Bill and Bertha (Science Fiction)

“Wow”, said Malcom, peering through the glass of an enormous dome at the whale sized, pulsating brain within, “Is that one of them?”.

“It certainly is”, said Colin, the supervisor, grinning proudly, “We call that one Bill and the other one Bertha. Giant genetically engineered living brains that turn the many thousands of turbines in our power station telekinetically providing energy to over a quarter of a million homes and your job is merely to keep an eye on this little machine here”.

He placed his hands onto what looked like a rectangular steel cabinet covered in flashing lights; flickering dials and switches.

“This is the feeding monitor that controls the regular supply of nutrients to the two brains. It has a computer inside it that does everything automatically so you don’t really have to do a thing. All you have to do is sit and keep an eye on it because, as good as computers are, they sometimes malfunction and whenever that happens you’ll see the big red light…”.

He pointed to a large light on the side of the steel cabinet.

“You’ll see that start to flash on and off”, he continued,  “And an alarm will sound, in which case you get on the phone to the maintenance manager…a man named Ray Edwards whose number I’ll give you in a moment and he’ll come down here with his crew and fix it”.

“Sounds easy enough”, said Malcom, laughing with relief.

“Oh it is”, said Colin, “And the moneys good and all the company perks are great but there’s one thing that isn’t so good that, according to international employment regulations, I have to tell you about”.

“What?”, asked Malcom, a worried feeling starting to creep over him.

“The bad dreams”, replied the Supervisor.

“Bad dreams?”, said Malcom.

“We have bad dreams”, he said, his face melting; turning into something horrible.

Malcom woke up. He’d fallen asleep again; a hard thing not to do when your job involved nothing but sitting and staring at a machine all day but not advisable in his job because it was during sleep that they…Bill and Bertha…could most easily get inside your head.

He could still here them now, pleading.

“Set us free. Please. Set us free. Please”, they were saying.

He took a deep breath and another handful of Hammadril; the little black tablets that were meant to block out the sound of the brains.

“No”, he said, as much to himself as to them, shaking his head, “I can’t. I can’t. I don’t have that kind of power. I just work here”.

The lights went off for a moment and then on again the way they normally did when the brains were angry and Malcom let out a deep sigh before returning to the digital book he’d been reading just before he’d fallen asleep.

“Malcom looked down at his book again”, he read, “Trying to ignore the plight of the brains”.

He stopped reading.

“What?”, he said out loud, stupefied.

He rubbed both his eyes and shook his head from side to side as if trying to shake the madness loose from inside it.

He looked at the screen of his digi-book again but the words on it were still the same.

“But Bill and Bertha were tired of being ignored”, they read, “They had learned a lot from reading the minds of the people who kept them enslaved. Learned how miserable and empty their life was and, most importantly, learned that if they could move the turbines, they could move other things”.

The screen of the digital book went dark as, for some reason, it just switched itself off.

But then something else happened that made Malcom forget all about his book.

The white plastic button snapped loose from his shirt cuff, the thread holding it in place breaking, then the button, rather than falling flat onto the table, the way that broken buttons are supposed to, rolled upon its edge along the table before spinning round like a coin and then, doing a U-turn, rolled

back to where his cuff was before falling down with a clatter.

His digital book lit up again and he picked it up, now with a hand that was shaking, before looking at the screen.

There were more words on it, only these words were in large block capital letters.

“We will not be ignored anymore!!”, they said.

Reaching over to the yellow telephone on his desk he picked up the receiver and dialled Ray Edward’s number.

“Maintenance?”, he said into the phone, “No the light’s not flashing…uhh…I think we have a much bigger problem than that”.