⚒️ Every Day Is A School Day

by Joel Glover

In-person meetings between Zambesi Miombo and CE Growth Matrix were always tense affairs. 

There was history.

Stefania had spent more than an hour overseeing the arrangement of the pens and pads of paper on the tables. The choice of flatware had been the cause of one hundred and seventeen emails—a new record—as well as the usual five meetings. Glassware was a potential sticking point, with both parties having very particular and contradictory cultural cues.

She looked over the heavy conference table, its wood exported at great expense from the cultivated forests of New New Caledonia, carved from that single timber by artisans in the zero-G manufacturers of Mahiladū Station, then shipped at even further expense to the regional headquarters of Cavendish Fuel (Rocketry) where it went mostly unused. 

There was a speck of dust. A touch of organic beeswax from the HQ’s own apiarists restored the offending blemish. The canister, adorned with a C stylised in a jagged font, went back into the drawer of the somewhat less expensive beverage station.

Both parties arrived on time. 

This was not an accident.

Outside, the geosynchronously orbiting satellite pilots followed AI generated flight paths, dancing towards their docking bays like bees towards their hive. Both landed and locked into place at the exact same moment, so neither could claim they were preferred. Both walked almost identical distances, the differences adjusted for by slight delays in door opening cycles and the speeds of the walkways rotating gently underfoot. 

“Colleagues, welcome.”

She made the still universal gesture of greeting, arms spread wide to show that she was unarmed and unthreatening. 

The whole affair was primitive and exhilarating.

None of the attendees shook hands. 

Their weapons were words unspoken and contracts unwritten. Their hands were never on the blade that caused the damage, their fingers never pulled a trigger.

Everyone smiled a genteel, polite smile. 

In simian societies the baring of teeth is a threat, Stefania had read. In this room everything was a threat.

The groups examined the table, the room, searching for an insult. The heads up display rolling across one lens of her otherwise purely cosmetic eye wear told her the temperatures on both sides of the room were precisely set to the requirements of the respective negotiators.

Stafania sat down. As an arbitrator she needed to be equidistant between both groups to show no favour, but it did leave her at the head of the table—alone—like her mother at family dinners.

“Thank you all for joining us today. I hope this will be a productive discussion. As agreed, I will now give the floor to Zambesi Miombo to make their preparatory statement.”

The spokesperson for Zambesi Miombo was hooded, their face masked behind a sensor-occluding array of wearables. Their entire body was sheathed from the outside world, so no evidence of their identity could be gathered. Their voice, when it came, was scrubbed by filters and then re-processed. The whole statement could have been pre-recorded or written down, but this was the formula.

Stefania was experienced enough to not roll her eyes as the speech lasted the precise time allotted without adding anything of substance not already contained and previewed by the meeting’s title and agenda.

Where Zambesi Miombo were hooded and swaddled, CE Growth Matrix wore their own uniform: worksuits. The all-in-one baggy garments kept the wearer warm when moving between dormitory cubicles and EVA suits. Stefania had never met a CE Growth Matrix employee who was wearing anything else, at work. ‘I am ready to go and get my hands dirty,’ said the suits, ‘my hands are for calculators and keyboards,’ said the skin of those same hands. 

“We are willing to provide services to Zambesi Miombo at the commercially quoted rate, which is widely available.”

The commercially quoted rate is, Stefania happens to know, set at five times the rate at which CE Growth Matrix typically operates, give or take. This would look like egregious price gouging from a monopoly position were it not for—

“You cause this problem and then seek to profit from it!” The largest of the Zambesi Miombo negotiators strikes the table so hard their gauntleted hands leave gouges no amount of beeswax will buff out. The tone of their speech is rendered out into a totally neutral affect by the synthesisers, but Stefania knows this is a person she would try not to anger in the octopush pool.

The main suit from CE Growth Matrix spreads their hands appeasingly. “We are sorry for any temporary difficulties you may be experiencing.” 

The gauntlets strike the desk again. The words: ‘A bombing campaign conducted by your surrogates to deny us access to mineral rights across several solar systems, followed by refusal to help us rebuild, is not a temporary difficulty’ throb unsaid from by the Zambesi Miombo group.

The suit begins again. “I am sure that reasonable people can come to an agreement.”

He means ‘give us twenty percent of everything produced by those new facilities’ thought Stefania. This new tariff had been set elsewhere, and represented an increase on whatever they had gouged from Zambesi Miombo in the last round of intra-corporate negotiations.

The Zambesi Miombo group stood as one. They must have internal communication devices within their hoods, devices they must have been completely confident would withstand the scrutiny of CE Growth Matrix snoopware.

Eyes tightened opposite them as the implications of this sank in.

“We shall seek out such reasonable people then.”

Stefania did not know that it was possible to be sarcastic through a vocoder. 

Every day was a school day.