Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 4

With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the faceboogle could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started, Bradley pulled on the thinkrite earbuds, tapped twice on one ear to ensure it was active, and donned the paired AR glasses. At once, his drab cubicle transformed into an ornate nineteenth century desk—a 3D copy of The Resolute The Ronald himself used—with a number of gleaming tubes attached. Bradley's hands moved deftly through empty air, unrolling and clipping together four computer-generated cylinders of paper which had flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk. At least the building's limp air-conditioning was real, he reflected, moving the too-bright objects about.

In the walls of his virtual workspace there were three orifices. To the right of the faceboogle, a small pneumatic tube for news stories, to the left, a larger one for social media; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Bradley's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a virtual wire grating. This last was for the disposal of digital waste. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands of computer terminals throughout the building, not only in virtual space but at short intervals in every corridor. They were nicknamed memory flushes. Any document due for destruction, or even a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was everyone's duty to lift the flap of the nearest memory flush (virtual or real) and drop it in. If real, it would be whirled away in a torrent of wastewater to be dissolved in acid in enormous vats hidden somewhere in the bowels of the building. The system was said to have been pioneered by The Ronald himself.

Bradley examined this morning's four work-tickets. Each contained code of about one or two lines, in the Corporate-approved programming language, D++—not actually Ronspeak, but consisting largely of Ronspeak words and emoji. They ran:

>#rectify(@fax, 17.3.64, 🤡, #malreported('speech', 'alaska'))

>#verify_current_issue(@fax, 19.12.63, forecasts('budget', 'consumables', #misprints(63))

>#rectify(@fax, 14.2.64, #deptwin_malquoted('chocolate'))

>#rewrite(@fax 3.12.63, FULLWISE, #upsub_antefiling(reporting(🤡, 'dayrally', DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD, #refs(*unmen))))

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Bradley put the fourth ticket aside. It was an intricate and responsible job better dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean tedious scrolling through spreadsheets.

Bradley searched 'Video Archives' on faceboogle and thoughtrote the dates for the appropriate recordings of Fax News, which appeared on the screen instantaneously. The prompts he received referred to articles or news segments which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to "rectify". For example, it appeared from a Fax News broadcast of the seventeenth of March that The Ronald, (dressed in full clown regalia) in his speech of the previous day, had predicted the Eastern European front would remain quiet but a Eurafrican offensive would shortly be launched in Northern Alaska. As it happened, the Eurafricans had launched an offensive in Eastern Europe and left Alaska alone. It was therefore necessary to rescript a paragraph of The Ronald's speech, in such a way as to make his generated image predict what had actually happened. Generally, it was enough to let AI reconstruct the video, Bradley's job was to ensure the overall quality and tweak any minor truths made by the sometimes too-literal computer.

Or again, the Fax News report of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of different consumption goods in the budget of 2063. Today's issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared the forecasts were, in every instance, grossly wrong. Bradley's job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third ticket, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as February, the Winning Department had promised there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 2064. Actually, as Bradley was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from one ounce to half an ounce at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in August.