Carol for Another Christmas by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Read Free Book Online Page A

Scrooge’s nose in a most ill-mannered way. “You’re from Wayne, aren’t you?”
    Scrooge started to give him his sternest glare, and then realized that perhaps, for all his rudeness, the man could be correct. “I’m afraid I don’t know,” Scrooge admitted. “How would one go about finding this Wayne?”
    â€œI’ll see if I can send you back to him right now,” Curtis said, and he disappeared from in front of the screen for a moment. “Pulling the plug,” he said to the others.
    â€œHe’s still hee-eere,” John told him. “Maybe someone is messing with your instrument. Let’s take the lid off.” They did so and poked around in the innards of a large, roughly square beige metal box located next to Scrooge. Scrooge felt a few odd tin glings as they unplugged this and that, removed and replaced this and that, but nothing seriously affected him now that he realized he was in control of whether or not he stayed. Miss Banks’s action had simply taken him by surprise.
    â€œNada,” someone said finally, and they reassembled the box.
    â€œWell, I’m going to see if I can get back into what I was working on,” Curtis said, and resumed tapping at the letters and numbers located just beneath Scrooge’s chin.
    Scrooge watched with some interest. The keys were very like the typewriting machine, which was just coming into use toward the end of his life. He had thought, the year he died, that he might purchase one for his office, to aid in the making up of bills and the printing of notices granting extensions to those unable to pay their rents for some reason or other. Formerly, he would never have spared the expense even to write the many eviction notices he had once sent out. The Christmas the ghosts had visited him had changed his business practices year-round, however; so much so that although he had a slimmer profit margin at the end of his life, he had many more friends.
    â€œIt’s locked up,” Curtis said. “I tried to get out on the Net, too, but I can’t lose this image long enough to reach Wild Web. I think we’ve got a major bug here, guys.”
    â€œYeah,” said Miriam, “and if this guy is really Ebenezer Scrooge, I guess we’d call him a hum bug, eh?”
    â€œMost certainly not, young lady,” Scrooge said to her. “I am a quite genuine manifestation, and I am currently in charge, so I’ll thank you not to insult me.”
    â€œBe careful, Mir,” John said. “He’s right, and Melody’s right. If this is really Ebenezer Scrooge, we’ve gone through the looking glass into the twilight zone and are now working with the Scrooge Operating System.”
    â€œOh, no!” a light brown young woman groaned. “I thought if I didn’t watch TV and stayed away from high school plays, I’d avoid seeing another remake of A Christmas Carol ! Don’t tell me someone’s turned it into an operating system. This thing has to be a virus that ate the operating system. And a CD-ROM would have been bad enough.”
    â€œA virus that keeps on the screen even after the machine’s been disconnected? I think not. I think we are privileged here to see the first signs of independent artificial intelligence. The Scrooge Operating System it is, or SOS, which seems an appropriate enough acronym when you think about it.”
    Scrooge did not quite understand the language these people were using. It seemed to be English, but so many of the words were in the wrong places. However, they seemed to understand him well enough when they weren’t trying to disregard him or dismiss him altogether, so he ventured a question. “This Miss Banks: I take it from my brief interview with her that she is your employer?”
    Curtis looked around, then answered the question quite civilly, having finally decided to treat Scrooge as another person. “For the