Vignette - Tengri or a bureaucrats day
So how much to the living and the dead interact? That’s an important question. We know that the living are pretty darned ignorant of the capabilities of the dead. But we know at least one drone was pissed enough to stab someone. How exactly does AfterLife decide where drones can be employed in the living worlds?
I tried to give a few answers about that through the perspective of Valentia Novikova a bureaucrat on the moon of Tengri orbiting the living colony of Xanadu.
“No absolutely not,” I said to Morgan, the regional contacts manager.
“It says it is for waitstaff,” zhe responded, swiping through the purchase order from Elim Entertainment Limited.
“It’s for sex bots. Eska Elim has tried a dozen different ways to get his hands on 2nd life drones for sex work. AfterLife may be a giant, faceless, corporate overlord, but we do not pimp out our workers. Drones cannot consent and they have no sex drive. Elim can pay regular human sex workers, who enjoy their jobs, put makeup on them and call it day. I am not facilitating his bloody fetish.”
Morgan looked chagrined. I knew zhe was looking forward to the credit bonus that would come with securing a contract with such lucrative payouts.
“Look, trust me, it would turn out bad. Letting something like that through can get you reassigned in a heartbeat.”
Zhe slunk out of my office a wronged look on his face. Maybe I would have zhim reassigned anyway. Someone who was willing to sell out the drones for a few extra perks was a skeevy bastard.
The company really needed to rethink the bonuses. It sent the wrong message. As I told all new staff in labor contracting, our job was not to make money for the company, it was to find a way to say, “No.” AfterLife had worked hard to move as many undead away from the living worlds as possible. Living and dead just didn’t mix.
There remained, however, some spaces where undead labor is necessary. AfterLife had contracts with nursing facilities, all the construction trades, maintenance and janitorial, as well as conservation. The living liked their paradisical worlds, they didn’t much like the work it took to keep them that way, or to manage the infrastructure.
Using drones in places where bots or VIs could do the job was frowned upon by senior administrators. They had allowed a few contracts here and there when upscale businesses wanted that undead touch, but ever since that waiter on Eden had stabbed the hero of Mirada to death in public, those contracts were being cancelled, denied renewal, and refused review. The fallout from that had been a bureaucrat’s nightmare.
It was my job to make sure that any labor contracts to Xanadu were strictly necessary, not merely vanity.
It’s not a bad gig. Tenrgri is a good sized installation on the 2nd moon of Xanadu. There’s plenty of stuff to do or spend credits on and lots of interesting people to spend time with. The ratio of atypes to drones is unusually high here, given the delicate nature of the contracts we negotiate. There isn’t any substantial manufacturing here, mostly administration.
Lately thought, the job had gotten more precarious. That business at Mirada had everyone on edge. If some of the most prized staff in the AfterLife workforce could be coopted by Navy brass hellbent on starting a galactic war, were any of us safe?
I was having to be extra diligent, double assigning contracts for review by both drones and atypes. The drones were good at catching minutiae and weren’t swayed by personal biases. The atypes were better at reading between the lines and thinking of creative ways clients could do stupid things with reanimate workers.
I’m just glad I’m not a part of customer relations and compliance. They were having to rewrite all the terms and conditions for drone maintenance and use and update all the client training accordingly. Compliance on training is a nightmare. You basically have to have someone stand over the customer’s designated agent and watch them watch all the training videos and take the practical exams. Otherwise people just skimmed through and got a VI to cheat the answers.
I got up from my desk and stretched. A call from Delbert one of my drone team leads popped up. “Supervisor Valentina, it is time for C shift to go on to regeneration, but we still have a number of contracts to review. Would you like us to work through?”
“No Del, go ahead and take your rest. Hand off anything you’ve got back to the general queue.”
“The queue is quite long. We will not be unduly harmed by skipping one rest.”
“I appreciate your ‘can-do’ attituded, Del, but go take your rest. The contracts will get done when they get done. Thanks.”
“’If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly.’ Good evening, Supervisor Valentina.” The enigmatic drone often signed off with a literary quote. As with this time, I rarely go the reference.
“G’night Dell.” Drones will do things like that, quote stuff they knew from 1st Life. If you ask them, they’ll tell you all about their first life. I mean all about. Not just about their kids and their hobbies and their spouses. They’ll also tell you what they liked to eat for breakfast, the names of all their neighbors, and their preferred sex positions. If you get them going they’re like these crazy stream of consciousness machine. Sometimes I think about recording drones answering random personal questions and cutting them together into an epic spoken word rant, poem, thing. But, I’m not really that creative.
My main talent, at least the talent that AfterLife values, is my ability to ferret out the crazy shit and put my foot down. I like saying “no.” I’m like a perpetual 2 year old with the cynicism of a died-in-the-wool misanthrope. I lovesaying, “no.” Come to think of it, it is a pretty rare talent. I mean sure, the world is full of assholes, but non-assholes who are willing to disappoint people, we’re like magical fucking unicorns.
I sat back down at my desk and skimmed through the list of contracts:
Request for a qualified paleology labor team—probably legit, but low priority. The fossil record on Xanadu was pretty milquetoast.
Request for additional park maintenance crews—I’d need to look more closely at that one.
Request for cosmetic testing assistants—That one caught my interest. What was a cosmetic testing assistant? An upgrade on the cosmetic counter bots that would tart you up for fun?
I pulled up the contract. It took me a minute to suss out what they wanted. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I nearly shouted, pounding the desk.
“Supervisor Valentina, do you require assistance?” Adele, the drone who worked closest to my office had leaned back in her chair and was peering in at me, just a touch of concern in her normally blank expression.
“No, no, Adele. Thank you, go back to your work.”
Make-up testing. They wanted to rub experimental boutique cosmetics into drone eyes and skin and see what would happen. Ignoring the fact that reanimates would be a poor choice with their lowered histamine response, I mean, fuck that. Earth outlawed such frivolous animal testing centuries ago. Most meat was vat grown. Hell, the flocks of chickens on Bardo that produced the entire Earth Federation supply of eggs live in a free range paradise because no one wanted to think of cruelty attached to their breakfast, but sure, let’s just use the dead!
Of all the wrong headed nonsense I’ve seen this really doesn’t rate, but today, it was pissing me off. I mean, at least pervs are seeking enjoyment, this was just grade-A dehumanization. I checked the contract log to see who bothered elevating this to me. It was Del. Oh for the love of little green apples.
“Adele, quick question.”
“Yes, Supervisor.”
“When you review contracts, do you consider the discomfort of the assigned drones?”
“Discomfort?” she paused a moment. “I apply the company guidelines for potential damage to assigned personnel and appropriate use.”
“But I mean, what if a contract involves doing something the drones wouldn’t like.”
“That is not a part of the guidance, Supervisor.”
“Really? No don’t answer that. Thank you Adele.”
I denied the contract. No doubt a number of similar contracts had been denied for other conflicts. People willing to jam harsh substances into drones faces would not doubt ask for other banned activities.
The I put in a request for a policy update with my supervisors and in the meantime added some pro tem instructions in the relevant decision trees for drone reviewers to consider discomfort and distress in assessing contracts. Ugh, no doubt it would result in my queue being flooded until the details got smoothed out, but really, what is the world coming to?
