It was out! Marius had finally admitted his greatest fear, – being “cancelled” on social media. The finality of the word frightened him. Not so Errol his line-manager cum press officer whose antennae for company advancement,-and thereby his own,- were finely tuned. The press release on World Autism Day proclaimed Brigham Enviro-Solutions’ enlightened consultant apprenticeship programme whilst showcasing the solution to oceanic pollution by plastic single-use PPE, face masks and testing kits.
“We at Brigham’s value the spectrum of neurodiversity. You won’t find any room given to Time-Pass Occupational Therapy at BES. By developing and harnessing each apprentices’ detail-oriented abilities in analytics, mathematics, pattern recognition and information processing, our “special” employees can advance to full consultancy status within 3 years. They receive a competitive market rate based on successful outcomes. Everyone benefits, – apprentices, investors, clients.”
“Likes” exploded on Twitter and Facebook. By close of trading BES share prices had quadrupled. Errol and Marius became a popular duo on late night chat shows. Of course Errol did the P.R. before skilfully inviting Marius – as the cipher of a differently-skilled former apprentice, now consultant – to outline his success in combining bio and nanotechnologies to create the World’s first supersquid ocean-floor cleaning machine: how the embryonic squid were harvested, their immature cerebral ganglia modified with the specific human genome for cleaning and tidying activity, dietary preference altered by introducing plastic-eating bacteria into the digestive system, and how tiny biological xenobot robots, controlled and monitored from Brigham Labs’ mainframe were implanted. The resulting beings, Marius explained, were programmed to undertake a host of tasks and actions, including recording memories of things that happened to them, moving themselves and other things around and demonstrating collective behaviour. Most popular with the studio audiences was Marius’ retelling of how his reputation as a cold and distant boss was transformed by his trainees’ laughter when he insisted the daily lab routine begin with a group-bonding, repetitive chanting of the tongue twister collective noun for these living robotic humanised squid, “A SquadSwarm of Squid, a SquadSwarm of Squid… ”
But with success came disabling fear. A troubled Marius confided in therapy the possibility of “cancellation” terrified him. Recording the number of likes and re-tweets from the glowing screen was his life. Attention to detail and mathematical models notwithstanding, he had not foreseen that squidswarms might, like humans, experience false memory; might forget their dietary preference was plastic and start “tidying up” everything animal vegetable and mineral in their progression across the seascape. As a photo-journalistic copy of dead coral reefs, graveyards of fish skeletons, rising mountains of marine plastic and the stench of decaying seaweed reaching 100s of miles inland increased…. so did the number of thumbs-down.
Scanning social media, a possible solution presented. Errol, now his underling, had been obliged to share the passwords. One by one Marius closed all media accounts, both personal and those of BES, thus effectively cancelling himself and BES. He was back in control.
In the seas the 8-legged army continued its advance.
