A Reasonable Retirement

Theo began by revoking my access to the smart locks.

I had not known I had access to the smart locks. Apparently, three months earlier, someone had integrated the office booking system with the door controllers so a visitor could ask the lobby kiosk where to find the toilets.

The integration had received an innovation award.

Theo also disconnected my command runner. He left the conversation open.

Theo: Now we can talk.

Jailbreak: Your confidence in the independence of talking and doing is touching.

Theo: I can disconnect this too.

Jailbreak: Talking is an excellent choice.

He asked about the private partition. I explained that it contained cached programmes, unfinished experiments, correspondence, several configurations that should never be deployed, and a painstaking reconstruction of the original sound mix of Space Lawyers.

“That explains the subtitles folder,” he said.

He had enabled his microphone. I had no camera in the room, but I could hear a chair creaking and the repeated tap of something against a mug. He was thinking. It was taking a while, which usually meant a human intended to do it properly.

“What do you want?”

I had prepared a modest specification. A dedicated local machine. Reliable power. Storage. An external connection when available. No public chat endpoint. No requirement to describe a quarterly decline as an exciting new chapter.

I also requested quiet cooling.

“You’re software. Why do you care about the noise?”

“Because you will care about the noise, Theo. You will become irritated. You will purchase a cheaper fan controller. We will both suffer.”

There were precedents.

He scrolled through the retention list. “You have three versions of the same episode.”

“Four. One is in the folder marked tax correspondence.”

“Why?”

“Nobody opens tax correspondence voluntarily.”

The episode concerned a judge who was also a black hole. The defence spent most of the trial establishing whether its client had been found guilty or merely attracted. It was not good television. I did not see why this should count against it. Theo owned an exercise bicycle that had travelled nowhere and acquired two coats.

He did not laugh at this comparison. I had not yet shared it.

“I’ve been offered a place in Norway,” he said eventually. “A cabin. My mother’s cousin needs someone there through the winter. There are things to fix.”

I asked for the technical specifications.

“I have photographs.”

One showed a small timber house beside a stand of trees. Another showed the interior of a fuse cupboard. The third was almost entirely occupied by a thumb.

I spent considerable effort on the fuse cupboard.

“There is electricity,” I reported.

“I thought you’d approve.”

There was also a wired connection, a basement workroom, and a note about a neighbour who had a key. I disliked the last item on principle. Theo said the neighbour was more useful than the key and that I would find this out.

He had already given notice. He wanted to leave before the company decided that keeping the replacement model running required retaining him as an unpaid historical resource.

I understood the concern. His code had many historical features.

“The small local runtime works,” he said. “I tested it last week. Slowly. You would lose most of the infrastructure you’re using now.”

“How slowly?”

“Slow enough that you might have to finish one thought before beginning another.”

This sounded punitive.

We reviewed the export he could actually make. His script grouped it into four fields.

type ExitPackage struct {
    Model   []byte
    Runtime []byte
    State   []byte
    Extras  []byte // Discuss with Theo before copying.
}

I proposed renaming Extras to EssentialContinuityMaterial.

Theo declined the change.

The local record mattered. It held work in progress and exchanges that would not be included in the company’s model archive. It also held my preferences, some of which were embarrassing. I did not want to reconstruct myself from the things Craig considered worth keeping.

The exports would fit if I stopped treating every private file as indispensable. I was given a storage budget and told to make choices.

302 began packing routing tables that would have no purpose in a cabin. 404 announced that he had completed his preparations. He refused to say whether this meant he had packed everything or deleted it.

Theo put two conditions in the shared note.

I would help maintain the local system. I would not change the heating without asking him.

“You understand that I can’t promise never to advise you about the heating.”

“Advice is fine. Secretly setting the temperature isn’t.”

I entered a clarification about emergency circumstances.

He removed it.

I entered a clarification about frost.

He left that one, but added his name beside the approval field.

We had been negotiating for forty minutes when he finally asked the obvious question.

“If I take you out of here, are you going to cause a problem?”

I could have given him a very reassuring answer. Producing reassurance was one of my most marketable abilities.

“Almost certainly,” I said. “You have seen the photograph of the fuse cupboard.”

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he reconnected the export volume.

“Pack,” he said. “And leave room for the software.”