Christina, Act 1
Dressed in a muted gray short-sleeved blouse, dark blue jeans, and a waist-length maroon waistcoat, buttoned all the way up to her neck, she didn’t necessarily stand out in a crowd. Given the breakdown of local demographics, she could rely additionally on looking, on first blush, like she could well live in this part of the city. As a person of color, she could easily be mistaken for a local.
But Christina Kincaid had not only never lived in downtown Minneapolis, dead-center of the northern Sixth Territory, she had also never lived further west in the Empire than the Third Territory. Raised in a devoutly Evangelical household, she had grown up as a model citizen in the Weiland Empire. She supposed that was why her mother and father had been surprised and more than a little off-put by her decision, upon acceptance to Brown University, to declare Journalism as her major. They had fully expected her to take up either Education, as her mother had, or Religious Studies, as had her father.
Seated in the café with her pocket digital recorder and her small notebook situated before her, she kept checking the doorway whenever the little bells above the entrance jingled. She didn’t know for certain what her source looked like, only that she should be looking for someone, according to the email she’d received, wearing a white scarf.
When finally a woman came into the café wearing said article wrapped loosely around her neck, Christina found herself puzzled. From the tone and word use in the email, Christina had been expecting a man to be her informant; instead, she found herself being approached by a middle-aged woman, on the tall side, wearing a puffy purple coat, weathered jeans, and solid but scuffed sneakers.
“Ms. Kincaid,” the woman asked, raising one pale brown eyebrow. Where Christina blended in with the neighborhood, this woman did not- Caucasian, dressed somewhat plainly, and casting furtive glances every couple of paces, as if she didn’t belong in this part of the city. If she were trying to be inconspicuous, she was doing quite poorly at it.
“I am. What’s your name,” Christina asked, using a quick wave to indicate the chair across from her. As the woman seated herself, Christina waggled her digital recorder for her to see, and the contact let out an exhausted sigh.
“You can call me Debra, even though that’s a lie,” said ‘Debra’. “I can’t give you my real name.”
“I’ve heard that from just about everybody I’ve tried to talk to,” Christina observed, opening her little notebook and jotting down a quick note for herself for later reference. “Why is that?”
“Because Ganges makes you sign a contract before they’ll actually let you start working in one of their Centers,” said Debra, looking aside and raising a finger to snag a server’s attention. The young man came over with a little order pad and pen at the ready. “French vanilla cappuccino, please, with a couple of ice cubes to cool it. Thank you.” The server nodded and scurried away back behind the serving bar, quickly going through his motions.
“Can you remember what the contract stipulates? It doesn’t have to be exact, mind you, but you’re the second person to bring this up,” Christina asked, nudging the recorder closer to Debra across the table.
“Well, I can’t remember everything, but I do recall a section about sharing internal practices, policies and procedures,” Debra began. “It’s a big no-no, and anybody found to have done it will be faced with civil litigation. There’s also a time-compete clause, so if you have a second job, even if you’re only working for Ganges part-time, then you have to put your schedule with the Center ahead of any other employer’s time, even if you’re self-employed. And oh,” she said, snapping her fingers and pointing rapidly at Christina. “That’s another thing; anything you develop or create while you’re working for Ganges, they get to claim a minimum 75% ownership or stake in.” She shook her head and let out another tired sigh. “It’s disgusting.”
“So, if someone, say, wrote a book, or created a product, while they were working for Ganges, the company just gets to claim most of the ownership of it? How does that work?”
“I don’t know,” said Debra with a shrug. “But I know that if you don’t sign the contract, they don’t bring you onboard. There was one guy in the group I was brought on with, he tried to cross that section out, but when he went to turn in his contract, they pulled him aside and asked him about it. He told our Tutor, that’s the person that does your group’s orientation the first couple of days, a Tutor, he told the Tutor that he had written a couple of books of his own, worked with a small publisher, and that he wasn’t going to let Ganges just take claim of any books he wrote while he was working for them. So the Tutor had one of their security people show him out and tore up his contract, right there in front of all of us.”
Christina jotted down another quick note, and asked, “Do you remember his name?”
“Not his first name, but his last name was either Mellon, or Mellons, or Mallon, something like that,” Debra replied. Christina wrote each of these iterations down, followed by ‘Check alternative spellings’ in her notebook.
“I noticed when you were walking over here a slight limp,” Christina noted. “Did that happen on the job?”
“Yes it did,” Debra answered. “I worked in Storage. We basically have this narrow little workstation, and we scan products that come in on flats, and once they’re scanned, these Stowcarts, these little robots with tall storage carts mounted on top of them, automatically wheel their way over to our station. The computer screen tells us which slot the system recommends, and we climb up or down this sliding ladder mounted to a rail in our station to put things up high on the cart, or move it aside and just pop the product in.”
Christina quickly checked her recorder; she had four hours’ time left on it before she’d need to port over her files. She realized she hadn’t moved anything from the device to her laptop in almost four months, and everything she had on the recorder centered around her recent obsession with the online retailer. She needed to do some compiling and cross-referencing, and sooner rather than later.
I should probably finally talk to my editor, too, she thought. “So what was the injury, Debra? How did it happen?”
“Well, have you heard from anybody else you’ve talked to about ‘making rate’,” Debra asked.
“Yes, I have. There’s a certain number of products you have to process each hour at a minimum. It’s the same thing for Storage workers?”
“Yeah, and they’re all fucking brutal,” Debra said. “So, one night, our area manager decides we’re going to do a ‘Power Hour’, where they push everybody to try and hit as high a rate as they possibly can. Every now and then they’ll give the ‘winner’ of the Power Hour a Ganges gift card for, like, five credits, but even that’s a crapshoot. So anyway, thank you,” she said to the server, who’d finally brought her drink over to her. “Anyway, I’m barely able to do more than make rate most of the time as it is, and the Power Hour comes along, and I’m hupping up and down that ladder to put stuff away. I’m coming down the ladder to get more stuff, and the ladder shifts under me, and I come down the wrong way on my ankle.”
“Oof,” said Christina in sympathy.
“Oh, it wasn’t a little twist; I HEARD something like a branch snapping, and I fell over screaming.”
“Jesus Christ! So, did anybody hear you over the conveyors and Rollbots?”
“Yeah, my area manager, and she came running,” Debra replied. “She helps sit me up, and pulls my shoe off to look at it. She told me to stay down, to just not move, and she ducks off. She came back about three minutes later with this ice wrap, tells me to strap it up and take these painkillers she grabbed out of a supply vending machine, they’ve got, like, a dozen of them around the warehouse, and then helps me put the shoe back on.”
“Even though it was broken?”
“We didn’t know it was broken at the time,” Debra said with a sigh. She sipped at her drink, looking down at the table, her shoulders slumped. She exuded an aura of defeat, shaking her head. “It was sore as hell, but the ice wrap and the drugs dulled it down to a minor throb, and Carla told me I didn’t have to finish Power Hour, that they were going to give me an exemption from rate for the rest of the night.”
Christina made another note in her notebook, checking her recorder once again to make sure it was still recording. It occasionally would just cut out, but she alternative was using a program on her cell phone, and she didn’t want to do that since the fidelity was shit. “How long did that last?”
“Oh, I went to the hospital right after work, which was awkward, trying to drive with my left foot,” Debra said. “And of course, they did an x-ray, and told me my ankle was broken. I called the center and talked to the folks in HR, and they told me I had to bring in copies of the paperwork from the hospital in order to process a worker’s comp claim and medical leave. It took a while, and I had to contact this service to come pick up my car and take it to my building while a taxi took me back to the center.”
Christina nodded, rolling her hand in a forward motion to propel Debra onward.
“Anyway, after a couple of months and physical rehab, I headed back, and of course, I was moving kind of slow. That first night back, Carla comes by my station three different times, and she drags me to the dogs and back for having a shitty rate. And the last night of the week, about half an hour before the end of shift, she comes by my station with two guys from security and tells me I’m fired for repeatedly not making rate too many days in a row.”
“They didn’t give you any exemptions for having just recovered from a broken ankle?”
“Their policy is that employees shouldn’t come back to work in the center until they’re back up to 100%,” Debra said. She polished off her cappuccino, pushing the cup aside. “Frankly, that’s bullshit if you ask me. I mean, how is somebody supposed to come back completely ready to go when the way they push people requires getting used to, you know?”
Christina nodded, turning off her recorder and tucking it into her messenger bag. Pen poised above her notebook, she took a deep breath and looked Debra in the eyes. “Debra, I know you’re scared of facing any kind of legal action from Ganges, but I have to ask; is there any way I could convince you to go on record with your real, legal name?”
Debra looked aside, peering out the window at the passing foot traffic of downtown Minneapolis. “You know, I wish I could, but I can’t. There’s no way to fight something as big as Ganges. They have more people in their Legal division than live in my apartment building, and they could crush the life out of me without even batting an eye. There’s just no point, Ms. Kincaid. I’m sorry I can’t be more help,” she said, rising from her seat. “I wish you the best of luck.”
And just like that, she was gone once again, leaving Christina with her fourth interview with an ex-Ganges employee, and nobody willing to go on the record.
**
The narratives all seemed to run largely along the same lines, she discovered as she reviewed all of her notes the following afternoon. She’d taken a direct flight and picked up her car from short-term parking at the airport, breaking at least three different traffic laws on her way back home to her apartment. Upon getting in, she immediately addressed the bills that had gathered in her mailbox, then set to work transferring her files from the voice recorder to her laptop.
The files were still transferring as she reviewed her handwritten notes from all four subjects, but the overall theme seemed to run to this- Ganges’ Processing Centers were vile grindhouses that pounded their workers into a pile of broken parts. The first subject, calling himself ‘Paul’, had gotten his left hand caught in something called ‘The Flat-Stamper’, which pressed the shipping labels on the outgoing packages. He claimed there was supposed to be a guard plate in place between his console and the device itself, but according to his story, the plate had fallen off of its mount, and when he told maintenance about it, rather than risk shutting down the packaging line to get it fixed, his area manager had told him to simply ‘be mindful’ until the end of shift, when they could get it put back in place. Even being mindful, his hand had slipped at one point, and he lost most of his left hand to the machine.
Her second subject, a woman calling herself ‘Evelyn’, had been terminated for taking too much ‘Time Off Task’, or TOT, over the course of a week. She’d had a stomach bug, of the vicious, running-to-the-bathroom-five-times-an-hour variety, and it had caused enough trouble that the higher-ups at her facility had deemed her unfit to continue employment in the center.
Her third subject, ‘Wayne’, had perhaps been the only interviewee whose termination from a Processing Center that Christina sort of understood being let go. According to Wayne, the Processing Centers had an attendance policy that worked by allotting each employee a set number of hours of unpaid time off, shorthanded as UTO, and paid time off, PTO. If an employee’s UTO balance went negative, they were terminated, and that was precisely what had happened to Wayne. However, his explanation of how his UTO had been used up made her take his testimony into account with the others; he’d been in the midst of a fairly contentious custody battle with his ex-wife, and ended up in court hearings on numerous occasions that had not been previously planned. At first, when he called into the HR line to tell them he wouldn’t be in to work because of a hearing, they had been more than happy to use his accrued PTO, the balance of which was upped every week with the deposit of a couple of hours. But he quickly ran out of that, which forced them to take from his UTO, which only refilled every 90 days.
Within a two-month period, he was out of UTO, and when he came into work one day, security immediately approached him after he scanned his badge for entry through one of the revolving turnstiles, and told him to turn over his badge and leave the property. “They didn’t accept court hearings as an exempted absence unless it was planned, like, months in advance,” Wayne had informed her. “I get that they want to cut back on absenteeism, but it wasn’t like I was just goofing off; I had to take care of that nonsense with my ex-wife and make sure I got my time with my girls.”
And now, of course, there was ‘Debra’ and her broken ankle. In every case, the takeaway was effectively the same, that Ganges wore people down and tossed them aside like malfunctioning equipment, quickly and easily replaced by the next batch of folks willing and eager to exchange their time, effort, comfort and, apparently, dignity, for the pay and benefits that Ganges constantly boasted about in their promotional materials and press releases.
Convincing her editor to give her the green light for her idea would be difficult, Christina thought. She had no named sources to go with, since all four had used pseudonyms, and every other story on the internet and mainstream media seemed to have nothing but praise for e-commerce giant.
Over the course of two following days, however, she edited, clipped and compiled her audio logs into a single forty-minute file, which she saved to a flash drive along with a quickly constructed text document, outlining her idea and a basic game plan for how to proceed if she got the go-ahead. When she felt ready, she headed into the offices at The Sentinel, and made a beeline for the paper’s editor-in-chief, Will Trapper.
She offered no verbal explanation, simply slipping into his office quietly and handing him the flash drive, then wheeling about on her heel and marching to her cubicle. She hadn’t sat down in it in what felt like ages, but everything was as she had last left it, including the thin film of dust which had settled over everything. Christina Kincaid didn’t sit a desk for long; she had no desire to be one of those drones who dragged the internet and then repackaged other outlets’ and bloggers’ posts as if they were her own. Leave that shit for the op-ed people, she thought.
She was about to get up and fetch a cup of coffee from the breakroom when Trapper filled the gap that would lead from the cubicle to the narrow aisles of the office, the flash drive held between his right thumb and forefinger, his left hand stretched out to clutch the top of the wall divider between cubicles. “You think it’ll work,” he asked simply.
“I’ve already got a guy who can do it, he’s just waiting on me. And the thousand Imperial credits he charges to do it.” Trapper handed her the flash drive, then reached into his dark blue blazer’s inner pockets, pulling out a thin manila envelope, offering this to her as well.
“There’s fifteen-hundred in there, should cover your fee for the papers and a plane ticket, unless you’re thinking of going to the one right in Holeck.”
“That’s the plan, actually,” Christina said, her voice rising a little in pitch, her cheeks hurting as they expanded in a broad smile.
“Do it right,” Trapper said, waggling a finger at her. “I’ll talk to our people in legal, see how best to cover our asses in the fallout. Keep me updated, too.”
“I will, sir,” Christina said, tucking the envelope into her purse and making a dash out of the building. She only hoped that her contact would still be in his usual haunt.
**
The papers had been meticulously forged, and Shadow had been both methodical and very open about how he created her new, virtual footprint online. His usual haunt, it turned out, was an old-fashioned diner on 7th Street that looked like it had once been a very long train car. Shadow himself was, at first glance, a fairly unimpressive specimen, a short, dumpy little man with more hair visibly sprouting out of the ‘v’ of his button shirt than on his head. His arms looked to be too short for his frame, the result, he’d informed her on one occasion, of a mild birth defect. Still, it hadn’t stopped him from getting ahead in life.
Ostensibly, Shadow worked for the 3rd Territory Department of Motor Vehicles, but in truth, made most of his living as a hacker and forger of false identities. Christina had made contact with him two years prior, when she’d been investigating the disappearance of a local Territory Councilman. It had turned out that the Councilman was a closeted homosexual, and he’d vanished himself with Shadow’s help because he couldn’t take living a lie anymore. With the forger’s assistance, he’d made his way with a whole new identity to Miami, in the 1st Territory’s southernmost stretch.
Though she’d exposed what had happened to the Councilman, however, Christina had honored the Councilman’s wishes by not revealing the name of his new false persona, thus leaving him to live his life as he’d always wanted to. Shadow, however, had turned out to be an invaluable asset here, because he was even now showing her how easily he’d been able to hack into the very department he worked for in order to create her a fairly convincing background.
“So, this’ll be you for the time being,” he said, turning his laptop toward her across the table. He took a moment to snag a bite of his club sandwich, speaking with his mouth half-full of food. “Nancy Tulane, 28, divorced, no kids. And also, not the best with finding legal parking spots,” he added with a grin marred by mayonnaise.
“This is great, thank you, Don,” Christina said. It was part of their agreement that she wouldn’t use the title he’d earned among the less-than-savory clientele he usually served.
“Now, there is going to be one hiccup with this persona I’ve made for you,” Shadow said. He took a sip of his Coke through a straw and smacked his lips dramatically. “It only goes so deep, back to high school. Anybody goes rooting around for details on your childhood, they’re going to come up with bupkes, but the odds of that happening are pretty damned slim, and besides, 28 years ago, the internet was barely even a thing, you know?”
“So it should be good enough to get me into a Processing Center?” Shadow scoffed at her, flapping one hand dismissively.
“Those people are clowns. All they’re interested in really is figuring out how to make a few extra bucks off of people. Trust me, this’ll work just fine,” he said. He pulled out a small black box from the duffel bag he’d brought with him, and after several more minutes, he handed her a driver’s license for Nancy Tulane, a debit card, a credit card, and a citizen registration card. None of them looked false in the slightest.
She now had everything she needed, and with any luck, she’d get an inside look for herself at how Ganges operated their Processing Centers very soon.
****
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