ref: b9fbb17c04e4ccfb2021dac818e514351ca8f646
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.LP \& .ce .sp |4.25i .PP .ps 12 .CW ░ Aij's first day at the company was uneventful by any newb's measure. She had begun to wonder if she'd made the right decision, accepting this job. Massive Fictions was a publisher of lies\(emthat is, stories, magazines, and books (inclusive) blatantly incompatible with material reality as she understood it. Ridiculous, some might say \fItrumped\-up\fR nonsense, sandwiched between salacious covers, pawned off on an unsuspecting public at reasonable, irresistible prices. Bargain basement bullshit. Harmful, Q.E.D. .PP .ps 12 Aij sat at her lunch table and surveilled the assembled staff, evaluating each at a glance according to the usual criteria: signs of good breeding, physical attractiveness, and most importantly, general suitability for the work at hand. Most of them appeared to be left\-handed. Why? .PP .ps 12 The cafeteria was filling up from the lunch rush. She'd chosen the moment deliberately\(emmaximum engagement, forced face\-to\-face fuckery\(emshe was daring herself to get on with the process of fitting in. .PP .ps 12 Time to meet her colleagues. .PP .ps 12 The RFP called for an operating system small enough to be understood by its implementers, obscure enough to pass undetected beneath the noses of management. Cin had already proven the concept by working for months on the unauthorized software at his day job, stealthily ignoring those company policies with which he personally disagreed. .PP .ps 12 Monitoring the situation remotely, SL formed the fingers of his data gloves into a metaphorical tent, triggering a near\-instantaneous response from his visor's operating system. It startled him, but he went along with it. .PP .ps 12 His plan had worked. .PP .ps 12 Cin didn't even work for his company. .PP .ps 12 Levels of classification above SL's necessarily limited awareness, disparate government officials were also making hand tents, some of them literal rather than figurative. Peering down through the \fIaether\fR from their rarefied heights, Cin's progress was evaluated by responsible parties, parties responsible for allowing or denying the project to continue. Hand\-in\-glove all the way down, the system was working, provided local project managers at each successive level didn't lose the plot. .PP .ps 12 For his part, Cin didn't seem to care who thought they were in charge. The work was getting done. .PP .ps 12 .I And just who had paid for all these flowers? .R The basic technology had been in the public domain for more than a century, but, still, the materials and labor cost money, so, specific implementations were usually kept proprietary. One didn't simply .I grow .R a public housing project out of the green\-ness of their heart. There had to have been some expectation of profit in order for the effort to be budgeted and placed on the schedule in the first place. But \fIthat\fR implied competence, or at least awareness, which everyone knew was in short supply... .PP .ps 12 SL wasn't particularly invested in such questions, but interrogating the angles did occupy his otherwise restless glandular system during the lateral journey back to his apt. He knew for certain that the money hadn't come from .I him, .R and that seemed to imply... .PP .ps 12 \&...and he was home. .PP .ps 12 There were messages. SL didn't bother to turn on his music. This was more work than he'd had dumped on him in years. A flash of renewed awareness, encoded memories of green quickly and efficiently suppressed, a reckoning forever deferred. It suggested that somebody upstairs was probably having a laugh. SL stabbed himself with his pen, superficially wounding his immediate supervisor. \fISee?\fR he seemed to be saying. Of course, there was no response. .PP .ps 12 Dawn in the fields. Sensors collected data. SL was on hand in only an unofficial capacity, examining the anxiously bucking rows of young office buildings as they strained counterfactually toward the artificial light. So much potential. .PP .ps 12 SL liked to spend his mornings here, wandering the unadvertised areas. That is, when he could get away from the office. The new work had been pressing fiercely for months, commanding steadily more of his otherwise free time. These days, simply making it over to the nurseries was rare. When he did make the trip he was seldom disappointed. The little fellows sure were trying hard, and they did it all without calendars or reminders. .PP .ps 12 SL headed back to his office as the morning mist abruptly transitioned to bright sunlight. .PP .ps 12 Aij put on a brave face but she was dying inside. No one had acknowledged her attempts to integrate. No one was meeting her halfway. It was almost as if her peculiar qualities had gone unobserved, which, while admittedly unlikely, still galled her to no end. .PP .ps 12 She didn't even fit the profile. .PP .ps 12 One of SL's new duties was the care and feeding of such raw, unfiltered talent; to wit: promising new recruits just such as Aij. Part of his daily routine (after visiting the "new construction" farms) was to scan the daily manifests for new arrivals. He spied that one of his coworkers had already underlined Aij's entry in red. When SL flashed on this he swiped away all the other entries and cleared his schedule for the rest of the day. .PP .ps 12 This one was already half\-done. .PP .ps 12 Next morning, a priority directive from above admonished: .PP .ps 8 .CW You are to complete the work assigned to you each day. Do not cherry\-pick from the worklist. .R .PP .ps 12 SL was duly chastened, but there was no real penalty for getting work done. (He hoped.) .PP .ps 12 He kept going.