, huh? So much for today's work. Okay, I can handle that. Do a hard boot and see what happens.”

Curtis stabbed a finger again but Scrooge raised his cane and shook it at the fellow, adamant not to be ignored. Peculiar, that they should bury him with his cane. Convenient, however. “You there! Stop, I say!”

“He's . . . still . . . there,” the curly headed woman said. “I don't think we're in Windows anymore, Toto.”

“Whatever are you talking about, madam? Of course I am still here, and I demand to know where I am, who you are, and just what is going on here.”

“This is rich!” John cried, slapping his thighs and hooting in a voice entirely too loud for comfort.

“Who thought you up, gramps?” the blonde asked as sweetly as she might ask a lost child what his mother looked like. “How do you work?”

“Could be one of the network guys messing with our heads,” Curtis said doubtfully.

“I bet I know who he is, Melody,” Phillip said. “I'll bet he's a present from Wayne—a new Wild Web toy to slow us down and make us wish we'd jumped ship with him. That's it, isn't it?” Phillip said, pointing a finger at Scrooge's nose in a most ill-mannered way. “You're from Wayne, aren't you?”

Scrooge started to give him his sternest glare, and then realized that perhaps, for all his rudeness, the man could be correct. “I'm afraid I don't know,” Scrooge admitted. “How would one go about finding this Wayne?”

“I'll see if I can send you back to him right now,” Curtis said, and he disappeared from in front of the screen for a moment. “Pulling the plug,” he said to the others.

“He's still hee-eere,” John told him. “Maybe someone is messing with your instrument. Let's take the lid off.” They did so and poked around in the innards of a large, roughly square beige metal box located next to Scrooge. Scrooge felt a few odd tin glings as they unplugged this and that, removed and replaced this and that, but nothing seriously affected him now that he realized he was in control of whether or not he stayed. Miss Banks's action had simply taken him by surprise.

“Nada,” someone said finally, and they reassembled the box.

“Well, I'm going to see if I can get back into what I was working on,” Curtis said, and resumed tapping at the letters and numbers located just beneath Scrooge's chin.

Scrooge watched with some interest. The keys were very like the typewriting machine, which was just coming into use toward the end of his life. He had thought, the year he died, that he might purchase one for his office, to aid in the making up of bills and the printing of notices granting extensions to those unable to pay their rents for some reason or other. Formerly, he would never have spared the expense even to write the many eviction notices he had once sent out. The Christmas the ghosts had visited him had changed his business practices year-round, however; so much so that although he had a slimmer profit margin at the end of his life, he had many more friends.

“It's locked up,” Curtis said. “I tried to get out on the Net, too, but I can't lose this image long enough to reach Wild Web. I think we've got a major bug here, guys.”

“Yeah,” said Miriam, “and if this guy is really Ebenezer Scrooge, I guess we'd call him a
hum
bug, eh?”

“Most certainly not, young lady,” Scrooge said to her. “I am a quite genuine manifestation, and I am currently in charge, so I'll thank you not to insult me.”

“Be careful, Mir,” John said. “He's right, and Melody's right. If this is really Ebenezer Scrooge, we've gone through the looking glass into the twilight zone and are now working with the Scrooge Operating System.”

“Oh, no!” a light brown young woman groaned. “I thought if I didn't watch TV and stayed away from high school plays, I'd avoid seeing another remake of
A Christmas Carol
! Don't tell me someone's turned it into an operating system. This thing has to be a virus that
ate
the operating system. And a CD-ROM would have been bad enough.”

“A virus that keeps on the screen even after the machine's been disconnected? I think not. I think we are privileged here to see the first signs of independent artificial intelligence. The Scrooge Operating System it is, or SOS, which seems an appropriate enough acronym when you think about it.”

Scrooge did not quite understand the language these people were using. It seemed to be English, but so many of the words were in the wrong places. However, they seemed to understand him well enough when they weren't trying to disregard him or dismiss him altogether, so he ventured a question. “This Miss Banks: I take it from my brief interview with her that she is your employer?”

Curtis looked around, then answered the question quite civilly, having finally decided to treat Scrooge as another person. “For the time being,” he said. “Some of us are only on contract, but some, like Sheryl”—he nodded to the young woman whose color resembled strong tea with a great deal of milk—“have been here since Doug and Wayne founded Databanks.”

“You wouldn't know it was the same place,” Sheryl said with a woeful shake of her head. “Would you, Harald?” she asked another fellow, this one thin, dark, and bespectacled, and perhaps a bit older than the others.

He shook his head sadly and held up a slice of pie with what appeared to be cheese melted on it. “Nope. Look at this. Cold pizza. On Christmas Eve, no less. Dragonlady closed all the cafeterias after five P.M. and charges more than a five-star restaurant to eat there. Plus we get only a half hour.”

Phillip chimed in, “When Doug was alive, they were always open and
free
, so if you were working on a problem at two A.M., you could still get a noshie.”

“She brought in
time clocks
,” Melody said with a delicate shudder.

“Sold the art collection, too,” Sheryl added for lornly. “I could tell which building I was in by that art collection. Now all the interiors look the same. I was lost for three days once trying to get back from the rest room.”

“Pay toilets,” a red-haired woman interjected.

“I used to be able to tell where
I
was by Matt in development's inflatable shark hanging from his ceiling, Karen the coder's aquarium, tester Bob's stuffed gorilla, and the different
Doonesbury
,
Far Side
, and
Peanuts
cartoons on people's windows, but they're all gone now,” Curtis said, shaking his head, grieving for what had gone before. “All gone.”

Scrooge could tell they were very upset, but he hardly considered these complaints to be on a par with those of the folk he had found, once he took notice, to be starving, freezing, or perishing of disease and poverty in London during his own time. Still, he had come to realize in his latter years that working conditions were most important to employees.

“I read that she's closed off all but one bathroom, one bedroom, and a kitchen in Doug's mansion,” the redheaded woman said. “She's letting the estate grow wild, like the grounds here.”

“Not for long, Miriam,” Curtis said. “She's going to sell Databanks's old-growth forest to Beaver Construction and let them subdivide the campus grounds for condos.”

In the fervor of their complaints, they seemed to have forgotten entirely that they had not believed Scrooge to be real. Not that he was sure he was. But their comments served to reaffirm his suspicion of why he was where he was, wherever that was, which he did not know. Nor did he know when it was, for he felt that these people belonged to a quite different time, such as Mr. Jules Verne might have speculated upon in his stories. Before the Christmas with the ghosts, Scrooge would have disbelieved this perception, himself, or found it unsettling. But he had found that traveling through time could be instructive for him, and he was certain, now, that his current travels were intended to be instructive for others. Whenever this was, he knew one important thing: No matter which year this was, it was Christmastime, and Christmas was being ignored.

“Never you fear,” he told them, feeling full of resolve. “I am here to see that you have a merry Christmas, after all.”