---

Hey, George

By Elizabeth Guilt

“Hey, George.”

I remind myself that that is not my name; it never was. I will myself not to react, not to break stride, as I stroll along beside the beach.

Old habits die hard, and the best neuro-reset in the world can’t overcome years of routine. Whoever called out could, had they been watching closely, have seen my tiny hesitation. But they are not calling me.

I hear footsteps behind me, running steps, getting closer.

“George!”

I stop walking and take a deep breath. I assume a politely blank expression, and turn around.

And then I see her.

---

“Oh, George, I almost forgot. While we’re away, get all the carpets cleaned.”

“Sure. Have a safe flight.”

“Thank you, George.”

Mrs. Mason climbed into the back seat of the ‘copter, and whirled away into the California sky. I watched until the machine was a tiny dot on the blue, then whistled for Pebbles to join me.

Five days. Five lovely, peaceful days when the house would be empty. Pebbles and I could go about our lives without him being shooed off sofas, or me worrying how much pale blonde fur he left on my brown suit.

Not that I was complaining, not at all. It was rare to be employed exclusively by one family, and even rarer to get time to myself. Most of my job here could be done by a regular housekeeper, but money was no object to the Masons, and they wanted the best. Besides, they enjoyed the cachet.

Pebbles snuggled up against me, and I decided to take a few minutes before booking the cleaners.

I snapped awake, heart hammering, tears on my face. Pebbles! The black car, the wet road, Pebbles flung to one side, his body twisted…

I shook my head frantically. No. That dog was old, and grey, with a wiry coat.

That was someone else’s dog.

I buried my hand in Pebbles’ silky neck, and tried to calm my breathing.

---

“George, is my room ready?”

Mrs. Mason stumbled out of the lightweight ‘copter and clutched my arm, her face practically grey underneath her smeared make-up. The stacked columns of cumulus cloud, pink in the evening sunshine, were beautiful, but I guessed they’d made for a bumpy journey.

“Of course.”

“The flight was just ghastly. It was so clear at home, but here…” She flapped her hand vaguely at the coral-coloured sky. “I’ve been flung in all directions for the past two hours, you can’t imagine.”

I steered her in through the door of her spacious suite, and she sank dramatically onto the bed. “So nice to be in my usual room.”

As if the hotel would dare rent it out to anyone else when she was coming. I fetched her luggage.

“George, did you pack my cashmere wrap?”

“Of course, Mrs. Mason.”

She held out one hand, the other clutching her brow. I flipped the lid of the largest case, the silky wool lying there as smooth as when it was tucked in this morning. I passed it over.

“Can you fetch me some tea?”

“Certainly, I’ll call…”

“No, bring it yourself. I can’t bear too many people around right now.”

“Of course.”

From the hotel atrium, I called down to room service for the tea: peppermint, infused fresh leaves, not dried, freshly-boiled water. While I waited, I reserved a dinner table for the family in Suite 7, and rattled off a snippy message to the law firm in London who still hadn’t replied about the Philips estate. I reviewed Mrs. Mason’s recent medical history, and cross-checked calendar availability for rescheduling her morning engagements, should she not feel recovered. All this while keeping an eye out for other subscribers who might require assistance. More than a decade of Academy training, and the woman still orders me to fetch the tea.

The maid brought the tray up, and I took it in to Mrs. Mason. By then, she was asleep, wrapped up like a child in her fancy blanket, dozing in a room that cost more per night than we needed for Hannah’s stomach surgery.

I set the tray down on the bedside table. Who the hell was Hannah? I tagged her as irrelevant. People should keep memories and other personal shit to themselves.

---

“Hey, George.”

I set aside the accounts I was checking. “Good afternoon, Mr. Mason.”

“I’m gonna be done here soon, so move the flight to my daughter’s forward a day.”

“No problem.”

“Oh, and get a gift for my wife. I’ve been away a while.”

“Certainly.”

He breezed off to the bar, and I returned to the accounts. The Balfour company was doing well, very well, and my stomach dropped as the zeroes rolled up along the bottom line.

How on earth were we going to afford Hannah’s medical bills?

I signed off on Balfour’s accounts, then spoke to the agency who booked all the Masons’ flights. They umm’d and aah’d for a while—they were busy, high demand, etc., etc.—but eventually agreed to move the flight twenty hours earlier.

A gift would be easy; Mrs. Mason had said only yesterday how worn her favourite scarf had become. I remembered her long fingers picking at a loose thread, while two continents away her husband flirted with a hotel receptionist. I remembered that, too, although I would not, of course, mention it.

I bought an almost-identical scarf, and waited while it was gift-wrapped in layer after layer of bright tissue paper. Even the wrapping cost more than I could have afforded, despite the good salary, and Hannah was looking weaker every day. She tried to be cheerful, but she couldn’t hide how much pain she was in. How much longer…

“George?” A young lady brandished a handbag at me. “George, do I have this bag already?”

“No, Miss Denver, not in navy. You have the same design in burgundy.”

“Great.” She slung it over her arm, and continued browsing.

Millions and millions of memories, sorted and sifted in a tiny fraction of a second, just so a steel heiress could be reminded whether or not she’d already purchased a designer bag. I wanted someone to make life that easy for me. And for Hannah.

As I walked back to the conference centre that employed me, I heard a familiar tone pinging over the neural link: the Academy warning me of an upcoming . I’d already had two formal notices about filing stuff the others tagged “irrelevant”, but I couldn’t stop worrying about Hannah. I leaned against a wall to wait for the neural update.

The sunshine bounced off the plate glass windows of the fancy shops. It was a lovely day. I had the present I’d come out to purchase. Weird, I was sure I’d been worrying about something a moment ago.

---

“Oh, George, can you change that flight you booked to my daughter’s? I need to go a day earlier now.”

She didn’t speak to me, not really. Once I had combed my parting to match the Academy style-guide and put on the clothes, I became someone else. When I clocked on each morning, holding the tiny scanner up to my eye and feeling the confused numbness of the memory switch, I became whatever the subscribers needed.

Everyone spoke to the brown-and-cream suit I wore, and to the dated, distinctive hairstyle. I doubt they even noticed that the face between them sometimes changed.

I was the supreme convenience. The definition of service.

“Of course, Mrs. Mason.”

I called the agency.

---

I’ve never flown in an aeroplane. I’ve never been in a car. I’ve seen both, of course, although planes are pretty rare compared to ‘copters these days.

When clocked off, I can remember my grandparents talking about the days when everyone drove cars, when flights were so cheap that anyone could take a holiday overseas. Once the climate panic really kicked in, there was talk that no one would fly ever again, but it didn’t stick. No one would fly, except the military when it was vital for national security. No one except people in government, in times of crisis. No one except directors of the largest corporations, when it was essential for the economy.

Or when it was urgent.

Or unavoidable.

No one, unless they could afford it.

If prices fell, governments slapped on another tax to keep the numbers down to an ignorable level and the super-rich carried on their fabulous lives. Business meetings around the globe, holidays wherever they wanted. For them, crossing the country didn’t mean they might never see their family in person again.

They had to throw the masses a bone, those rich folks. They had to show they were keeping flying to a minimum. No entourage; no PA. No one who knows the drill.

And one man saw a business opportunity: he created George.

There were no memory exchangers back then. In my grandfather’s day, the job—the life—of being George involved taking endless notes and sending emails to keep everyone in the loop. He did it for fifteen years before he got married.

There are some transcripts of those early reports in the first training pack you get from the Academy. To save time, George developed codes; words and whole concepts were contracted down to single letters.

I showed one of the old emails to my grandfather. It was fifty years since he retired, but he rattled off a stream of details. I could only see the family’s names; he told me the kids’ ages and dislikes, the parents’ jobs and how they drank their coffee.

The first neural links were up by the time my mum got her brown-and-cream suit. She says it was exhausting, requiring intense concentration for every single save and retrieve. You have it easy, she says.

She’s right. Once I’m clocked on, I simply remember.

---

I told Mrs. Mason the new arrangements for her flight, then spent the morning working through her task list. I slipped out briefly to use the bathroom, automatically shifting my focus away from the neural link. Technically, anything—everything—that happens to George is recorded, auto-tagged and stored. The Academy taught me how to add weighting to memories that I thought important and I simply lean the other way for things I don’t want to share. Judging by the contents of the memory banks, so does everyone else; the memories are there, but easy to skim over.

In the hotel lobby, a man hailed me, timidly. “Excuse me, please. When does the restaurant open?”

He was not a subscriber—even in an expensive hotel like this, George was beyond many people’s means—but it was a simple question and it cost me nothing to be polite.

“At three for afternoon tea, then dinner is available from seven.”

He thanked me, and a woman tapped me lightly on the arm.

“George, can you take me to Mrs. Mason?”

She was not a subscriber, either, despite her confident approach—and Mrs. Mason was not expecting a guest. The woman was dressed in a cheap, cotton dress, and her rough brown hair fell untidily over her face.

“I’m afraid Mrs. Mason does not have any appointments free this afternoon.”

“Please,” she swept a thin hand through her hair and I was staring into eyes of the darkest brown I’d ever seen. “Please, I need to see my mother.”

I didn’t recognise her. The daughter whom Mrs. Mason was flying to visit was in her thirties: blonde, stylish, and absolutely not the woman in front of me.

I was too well-trained to look surprised. Was she really another daughter? A family member, even estranged, should not be a surprise to George. Was that level of memory-scrubbing even possible?

“Mrs. Mason has given no instructions. I’m afraid she is not available.”

She looked me up and down, and rolled her eyes.

“Yeah. I’m the other daughter.”

She stalked off towards the hotel desk, her bravado barely masking her distress.

I turned away to hide my face, and tried not to think of those brown eyes filling with tears.

I filleted the memory so only the banal facts were filed. No one else needed to know that it hurt me to tell her no.

---

In the evening I clocked off, riding the pendulum-swing of disorientation as my own memories fell back into place.

I could still feel the sting of guilt that I didn’t help the woman in the lobby, but the details of her face were hazy. Brown eyes, I murmured, but I remembered that as I would a dry description from a book.

Brown eyes, and a fierce, burning quality that made me ache.

---

When I ran through Mrs. Mason’s schedule the next morning, she made no reference to the hour blanked out as busy in her diary; naturally, neither did I.

I spent my day putting together a skeleton of the presentation she would give the following week and, at my appointed time, headed to her suite to discuss my work. Her mystery appointment should have ended a half-hour earlier, but even from the corridor I could hear angry voices.

“… can’t just expect I will forget the past twenty years when it suits you…”

“… so unfeeling…”

“… ungrateful wretch…”

I waited for a pause that would allow everyone to pretend I had not overheard, and tapped on the door.

“Ah, George, perhaps you can escort this woman from my rooms.”

The other daughter stared at her, eyes hard, but spoke to me.

“Check my pockets, George.”

“Excuse me?”

“Go through my pockets. I want you to be able to verify that I took none of the jewellery left oh-so-causally on display.”

Now that she mentioned it, Mrs. Mason’s more expensive possessions were scattered haphazardly across the room.

She was wearing the same tired shift dress as yesterday. I was surprised it even had pockets, let alone that anyone could imagine hiding stolen goods in them.

As impersonally as I could, I slid my hands along the side seams until I located the openings. The feel of the empty pockets, my fingers brushing the inner edges of the fabric, streamed off into the memory banks. I might be able to lie on this woman’s behalf, but George could not. If, on some future occasion, testimony were needed that the daughter left with nothing of Mrs. Mason’s, then it would not be me called to the witness stand. Instead, it would be someone else; someone with no involvement, who could be relied upon to relate only objective facts. Someone else who answered to the name George, and who would be considered the gold standard of eyewitness reporting.

I kept my thoughts on this other person, and my hands as far as I could from the daughter’s body, so I would not feel the warmth from her thighs. I was relieved that she closed her eyes, saving me from trying to read her expression. When I withdrew, she slung her handbag towards me.

“And the bag, please, George.”

She looked directly at me, silently daring me to feel sympathy as I rummaged through the few possessions in the cloth bag: some keys, a thin, old-fashioned purse, and a pen.

“Anything stolen?” she demanded.

“No, ma’am,” I murmured.

“Thank you, George.” She left without a backward glance, walking so upright that I knew only grim determination kept her from crumpling.

I took a moment to straighten my already-straight cuffs. Would Mrs. Mason be keen to get to work, or ready to launch into a long monologue about her visitor?

The answer was, as I feared, one disguised as the other. She asked brightly to see my presentation, then paid it little attention. She asked question after question, not listening to the answers, flicking repetitively over the same few screens.

Eventually, she boiled over. The “woman” had been a StraightLine activist for years, decrying the Mason family’s way of life as “profligate” and “over-privileged”. Instead of enjoying luxury, she worked tirelessly to advocate for a redistribution of wealth and resources, and help for those whose world was drowning in rising tides.

Not that Mrs. Mason put it like that. “Thrown everything in our faces,” she said. The other daughter had played with “silly little projects” instead of taking her part in the family’s business empires.

“And now,” stormed Mrs. Mason, “when the child she can’t afford to raise is sick, she comes crawling back for money. That’s how much her principles are worth. Naturally, I refused.”

She returned to the presentation, and began reading aloud. Again.

George would not, of course, become involved; the Mason fortune was none of my business. Family disputes were—except when I was asked to mediate—never my business. But the crowing of this wealthy, comfortable woman was ugly and hard to stomach. I wondered how old Hannah was. A baby, or a teenage child? Hannah? Mrs. Mason had only spoken sneeringly of the child and that part of her family still appeared nowhere in the memory banks. Where had the name Hannah come from?

She was speaking again, and I dragged my attention back.

“George, this section isn’t clear. Put the company’s guiding principles earlier, and I’ll rewrite the key points. Honestly, how dare she ask me for money?”

“Shouldn’t the principles follow the mission statement?”

“Hmm. Move them both to the earlier screen. I don’t suppose the story about the child needing emergency surgery is true, anyway.”

“I’ll update the presentation.”

Unlike Mrs. Mason, I did believe the story—even though I hadn’t heard it. Everything about the other daughter had spoken of desperation. If she belonged to the notoriously uncompromising StraightLine, then only something so serious would have brought her to her mother for help.

---

When I went to bed, concern nagged me. By then, of course, I could no longer remember the details of the story. Someone was in trouble. She needed help. Someone had refused. Her face eluded me, but I could feel the space she took up inside me: fierce, and beautiful, and doomed.

This sort of emotional spillover was not supposed to happen—though of course it did, from time to time. In both directions. The correct procedure was a quick message to the Academy. They would organise a neural flash, to restore the sharp divide between my own memories and the thoughts that belonged to George. George did not form what the Academy called “close personal relationships”.

I didn’t send the message. She—whoever she was—seemed too important, too real to be neatly burnt from my mind. I wanted to keep the elusive warmth that pulsed from the dim memory.

Before I went to sleep, I wrote myself a note—the old way, pencil on paper. If I kept my eyes on it as my memories swung over next morning, I’d have a small amount of time before the streams were in place. Time to jot down as many details as I could about the other daughter.

---

The alarm shrilled while the room was still dark.

“George! I’ve been robbed!”

There was a protocol in place for emergencies.

“Please remain calm. I’ll be with you in a few moments.” I lunged for the scanner, and sent my sleepy brain tumbling through the neural switching.

“That woman came back for my jewellery. While I slept!”

“I will be”—where was I? a hotel?—”at your room immediately.

Yes, the protocol was basically spout platitudes until George’s systems are up and running. I swayed dizzily as I reached for my clothes.

“She was in my room!”

“Please don’t worry,”—the streams clicked into focus—”Mrs. Mason, I’m sure we can resolve this quickly.”

A deep sense of unease rolled over me as the memories dropped into my mind. The Other Daughter. She had committed a crime, and I was hurrying to make sure she was caught.

Or, with my unimpeachable testimony, to make sure she wasn’t framed. I sped up.

The door to Mrs. Mason’s room was standing open, and the minute she saw me, she launched into her story. How she had woken to find it open, had turned the light on to find the room ransacked, how she feared for her safety.

“I could have been murdered!”

“I’m pleased to see that you weren’t harmed. We should—”

“Look!” She wrenched out a drawer. “Everything is gone!”

“Please don’t touch anything. We must make sure any evidence remains for the police to collect. I will call—”

“Why? It’s obvious who did it.”

She was an astute businesswoman; she knew the law as well as I did. At 3am, with my brain still fuzzy from the rushed changeover, the last thing I wanted was to listen to this nonsense or waste my energy soothing her into a more reasonable state. Sadly, that was exactly my job.

“We need to have the most watertight case.”

“But it’s the middle of the night!”

I made the calls. To hotel security to monitor exits, and review all camera footage; to the police; to various bureaus that monitor international jewellery sales. To the hotel desk to find an empty room. When the police arrived, Mrs. Mason was in her new bed, having decided she would be better able to give a statement in the morning. The police sealed the scene, and embarked on a full sweep of the hotel.

I returned to my room, down one of the service corridors accessible only with a staff pass. At the final corner I found myself face to face with the Other Daughter. She froze, eyes wide; I ran, eyes closed.

Blood pounded in my ears as I fought the neural link, misusing every last bit of my long training to keep the fleeting impression of her face from being filed. I blundered through my door, scrabbled for the scanner, pulled one of my eyelids up with my fingers long enough to clock off, and collapsed to the floor.

Did I lose consciousness? I wasn’t sure, but when I pushed myself upright, my jacket was smeared with vomit and my head pounded. My memory of the past couple of hours was hazy—it belonged to George—but my rapid flight from the Other Daughter was vivid. Did that mean I’d succeeded in keeping it out of George’s memory banks? Her face was now clear in my mind—as was her terror at being trapped in a service corridor which needed a staff pass at the entrance.

Or the exit.

I jumped up, then sank to my knees again. The neural link felt loose, as if my brain was bleeding.

“You’re fine,” I muttered. “Get up.”

I changed into my own clothes and crammed on a baseball cap. It wasn’t much of a disguise, but no one looks at George’s face. I snatched my pass, and shot back towards the corridor.

It was empty. A ventilation shaft cover lay on the floor; a gaping metal mouth above head height suggested how the Other Daughter had escaped. I craned my neck—two feet away from the building, the shaft turned abruptly downwards. The thought of crawling into that gap and lowering myself down four storeys of narrow tube made my stomach heave again. I picked the cover up, and fitted it back over the hatch. I lined the screws up as neatly as I could, double-checked that there were no surveillance cameras in this corridor, and returned to bed.

I did not go back to sleep. Huge, frightened eyes stared at me, and all I could think was: would she understand why I had not stopped to help?

The following morning, I was there to see Mrs. Mason safely onto her flight. George would be at her destination with an update from the police. She boarded the ‘copter without a second glance.

A policeman interviewed me; I suppose he had no reason to suspect me, and I was close to hand. If even the police didn’t understand the value of interviewing a different, distant individual to get George’s honest memories, then it was unlikely the average person would. The Other Daughter would not have known why I ran when I saw her.

There was no evidence. No prints, no footage, nothing. Mrs. Mason pulled strings, somewhere, and the case was pursued; massive resources went into analysing the security video; still nothing. She managed to take the case as far as a civil hearing. George was questioned, and the presiding official made a big deal about how it was technically impossible for George to give misleading testimony. I hoped the woman in the dock understood.

---

I worked as George for a few more years, but it’s a lonely life, and the money is good enough to retire early if you live simply. I sent a message to the Academy, and they arranged the neural work to smooth away a decade of dedicated service.

I did not see the Other Daughter again. I never lost the sense of her passion; how I could see it burning inside her even though I barely knew her. I hoped, one day, to find someone else who could make me feel the way she had.

I bought a tiny flat, somewhere I could just—just—see the ocean. And in the evenings, I walked along the beach, dreaming of the horizon. I enjoyed the anonymity of my own face. Sometimes I saw George running an errand; waiting for a courier; escorting a rich client across town.

And then, one evening, I hear a voice behind me and turn to see brown eyes in a face more lined than I remembered.

“Hey, George.”

---

Host Commentary

Host Commentary

By Valerie Valdes

Elizabeth has this to say about the story: The idea of George started after I learned a little of the story of the “Pullman Porters” who were employed in the 19th century by George Pullman to staff sleeping cars on the American railroad. The sleeping car attendants were often called “George” by the passengers, and inspired the idea of a role which was consistent across the individuals who played it. What I did not realise at the time was that the sleeping car attendants – who were all black, and most of whom were former slaves – were known as George in reference to the practice of calling a slave by their owner’s name. “Hey, George” tells a very different story. But I wanted to acknowledge the debt to the men who worked long hours for terrible pay, relied entirely on their passengers’ tips and had to answer to a name that wasn’t theirs.

In a world of increasing chatbot sophistication and the proliferation of networked technologies, a story about memory-linked personal assistants stripped of their individuality may feel almost quaint. But we also live in a world where people in service industries are frequently treated as interchangeable automatons, even as many customers prefer, and sometimes loudly demand, a human touch instead of a digital one. “Hey, George” extends these and other elements of our present into a painfully possible future. We must not only ask ourselves to what extent we will be replaced by robots, but how much we will continue to be devalued by them, and at what point we will refuse to allow anyone to put a literal or figurative price on human lives.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Karel Čapek, who said, “Without a sense of art, it is impossible ever to think of something new. We need to be poets if we are to keep the world moving.”