Snapshot

Angel Fish, like all Faster-Than-Light-enabled spacecraft, is dotted with FTL relays, which need to be inspected periodically. These nodes help the central FTL unit, built by the Salient company and powered by a Salient-compliant reactor core, map and boost the extent of the FTL unit’s Area of Effect. That is it’s important to stretch and distort the FTL field so that it will pull the whole of the ship, rather than just part of it, into the puncture that it forces through a multiply-folded point in spacetime.

It’s something like that, anyway. Thom’s not sure how Salient FTL or Salient-compliant reactors work. He knows that you have to have a powerful computer attached to the FTL unit to do the chaos calculations that it requires to accurately place the ship where it’s meant to be going. He knows that there’s a lot of murmuring about the deleterious effects on the body of being subjected to too many FTL jumps, or about the kinds of things that have happened to people who were too close to FTL relays when the jump capacitors were charged and the hop primer was ready to pull the trigger on the jump. But he doesn’t really understand much more than that — or even if that stuff about folded space or chaos calculations actually have anything to do with how the technology works. Even Salient couldn’t tell you now–perfecting FTL travel was the beginning of the end for the Salient corporation.

So as Thom wanders through the FTL relay hangars, he doesn’t really pay much attention. It’s not like he can really tell if there’s anything wrong anyway.

There is no paucity of everyday workwear aboard Angel Fish. Aside from the one space suit per employee, the algorithmic procurement system that acquired the employee uniforms had been bamboozled by a superior AI and been tricked into buying in vast, vast bulk. It’s mostly eye-burningly bright orange high-viz branded pants and t-shirts, but there are also boxer shorts, hoodies, and all kinds of other things, stacked high in one of many otherwise-unused rooms aboard the ship. It’s probably for the best, really, as the quality is generally so poor that Thom has had to throw out more workwear than he’s ever put through the laundry.

One thing there is not much of is footwear. Plenty of surprisingly comfortable and warm (if unfashionable) socks, but no practical work boots (aboard Angel Fish, anyway). There are some pseudo-canvas sneakers (orange, and painfully ill-fitting for Thom’s quite wide feet). There are also the boots that integrate with his space suit, but they are not easy to wear on their own–they’re designed to merge with the legs of the EVASleev (a feature of the Mutable Smart Fabric) and won’t really stay on very well.

The choice of clothes Thom makes when he’s not wearing his space suit goes beyond this, though: tending towards the soft, the pyjama-like, the soft, even when it goes against the obvious sensible decision to wear things that offer at least superficial protection from the harsh, unfriendly surroundings of the ship. Given that the nature and execution of his job has utterly collapsed the distinction between work and personal life, this type of blurring is almost inevitable. Sometimes, I suppose, you just want to feel comfortable; you don’t want to feel on-guard; you don’t want to feel like your whole life is at work; you want to feel, briefly, in some small way, like you are home. 

Stay awake.

Think of the feedback.

Stay awake.

Think of your bills.

Stay awake.

Just a few more hours to go.

Stay awake.

You’re supposed to help people.

Stay awake.

It’s too dangerous to sleep here.

Stay awake.

The lift is so gentle.

Stay awake.

The suit is so warm.

Stay awake.

I can hear my own breath slowing.

Stay awake…

Like most companies, REZQ are well-aware of how artificial light can be used to manipulate people’s sleep patterns. It’s a pretty well-known effect: electricity finished what the Industrial Revolution started, completing the rupture of human activity from the rhythm of the diurnal cycle. And the deleterious effects of artificial light upon sleep have been increasingly obvious. The continual ingress of bright light, especially short-wavelength light, is known to disrupt the production of the melatonin that is crucial for the beginning of the sleep process. And, of course, the surge in persistent screen use in the 21st century compounded this.

Even without knowledge of that mechanism, it’s not new for an employer to use bright lights to keep their employees awake on long, boring shifts (just look at any 21st century supermarket). In space, this is even easier–artificial light is the only solution when not far too close to a star, and the idea of matching starship internal lighting to the 24-hour cycle of an Earth day went into the trash in the earliest generations of deep space work as it was realised how badly this affected productivity.

No, the biggest change here comes with the deliberateness of the attempt not just to keep people awake, but to have a lasting and measurable effect on the ability to sleep later. Combining vascometrics data with room sensors and scheduling information, the ship’s computer can measure and control the lux effect of its lighting according to how best to a) help keep the organic crew awake for an economically optimum duration and b) disrupt later sleep–the logic being that, eventually, employees will no longer even try to sleep unless they’re sure they’re ready to drop.

Just one of a multitude of subtler nudges to go along with the forceful shoves that REZQ use to squeeze more out of their organic resources.

Sometimes, Thom gets to put his feet on solid ground. Occasional corporo-bureaucratic necessities — such as undertaking in-person psychometric tests, or providing synchronised interior-exterior bodyscan data for the company database that can’t be provided by vascometrics– require turning up in person in a certain place at a certain time.

The company to which REZQ subcontract this work in turn subcontract to another company, who, through algorithmically-calculated layers of procurement and tendering, have established a small manned office on a massive, crudely-geoengineered planet whose name is a near-unpronounceable concatenation of dozens of brand identities.

The planet itself is vast, and has a gravitational pull many times the Earth equivalent. This would normally be impossible to occupy. However, it’s one of those places founded by a now-defunct and seemingly lunatic company from before true FTL (when planets closer to Earth would be much cheaper to colonise, if you could figure out a way of doing it). This company, and some others who jumped on the bandwagon, had figured out a way of creating pockets of localised antigravity, using the same technology as artificial gravity on starships.

Inside this small radius, Earthlike gravity is in place, and life can carry on more or less as normal: offices, commerce; some dwellings. Powered by a huge, robust geothermal power generation system, this generator could work for thousands of years, assuming it doesn’t break down (repair would be near-impossible; the process of using hardened drones that put the barebones in place could not be repeated now in anything like a cost-effective way when there are so many other cheap planets to plunder).

It’s inkeeping with the way people tend to do things now that this vestigial planet is still exploited, even though nobody really understands or takes responsibility for the how the planet came to be, or how it should be maintained or secured for the future. In fact, the risk of catastrophic breakdown is part of the attraction, as it makes the planet very cheap to occupy, and so the chosen venue for all kinds of cost-conscious companies to use as an outpost.

Of course, the office Thom needs to visit is only open for a tiny part of the day. And rarely at the times they advertise. So, as is often the case, there’s a lot of waiting around. A lot of waiting around being faintly anxious that, somehow, the gravity balancing system will fail, and suddenly you’ll find yourself crushed like an empty can of SPEED COFFEE.

[a gabbled, angry, spittle-flecked voice, cutting into the PA on the ship as many such vascometrics-triggered commercials often do]

WAKE UP!

We caught you again, thinking about sleep. This is the fourth time in the last hour that the alpha wave levels in your occipital lobe have peaked! You think you have time for sleep? Let me tell you buddy, life is a sliver of light between two infinite walls of darkness, and you gotta hit your targets before that second wall hits you!

Yeah, sure, I know what you’re gonna say. “I need sleep”! “I’m too poor to get my central nervous system refitted”. Good thing some of us were smart enough to solve our problems instead of just whining about them! That’s how we invented SPEED COFFEE!

Now, with SPEED COFFEE, we can give losers like you a helping hand… or, more accurately, a kick up the ass!

Powerful amphetamines, with realistic coffee flavour! SPEED COFFEE!

Beat laziness, hit targets, make money, and be an all-round better person. SPEED COFFEE!

Over 40mg of our patented blend of levoamphetamine, dextroamphetamine, and other secret ingredients in every self-heating cup! SPEED COFFEE!

Stay awake and stay productive. Just rip the foil lid, pull the tab and SPEED COFFEE is hot and ready to drink before you can say “ARGH! MY HANDS ARE BURNING!”

Somno say you need more sleep. Get real. Those jerks would say that, right? We know how much sleep you need, and it’s less than you think. So stop doing it. Stop thinking about it. And drink SPEED COFFEE. If you’re hearing this commercial, it’s in a vending machine NEAR YOU.

SPEED COFFEE!!

Sleep when you’re dead!

SPEED COFFEE!!

Buy it, you lazy piece of garbage!

SPEED COFFEE!!

While magical thinking is a common habit that many advertisers rely on to sell their worthless junk, Thom isn’t exceptionally vulnerable to it–he’s not got a strong belief in miracles. Odd then that he has such a superstitious relationship with gambling scratchcards.

These little broken promise coupons have been around for centuries, and they’ve not really changed much. Petrochemical-based synthetic paper has replaced wood pulp paper, but otherwise they’d be recognisable to someone from the 21st century: some kind of colourful artwork arranged around a baffling theme; brazen lies about life-changing sums; matrices of silvery scratch panels; bewildering small print and loopholes on the reverse.

Maybe they’ve stayed such a constant because of their expert, low-overhead manipulation of a seemingly endless resource: the accumulated pools of hope that even the most desolated people can find deep inside themselves. For Thom, the process of obtaining a scratchcard begins with the decision–usually impulsive–to buy it in the first place. He’s not a habitual gambler (yet) but he’s definitely been guilty of acting on a certain  feeling. More often than not, if he gets the feeling–something that happens most frequently when he is standing in a line and he sees an affordable scratchcard positioned to take advantage of bored, wandering eyes–he will buy one.

Obeying that feeling and making that purchase is the beginning of a process that can last for days.

Planning to scratch that first panel in a few hours’ time. Revealing the first symbol, and trying to infer meaning from it: how much would I get if I got three of these diamonds/safes/money bags? Would it be enough? How much of my debt could I pay down? 

Setting goals for putting off revealing the next panel. After I’ve done the cargo inventory. Once I’ve updated the subscription trackers. When I’ve chased the customer surveys. 

Revealing another symbol, and being deluged by speculation: what does this mean? What do the rules say about this? Can I still win? 

Finally, after hours or days of this, depending on the card, he will be unable to resist, and frantically scratch the rest off the paper clean, only to be crushed by the reality of failure once more. He’ll toss the card and vow never to buy another–what’s the fucking point?

But he never means it. And each time that he relents, startng the process again, it takes longer. Eventually, at this rate, he’ll reach the point where he has a scratchcard permanently tucked into a pocket, with one panel left unscratched, afraid to finish the job and collapse the potential outcomes into the inevitably disappointing truth.

Somewhere underneath this spiral into ritualistic absurdity is one idea, glinting off that tiny pool of hope deep inside: you haven’t lost until you’ve scratched off the last panel. Thom’s not bright enough to see the gigantic metaphor staring him in the face. But somewhere, if only in the most dispersed and diffuse version of conscious thought, he might be able to perceive that, if can just transfer this logic to the rest of his life, maybe he can cling on just a little bit longer. As long as he doesn’t forget that all scratchcards have an expiry date.

Angel Fish is an old ship that has been modified, rebuilt, cut up, and reconfigured more times than anyone has kept the records for. As a result, some pretty lunatic decisions have been made that have left some parts of the ship with nothing but a few millimetres of external hull skin as the floor.

Given that there’s no record of where these weak points might be–as the one thing that every entity modifying the ship has done is applied new coats of paint, making it impossible to tell the ship’s skin from any other alloy floor–it’s all too easy to find yourself in a situation where a dropped tool could puncture the hull. And in a pressurised room, and with a fatigued and corroded alloy for a hull, this can get serious fast.

If you know how to look–if can get past the NDAs, the gatekeepers, and the security systems; if you can get past the encryption, the proprietary formats and the jargon–you could probably find, at any large organisation, a number of documents, policies and procedures pertaining to risk.

Managing risk is the topic of a billion tedious corporate seminars. How do you identify risks? How do you eliminate them? If you can’t eliminate them, how do you minimise them? If you can’t minimise them, how do you mitigate their effects?

Business continuity plans. Contingency matrices. Decision trees. The reality of “risk” at the highest levels of the corporate chain is often a reality that is held at arm’s length–if not a galaxy arm’s length–with many physical and social barriers to protect those who, ultimately, are responsible.

For a REZQ recovery operative living and working from overlapping job to job, there are few tasks that don’t carry some kind of real risk. Whether physical, financial, psychological or existential, a REZQ operative gets used to the kinds of risk that can’t be held back. Risks that have to be faced down, or faced up to.

And, sometimes, a situation comes along that threatens a risk that is profoundly grave. And as powerless as someone like Thom usually is to eliminate or minimise risks–not being in a position where he could, for instance, choose to avoid or offload a task onto somebody else–the only path left is to mitigate the effects of that risk.

If you’re the kind of creature that has them, you tie up your long floppy ears out of the way. You find the hardest-wearing clothing you can scrounge up from whatever old lockers are aboard your ship. If you can afford it, you rent a few plates of 24-hour self-destructing body armour from a public 3D Printer to protect some of the key areas.

Then, finally, you think about the risk, and you compare it with the others in your life. The risk of unemployment. The risk of debts being called in. The risk of being chased down by a Revenue Protection agency and the fatally vicious circle of a Debtors’ Colony.

You think about the risk. And because you can’t decide, time makes the decision for you. And once again, it’s irrelevant what the nature of the risk is: all that matters is that the risk is yours alone.

“It’s not self-service, sir…”

REZQ have a de facto monopoly in recovery services in many of the less-well-explored and more desolate sectors of this arm of the galaxy. This means they charge way too much for a subscription to feel affordable, but are just cheap enough that companies will take a subscription to REZQ rather than have their employees try to fix dangerous, potentially expensive problems themselves. The problem comes when you get somebody who is a subscriber, but who wants to try and negotiate down the cost of the recovery once REZQ have arrived.

This usually takes the form of trying to strip back “extras” like voidwear hire: if part of the recovery would involve extra-vehicular activity for the customer, and they don’t have a vacuum suit (fewer spacefaring people own them than you’d think), Thom would normally rent them a cheap one that is kept aboard the ship for that purpose–but some customers would rather close their eyes, put their fingers in their ears, hold their breath, and hope for the best.

Sometimes, though, they will actually manufacture a means to dispute the final invoice. This could be by trying to carry out parts of the recovery themselves–going for a PHOME thrower to repair their own damage (even when using it would be even less safe than usual). Or they might supply their own janky home-made tools with cracked software and insist that Thom use those intead of his own, to avoid the tool hire surcharges.

“I’m not paying for that, I did it for you!”

“How much? I’ll do without!”

“You broke that. I saw you. I want a discount.”

The customer is always right. And out here, the customer is often some kind of poor dickhead not unlike your average REZQ Peripatetic Frontline Team recovery operative. Unfortunately, that means they’re probably just as impoverished, tired, desperate, and willing to cut corners as they are. It’s a delicate balancing act: acquiesce to the customer too much, and margins can shrink in a way that get you sanctioned. But if you don’t give the customer enough, you can kiss goodbye to the high feedback rating you’re compelled to collect after every job–or they might even sue you.