2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  It’s the Pizza guy at the door. He unhooks the chain, opens it up, takes the two big boxes and transfers him credit from his spex. It’s the last of the few quid he made by trading in some of his points on the Smash/Grab server. Means his ranking has taken a major kicking, but it’s all good if it means he can feed everyone for a few days. Plus they’ll be more runs, more points. Standard.

  He carries the boxes back into the lounge, drops them down onto the threadbare carpet, in front of his little brother and sister who are busy watching Korean samurai cartoons. He smiles as they set upon them, steam bellowing from the boxes as they flip open the lids.

  “Try and leave some for dad, yeah? If he ever wakes up.” He glances over at the sofa, shakes his head. His dad is flat out as usual, immersion headset strapped to his face, empty unbranded cider cans littering the floor around him, ashtrays full of spliff-ends spilling out on the carpet.

  Grids bends over and grabs a couple of slices for himself, rustles his brother’s thick hair playfully before heading back to his room. On the way there he pauses in the hallway to stare down at his feet, the Eugine Sureshot Limited Edition trainers still immaculate. They’re so clean that he almost never wants them to leave the flat, but as he watches cities bloom in infinite fucking detail on the carpet around him he knows there’s no point in that. He’ll have to watch his back wearing them, that’s for sure, but they need to be seen. It’s still a week until the street date, and these are the only pair in the ends. He made sure of that. Unparalleled significance. Until then, at least, this is his world now.

  ZERO HOURS

  by Tim Maughan

  First published in Futures Exchange (Sep. 2013), edited by Frank Swain

  • • • •

  0714, Wanstead

  NICKI IS AWAKE even before her mum calls her from the other side of the door. She’s sat up in bed, crackly FM radio ebbing from tiny supermarket grade speakers, her fingers flicking across her charity shop grade tablet’s touchscreen. She’s close to shutting down two auctions when a third pushes itself across her screen with its familiar white and green branded arrogance. Starbucks. Oxford Circus. 4 hour shift from 1415.

  She sighs, dismisses it. She’s not even sure why she still keeps that notification running. Starbucks, the holy fucking grail. But she can’t go there, can’t even try, without that elusive Barista badge.

  Which is why she’s been betting like mad on this Pret a Manger auction, dropping her hourly down to near pointless levels. It says it’s in back of house food prep, but she’s seen the forum stories, the other z-contractors who always say take any job where they serve coffee, just in case. That’s how I did it, they say, forced my way in, all bright faces and make up and flirting and “this coffee machine looks AMAZING how does it work?” and then pow, Barista badge.

  But Nicki doesn’t work like that. She’s not one of those girls, she doesn’t feel comfortable playing it that way. She just likes to keep her head down and get the work done, get out, get home.

  Her tablet pings once, flashes a notif, pings again and flashes a second. Two auctions won. Both lower than she’d like, both lower than the national minimum, but it’s a start. It’s a reason to get out of bed. Her mum shouts her again, she hollers back. Before she gets up though she’s got the CopWatch wiki open in front of her, checking her route. London Transport Police drone spotted at Mile End, actual cops doing spot checks at Bank. Fuck it. She’s gonna have to change her route — she’s not put credit on her legit Oyster card for time, and she’s only reasonably sure the three hacked ones in her wallet will get her through to Zone 1 from right out here in the forgotten sprawl of Zone 4. Even if they do, re-routing round these checks are going to put an extra half hour on her trip.

  She’s out of bed, pulling on clothes, before her mum calls her for a third time.

  • • •

  0920, Oxford Circus tube station

  As she reaches the exit barrier at Oxford Circus there’s some kerfuffle on the other side, cursing and shouting, and as the crowd gets out of the way she can see what’s going on; security theatre breaking it’s own fourth wall as two cops wrestle with a guy and get him to the floor, gloved hands pulling back his hood to reveal the shock of his warped face, mutated beyond machine recognition into a disturbed alien mask. Nicki has seen it before, but it still surprises her that people would go to those ends, pumping their face full of QVC home botox injections just to fool the cameras.

  Misuse can lead to dangerous long term side effects, the EULAs warn. Plus they just look fucking painful. Apparently the swelling goes down after a while, but the stretch marks remain — plus if that’s the only way you can do business inside Zones 1 & 2 then you need to start jacking your cheeks and forehead up with that shit all over again.

  Nicki’s in the barrier gate now, people crowding behind her, eager to get out or crane a look at the guy that’s pinned to the floor. She glances back. No retreat. She steps forward and pops her wallet on the reader, hoping the right card is out of the RFID blocking envelope. She holds her breath. The gate bleeps dully, the barriers swing open, and she’s stepping out, head down, pink hoody up, past the sprawled, screaming guy with the face made of balloons.

  • • •

  1235, Pret A Manger, Oxford Street

  Two hour shift down and she’s not even seen a coffee machine, let alone some hipster barista she can flutter eyelashes at. She’s been stuck in a cold backroom sticking vacuum packed, pre-sliced organic cheddar into authentic French artisan baguettes she pulls out of a box from a bakery in Croydon.

  Her phone chimes in her pocket, vibrates against her hip. Shift over. She peels and drops plastic gloves into the bin and heads out to the main counter, is surprised by the sudden mass of bodies — it had been dead when she got here, but the early lunch crowd is in now. There’s the fucking coffee machine, steamy and hot and out of touch. She contemplates hanging around to see if she can grab the barista’s attention, but it’s getting too busy in here for that sort of shit, plus she needs to clock off and go, get to the next job.

  She finds the manager, he’d been all gruff and short with her when she turned up, but he seems more chilled now, friendlier — despite the fact the shop is getting busier. Maybe that’s why. He smiles and winks at Nicki, and she pulls out her aging Blackberry and scans the the QRcode he shows her on his tablet.

  Another chime, cash register sounds kerching, kerching, kerching

  Shift completed!

  £12.64 received.

  Achievement unlocked!

  Sandwich Stuffer Pro badge!

  • • •

  1330, outside Starbucks, Oxford Street

  Nicki sits soaking up skyscraper focussed rays, eating self made ham sandwiches out of tin foil wrappings, leeching wifi from Starbucks. Somewhere overhead rotors buzz, and she catches a glimpse of one of those Dabbawallah.net tiffin drones straining against it’s own payload as it vanishes behind cliffs of steel and glass, delivering Indian food to penthoused analysts in those tall, metallic tins that swing like bombs from its underside.

  She glances back down at her Blackberry, checks CopWatch again. More random stops on the Central line. Safer to walk. Lunchtime over.

  • • •

  1415, Boots the Chemists, Holborn

  Boots is busy, a steady flow of post lunch shoppers. Occasionally one of them stops and asks her or one of the two other zed-contractors she’s stacking shelves with for directions to some product they don’t even recognize the name of. She smiles politely, tries to explain she’s zero hours, and offers to find someone to help them. Invariably the customers just tut and twirl on their heels, walking away from her mid sentence. The two other girls she’s working with keep their heads down, don’t even bother to look up. Maybe it’s the best strategy.

  The work is fiddly, annoyingly so. Usually shelf stacking is pretty straightforward — but this time they’re all on lipsticks and each one needs to be slotted into the correct little
plastic hole on the display depending on colour and shade. Get it wrong and the shelf knows, and buzzes the app on her phone. She guesses it’s probably telling someone else too, building stats on her, trails of data ranking her for efficiency.

  She watches the other girls, both about her age. Similar clothes, with the oversized Boots t-shirts they were given over the top. She wonders how much they are getting paid — all the auctions are secret. Did they undercut her or the other way around?

  As she gazes at them the one nearest her, the one with the tight, straight black bob of hair, slips two of the lipsticks into a silver envelope and then into her jeans pocket. She recognizes the envelope, it’s made of the same material she keeps her Oyster cards in when she doesn’t want them to be scanned. RFID blocking. She pretends she hasn’t seen anything, turns back to the shelf and the lipsticks and the endless stupid holes.

  • • •

  1845, Boots the Chemists, Holborn

  Nicki and the other two zed-contractors are in the manager’s office, waiting for her to get off a call. It’s nice in here, Nicki thinks. Warm and quiet. There’s chairs and one of those old desktop computers with the big displays. Nicki wonders what it’s like to have a job where you get to sit down all day.

  The manger gets off the phone, and near silently walks over to them, showing them each her tablet so they can scan the QRcode. Nicki is last, before her the girl with the bobbed hair and light fingers. Chimes and kerchings. Nicki glances a look at the surface of the girl’s two-seasons-ago iPhone, catches perfectly rendered text on its OLED screen.

  Shift completed!

  £19.84 received.

  Nicki feels a rush of jealousy, anger. The girl is getting paid more than her. It’s pence, but.

  The manger reaches Nicki, presents her with the QRcode. She scans it. Chimes and kerchings.

  Shift completed!

  £19.24 received.

  Achievement unlocked!

  Shelf Stacker Pro Level 2 badge!

  The manger thanks them all, and the three girls shuffle out of her office, Nicki at the back. Something stops her before she makes it through the doorframe though, a cold grip of rage and injustice. She turns back to face the manager, who looks at her over the rims of her Samsung branded spex.

  -Yes?

  Nicki looks at her, at the floor. Rage tinged with shame.

  -That girl, with the black hair. She took some lipsticks. Put them in an RFID bag.

  -I see.

  The manager touches the side of her spex, talks to an unseen security guard. She thanks Nicki and taps her clipboard-tablet, gives her another QRcode to scan.

  Chimes and kerchings.

  Achievement unlocked!

  Shop-cop Pro badge!

  £5.20 bonus received!

  • • •

  2127, Wanstead

  Nicki lies on her bed, surrounded by books from what’s left of Wanstead’s library. Dali, Gaudi, Piccaso, Bosch, Warhol, Giraud. Her sketchbooks sprawl open around her, pencil scribbled designs sprawling across multiple pages; figures and textures, architectures and crowds, trees and towers.

  Nicki is on her tablet, transferring credit from the RetailWarriors app to her PayPal account. She checks the total. £3,467. Still not enough to cover the first term of graphic design at the Wanstead Community Academy.

  Maybe next year.

  She slides the books off her bed onto the floor, sets the alarm for 0645, and slips under the sheets. She’ll have to wake up early again, before even her mum calls her.

  COLLISION DETECTION

  by Tim Maughan

  First published in Futures Exchange (Dec. 2013), edited by Frank Swain

  • • • •

  ONCE, when she’d been working on the Turkmenistan pipeline project, they’d been relegated to just a video feed for all contact. It seemed archaic, cold. Heavily pixelated due to ancient bandwidth levels. “Ghetto compression” she’d called it, and they’d laughed because that’s what talking about poor people always made them do.

  But even then, as he watched her sleep in that barebones foreign hotel room, he’d found a way to interact, silently moving his finger tips in front of the pin-hole of his tablet’s camera; filtering light passing through their portal to play shadows across her unaware face.

  He remembers this as the scanner slides him backwards into its unseen tube, swallowing him in steel and plastic, and he imagines the dappled light of external fluorescence and internal LEDs playing across his face.

  Timo’s voice is full of its usual Dutch calm and reason, the soft gutturals consistent even through the scanner’s tinny speakers.

  -So the gel we’ve injected into your face and arm will be settling in quite nicely now. The scanner will map it, your nervous system, and where the two touch.

  -And it’ll be ready to use…?

  -Oh, when we’re done here you should be good to go. The software is quick, this new version. We just upload the map to the servers, you share it with your… partner, whoever.

  -Okay.

  Over the speakers he can hear the clatter of typing, Timo’s fingers on rare physical keys.

  -Okay. How are you feeling? Everything good in there?

  -Yeah. Fine.

  More clattering.

  -Good. Good. So this should take about an hour. I’m here though, ok? You want or need anything just shout. Try not to get bored, huh?

  -I’ll try.

  -Good. Hey, you want some music on? I can’t give you too much in the way of entertainment in there because we don’t want to overstimulate your CNS, but I can play some music?

  He holds his breath, listening to the tube come alive around him. A low frequency hum. A rhythmic, muffled electronic heartbeat. The gentle, polite whirr of motors as sections of the tube rotate around him. He’s not sure if he’s imagining it but he feels hairs stand on end, the brush of invisible magnetic fingers as they caress and fumble at his near naked, slabbed body.

  -No, no music. I’m fine.

  @CNN

  San Francisco—Sea-steading guru faces continued controversy

  Self described “neo-reactionary, transhuman, and disruption monarchist” Gale Klass was in trouble again today, as he described workers on his still to be completed floating city project as “lucky to be having the opportunity to help forge the future.” The comment came after Bay area officials raised concern over pay and conditions for workers on the ambitious engineering project, which Klass describes as “a vital step in liberating honest Americans from the tyranny of economic regulation and the shortsightedness of democracy.” SF Mayor Bill Hatchings responded by saying “Mr Klass might be on his own when he floats off out into the Pacific, but while he’s in the Bay he’s still on my turf.”

  >>Blink to read more<<

  Timo waves at him one last time, as he pulls down the garage door entrance to his studio-slash-operating room. It’s not quite what he’d envisioned a backstreet grinder clinic would look like, and—despite his subtly animated tattoos and achingly faux-scruffy beard—neither is Timo. What the drop-out med student turned artist has just done to him is technically illegal, yes, but then the Amsterdam authorities have a penchant for turning their eyes away from such things, hence Timo is able to operate out of this prime location overlooking the Singel. Just across the water from the flower market. Lovely. A certain clientele expects a certain standard of surroundings, he tells himself.

  He takes the tram home, Timo advising him it’s best not to drive. It makes him uncomfortable, itchy, sitting here amongst the unwashed, unchosen. Even through his face mask, the stench of untweaked, un-perfumed sweat and fried-food flatulence scalds his nerve endings. He touches fingertips to his cheek, feels a numbness there that he knows is caused by more than the December air, that recalls childhood memories of dentist’s anaesthetic, feels a sickly tumour like solidity under his skin where the gel’s excesses are still dissolving into his blood. It reminds him of touching his mother’s heavily botoxed face as he wip
ed confused, angry tears from her dying eyes.

  His hand brushes against the seat—he’s forgotten his gloves—and he instinctively reaches for the anti-bac spray in his jacket pocket, and applies it to his fingers. As they return the small tube they brush against a larger metallic cylinder. He tries to resist it, but finds himself removing it from the pocket anyway, obediently touching the top so that previously invisible LEDs flare on its brushed aluminium surface, showing charge and signal levels. He rolls the cylinder between his fingers.

  Timo said to give it a few hours

  She’s probably not up yet anyway

  Instinctively he unscrews the lid, disgorges the two floppy deep-sea invertebrate-like contact lenses, inserting each one into a welcoming eye. A microsecond of flash bulb white-out. The interior of the tram spins, then steadies, feels heightened. A flurry of peripheral notifications. A sense of known, sprawling depth beyond the corporeal.

  She’s probably not up yet anyway

  He pings her. A few tense seconds of buzzing and chimes.

  And then the empty seat on the tram starts to reorganise itself, attempting to cope with two realities merging, software trying to make sense of conflicting context. Through the window the blur of passing shops and the never-ending stream of bikes fades and disappears, mercifully replaced by the view out of her window, across the bay at the three towering black pyramids, an unfinished science fiction cliché surrounded by multi-limbed stick-insect cranes and scaffold cages, stark against the dawn sky.

  And then that is blocked from his sight as she manifests, on the empty seat, her hands air-typing at unseen interfaces, windows of data lighting her face with a simulated, non-existent glow. She turns to face him, and his tension starts to lift.