Marcin put his hand on Greg’s head.
“What’s that?”
Greg continued buttering his toast. “You’ve had that joke since primary school.”
“A brain sucker,” Marcin said. “What’s it doing?”
Outside the café, a walking tour had stopped beside a mural. The guide held one hand above his head while his group negotiated the pavement around him. Belfast rain gathered on the window without quite committing to falling.
Anna had commandeered the dry end of the table for invoices. She still competed, although these days running a small cliff-diving crew occupied more of her year than actually throwing herself off things. Marcin coached, dived and repaired equipment he insisted wasn’t broken. Isobel filmed them. Greg, a former competition diver with a shoulder that clicked when the weather changed, handled water safety and drove the van.
They had come north after a coastal shoot. Two days of weather delays had eaten the accommodation budget, and Anna was trying to persuade a sponsor that waiting for conditions was part of producing the footage.
“Tell it to make you sound less annoyed,” Greg said.
Anna typed.
“There,” she said. “Apparently we appreciate their flexibility.”
“Do they have any?”
“F’ch knows, but if we appreciate it, it may manifest.”
Isobel looked up from her laptop.
“That’s another thing it knows about us.”
“What?”
“How small production companies explain to large companies that the sea was there first, you know f*cking Canute again, can’t control the weather, maybe the climate long term but not the weather…”
Anna stopped typing.
“That,” she said, “is the brain sucker.”
Marcin raised his hand. “This one?”
“The one I’m prompting to write the email.”
Greg folded his toast.
“I can already feel us missing the parking.”
Anna turned the laptop slightly.
“Yesterday I gave it our schedule, the weather problem, the client’s complaint and three versions of what I actually wanted to say. It helped me draft an answer. Fair enough. But look at what came from me.”
“The expletives?” said Marcin.
“Experience. A problem it didn’t have until I brought it one.”
“Doesn’t mean it learns from every conversation,” Isobel said.
“No. Depends what’s kept and what gets used. I’m talking about the whole business growing around these exchanges. We bring the awkward bits. It helps solve them. Someone gets a better product.”
“We get collectively dumber” Greg said.
“So everybody’s happy, hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a Coma”
Anna glanced at the invoice.
“Hang on a moment.”
At the next table, a child was trying to show his grandfather something on a phone. The grandfather kept reaching for it, and the child kept pulling it back so he could finish explaining.
“Once,” Marcin said, “we were monkeys throwing food. First you throw something. Then you point. Then you discover you can make a noise and get somebody else to fetch or throw the thing.”
“Management,” said Isobel.
“And eventually,” Marcin continued, “you write it down so that the next monkey in line can learn to manage.”
“Monkey can leave instructions while he’s out,” Anna said.
Greg inspected a split in his thumbnail. Somewhere along the coast, while hauling a rope bag over a rock, he had cut it and now a sea ulcer was forming.
“Writing already captured information,” he said. “Books. Newspapers. You can’t say we’ve only just discovered keeping things.”
“No,” Anna said. “We got very good at keeping them. Then sending them. Then fetching them.”
“My father used to wait for the paper,” Greg said. “Whole breakfast arranged around a man arriving on a bicycle.”
“My grandfather argued with the radio,” said Isobel.
Marcin leaned back.
“Mitch’s been swearing at the radio all morning, test at Newlands.”
“And now,” Anna said, “we’re talking monkeys throwing stuff again.”
That kept them quiet briefly.
The coffee machine hissed. Outside, the guide lowered his arm and one of the tourists raised a phone towards the wall.
Isobel closed a folder of footage.
“I used it last night to help organise the interviews.”
“The diving ones?” Greg asked.
“And the harbour interview. I’d been through it twice and missed a connection between what he said about access and what the organiser said about insurance.”
“That’s exploration.”
Anna considered it.
“It can be. I’m probably making the division too neat.”
Marcin looked disappointed.
“I was enjoying humans explore, machines exploit.”
“Put it on a shirt,” Greg said. “Then ask a machine where to sell it.”
Isobel smiled.
“The connection was useful. But the harbourmaster still had to spend thirty years finding out how that harbour works. I had to ask him. He had to decide what was worth telling me.”
“And now you’ve brought those thirty years into the conversation,” Anna said.
“A little of them.”
“Multiply that by everyone bringing a little.”
Marcin reached for the sugar, then remembered he had already added some.
“And the brainsucker grows from what they’re doing.”
Greg sat back.
“Right. The joke’s wrong, then. It isn’t starving.”
“No,” Anna said. “It’s doing quite well.”
Her laptop offered another revision. She read the opening sentence, deleted “valued partnership” and replaced it with the sponsor’s name.
“The difficulty,” she said, “is that this saves me half an hour. Isobel finds something in the interviews. You could use it to sort the safety paperwork, but i dont think about it, I am saying stuff I have no relationship too, is that safe?”
“Well if another crew gets its bids done faster, edits faster, answers clients faster we lose work,” Isobel said.
“So we use it. Sensibly, carefully, whatever. But everyone making that reasonable decision helps make it part of how the work gets done.”
Greg looked towards the van.
“And eventually half an hour isn’t a saving. It’s half an hour the client assumes you never needed.”
Anna nodded.
Marcin watched a woman outside trying to close an umbrella that had caught her sleeve.
“Could have our own brain sucker. Local one. National one. Keep some of the benefit here.”
“And still be able to work.”
Outside, the walking tour moved on. A few people lingered to photograph what the others had already photographed.
Marcin glanced at Anna’s screen.
“Ask it.”
“What?”
“How we stop becoming dependent on it.”
Anna placed her fingers on the keyboard.
Then she looked at him.
“Oh, fuck off.”
