The screen took up one complete wall of the basement and Oliver stared at it intently. It was filled with a giant spreadsheet with columns and rows. He had plugged his stump directly into the neural interface on his chair so he could select cells and change numbers just by thinking. Today he was working on budgets for the next financial year and his forecasts were looking positive. He intended to delete roles by making people redundant and he wanted his remaining staff to make more share trades each day to generate an uplift in profit. His heart rate increased and he breathed heavily as his bottom line went above six digits. For him and, of course, his family next year could bring lots of new acquisitions. He wanted a faster car, his wife could install new servers, Emma could have a skin suit for space camp, and Ethan could have a new neural connector for his bed. Oliver was worried about Ethan. His processing speed at night wasn’t as fast or as focused as it needed to be. He was dreaming too much, which needed to be stopped, and the improved neural connectors could be just the thing.
Oliver’s gaze drifted away from the screen for a moment so his watch send an electric pulse through his arm to bring back his focus. He moved to the next row and saw that he could reduce costs here too. His former employee, Henry, would turn 80 before the financial year started so he would be forced to retire. It was the Government’s responsibility to look after people once they finished their full-time careers so he would be paid a peppercorn wage and put to work cleaning streets or collecting rubbish. It was a shame Henry’s wife had died otherwise, as a couple, they might have been sent to the farms in southern Europe; but they had no use for single people because it took more than one to look after a field of crops. Another expense saved, thought Oliver.
Emma’s avatar appeared in the bottom right of his screen and reluctantly he clicked on it. She knew not to disturb him while he was working.
“Dad, my server has frozen again and I can’t access my astronomy lesson.”
“Well, contact your Mother. She is the only one with the authorisation code to reboot. I’m really very busy, darling,” he said.
“But she is not picking up. I think she is in the body pumper with the music up loud.”
Oliver’s watch sent another pulse up his arm as it was during work hours and he didn’t like to be off task for too long. He had programmed it to keep him focused.
“Sorry, got to go,” he said. “Why don’t you look for Mummy? She wasn’t going out today so she is probably plugged into the body pumper in the house gym. Speak later.”
Oliver closed the call and activated the do-not-disturb function. Children were necessary for reproduction but annoying when you wanted to work. He dimmed the lights so he could focus better on the screen, highlighted the next row, and started to amend the numbers.
Scribblings 