Switch by T. K. Howell

Jenny filed a complaint against her manager on Monday afternoon and was out of a job by Thursday evening.

“They can’t do that,” Frank said. “There are rules against that kind of thing aren’t there?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? They’ve given me a month’s pay.”

Frank said he could take more shifts, but it was going to be tight. “We’ll have to cut back on a lot. Fuel. Food. Energy. Have you seen our energy bills recently? Good grief.”

“I’ll get another job,” Jenny said, but her voice trailed off. It was never that easy. She worked in a tough sector. It could take months. And what was it they said? You were only ever three pay-cheques away from poverty.

“There is one thing,” Frank said.

There was a long pause when neither of them spoke or dared move.

“Please. Not this again honey.” Jenny rolled her eyes. “We’ll work something out, I promise.”

Frank took a deep breath and passed his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. He looked down at the cracked linoleum kitchen floor, concentrating intently on a spilt crumb.

“The gaming,” he sighed. Jenny gave an exasperated harrumph and turned her back on him. She put her hands on her hips and stared through the kitchen window at the scrappy mess of their backyard, at Nessie’s Stomp Rocket and her balance bike, her toys scattered across the uncut lawn. She stared at the cracked patio slabs and the empty washing line. And beyond the patio, at the bottom of the garden, she looked at the shed. Her shed. Calling it a shed did it a disservice. It was more of a cabin. Its windows were reinforced with steel bars and the door was solid oak with two padlocks. It had its own alarm system. You couldn’t be too careful given the neighbourhood. Particularly if the local youths found out what she kept in there.

“It is not gaming. Can you please stop calling it that?”

“Well… whatever. I looked at the breakdown. It’s over half of our energy costs. Over half! That’s insane, Jenny. It’s not sustainable.”

“It’ll work soon, I know it will.”

She had been saying the same thing for six years, since before they married, since before Nessie was born. Frank had believed her, once. He saw it as a moonshot now, a lottery win. It would be nice, but he’d given up expecting or hoping for it. “I just need to adjust the parameters a little,” she would say, and for the next month, there would be some promising data, some convergence with real-world observations. But it wouldn’t hold. It had been mostly his savings that had helped her set up the shed. His money that had gone into buying all that extra RAM, the screens, the military-grade Graphics Cards.

Cables. There were so many cables. They led out under the patio and up into the shed. On quiet days if she sat in the kitchen with the doors open, Jenny could hear the shed gently whirring, clicking, and ticking. Every night she slept to the sound of it collating, calculating, predicting. It soothed her to think of all those little packages of data going about their business oblivious to their purpose. Frank said he couldn’t hear it, but she knew he was lying.

Frank shook his head ruefully and opened the patio doors. He walked into the garden, and paced aimlessly, hands thrust in pockets. Occasionally he would aim a leisurely kick at a tall spike of ryegrass. He deliberately ignored the shed, spurning it. Jenny put the kettle on and shouted out to check if he wanted a cup of coffee. She hoped that would be the end of it. She hoped that if she buried the conversation and carried on as normal, Frank would forget about it. There would be a new job. Of course there would. But turning off the shed? It made her shudder. Emergency meetings with HR and abrupt contract terminations were nothing compared to the icy chill that ran down her spine when she thought of shutting down the shed. Was it just a sunk-cost now? She’d devoted so much time to it and spent so much of Frank’s money that she felt a certain sense of obligation. It must come good. It must deliver.

But it was more than that and she knew it. She’d built the shed bit by bit. It was hers, her creation. And all those little data points were her data points. All nine billion of them. She watched them on her screens, read the print-outs, clawed her way through the reams and reams of ones and zeros looking for prophecy and prediction.

At first, she thought she could use it for the sports results. But she could never quite get it. Maybe it was because she didn’t really follow sport herself, maybe the engine was just geared to large-scale, metadata analysis. Sport involved too much minutiae, too much chance. Nearly every time, the shed agreed with whatever the bookies said. There was no margin in it and slowly her horizons had broadened.

Jenny watched Frank circle the garden. She could see him muttering and knew he was counting down from one hundred. If they were going to talk about wasting money, she could just as easily point to his damn therapist. Counting down from one hundred! All that money for something her mother made her do when she was throwing a tantrum.

Frank made it to forty-three then turned back toward the patio doors.

Forty-three pounds a week! That’s what they could save by simply flipping the switch on the shed. Forty-three pounds. If Jenny could get welfare until she got a new job, then they could probably get by. They could stay in the black, provided the cost of living didn’t get worse. It would be useful to know if it was going to get worse. It would be useful if they had something that could tell them what would happen and what they could do about it. Frank’s brow furrowed. How much time and energy had they wasted waiting on predictions? He came back into the kitchen wagging his finger.

“What good has it done, huh? So it predicted a war and a fuel price spike, it didn’t help us do a damn thing about either. That’s the problem with estimates and forecasts, they stop you from living in the now. They fill you with fear until you’re terrified of tomorrow while today is still perfectly fine. It would be OK if it gave us the lottery numbers or something, but no. It gives us a war. It wasn’t even the right country.”

“It predicted the pandemic.”

“Fat lot of good it did us. Remember how much money you lost on Trump-Harris? You have to turn it off, Jenny. You can always plug it back in when things calm down a bit. Give it a year, I’m sure things will level out.”

Jenny gritted her teeth. “That’s not how it works. You pull it and that’s it, they’re all gone. You can’t interrupt the simulation once it’s been started.”

“They’re not real,” Frank said

“What’s real?”

“Oh button it with the existential questions, would you? We can halve our energy bills if you just turn the damn thing off. It’s either your world of imaginary friends or your husband and your daughter and a house with central heating. Nessie needs new clothes. She’s growing so damn fast. You need to snap out of it.”

“They’re not imaginary friends. They’re not.”

Frank strode across the kitchen and found the multi-socket adapter running from a plug under the wine rack. Ten plugs in total, ten leads cable-tied together and buried in an old piece of guttering so that Nessie wouldn’t play with them when she was in the garden. He rested his fingers on the switch and froze as he heard the unmistakable sound of a knife being drawn from the cobalt-blue knife block by the hob.

“Don’t you dare,” Jenny hissed. “Don’t move another inch.”

Frank stood up slowly and turned. Jenny gripped the knife in her fist, letting her arms hang low by her side, the blade pointing from her hip. Frank backed away, palms facing out. Things had flipped on their head and he didn’t know how.

“OK, OK, Jesus. Just relax, OK. I won’t touch it, I promise. We’ll find some other way.”

“She will provide. I know she will.”

“She?” Frank asked. Jenny raised the knife in her outstretched arm and levelled it at his face. For a brief moment, he considered charging her.

Charging Jenny.

To knock a knife out of her hand.

Which she was pointing at him.

How the hell had it come to this? The thing was doing it to her. The shed. No matter what happened next he knew: it had to go.

“It would be like… like genocide,” Jenny said.

“OK, OK, I’m stepping away,” Frank said but didn’t make to move. She’d lost her mind. She’d lost her mind. They would have to have her committed or something. Could they even do that these days? God, what would he do with Nessie? She couldn’t stay here with Jenny like this. Frank marvelled at how his mind focused itself on such things while the mother of his child pointed a knife at him. He was already seeing a week, six months, six years down the road. So much for high-spec. data processing units. All he needed to see the future was a short, sharp shock of adrenaline straight to the hindbrain.

“Move away, Frank.”

But not even Frank could have predicted that a single impulse would catch in his mind for long enough to change a world.

Just flip the switch. Just lean back and do it. Then it’s over.

Frank lunged for the switch and Jenny charged him. He felt his fingertip brush it as she caught him in the chest and then the knife was coming toward his cheek and she wasn’t a big woman, but she was fit, spent two evenings a week in the gym, and played lacrosse in college. Frank fell backward and Jenny fell with him. There was a sickening crack as her head bounced off the corner of the wine rack. The knife skittered from her hand and the two fell in a heap. Frank stood, opened his mouth to shout, and then saw the blood on his hands. Jenny lay face-up, motionless. Blood was pooling on the uneven linoleum.

“Jenny? Oh, Christ. Jenny?” He stooped and put his hand to her cheek. She was still breathing, but it was laboured. Her eyes twitched toward him, but she did not appear to see him. An Ambulance would be ten minutes if they were lucky, and by then she’d be dead. He knew it.

“You...” Her voice was a gurgle. “Please… don’t kill them.”

“Stop talking, please. Stay calm. I’m calling 999, it’ll all be OK.”

“Consider… maybe there’s another us, somewhere. Maybe another me ran a simulation to see what would happen if… maybe… maybe, ha.” Jenny started to laugh. Blood came up. She bared her perfect white teeth. Dark red pooled in the gaps between them. “Maybe this will help the other me make better choices.”

Jenny coughed and then lay still. She was breathing, but it was shallow and raspy.

Frank gritted his teeth, stood up, and walked to the back of the empty wine rack. Her eyes did not follow him any longer. He rested his fingers on the switch, smearing it with blood. On the linoleum, Jenny finally stopped bleeding. Frank gulped in rapid breaths and somewhere, someone flipped a switch. Click.

T. K. Howell lives on the banks of the Thames and manages ancient oak woodlands, tending to trees that are older than most countries. His writing is often inspired by mythology and folklore and can be found at various genre and literary spaces including The Mantelpiece, King Ludd's Rag and The Brussels Review.