What to do about Katrina, Ep. I, Act I, sc. 11-13
Enter Exhibit A, & the dark arts of annoying a junior MI5 liaison officer
If you have only just joined us, you are most welcome. Some might advise you to start at the beginning, though, if you want to avoid spoilery stuff, which you can do with my intro here, or the first instalment here.
To recap, in the previous chapter, our Tom from MI5 took a whole load of Katrina’s parallel world personal details, and is doing very well to maintain his professionalism in the face of all this cognitive dissonance. He is, however, very much looking forward to the end of this day. She’s not done with him yet, though. In the meantime, please say hello to Exhibit A.
Audrey Manadou was having a dull day. She spent half her time on Twitter. The other half, not much more than data entry. Not many tourists with missing passports at this time of year. She checked the time. Four. What her English boyfriend would call teatime. Except he never introduced her as the girlfriend. She’d noticed that. It irritated her.
Part of her put it down to English reserve. The other part wasn’t so sure.
She sighed, and tried to think of something exciting to do to him that evening.
The door opened and she quickly put the phone down and tried to look busy.
But then smiled. It was him. She did her best nonchalant look as he approached.
“You don’t look happy, chéri,” she pouted sympathetically. “Anything I can do to help with this? Bad day at the office? Peter making you do bad spy stuff again?”
“All of the above. And worse.”
“Can it be kissed better?” Audrey spoke fluent English, although she loved to do it in her cute French accent.
“Quite possibly later, I would imagine. I have some personal details for you.” He waved a sheet of notepaper at her then placed it on the desk next to the keyboard.
Tom made no secret of the fact that he enjoyed being teased by Audrey. It was certainly what the doctor would’ve ordered on this day, for sure. She glanced at the paper then watched him curiously as he connected a USB from the phone into the side of her PC.
She didn’t ask. In his own time.
Then Katrina’s picture appeared on her screen.
“Oh!” Then she looked up at Tom suspiciously. “Who is this girl?”
“It’s not what you think. Honestly. She’s insane, for a start.”
“Insane?”
“Certifiably, I’d say. We’ll see what Malcolm has to say. Which reminds me I’ll need to phone him. What I need you to do is create a new personal file for this girl. Her details are all written down there. Then once you’re done, find out what you can about her relatives. Also written down. I’m also uploading fingerprints.”
“Remember I do not have the same access to spy stuff you do. Is she a spy?”
“Peter probably thinks she is.”
She giggled. “Peter thinks everyone is a spy. I think he thinks I am too.”
“Probably. A sexy French honey trap, to be specific.”
“I like the sound of this.”
“Me too, as it happens. I’ll tell you anything you want. But only once I’ve installed this impossible girl into a hotel. I’ll be about an hour. Then I will be needing a very strong drink. Or three.”
“Impossible?”
Tom shook his head. “I don’t know what to make of her. She’s insufferable. Sometimes she’s all nice and apologetic, then she’s manic and raving, then she’s sad, then she’s sorry again, then she just goes off into the land of fantasy. She thinks she’s from a parallel world.”
Audrey burst out laughing. “Parallel world?”
“Don’t even ask. So, are we up for drinks and dinner and, well, anything else you can think of to ease my suffering?”
She smiled. “So long,” she pouted again, “as you can convince me that you don’t fancy this girl.”
“I’m not a masochist, Audrey. So no, I absolutely do not have any romantic inclinations towards her whatsoever. Besides, she thinks she’s old enough to be my mother.”
Audrey couldn’t help sniggering. She felt better.
“Genuinely,” Tom reassured her, “I’ve done very well to conceal it so far, but I’m getting near the end of my tether. She’s impossible. Intriguing, granted. But still impossible.”
She smiled. Then she looked back at the girl on the screen. “Mais elle est très belle, non?”
Tom refused to answer that one. He shrugged and started back towards the door.
“I’ll be back in an hour. Oh, and check missing persons.”
She watched as he closed the door behind him. Then she looked at the screen again and squinted.
Then she turned her head back to the door again, and pondered.
Dr. Psych. Malcolm Gladwish, alpha level clearance, was approximately five kilometres away from the end of his 100k bike ride through Brittany when the phone rang. He was puffing up a hill at the time so he ignored it.
Thirty seconds later it rang again.
“Leave a bloody message!”
He picked up Tom’s message around fifteen minutes later just as he was taking his first – always the best – great draught of fine cidre de Bretagne.
He almost choked on it.
“Where’s Netflix? I thought you said this was three stars?! There’s no bloody Netflix!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Netflix!! Have you heard of it? Online streaming service? Please tell me you have Netflix?”
Tom wasn’t sure how to respond to that. She was being deliberately obtuse again, and he didn’t know whether to ignore it, warm to it, or get irritated.
He decided on the latter. Lay down the law, so to speak. “May I ask you to stop being so bloody insufferable and ungracious? I was, believe it or not, beginning to like you. But a little diplomacy goes a long way, you know?”
That stopped her. She wasn’t expecting that at all. She remained silent but glared at him.
“There is such a thing as Netflix, yes. I’ve got it myself at my flat.” Tom eventually said.
“Oh. But not in this hotel, eh?”
“Beggars can’t be choosers, Katrina.”
“Oh that’s very funny, Thomas. Very funny. Remind me how poor I am, why don’t you.”
Then Tom decided to laugh and beat her at her own game.
“Your world can’t be that socialist then,” he ventured, “if you have Netflix. Unless you’re going to tell me it’s publicly owned and free at the point of use?”
“Equally funny, Thomas. Nice one. Actually, no, it’s not free at the point of use. Not yet, anyway. There’s a subscription fee. A very reasonable subscription fee, as it happens, if I do say so myself.”
She was flashing him a sly smile. Just to confuse him.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “What do you mean, ‘if I say so myself’?”
She grinned. “You wanted to know how rich I am? Well, there’s a bit of your answer.”
“Are you trying to tell me you own Netflix?” He tried not to snigger.
“Not in this world, obviously. But I’m interested to compare the two. As with everything else, for that matter. Like some of your Bond movies, for example.”
“And you still insist you were in those movies, too, huh?”
“Stop looking at me like that, Tom. And I told you I was a very astute businesswoman. So buying Netflix was an equally astute investment.”
He continued to grin, suddenly deciding not to be so defeatist about her deliberately winding him up. “Ok, so how much did you pay for it?”
“Sixty million. Dollars, that is.”
“Is that all? I don’t believe you.” But he was, at least, enjoying the idea of it.
Katrina sighed. “That was during the dot-com bubble. Late 2000. You would’ve been, what, three years’ old at the time, so no wonder you don’t remember.”
“Hmm. So on the one hand you say you’re a socialist, whilst on the other you’re a vulture capitalist?”
“It’s called beating the bastards at their own game, Thomas. I was never so proud that I wouldn’t use their own ruthless methods against them, in the cause of goodness and a better world.”
He burst out laughing. “And Netflix helped make your world a better place, then, did it?”
“In a way, sure. We made stories accessible to anyone on the Internet with a fast enough connection. Stories with meanings. Positive, counter-subversive meanings. Undermining Hollywood Americanist propaganda and bigging up the British production industry to boot. And I knew perfectly well when the Lizzies got into power they’d renationalise BT and go hell for leather to roll out that mega-high-speed fibre optic broadband to every house in the country, no matter how rural or isolated. Once that happened, not even the sky’s your limit anymore. And coupled with my production company, our customers got exclusive content before anyone else. Vertical integration and all that. First mover advantage, that kind of thing. So by the mid-2000s, with everyone approaching gigabits of connection speed and the production company having quite a few billions to spend on original content, well, there you go. Plus Netflix was originally an American company, so we had the American market, too. Except there was bloody Nathaniel wanting his 35% share of that.”
Tom enjoyed that image and decided he liked this Nathaniel and wanted to buy him a drink. “Scorpio, huh?”
“Scorpi-bloody-oh, quite. Always a sting in the tail.”
And she burst out laughing with him.
“Is that why you broke up with him, then?” He was genuinely interested about that, she noticed.
“No, that was earlier. In exchange for the zero percent loan he got ten percent of the business until I was in a position to pay him back. But when that happened and he knew I wanted to expand, he offered to keep the ten percent in perpetuity in exchange for pretty much doubling our budget. Which was around ten million at the time. It made all the difference, actually. But he also said we should set up an American branch, in New York, which he would pay for in exchange for 35%. He knew I wanted to give my employees 30%, like my dad did with his company and I’d done for the record label. So that would’ve left me with 35% too. Meaning not a controlling share, in other words.”
“Ah. I think I see where you’re going here.”
“Quite. Anyway. It wasn’t as bad as I’m making out, to be honest. I mean by the time we got Netflix we’d completely made up and we were both married. And he lived in NYC so he could look after the American stuff for me. Which was just as well because I was persona non grata in the States by then.”
“Oh?” Tom raised his eyebrows. “How so?”
Katrina sighed. “Another time, Tom.”
“Fair enough. But I will hold you to that?”
She laughed. “Sure.” Then she decided to do more poking around the room with a curious expression on her face. Looking for the little parallel world differences, perhaps.
Or scoping the place out and assessing escape route options.
Tom observed her with equal curiosity. “So your dad had a company, too?”
“Meyer Electronics. He made computers and solar panels, to begin with. Then later he got into the gaming market, and also made all manner of cool gadgets.”
“I see.” Tom was not a little suspicious, professionally-speaking, although this time he hid it well enough.
“That explains my astute investment in Netflix, by the way. I knew what streaming would be like years before it ever happened. I knew about computers and the Internet since I was young.”
“I suppose that makes sense, sure.”
“Quite.” She peered into the bathroom again. “My dad is a brilliant electronics engineer. He’d always been fascinated with computers since he was young, too. In a kind of boyish way. It’s that Cancer thing again. So he knew about Moore’s Law and the possibilities of what would eventually be called the Internet even back in the late sixties when he was at tech college. Built his original business model around it.”
“Hmm. Ok.”
Katrina smiled slyly to herself then turned to face him, arms crossed in front of her again. “Do you know what Moore’s Law is?”
“Sure. Of course.”
“What is it, then?”
Tom tried and failed not to laugh.
Katrina tried the same thing and succeeded. A wry smile would suffice. “Computer processing power doubles every few years. It’s because of miniaturisation, of course. You can fit twice as much stuff on the same surface area. Obviously there’s a limit, beyond which quantum effects take over and that’s when you have to get into quantum computers. Which he also happens to be a pioneer in, by the way.”
“Ah,” Tom thought he had it, “so this explains how you ended up in this universe, then?”
“You mean I just stepped into the quantum leap accelerator and then vanished?”
“Did you?”
Katrina burst out laughing. “Don’t be ridiculous, Tom. The so-called quantum leap accelerator is a fictional device in the TV show Quantum Leap, in which Dr. Sam Beckett, played by my good friend Scott Bakula, does indeed step into the quantum leap accelerator and then vanish. Then he has to flit around different times fixing things that went wrong, ‘hoping, each time,’” she put on a sad voice, “‘that the next leap, will be the leap home.’ Ahhh.”
Tom giggled. “Right.”
“But like I said,” she went serious again, “I know I’m not leaping home anytime soon. So there. You’re stuck with me. Sorry.”
Tom sighed. There wasn’t much he could say to that.
He sighed again, then remembered. He took out his wallet and retrieved a hundred Euros and handed it to her.
“You said you needed some essentials.”
Katrina examined the notes disapprovingly. “Hmm. Euros. I noticed in the newspaper you’re still using that single European currency rubbish. Supranational control over a country’s money supply and all that. Is this enough?”
Tom willed himself not to get annoyed again. “Possibly not for your tastes, but it’ll have to be. And please stop being so self-entitled.”
Katrina folded the notes between her fingers, crossed her arms and glared at him. “Self-entitled?”
“Self-entitled. You know, there are in fact moments when I like you. You’re amusing. But then you can be insufferable.”
“Insufferable? Amusing?”
“Yeah, amusing. Like you being in the Bond movies.”
“Are you saying you can’t imagine me in them?”
“Well, actually yes, oddly enough, I can. Bond girl, sure. Evil Russian spy Bond girl, but yeah.”
She suddenly laughed. “Well, you’re kind of close. Self-entitled, huh?”
He shrugged and raised his eyebrows. And if he’d been wearing a tie he’d probably have thought of straightening it.
“Right. At least I know where I stand. No chance of dinner and a movie at yours, then? You said you had Netflix.”
“I seriously doubt that’s a good idea. And stop trying to wind me up.”
She sighed. “Fair enough. Well, thanks for the pocket money.”
She smiled gratefully, although it looked more like sarcasm to him. He regained his composure and smiled back. “There are some shops a few blocks away. You should be able to find what you need there.”
“Thanks. And I’ll have your friends downstairs for company, eh? It’s ok, Tom, I couldn’t fail to notice. They’re the same couple as were in the brasserie. Presumably to make sure I don’t scarper or anything?”
“And to make sure you’re ok,” he held his arms out just for emphasis, “honestly.”
She wasn’t upset. “Perfectly understandable. And thank you. I mean it. I’d be totally lost without you.”
She disarmed him again, because this time it seemed she meant it. Rather than answering he decided that was his cue to leave.
“May I ask you just one last favour, Tom?”
He turned back. “Erm, depends.”
“Netflix at yours? Dinner and a movie? I’m a very accomplished cook.”
He burst out laughing again. “Is this the evil Bond girl honey trap routine?”
“No.” She said it softly and sadly, and it penetrated. “Honest, I really am a good cook,” she insisted. “And I miss my family. Right now I’d be in the kitchen making something for them. I may have been rich but I always looked after my own children. None of this capitalist nanny crap for them, I can assure you.”
“I believe you. Sure.”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“That sounds like a provocation.”
She just smiled slyly at him. That would do the trick.
“I’ll think about it,” he replied, coyly, before finally, not without relief, leaving her alone again…
To be continued…
Love the dialogue and developing relationship between Tom and Katrina! It’s lots of fun to read.