⚒️ Time and a Quarter

⚒️ Time and a Quarter

by Joel Glover

“There are some jobs Big Blue will never ask a robot to do,” Uncle Machel said. “If you want to stay away from the Department of Labour, best find one.”

The Department of Labour had plenty of jobs that they hadn’t automated. Not because the jobs couldn’t be done by robots, but because the devil made work for idle hands. If you had the time to be idle, you had time to make trouble, and the government wasn’t keen on that. So some of the worst, most back breaking, menial work had been left resolutely unautomated. Some inflicted psychiatric trauma on you so deep that the people who did it needed to medicate themselves with increasingly dangerous bathtub psychotropics; drugs that turned your blood to glue and your brain to rotting pus. 

Work Makes You Free, the adverts said.

Right.

Uncle Machel was right though; there were jobs in what was left of London that you didn’t see a blue robot anywhere near, which weren’t part of the government’s labour programmes. 

I got me one of those.

Cleaning up the scenes of murders could definitely have been done by robots, but the government decided having your mortal remains scraped up required the personal touch only a fellow human could bring. 

I did it for a year after I finished school. A year to the day. 

I saw what happened if a bathtub of носорог exploded, melting everyone in the flat like ghee in a pan. Including an eight year old girl.

I used a carpet comb to get chunks of a drug dealer’s brain out of a thick wool pile. Then cold water on the carpet — you never use warm water on blood or it coagulates, and we wouldn’t want to lower the property value. 

I was there to see a few bodies removed, too. I saw two women with holes punched in them you could put your arm through: asteroid mining drills turned into pistols, one of the coppers said. That one kept me awake at night until I saw worse, for real.

The thing that got me in the Cavendish recruitment portal was a small one. I had pulled a double, earbuds in to block out the noise of the machines I used and the screaming in my head. Took the bus home, through ends I wouldn’t step out in during the day time. Turned off the music when I got home so I could speak to my mum. I only took two steps in the house, ‘cause I leave my trainers at the front door, but those two steps had this funny scratching noise. They must have been doing it the whole way home, because there was something stuck in the treads, jammed into the foam. It cut me as I pulled it out, sharp edges at funny angles.

I knew what it was straight away. 

A shard of skull.

The scene I’d been working was a bad one, even by our standards. Someone had kicked in the door, stormed through the place, knocking things off the walls using the face of the person who lived there. They asked her some questions, the kind of questions you try not to answer at first. She either answered, or they got bored of waiting, because after snapping eight of her fingers into angles fingers don’t normally go, they’d put a shotgun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. There were teeth in the window frame which Daisy used pliers to pull out. The fillings in them were probably worth something.

She had no face left — not really — the girl in the flat. When the back of your head is smeared across the broken windows in your gaff the face sort of deflates. But I knew here anyway, I’d been at the flat before for a party once. Simti. We’d been at primary school together, back when school still happened in person. And now a splinter of her skull had cut my finger, and I had to go get blood tests.

Cavendish had a self-service recruitment device actually in the A&E of the Valerian St John Hospital. I guess it was a good place to be thinking about leaving your shit life behind. I pressed my thumb into the reader, the one without the cut on it, let it look me up. Then accepted the offer twenty hours later when the labs came back clean. 

Which is how I ended up on Minikoi station.

There are some jobs Big Blue doesn’t ask a robot to do, even in space. Policing, Soldiering, Deep Crevice Mining. I didn’t have the education for those. So I got stuck with High Risk Cleaning. There are AI-driven robots for most of the cleaning. What I learned is that the Intelligences might be Artificial, but they lack curiosity. So you put a person in the air ducts, cleaning up behind the bots, asking questions the computer can’t be taught to think of.

I spent hours watching ‘Dr Amma’s Galactic Adventures’ when I was a kid, and she never mentioned pirates once. The safety briefing mentioned them once. I had gone back to look it up. 

“Some species cling to their scavenging roots, eager to strip resources from installations they perceive as vulnerable. Cavendish Security and Intervention can be reached from any emergency communication device in the event of an Incident.”

An Incident.

Like a rogue ship pouring an uncountable number of undomesticated, octopodal, carnivorous things into the ventilation system of a civilian space station to clear out the occupants before stripping it for parts. The self-defences of the station had kicked in at some point, but not before the little horrors got to the poor bastard I was stuck cleaning up.

I thought I had left this all behind in London, but here I was, on a zero hours contract, wiping up what remained of a man.

At least I was on time and a quarter.