Turbo, Jeeves
June 2026
I had almost shaken all the lumps out of my breakfast when my work phone rang. I wouldn’t have picked it up on a Sunday, except that the caller ID said SunflowR. That sounded like it could be one of my companies. I mean, I didn’t remember investing in anything called Sunflower, but my startups are always pirouetting to new identities.
“Turbo,” I helloed. I sounded pretty good, like I was smoking, or at least chewing gum.
▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄The caller said nothing, but I heard faint thumping. The thumping wasn’t entirely random, but trying to predict it made me feel like I was in one of those logic puzzles where you have to complete a sequence like 1, 4, 9, BLUE, ____.
“Yellow?” I said, beating a retreat to better-defended trenches of helloing.
▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄ ▄The thumping became louder and more angry. It sounded like a hand hitting a table over and over. I couldn’t decide whether the caller had lost his hammer or his marbles. What was this? A threat?
I hung up quickly and called my sister.
“Hello brother dearest,” she said. She sounded surprisingly perky for someone who had almost certainly been defusing domestic disasters for six hours already.
“Turbo, Felicity. QuiQu for you, can adults be kidnapped, or is that just for kids?”
“What, Felicity?”
“Turbo.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I want to start off my calls with the right vibe. ‘Hello’ is too mellow.”
“Hell will be too mellow for you, I think.”
“If you’re wishing me ill, your guardian devil is listening. Someone just threatened me.” I told her about the ominous thumping call.
“Didn’t you tell me your friend Hokey is at a silent retreat this week?” Oh, right, he was. He is one of those people who, despite having what seems to be a pretty cushy life, is always trying to heal from psychic injuries.
“It’s not– It’s ‘Hockey,’ like the graph.”
“Well, he’s probably fallen through ice, and wants help.”
“Right. Okay. What are you doing today?”
“The usual: diapers, playgrounds, errands.”
“I don’t suppose you could come with me.”
“Not today, brother dearest. I could make some time tomorrow. Why don’t you go try to rescue him today, and then I’ll come rescue you tomorrow.”
“Fine. I’ll thump your way if it’s an emergency. Two thumps means cult, three thumps means vegans.”
“I’m a vegan!”
I thumped my table three times and hung up.
I found the name ‘Sunflow Retreat Center’ in an old shout from Hokey, tossed a few shirts into a backpack, and got into my car. I spent a minute looking longingly at a Waymo driving by, but unfortunately, Hockey’s retreat was outside the bounds of civilization. It was even outside the bounds of California’s paved road network, as my trip ended with me turning onto a twisty wooded dirt path. Maybe it was my proximity to the retreat, but the wooded drive found me pondering with wonder upon God’s green Earth, which has an inconceivable variety of life, like deer and birds and ladybugs and people who actually enjoy driving on dirt roads, not knowing whether their tires are rolling over sticks or worms or bones or metal parts scratching the brand new body.
Deep in reflection, I didn’t expect an assailant to jump out of the woods and lunge at my car.
My mind raced back to kidnappings. I screamed
and then realized it was Hockey, banging at my window.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” he hissed. He yanked the door open and slid in. “Stop here, I need to talk to you out of earshot of everyone. I’m in trouble, CJ. I need you to ask your sister something.”
“Then why did you call me?”
“I can’t call your sister directly, can I? She’s…” He pressed his lips together and thought for a second. “She’s so… salt of the earth. And we’re…” He thought again, but the words didn’t come.
“Saffron of the hills?” I brainstormed.
“Glowsticks of the rave,” he nodded. “So, where is she?”
“She’s busy until tomorrow, but in the meantime, I have a pretty sizable helping of the family brains too. I can help.”
He looked at me and shook his head. “Not unless you’ve become an expert in art.”
“Art, Hockey, really? Two weeks ago, I heard you call it the ‘Museum of Modern Fart.’”
“Well, three days ago, I saw Manon. She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, CJ. Her eyes are like… like pools. Shiny black pools. With stars reflecting in them. She walks like she is tiptoeing on clouds. She looks at the world like she is waiting for her prince.”
“You’ve never spoken to her?”
“We’ve been in silence the whole time,” he said glumly. “The only way I can communicate with her is through art. We make a lot of art here. Ever since I saw her, I’ve been drawing hearts and joined hands and wedding rings, but she doesn’t even look at me.”
I only needed to pause for half a second before I slapped his back.
“You didn’t need to speak last time.”
“What last time?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t expect you to remember. You’ve never been a school memory champion.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t remember the final round? Hard candy. Paperclip. Easter egg.”
“What the hell are you on about?” He was still whispering, but I could tell it was taking a toll on him to not yell.
“Last time with that banana girl, you asked Felicity for help, remember? And she told you to foster a puppy because girls love to see that a man can care for helpless creatures.”
“Oh, yeah, now I remember. But how will I get a puppy?”
“Woof.”
We walked into the Sunflow Retreat Center’s main building, straight into the weepy gaze of a young woman who was really struggling to hold it together. I instinctively asked her what was wrong, but as I opened my mouth, she brought her trembling finger to her lips. Right, this was a silent retreat. I zipped.
She handed me a card with a trembling sigh.
She turned a small tablet to face me and scratched delicately at the inside corner of her eye.
How many nights? 6
Six nights? We wouldn’t take that long to rerun the playbook. I shook my head, and the tears bubbled up in her eyes. Hockey, exasperated, picked up my hand and jabbed my finger on the card. I got the hint.
She pressed a button.
How many nights? 7
How many nights? 8
Dammit. The card had no way to indicate ‘less’. I nearly brought my hand off the card to jab my thumb down, but I saw her lip start to tremble. I couldn’t gladiator her in this state. I sighed, which earned me an elbow from Hockey.
She nodded and briskly held out her hand. I surrendered my credit card. A few moments later, she handed me back my credit card and my speech card, with her finger precisely pointed to
She wasn’t smiling, exactly, but the sales commission had at least dried her tears.
We walked out of the main building into a little clearing in the woods. Cottages sprouted like mushrooms throughout the clearing, with about as much organization to them. But even without a map or any signs, Hockey homed in on one of the cottages. I followed, praying that the cottage would have some grub.
My hopes were dashed as soon as Hockey opened the door. The only oils in this cottage were being carelessly spread on canvases. This was the art room, soon to be our stage. I tried to make eye contact with Hockey so I could beam thoughts of food into his head, but his eyes were busy scanning for the object of his affections. When he sat down in a chair, dejected, I surmised that she wasn’t here yet. The room had eight or ten other people, all huddled in groups of two to three sketching busily on their easels. We formed our own little group of two. Our plan was that I would be the incompetent student, and Hockey would be the inspiring teacher.
Hockey began making large swashbuckling lines on his drawing pad. I tried to copy what he was doing, but it was the darndest thing. Even though both our drawing pads looked equally like a pile of pickup-sticks, if you blurred your eyes, his somehow fuzzed into a mountain range and mine fuzzed into blurrier pickup-sticks. When he was done sketching, he came over to my pad and added a few lines. After each line, he pointed to either
When he was done, I was as confused as ever. I did the only thing I could.
We finished one more drawing before Manon entered. I could tell she had come in because Hockey sat up straight. He always sat up straight when he was in love. She entered with a group of women who all seemed to glide over the ground; Manon was the one with scarves and tattoos, so many that I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
Hockey jumped up, walked to a supply shelf, and brought over a wooden model of a hand. He arranged it so the hand was holding up a ring: a proposal. Then he walked over to me and jabbed hard at my easel, then the hand, then my easel, and then the hand again. This made me remember something about Hockey back from our working life.
He was an asshole boss. It had been a long time since I had seen him as a boss. In our new lives, he was rich and relaxed. But back then, he was known as the Butcher of the Bullpen. As I started to draw again, the silence of the room felt more like the calm before a jump scare.
I tried my best, but even from the first line, it was clear that something was off. I was like a kid playing a video game for the first time: it took all my concentration merely to go left or right in a straight line. Add in jumpscurves, obstaclesshading, goalsrealism, and I was hopeless. I stared with increasing dread at the difference between my fairly-normal hand and the ghoulish claw I was Frankensteining. If a genie had offered, I’d have used three wishes to trade the two hands and save my one life.
No such luck. Hockey came over to me as I was attempting to add nails to the hand. He looked at me like he wanted to add nails to my hands, and like the other guy, I felt fairly forsaken about the whole idea. He pointed, pointed, pointed, ☞ to my pad, ☞ to the model, ☞ to my hands, ☞ to my mistakes, ☞ even to the ☞ parts I thought were ☞ serviceable. Finally, he pointed to me in an accusation and froze.
I didn’t know how to tell him I was really, truly, trying my best.
He unfroze and ripped the top sheet from my drawing pad.
The sound ripped through the classroom.
Everyone in the classroom turned to look at us.
At this point, I was foolish enough to think we were still in business. Manon was looking at Hockey. Sure, it wasn’t for a good reason, but wasn’t all publicity good publicity? My optimism lasted half a second before it all went to hell.
Manon came over. She touched my shoulder like I was an injured puppy, and gently pulled me away to join her group. They were drawing a wooden sphere. I could feel Hockey projecting neither peace nor love at me as I stood at my new easel. And then, Manon was holding my hand and guiding it to draw the outline of the sphere. A ref for an eye-bulging contest between me and Hockey would have had to go to the replay.
No. No. I tried to find my card so I could point to no. But it was too late. Hockey was outraged, enraged, allaroundraged. I finally dug my card out of my pocket. My fingers scrabbled to point to no. In my hurry, I overshot. Instead of pointing at no, I was pointing exactly at
She blushed and dropped my hand. But she didn’t drop the idea. For the rest of the afternoon, I caught her stealing glances at me as we drew. And I caught Hockey stealing glances at her stealing glances at me. I was in big trouble.
In the silence, my thoughts spiraled. I’d never before realized how much I loved hearing words. Truly, the ear needed to hear. No other sense organ had that distinction: eyes didn’t heye, mells didn’t smell. But without the ear, issues that could have been solved with a single sentence, like ‘I’m hungry for lunch’ or ‘My friend over there likes you’ turned into crises. My stomach grumbled. People glared at me. I shrugged. How did they want my stomach to point to p. and l.?
The sky was as dark as my mood when a gong broke the silence. Manon came over to me and smiled at my drawing pad. That’s when I knew I was in for it. I’d drawn a map from a fantasy book I was reading at home, complete with little ogres and dragons. If even that didn’t cause her to recoil, it was hopeless. I let her hold my arm and walk me to another cottage.
My spirits lifted briefly when I saw that this, finally, was the cafeteria cottage. And then they plummeted again, hitting every step on the way down: thump, thump, thump. Dinner was mushroom broth. Protein count: zero. Maybe even calorie count: zero.
I held out hope that maybe the mushrooms were at least hallucinogenic. From the way Manon smiled beatifically at me as she ate, she might have been feeling it. But when I finished my dinner, I was forced to admit that I felt nothing but hunger. And Manon was high on love. For me.
After dinner, she dropped me off at my cottage. I pretended to have a coughing fit so I wouldn’t have to kiss her goodnight. Safe in my room, I looked for my phone so I could text Hockey and get this plan back on track. But the retreat people had put all my electronics in a little locked box. All I could do was wait for Felicity.
It was almost noon the next day when she came. Like Hockey the previous day, I waited in the bushes to ambush her car. I had been waiting ever since breakfast (more broth), so I staggered out with the air of a man freed from rubble after several days. She startled a bit when she saw me, but the baby in the backseat was glad for the unscheduled peekaboo and giggled. I hopped into the car and turned around.
“You’re my favorite niece, Butter. Can you lend me a pouch?”
She blinked at me happily. I grabbed one from the backseat and stuck it into my mouth, sucking at the sustenance desperately.
“You don’t know where that’s been,” Felicity remarked.
“You don’t know where I’ve been,” I retorted.
“How much trouble are you in?” Felicity asked. I told her everything. Felicity frowned and gripped the wheel; this was her thinking pose. I let the cake bake while I grabbed a pack of yogurt drops from the back and split it with the baby. A couple minutes later, Felicity’s mind went ding. She told me the plan. I groaned.
“Do I have to?”
“Yes.”
I steeled myself for almost half an hour before I trudged back to the camp, feeling like a kid forced to go back to school after glorious recess.
Everyone was back in the art cottage. My jailer had saved me the cell next to hers; Hockey was staring at my stool as if willing it to burst into flames. The two of us were drawing a wooden cone today. All her friends had somehow known to melt away into a different corner of the room, leaving the two of us alone. How did girls pull off complicated plans in silence? Well, no matter. It was time to look to the future. I started drawing my pièce de liberté.
I started with the cone we were supposed to be drawing, and then I turned it into one of those cone fireworks that shoots sparks out of the pointy end much further than you'd ever think possible, only in my case, the sparks were hearts, and where the smoke should have gone, I'd topped it with stuff just as polluting to my present environment: words. "My heart is bursting." Then I waited for her to notice.
Before long, she did. She jumped to her feet and pointed in horror at the paper. She staggered away, not wanting to be associated with the contraband words. Her eyes were full of betrayal as she looked at me.
I pressed my advantage.
“Manon…” The whole room recoiled. It was as if I’d set off a bomb. I could see a few people almost shush me, before they realized that would also render them an outcast.
“Turbo. Hi. We can’t keep doing this with pictures. You remind me of Arwen, but I can’t draw her. I want to add you to my health insurance, but how do I draw health insurance?”
People were thumping their tables, their chairs, whatever they could get their hands on. No help arrived. My words continued defiling the room.
“I see babies in my head, but I wouldn’t even know how to draw its hands, let alone the rest. No, we need words. Take us off mute, Manon.”
Manon was trembling, like I was casting a curse on her.
“I need to know what you sound l–” The knight in shining armor swooped in. I felt Hockey push something into my mouth. For half a second, I was afraid it was his fist, but when I felt no pain, I realized it was a crumpled piece of paper.
I spat the slightly wet wad out and uncrumpled it. It was a drawing of intertwined hands, perfectly drawn. Manon looked at it with her eyes wide. Hockey looked at her looking at it. She looked at him. I knew that look. My job here was done. I walked away, trying not to jog or seem too eager.
Back in Felicity’s car, I hugged her.
“I don’t know how I can thank you.”
“Do you still have your room key?”
“Yeah, why?”
“A quiet room for the next seven days? I’ll get a babysitter to watch the baby and come here to read in the mornings.”
“It’s all yours. Put the babysitter on my tab too.”
Behind the Scenes
What job would a modern-day Bertie have?
I tried to write this story three times before I came up with a job that actually worked. It was hard to come up with a job that meant Bertie had all the following characteristics:
What job would a modern-day Jeeves have?
Bertie, of course, doesn’t exist without Jeeves. Jeeves has one big characteristic: he’s a very smart guy who hangs around Bertie all the time. (I think a lot of other Jeeves characteristics are less important, so I’m intentionally letting go of stuff like: being terse, being single, living with Bertie, etc.)
This is a huge contradiction. This guy is so smart he could be running a company. Instead, he’s selecting Bertie’s socks. Why?
Wodehouse!Jeeves is stuck tending to Bertie because his society was not very dynamic. Back then, it made sense that a smart kid born to the wrong family would be stuck valet-ing for the rest of his life. But, just like trust fund kid Wodehouse!Bertie makes no sense in 2026, underemployed Wodehouse!Jeeves also makes no sense in 2026. These days, a guy that smart wouldn’t hitch his wagon to Bertie.
I paired influencer!Bertie with cameraman!Jeeves. It makes sense that a cameraman would follow an influencer everywhere, but I couldn’t figure out why an extremely intelligent cameraman would choose to work for influencer!Bertie. Trying to write about cameraman!Jeeves made me realize that Jeeves can’t be Bertie’s employee in 2026. Employees have too little loyalty and too much to gain from switching to a competent employer. No intelligent employee would work for Bertie without having some sort of tragic backstory, and Jeeves doesn’t need a tragic backstory. No, in 2026, Jeeves has to be a family member, like a sibling or close cousin.
I paired government!Bertie with a brother!Jeeves who worked from home in some boring, flexible desk job, like insurance adjusting or medical coding. This fixed the logistical concerns, but made the interactions between them weird. I felt like two brothers, one of whom was a bumbling commissioner and the other of whom was a hypercompetent geek, would have too much underlying rivalry. They either needed to be more similar or more different.
Finally, I paired startup!Bertie with sister!Jeeves who is a stay-at-home-mom. This fixes all the logistical problems. A stay-at-home mom has pretty flexible hours when her kids are in school, so she can tag along with Bertie most of the time. A stay-at-home mom can also be very intelligent, so it makes sense why she can solve Bertie’s problems. Finally, unlike brother!Jeeves, a stay-at-home-mom sister!Jeeves is different enough from startup!Bertie that they aren’t really rivals.
I used Claude at various points during the writing process. (Don’t worry, readers, 99+% of the words on the page are bespoke, human-crafted words.) Below are notes about places where Claude was and was not helpful. Overall,
- It was not helpful for brainstorming the plot or dialogue
- It was somewhat helpful for making sentences and paragraphs better
- It was helpful for removing confusing bits
- It was very helpful for keeping me motivated and with coding
Not helpful: writing the whole thing from scratch
Whenever I write, I have an internal benchmark of “can I write this better than an LLM?” Or, to be more precise, “can I write this well enough that it makes up for the fact that I am much slower than an LLM?”
I’ve never before literally compared my output to what an LLM would produce, but this time, I was curious. I gave Claude Opus 4.5 (high effort, through the chat interface) this prompt with no other context:
can you write for me a modernized version of a bertie and jeeves short story?- change the characters so that they seem like realistic characters that could exist in the 2020s
- have them get into trouble in a way that makes sense for living in the 2020s
It’s not the world’s most detailed prompt, but this was basically the prompt I gave myself for writing this story, so it seemed good enough for an apples-to-apples comparison.
Claude wrote me a story called “The Influencer’s Dilemma”. At first, this really got to me, because my first idea for a modernized Bertie was also to make him an influencer. The story also wasn’t obviously bad; there were no eyeball kicks and the like. But upon reading the story, I was disappointed.
The main characters were named Jarvis and Bertie Worthington.
This seems like a waste. The new names are close enough to Jeeves and Bertie Wooster that they could have been left as-is.
Jarvis—and I should explain here that his name actually is Jarvis, which caused no end of hilarity when he first entered my employ, everyone assuming I’d named him after the Iron Man computer—is what you might call my personal assistant
I don’t recall Wodehouse using many pop culture references in his humor.
The plot is triggered by Bertie posting a video of himself dancing, where in the background, viewers can see a spreadsheet with salary information for everyone at Bingo’s hedge fund.
I think Wodehouse plots basically don’t work if the people involved have ongoing jobs like “actual influencer” and “hedge fund manager”. These people are supposed to be doofuses to a degree that’s simply incompatible with holding down a 9-5.
Roderick Spode was a tech bro of the most insufferable variety—the kind who’d made a fortune in crypto and now spent his time posting inspirational quotes about “building in public” while treating waitstaff like furniture.
This description of a side character is too obvious. Compare to how Wodehouse introduces Spode:
About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.
She arrived in workout clothes that probably cost more than my first car.
This is a pretty modern sentence that seems too serious for a story like this. The point is to make people laugh, not stroke class resentment.
Jeeves (sorry, Jarvis) solves the central problem by crafting a really well-written apology for Bertie to post.
This seems unrealistic; no problems on the internet have been solved by someone posting a good-enough apology.
You can read the full story Claude wrote here
The Influencer’s Dilemma
I was halfway through my third oat milk latte of the morning, scrolling through my notifications with the glazed contentment of a man whose portfolio had just ticked upward by a fraction of a percent, when Jarvis materialized at my elbow with that particular throat-clearing noise he makes when he’s about to deliver bad news.
“Mr. Worthington, I feel I should bring a matter to your attention.”
Jarvis—and I should explain here that his name actually is Jarvis, which caused no end of hilarity when he first entered my employ, everyone assuming I’d named him after the Iron Man computer—is what you might call my personal assistant, though that term hardly covers it. He manages my calendar, my apartment, my wardrobe, and, more often than I’d like to admit, my life. He came highly recommended from an agency that caters to what they delicately call “high-net-worth individuals who require comprehensive lifestyle support.” What they mean is rich people who’d forget to eat lunch if someone didn’t remind them.
“Fire away, Jarvis.”
“It concerns the video you posted last evening, sir.”
I brightened. I’d been rather proud of that video—a quick thing I’d filmed at my friend Bingo Billington’s party, in which I demonstrated what I called the “Worthington Wobble,” a dance move of my own invention. “Going viral, is it?”
“In a manner of speaking, sir. It has accumulated some four million views.”
“Four million! Jarvis, that’s magnificent!”
“Indeed, sir. However, I would direct your attention to the content visible in the background of the footage.”
He produced his tablet—Jarvis is never without his tablet—and showed me the video in question. There I was, wobbling magnificently, and there behind me was—
The blood drained from my face.
“Is that—”
“Mr. Billington’s laptop, sir, yes. Upon which is clearly visible a spreadsheet.”
“And that spreadsheet—”
“Appears to contain the personal salary information of every employee at Billington Capital, sir. The video has been shared extensively on LinkedIn and Twitter. The phrase ‘eat the rich’ is trending in connection with your name.”
I set down my latte with trembling hands. Bingo Billington was one of my oldest friends. We’d roomed together at prep school, gotten rejected from the same finals clubs at Harvard, and invested in each other’s doomed NFT projects. And now I had, apparently, torpedoed his entire hedge fund career by accidentally revealing that his junior analysts made roughly what most people spend on parking.
“Bingo’s going to kill me,” I said.
“Mr. Billington has called seventeen times this morning, sir. I took the liberty of letting those calls go to voicemail.”
“What am I going to do?”
“Perhaps,” said Jarvis, in that measured way of his, “we might start by assessing the full scope of the situation.”
The full scope, as it turned out, was considerable.
By noon, I had been tagged in approximately eight thousand tweets, most of them unflattering. A journalist from Business Insider had emailed requesting comment. My Aunt Dahlia—who manages the family trust and takes a dim view of anything that might reflect poorly on the Worthington name—had sent a text message consisting entirely of the words “CALL ME IMMEDIATELY” followed by seventeen exclamation points.
And then there was Honoria Glossop.
Honoria and I have what you might call a complicated history. We’d dated briefly in college, one of those arrangements that get made when two families in the same social orbit decide their children would make a sensible match. She’s now a wellness influencer with three million followers and a line of adaptogenic mushroom supplements. More relevantly, she was at Bingo’s party, and she had apparently decided that I represented everything wrong with inherited wealth.
“Have you seen her post?” I asked Jarvis, who was doing something efficient with my inbox.
“The one in which she describes you as ‘a cautionary tale of unchecked privilege and zero self-awareness,’ sir? I have.”
“She says she’s going to discuss me on her podcast.”
“So I understand, sir. The episode is scheduled to record this afternoon.”
I buried my face in my hands. Honoria’s podcast, “Conscious Abundance,” had a substantial following among the type of people who used words like “problematic” and knew how to pronounce “açaí.” If she devoted an episode to eviscerating me, I’d never be able to show my face at a sound bath again.
“Jarvis,” I said, “I don’t suppose you have any ideas?”
He was quiet for a moment—that thoughtful silence he lapses into when he’s working through a particularly knotty problem.
“I believe I might, sir. Tell me, is Ms. Glossop still romantically involved with Mr. Roderick Spode?”
Roderick Spode was a tech bro of the most insufferable variety—the kind who’d made a fortune in crypto and now spent his time posting inspirational quotes about “building in public” while treating waitstaff like furniture. Honoria had been dating him for six months, a fact that mystified everyone who knew her.
“As far as I know,” I said. “Why?”
“And Mr. Billington’s spreadsheet—I presume it contained salary information for all employees of the fund?”
“I suppose so.”
“Including, perhaps, information about outside consultants and advisory fees?”
I stared at him. “Jarvis, what are you getting at?”
“Merely, sir, that Mr. Spode has served as a ‘strategic advisor’ to Billington Capital for the past year. The arrangement has been somewhat controversial among the fund’s investors, given that Mr. Spode’s primary qualification appears to be his friendship with Mr. Billington rather than any particular expertise.”
Light began to dawn. “You mean—”
“I took the liberty of examining the spreadsheet in detail, sir. Mr. Spode has been receiving a quarterly advisory fee of three hundred thousand dollars for, as far as I can determine, attending one lunch per month.”
“But that’s—”
“Precisely, sir. I suspect Ms. Glossop, who has built her brand on transparency and ethical business practices, would find this information quite interesting.”
The meeting with Honoria took place that afternoon at a coffee shop in the Village—one of those places with reclaimed wood tables and twelve-dollar matchas. Jarvis had arranged it all, sending a carefully worded message suggesting that I had “information relevant to her personal and professional interests.”
She arrived in workout clothes that probably cost more than my first car, her expression set somewhere between curiosity and contempt.
“This better be good, Bertie. I’m recording in two hours.”
“Honoria,” I said, “I want to start by saying I’m genuinely sorry about the video. It was thoughtless and I’ve already taken it down and apologized publicly to everyone whose information was exposed.”
This was true. Jarvis had drafted the apology—a masterwork of contrition that somehow made me sound both remorseful and not entirely responsible.
“That’s a start,” she said, “but it doesn’t change the fact that—”
“Before you continue,” I said, “there’s something you should probably see.”
I slid the tablet across the table—Jarvis had prepared a summary of Roderick’s consulting arrangement, complete with a timeline of payments and a notable absence of any delivered work product.
Honoria’s face went through several changes as she read. I watched her process the fact that her boyfriend, the man who lectured constantly about “adding value” and “first principles thinking,” had been collecting a small fortune for doing essentially nothing.
“Where did you get this?”
“It was in the spreadsheet,” I said. “The one I accidentally broadcast to four million people. I’m not proud of how I came by the information, but I thought you deserved to know.”
She was quiet for a long moment. When she looked up, some of the hostility had faded from her eyes.
“You know,” she said, “I was going to destroy you on that podcast.”
“I had gathered.”
“But this—” She looked at the tablet again. “Rod told me that consulting gig was legitimate. He said he was doing real work.”
“I’m sure he believed that,” I said, which was charitable of me, since Roderick Spode had never done real work in his life.
Honoria sighed. “I’m not going to do the episode about you, Bertie.”
“I appreciate that.”
“But I am going to do an episode about financial transparency and the ways men in tech and finance gaslight the women in their lives.” She smiled, and it wasn’t entirely friendly. “I think I have a new angle.”
I returned home to find Jarvis arranging fresh flowers in the living room, looking as unruffled as if he’d spent the afternoon doing exactly that rather than orchestrating my social salvation.
“I take it the meeting went well, sir?”
“Jarvis,” I said, “you’re a genius.”
“That’s very kind of you to say, sir.”
“No, I mean it. How did you know about Roderick’s consulting thing?”
“I make it my business to be well-informed, sir. One never knows when such information might prove useful.”
I collapsed onto the sofa, feeling the tension of the past twenty-four hours finally begin to drain away. My phone buzzed—a text from Bingo, who had calmed down considerably once I explained that Jarvis was working on “damage control” and that the public conversation was about to shift to more deserving targets.
“Jarvis,” I said, “I feel like I should give you a raise.”
“That’s very generous, sir, but I believe my current compensation is quite adequate.”
“Well, take the rest of the day off, at least.”
“I appreciate the thought, sir, but I have several matters to attend to. Your aunt has called again, and I thought it best to schedule a video call for this evening so you might reassure her in person.”
I groaned. Aunt Dahlia. I’d forgotten about Aunt Dahlia.
“She saw the apology post,” Jarvis continued, “and was, I gather, somewhat mollified. I took the liberty of suggesting that you had acted quickly and responsibly to address the situation.”
“And she believed that?”
“I can be quite persuasive when the situation demands, sir.”
I looked at him—Jarvis, with his impeccable sweater and his tablet and his mysterious ability to know exactly what was needed in any given crisis—and felt a wave of gratitude so intense it was almost embarrassing.
“Jarvis,” I said, “what would I do without you?”
He considered the question with his usual gravity.
“I imagine you would manage, sir,” he said. “Though perhaps with somewhat more difficulty.”
And with that, he glided off to attend to whatever other disasters were lurking in my calendar, leaving me to contemplate the wreckage of my week and marvel, not for the first time, at my extraordinary good fortune in having him around to clean it up.
The End
To Claude’s credit though, it produced this story in a minute, and it took me six months (calendar time, not clock time) to write mine. Also to Claude’s credit, it would probably have done a better job if I had used agents or broken the task down into many pieces or provided more examples of what I consider good writing, but I would have found all of that tedious, so I didn’t.
Not helpful: sketching out the plot
Wodehouse’s plots are pretty simple. This seemed like the perfect place for Claude Opus 4.8 (high effort, through a Claude Code terminal, used for this and all below queries) to be useful. I gave Claude my initial draft, which went up until Hockey tells CJ “Ever since I saw her, I’ve been drawing hearts and joined hands and wedding rings, but she doesn’t even look at me.” I think asked Claude Not sure yet how this will go wrong, can you help me brainstorm a few ideas for that?
The very obvious answer here, which I was already leaning towards, is that Manon should fall in love with CJ. Claude gave me a list of nine options, and to its credit, this was on its list, but it wasn’t one of the recommended options, and the list also included some misfires like:
1. CJ is too convincing. His deliberately terrible art makes Manon assume Hockey taught him and produced this disaster — so she now thinks Hockey is the worst artist at the retreat. The patient-teacher plan backfires into “his student can’t draw a circle, ergo he’s a fraud.” (Bonus: ties to your “Fraudhouse” title.)
This was one of the recommended options. I think it’s really not good, and Claude knows that too, but it really indexed hard on the working title for this project being “Fraudhouse”. (I meant fraud in the sense of I’m the one writing this story, but I never explained that to Claude.)
8. Manon already has a read on CJ. She recognizes him — the startup guy, the “Turbo” guy, from some pitch or LinkedIn or a disastrous date with her sister — and reads the whole bad-art act as exactly the kind of fraud he is. His presence contaminates Hockey by association.
I think this kind of plot is hard to pull off in a setting where all the characters have to stay silent.
I then asked Claude when the sister gets there the next day after all this happens, what are some options for what she can suggest as a solution? Again, the obvious answer here is that someone needs to break the silence of the retreat. The silent retreat is a big Chekhov’s Gun, and the story will feel weirdly incomplete if no one says anything.
5. Just… talk to her. Felicity has the one superpower nobody else has: she never took the vow of silence, so she can speak. She walks up and actually asks Manon what’s going on — and learns the real situation (maybe Manon never clocked Hockey at all, maybe she reads the drawings completely differently). The Jeeves move is information, not scheme.
Claude got close, but missed an opportunity to make the break in silence funnier by having CJ do it instead of Felicity.
9. Treat them like toddlers. Felicity, fresh off diapers and playground diplomacy, applies literal toddler-conflict tactics to grown adults — redirection, parallel play, “we share the pencil.” Comedy from importing mom-brain wholesale; could be a runner that keeps paying off.
I think this misunderstands Felicity’s character. She’s a mom so she can be off-screen most of the time but still available for advice, but her being a mom isn’t actually relevant to the advice she gives. I didn’t tell Claude this, but this was pretty clear to me in my head when I wrote her. I’m not sure what the best way is to give Claude implicit context like this.
I then told Claude I wanted CJ to break the silence. It still didn’t fully get the vibe:
Is the silence-break Felicity’s plan, or CJ botching it? I’d lean botch: Felicity gives him some subtle, surgical instruction (make yourself a little unappealing, nothing drastic), and CJ — incapable of subtle — decides the move is to just start talking.
I think it’s funnier if Felicity tells him to break the silence! The funniest B+J plots are when Jeeves sets Bertie up to look like a loser (e.g., biking all night to complete a pointless task).
Not helpful: brainstorming dialogue
I then asked Claude brainstorm what CJ says when he breaks silence. The point here was to just be as absurd as possible! But most of Claude’s suggestions were curiously uncreative, stereotyping what a typical clueless techie would say, with little attempt to fit it into the story.
Okay but have you considered NFTs?
Wait, sorry, is anyone else getting signal out here? I have a 2 o’clock.
Honestly? Mid.
Sorry — quick QuiQu — where’s the bathroom?
I did like the QuiQu callback here, but why is CJ breaking the silence for such a pointless question?
I then wrote an initial draft where CJ breaks the silence by talking about how his love for Manon is like swiping through reels. When I asked Claude to come up with alternatives, it now indexed too heavily on the reels instead of suggesting things that made sense for the story. (Indexing too heavily on details I consider irrelevant is a common failure mode.)
Manon, you have my full engagement. Every metric, up and to the right. I’m done soft-launching this. Say something — I just need a signal.
I’ve been swiping right with my entire face for three days and you won’t match. Break the silence, Manon. At least tell me you’re not a bot.
I know this is fast, but I move fast. The silence? That’s a feature nobody asked for. You and me — that’s product-market fit. Validate me.
This one just makes CJ sound like an AI!
Credit where credit is due though, Claude did suggest take us off mute which I kept in the final draft.
In the next round of revisions, I had CJ talking about (1) Manon looking like Arwen and (2) wanting a white picket fence life with her, but I wanted a third idea in there to escalate things even more. A lot of Claude’s suggestions were still jargon-y:
You make me want to give you joint custody of my cap table — but there’s no easel big enough.
You make me want to name our firstborn after a Series A — but you can’t sketch a 401(k).
You make me want to die first so I never have to miss you — and there’s no pencil dark enough for that.
This one isn’t funny at all.
You make me want to buy a house, fill it with kids, and put you on my health insurance — but I can’t draw any of that.
I did like the health insurance idea, and kept it.
Somewhat helpful: fixing the tone
My initial drafts didn’t have the charming Wodehouse language. (I think the final version is still not quite there, although it’s much better.) I asked Claude one of the things i really like about wodehouse’s writing is the little language innovations and fun phrasings. can you point to some places in my story where i can add that? i don’t want those additions to make the story longer or more convoluted. This is what it suggested:
| Initial sentence | The thumping became louder and more angry. It sounded like someone was hitting a table with their hand angrily. |
| Claude suggested | The thumping grew louder, and somehow more personally offended. |
| I wrote | It sounded like a hand hitting a table over and over. I couldn’t decide whether the caller had lost his hammer or his marbles. |
| Initial sentence | Suddenly, a man jumped out of the woods and knocked on my door. |
| Claude suggested | A man flung himself out of the woods and onto my window. |
| I wrote | Deep in reflection, I didn’t expect an assailant to jump out of the woods and lunge at my car. |
| Initial sentence | I gave her my credit card, defeated. |
| Claude suggested | I surrendered my credit card. |
| I wrote | [I copied Claude here] |
| Initial sentence | With a sense of foreboding, I started to draw. |
| Claude suggested | I took up the pencil the way you take up a weapon you don’t know how to hold. |
| I wrote | I tried my best, but even from the first line, it was clear that something was off. I was like a kid playing a video game for the first time: it took all my concentration merely to go left or right in a straight line. |
| Initial sentence | If a genie had offered, I’d have traded the two to avoid Hockey’s wrath. |
| Claude suggested | If a genie had offered me the swap, I’d have taken the claw for keeps and thrown in a tip. |
| I wrote | If a genie had offered, I’d have used three wishes to trade the two hands and save my one life. |
| Initial sentence | The baby in the backseat found my sudden appearance hilarious and giggled. |
| Claude suggested | The baby in the backseat reviewed my sudden appearance and found it hilarious. |
| I wrote | The baby in the backseat was glad for the unscheduled peekaboo and giggled. |
Overall, I mostly appreciated Claude flagging the sentences even though I didn’t make the edits it wanted me to. But for the second round of this type of editing, I didn’t use Claude to flag the sentences because it felt easier to do it myself.
Somewhat helpful: editing
Claude was good at pointing out minor issues like:
- Using an egg metaphor to describe Felicity thinking, even though she is vegan. I changed this to a cake metaphor.
- Moving through the “Manon and Hockey fall in love” part too quickly.
Claude was also good at sanity-checking my language. For example, I asked it if i have cj say “i was shaking the lumps out of my breakfast” what would that mean to you to check that my idea wasn’t too confusing.
But the biggest thing wrong with my story was that the middle was not fleshed out enough. I sent this to a friend to read, and he sent me back three short sentences of feedback:
Intro was good and ending was good. If u r gonna add stuff, add to the middle. Show more character.
Despite its brevity, this was really helpful feedback. Once I implemented it, Claude agreed too. But it didn’t proactively suggest it.
Helpful: removing text
Claude was good at pointing out areas where what I’d written needed to be cut. This was most often because one of the following was true:
- There was a typo
- What I’d written was too wordy
- I was repeating the same word too often
- Unnecessary adverb
Very helpful: motivating me
After every writing session, I would give Claude my latest draft and ask for feedback. Claude always made a point of highlighting things it had noticed and liked in my writing, which felt really rewarding.
I can’t afford to send my writing to a real editor every 200-400 words so the editor can say complimentary things to me. But it’s costless to do so with Claude, and its nice words gave me just the boosts I needed to keep coming back to the story.
Very helpful: coding the visual effects
I didn’t let Claude one-shot these because I’m pretty finicky, and I also wanted to understand what Claude was doing so I could edit it later, but Claude did make this part of the process much less frustrating than it would otherwise have been.
