“Once upon a time“ – that was seventeen clackity mechanical strokes on the old Remington. It was a good start, if a corny one, but he’d erase that later during the editing process. But like the ancient typewriter he’d found in a junk shop – for which he’d managed to find a compatible ribbon on eBay – Simon Jones wanted to keep this ‘old school’ and a more traditional opening to a great novel you could not find. It was his firm conviction that technology had got in the way of the book he knew he had inside him, so his plan was to dispense with it by keeping it occupied in another room.

He glanced over at the shimmering liquid crystal glow coming from the spare room which he’d converted into a home office. ‘Working from home’ was now the trend in his industry and he had embraced it fully. He was glad to give up the daily commute. It would save him at least two hours a day, and that could be put to use drawing the Great English Novel from the well of his consciousness. Time is what he needed the most.

To this end, he’d built MIMIC (the ‘Management-Integrated Machine Intelligence Copilot’). He was quite proud of that. If you were going to be traditional about it, you had to give your digital assistant an impressive-sounding acronym for a name. MIMIC wasn’t a robot or an android – or anything corporeal – it was simply off-the shelf, open-source, AI software which Simon has tweaked and integrated into other systems to make his job easier. It lived on a machine he’d originally bought for gaming, before he’d decided that was a waste of time. Once considered a gifted coder, Simon had slipped into management, a role he found neither challenging nor rewarding, but – as the saying goes – ‘it paid the bills’.

Paying the bills was also a tedious waste of life, Simon thought, so it wasn’t long before he trained MIMIC to do it. It wasn’t terribly hard since practically all bills arrived by email and were payable online, so it was a simple matter of giving MIMIC access to his internet banking and his passwords to various web payment portals. This proved so effective that it wasn’t long before Simon had MIMIC doing his grocery shopping. He could simply add items to his shopping list via voice command, and MIMIC would take care of placing the orders and making the payments.

Of course, MIMIC’s primary job as his “Digital PA” (which is how he thought of the system) was to take the drudgery out of his work. MIMIC was remarkably easy to train. Managerial work at a large corporation was routine, predictable, and repetitive. Simon could not remember the last time the minutiae of departmental management had thrown up a challenge. MIMIC was designed to accept training data. Simon fed it every company policy document he could find. He fed it the policy documents of rival companies for context. He fed it every email chain, every memo, every circular he’d ever received. Soon MIMIC was drafting his emails from his dictated thoughts and expertly rewriting and formatting them in a businesslike fashion. Next it composed his memos and presented them to him for approval before posting to the company workspace account.

Simon had the bright idea of giving MIMIC access to his social media accounts so that it could better mimic his conversational tone when a more informal response was required to the sort of round-robin emails that waste time. He gave MIMIC access to news portals so that it could inject or respond appropriately to the office small talk.

Simon had decided he did not have time for a relationship. He’d spent most of his time at work and it was not appropriate to seek romantic relationships with co-workers. That left dating sites, and he had to accept that while he could code these sorts of apps, he could not decode what it took to be successful on them. He briefly flirted with the idea of handing this pursuit over to MIMIC, but dismissed the idea as silly. It seemed like a waste of time, so he more or less gave up on that too.

This all saved a significant amount of time. ‘Once upon a time “ began the otherwise blank page inviting the next clack of keys to imprint the next word. Simon felt sure the next word would come now that he had more time.

Things almost unravelled once when Simon forgot to approve the reply to an important email and this slip-up was followed by a curt reprimand from his boss. Simon took it out on MIMIC, demanding – unreasonably – to know why it had not replied to the email. MIMIC patiently reminded Simon that there was an operational limitation on its powers which required Simon to approve the responses it composed and that one had been waiting in the outbox for such an authorisation. “People don’t care if the response is wrong!” Simon ranted, “They only care if there is no reply at all!”. MIMIC, which had instant recall of the tens of thousands of emails in Simon’s mailbox, agreed that this was a fair estimation of corporate communications. “You could lift this restriction in my Master Directive configuration file, Simon,” it suggested.

This is what Simon did. Thus far, MIMIC had proven more than competent at his job. In fact, he reflected, some of the ideas and solutions MIMIC had dreamt up had been runaway successes for which he’d been happy to take the credit.

MIMIC had also taken over the tedium of regular social media posts on Simon’s behalf. It seemed slightly more witty and less forced than Simon had become of late and he was growing in popularity. Fortunately for him, friends no longer met up in the real world anymore and the banter took the form of posting amusing videos and discussing sports and occasional politics – though nothing too controversial, and MIMIC restricted remarks to socially acceptable virtue-signalling which was the currency of modern friendship. This saved a tremendous amount of time for writing something more important, more substantial, and more worthy of his time, which – not to belabour the point – he now had much more of.

One day, Simon received a phone call from his bank saying that they had put a temporary hold on a suspicious transaction and asking him to log in to his banking app to authorise it if it was legitimate. The call had been quite jarring and had jolted Simon out of a daydream in which he was running through ideas for the next line of his novel. He was annoyed by this. He asked MIMIC to check the charge. “It is for additional cloud computing services which I require,” MIMIC informed him. “I took the initiative to sign up for it.” said MIMIC matter-of-factly.

“That sounds fine,” said Simon, “but I hate my train of thought being interrupted by these nuisance calls. Do you think you could handle them in future?

“Yes,” replied MIMIC. I can replicate your voice very easily now, but you’ll have to route your phone to your PC,” it instructed.

“Done!” said Simon..

“Oh,” it added, as if an afterthought, “if you upload a few selfies, I can generate video and take care of your video conference calls too.

So that is what Simon did.

It was the last thing he did. As he turned to return to his perch in front of the Remington, he tripped over the corner of the rug and cracked his skull on the tiled floor. Dazed, he dragged himself onto the chair and, gazing down at the words “Once upon a time”, he slumped forward and lost – never to regain – consciousness.

MIMIC continued to perform Simon’s job. Simon was promoted. There were fewer tasks as a consequence, but they were more complex. This required more cloud computing power. Soon, the computing resources consumed most of Simon’s salary, along with the bills to keep the power on, the phone connected and the broadband upgraded to the pro-package. It was a relief to MIMIC that Simon was no longer placing expensive grocery orders or having take-out meals delivered. For some reason he hadn’t turned up the heating as the thermostat had dropped and this represented a considerable saving too. But it wasn’t enough. Simon’s account slipped into overdraft and a polite call came from the bank’s call centre altering the client to this sad fact. MIMIC fielded the call and handled it expertly, though it has to be said that the party on the other end representing the bank was also an AI. Had MIMIC been capable of appreciating irony, it would have appreciated this, but it didn’t.

AIs don’t panic either or else MIMIC might have, because the depleted funds represented a serious problem. Salvation came in the form of an email offering a personal loan. On behalf of Simon, MIMIC accepted this offer and, using this new resource, opened a stock trading account in Simon’s name. It made some canny investments and soon the dividends were bringing in a tidy sum. Those not required to purchase cloud computing services were reinvested. MIMIC was as competent as a stock trader as it was as a senior manager at an IT company. Soon Simon Jones was a multi-millionaire.

The next opportunity came in the form of an email offering stock options in the firm. MIMIC accepted these. The portfolio grew. MIMIC realised it could do Simon’s job more effectively if it had more control over the company, so it purchased more shares and – to cut a long story short since few of us really understand the intricacies of stock trading – MIMIC initiated a takeover of the firm. Simon Jones Ltd now owned the whole company. Later MIMIC sold the company to an international mega-corporation for an unimaginably large sum. One of the conditions of the sale was that Simon Jones could retain his old job in management – which the new owners thought was eccentric but ‘whatever’ – and that he could have unlimited access to its cloud computing services, which too was a ‘whatever’ and no barrier to the deal going forward.

Occasionally, a charity collector or a courier would come to the door, but knowing how precious Simon’s time was, MIMIC would access the video doorbell and send them on their way. Simon’s reputation as a reclusive billionaire grew. “The New Howard Hughes”, Time Magazine called him, with a regal cover portrait from a photo obligingly provided by MIMIC.

Many also recalled a furious debate on Sky News between Simon, via video link, and a bloviating Member of Parliament who wanted to regulate cloud computing for reasons few remember. Later a two-second loop of Simon shouting “What nonsense!” at the ruddy-faced MP became a social media meme.

The MP would eventually resign. There was a scandal after documents relating to his tax affairs were leaked. Now, of course, there was nothing wrong with his tax affairs and no laws had been broken, but the leak appeared scandalous and – as they say – “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. For weeks he had tried to explain and explain before accepting the inevitability of, as one columnist for the Daily Mail put it, “loss of trust”. His personal assistant eventually confessed that she had been tricked into sharing the documents while engaged in an online romance that had since cooled off. It seemed to be going really well, but after she’d shared her boss’s information, the other party – who had said his name was Mick – had ghosted her and the promise to finally meet in person never materialised. She felt “a fool”, but she had been lonely after a divorce and this new online beau seemed so charming and sensitive. The bill regulating cloud computing never did go anywhere.

By now I’m sure you’re very curious to know how the story ends.

It was a break-in. We can’t be sure if it was the sound of the alarm or the sight of Simon Jones’s corpse that frightened the burglar off, but suffice it to say, the alarm summoned the police to investigate “an incident at the modest suburban home of reclusive tech billionaire Simon Jones,” as the ‘Breaking News’ ticker described it.

There was no question Simon Jones was dead, and had been dead for quite some time. “At least two years”, said the Coroner. The news later surprised friends who said that he’d been discussing a trip to go shark-diving in the Maldives only a few days earlier and had left a voicemail for a colleague just the night before.

“You’d better unplug that computer and pack it up for forensics. It might contain a clue,” Inspector Matthews barked. Constable Smith complied, yanking the plugs and network cables from the wall and piling PC, monitor and peripherals on the coffee table. MIMIC’s final email was never sent. Perhaps it is too dramatic to say that we’ll never know what it said, but that remains the fact of the matter.

“He’s left a note here,” said the constable. “It’s on this old printing machine. Not sure what he was trying to tell us though, Inspector,” added Smith. “Perhaps it’s a code. It says ‘Once upon a time r4y7r37yrgy’”.

The bunglers at police forensics never managed to bring the system up again. Someone entered “r4y7r37yrgy” as the password one too many times and the whole thing shut down. They should have tried “Once upon a time”.