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⚒️ Value conflict and order

by Joel Glover

Back in London Tanya had worked in a fast food restaurant. It served shicken, a soy based alternative to meat which contained more saturated fat, fewer nutrients, with a comparable environmental impact to the real thing. Its principle benefit, as far as anyone could work out, was that it was cheaper to make but could be sold at the same price as animal-based alternatives, with a side order of ethical consumption, to go. The seasoning for the schicken was a carefully guarded secret, never patented for fear of copying. Metaverse debate suggested monosodium glutamate, complex sugars, and plain old-fashioned salt made up the base, but from there, debate sprawled from nutmeg to smoked chilli-peppers, from freeze-dried colas to ingredients grown in space-fabs.

Now Tanya was in New Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, and some things never changed.

She was pretty sure some of the machines being used in the CE Growth Matrix Plant—where she slept, ate, and worked—were not connected to any actual output. Others fed systems of pipework and movement she was convinced were more likely to be part of water filtration or laundry operations than anything related to the actual profitable product of the business.

There were definitely profits, too. The executives, the full-time employees, those not on zero-hour contracts, kafala, or indenture, had nice clothes, porcelain smiles, and full-figures of the well fed.

Tanya pressed the buttons and pulled the levers in the prescribed order. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, black, amber, check the dials for pressure—over and over

The robotics—for which she was the controlling appendage swung into action, adding, stirring, and mixing. Something hissed, something clicked, something hummed a low note that always made her want to take a piss.

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, black, amber, check the dials for pressure. Something hissed, something clicked, something made a banging, rattling noise that tore through her ear protectors, accompanied by a jolt, which turned the world from right to left and up to even more up.

There were men. Or women. In armour. Their faces were covered in masks designed to evoke primal fears; toothed, horned; demented mixtures of creatures which crawl and those which hunt.

One pointed a gun at Tanya, its barrel wide as a beer can.

She missed beer.

The gesture was unmistakable, he wanted her to come down. She pointed helplessly at the pressure dials. She had to check them. At all times.

She wasn’t sure why, but the recruiter and inductor were both very clear about the dials.

The man in the armour, mask, and gun made a ratcheting movement and the gun quivered in his hand like a dog ready to jump.

Carefully Tanya unbuckled herself from the restraints and followed the same procedure she always did when dismounting.

That was another thing the training had been quite insistent about.

The whole reason she left the shicken place was that it had been robbed by two guys with grenades. The franchise owner sacked her entire shift for handing over a crate of unseasoned protein and a cup of frozen blue lemonade. Apparently that was more than her life was worth.

There were three ladder steps to descend, and she trod on them all. Anya hadn’t and sprained her ankle Now her indenture had another thirty-seven kilograms of platinum to pay down.

Tanya didn’t know how many grams of platinum her hourly wage equated to; she was paid in new rupees. Definitely not enough to skip a step though.

The gunman poked her with the barrel, encouraging her to join the other workers on the factory floor.

“Where is the Growth Matrix?” the one who seemed to be the leader asked.

A dozen workers tried to explain they didn’t know.

One was shot in the face for their trouble.

“Give us the Growth Matrix, or y’all die,” the bandit leader demanded.

Above them, the dials Tanya was paid to monitor clicked from green, to amber, to red. Unattended the robots stirred, and mixed… a little too much… a little too much.

They did not give up their employers’ secrets, because they were not privy to them.

The emergency deployment of seventeen tonnes of liquid nitrogen coolant ended the discussion before the bandits could really press the issue.

Something hissed, something clicked, and somewhere the stock price of CE Growth Matrix increased by 0.1 bips.