(Excerpt from transcript of 4th day of hearing, Labour Relations Board enquiry in Daintree Distribution Centre 038884/17/42 Dunbar Commerce and Transport Hub Location)

  Osbourne: Staff should not masturbate during shifts.

  Daniels: ..Is that a question?

  Osbourne: I just want to know if you agree.

  Daniels:...If I agree?

  Osbourne: That staff should not masturbate during shifts.

  Daniels: I…

  Osboure: Is it that complicated?

  Daniels: It’s...I didn’t realise that this hearing primarily concerned the issue of masturbating during work hours. My understanding was that the focus of this enquiry was the working conditions of the mechanical non-organic employees of the warehouse-

  Osbourne: Distribution centre.

  Daniels: The non-organic employees of the distribution centre in question. I’m not an expert but…I don’t believe they masturbate at all?

  ----------

  CHAPTER 1

  “You can hold the fort yourself for five minutes,” said Maciek. “Say ten. I need to do a couple of things through the back,”

  “Okay.” said Iona. “Sure,”

  “When I come back through we can lock the door and get this place shut down. And then we can both get out of here. Hm?”

  “Great,”

  Maciek nodded. “You got another job to get to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” said Macieck. “Good for you. What you doing?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Iona. “Auntie Joan hasn’t really explained it yet. I guess I’ll be working with her, though?”

  Maciek pulled one of the wire shelves out of the nearest oven. “Security?” he asked.

  “That’s where Auntie Joan works, yes,”

  “Hm,” said Macieck. “She hasn’t told you what you’re going to be doing?”

  “She said she’d explain when I saw her,”

  “And you haven’t seen her?”

  “This is only my third day here,”

  Maciek set the shelf on the floor, leaning against the oven. “Well,” he said. “Let’s get closed up quick so you’re not late for your first meeting with auntie.”

  So now Iona was standing behind the counter by herself, wondering at her fantastic decision to come out here to Dunbar hub. Her aunt (probably not actually her aunt, probably a daughter of a friend of her granny or something) had finagled Iona into a job out here. ‘Out here’ being wherever Dunbar currently was, about a month’s travel past the end of civilisation. Iona hadn’t been keen on the idea at first but it was a job that, promise, wasn’t mining or farming. That was worth spending weeks living on a shelf in a freighter that was flying you away from anywhere people actually wanted to live.

  So far? So good. Typical minimum-wage-affordable accomodation on Dunbar was four-bedroom shared flats instead of dormitories like most places. The luxury was something Iona had never thought she’d experience. A bedroom to herself! A bathroom only four people shared! Dunbar was kind of a tatty old station with zero good shops and they were really stingy with the oxygen but privacy they had like hydrogen.

  And the job was amazing. Iona’s auntie/acquaintance had managed to get her into one of the three branches of McTavish’s Bakery And Sandwiches Number One In The Galaxy. For the first time in her life Iona wasn’t working twelve-hour shifts cleaning mining machines or cleaning tubes or harvesting fruit. She had spent the day taking nice-smelling hot trays out of big ovens and putting little rolls and donuts and things into bags for customers. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been so happy. The time had rocketed by. Iona hoped her other job, the one she was starting after this, wouldn’t be too hard, or too many hours.

  The door chime sounded and a customer walked in. Probably the last customer of the day, thought Iona, so she gave him a beaming full-force smile and a high-energy ‘Hi!’. It seemed to alarm him. He glanced up briefly at her and approached the counter slowly. “What can I get for you?” asked Iona brightly. The young man was peering into the cabinet where the hot food sat out to be sold. There were only a couple of dried-out samosas and a curled panini left. “Uh…” he said, staring at the empty shelves. “Have you not got any red puddings left?”

  “No, I’m sorry, this is all we’ve got,” said Iona with heartfelt regret. “Sorry, we’re just about to close,”

  “Yeah, I know,” said the customer. He gazed sadly at the panini. “Sometimes, usually, there are couple of things left, some of the puddings, battered sausages, you know? Black pudding…”

  “Sorry,” said Iona again. “Maybe come in a bit earlier tomorrow?”

  The man glanced up at Iona. He looked like he needed a good sleep and a hug. “This is the earliest I can get here,” he said. “I work...you know. It takes a while to get over here. I normally stop to get my tea here on the way home, and there’s usually something left...”

  “Do you live in the Beauly block too?” asked Iona. “I just moved in there, it’s really nice,”

  The man shook his head, perking up a bit. “No,” he said. “I’ve got my own place.”

  Iona’s eyes widened. “Really?” she asked. The guy didn’t look like someone who would have his own private accommodation. He was in his early twenties at most and dressed like a normal workie- hi-vis stuff, pockets and reflective strips all over, everything worn and shabby. Iona was about to ask him what he did for a job.

  “Oh, Iona!” said Maciek from behind her. “Iona, this is our favourite customer, Orson.”

  Orson’s round face was already starting to go red. “This is our new team member, Iona,” said Maciek. “Iona, I should have told you before. Orson comes in every day about this time. So when we turn the ovens off, I usually put whatever puddings are left into a bag and put it aside for Orson.”

  Maciek reached into the bottom of the heated cabinet and pulled out a foil-wrapped package. “See?” he said, pleased with himself. He placed the package down reverently on the top of the cabinet. “That’s for Orson. Black pudding, red pudding, battered sausage, battered haggis when we have it, that’s what you like, isn’t it Orson?”

  Orson nodded, blushing furiously. Iona smiled sympathetically at him.

  “Sometimes it’s less, sometimes it’s more, whatever we’ve got left.” continued Maciek. “But Orson just pays Orson price. Five coin flat rate, right?”

  “Right,” said Orson, frantically trying to get his handheld out of his pocket to pay.

  “Right,” said Iona. “So when I turn the ovens off, the leftover puddings get put aside for Orson,”

  “Right!” said Maciek. Orson extracted his handheld from his extremely orange jacket pocket and touched it to the payment bump on the counter. “Thank you, sir.” said Maciek. Orson pushed his handheld back into his pocket. Maciek picked up the package of puddings off the counter and presented it to Orson. Maciek and Iona both watched silently for maybe three minutes while Orson struggled out of his rucksack straps and wrestled the bag off his back. At last, red-faced, sweating, Orson took the foil package from Maciek and placed it gently into his bag.

  “Thanks,” he said. He zipped up his bag and toddled off towards the door, carrying it in front of him.

  “Good night, see you tomorrow!” called Maciek after him.

  “See you tomorrow, Orson,” said Iona. The door chimed as Orson left the bakery. Maciek turned to Iona. “That’s the most I’ve ever heard him say,” he said admiringly. “You’re good with customers,”

  Iona smiled shyly. “I hope so,” she said.

  “You’re going to be a great employee!” said Maciek, nodding firmly. “Now, go and lock that door. Let’s get tidied up quick so we’re not late for our next jobs.”

  Orson slung his rucksack, satisfyingly heavy with puddings, onto his back and started walking away from McT’s. He sighed with relief. Thank goodness that was over. He headed along the corridor towards the lifts. Mentally re-running the interaction that had just taken place, Orson screwed his eyes shut involuntarily. Oof. Could he still go back into McTavish’s? It had been very embarrassing but he didn’t think he’d actually done anything wrong. And now the new girl knew about his special discount so he could go in without worrying that he wouldn’t get his usual puddings package if she was there. So there wasn’t a problem? Except that it was embarrassing that he had been introduced to her as the discount puddings guy. He winced. Was that a problem? He felt like it was. The problem was that you couldn’t be the discount puddings guy without people knowing that you were the discount puddings guy. Did he not want the discount puddings? Orson felt the warm comforting weight in his backpack. Yes, he thought. He did.

  Orson started rummaging in his pockets for his key. The key unlocked other floors that weren’t available to your normal, bog-standard lift rider. Like the floor Orson lived on. He found the small metal tube and clutched it in his fist as he appproached the doors. He pushed the call button and a couple of seconds later one of the sets of doors opened. Must be quiet right now. Orson stepped into the lift and pushed his special key into the control panel. Immediately the number of floors available to choose from increased. Orson touched the screen to select his floor. He never selected any of the other floors, even though he could, if he wanted to. He didn’t want to. Orson might have his key but he didn’t strictly speaking- have authorisation. On a station going into unauthorised areas could get you into a lot of trouble. Orson had grown up on small stations like this one. He knew it was dangerous to go anywhere you hadn’t been specifically told you were allowed to be. His mum and dad had always told him you could just walk out into nothing or decompress a whole section of the station and kill everybody. Or even get into trouble with station control if anyone caught you somewhere you weren’t supposed to be.

  Orson enjoyed knowing that he could go to all these other floors, though. Even though he didn’t want to.

  The lift doors opened and Orson pocketed his key. He quickly zipped up his jacket , pulled up his hood and stepped out into the howling white void.

  It was so bright Orson could barely see. He grabbed the sides of his hood to keep it from being whipped back by the wind screaming along the corridor. Eyes screwed almost shut behind his glasses, Orson rushed across the corridor as the lift doors slid shut behind him. There was a door on the other side, unlocked. Orson could leave it unlocked because no-one ever came here other than himself. As far as he knew. Even the few homeless people on the station- very few, being homeless was extremely illegal- never ventured onto this floor.

  The door opened into the cleaning cupboard. All that was inside was a vacuum cleaner and the big coat Orson kept there for wearing while he was working on floor MF 049. Orson took off his bag and cocooned himself in the enormous coat, zipping it right up over his nose. Then he put on the tinted goggles he kept in the coat pocket, slipping them on over his glasses. He already had his earphones in, which would serve pretty well as earplugs. Orson put his backpack back on and now he was ready to work his second job of the day.

  This section of floor MF049 was about three miles long and it was Orson’s job to keep it spick and span. He didn’t know why. It was stripped bare of any debris or dust by the constantly roaring wind that scorched MF049 tundra-cold and dry. There was no reason for Orson to be here with a hoover. The thought had crossed his mind that maybe the real reason he’d been charged with cleaning this section of corridor was to have him here patrolling for the hourly cost of a cleaner rather than having to pay for security. The corridor seemed to need guarding even less than it needed cleaning, though.

  Orson dragged his vacuum-cleaner out into the wind-tunnel of the corridor and closed the cupboard door. He didn’t need to know why anyone wanted him to do this, he just had to keep up the routine and station control would keep crediting his account. He would hoover along to the ‘west’ one-point-five miles, and then walk back, and then he would hoover along to the east one-point-five miles and that would take him home. Then he and the hoover would spend the night in one of the two cupboards that constituted his flat. In the morning when he left for his first job he’d drag the hoover back along to the cupboard with him on the way to the lift and leave the hoover and his big coat in the cupboard. Then he’d go to his first job. When he got back from first job the coat and the hoover were waiting in the cupboard. Repeat. That was Orson’s routine.

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  It was all worth it to have his own place, even though his own place was technically two cupboards. It had been three cupboards, but the landlord of the middle cupboard had decided to evict Orson a couple of months ago. Orson had come along with his hoover to find a heap of his things strewn along the corridor, being tumbled further away by the howling wind. The landlord had put up the eviction notice in the morning when Orson went out to his first job and carried out the eviction before Orson got back. Now Orson and all of his stuff had to live in one cupboard because the other cupboard he had was (thankfully) the bathroom. The cupboard he lived in was a good-sized cupboard, though, enough room for Orson’s bed and his things (he didn’t have many) and the hoover. It was noisy, because of the constant howling wind outside, and cold, also because of the constant howling wind, but when Orson was tucked up in bed with his headphones on watching

  Seez he was cosy and happy. Every night he fell asleep quickly, belly full, tired from work, comfortable and quite content with his big coat over him like a bedspread. Every morning he woke up after a good six hours of rest, ready to drag himself back out into the blast winds of floor MF049 and off to his first job.

  ----------

  A small aircraft cut across the orange sky, completely silent. It left no trail behind it. Only the odd black flake broke from of the backs of the torn-open engines. If anyone had been there to see, they might have thought the quiet was strange but other than that just a small silver jet winging down towards the purple desert. Nothing obviously amiss.

  Nobody saw the plane crash.

  It hit the ground and spun. Sheets of smooth brittle rock slid across each other. The plane skidded and it scraped like a fingernail across a cheese grater. The undercarriage sheared off. The remains of the engines sheared off. The wings caught and tore off. The nose flattened like a piece of wood pushed onto a belt sander. The desert was a sea of purple slate. It shattered and flew like shrapnel. The aircraft didn’t slow much as it skited across the endless field of sharp tiles. It left scattered silver filings over the purple as its metal skin was abraded. It seemed as though it might just keep going, just being stripped away until the last curling sliver of metal was left blowing across the purple desert.

  The aeroplane’s smear-stop was arrested when the bit of it that was left ploughed into a pile of slate that made a sort of slate-dune standing up a bit from the ocean of purple. The landing was complete. A couple of shingles slid off the top of the heap and dropped to shatter on top of the slice of aircraft.

  At a little shy of 20,000 feet above the crash site, the vultures who’d been eyeing the plane with interest started to descend. Sometimes when a can like this opened up there was something nice inside.

  Some meat that was just slightly too alive to be appealing squirmed out of the crashed aircraft. A man, what was left of one. He pulled himself painfully across the scree. The tiles slid away under his hands as he tried to haul himself away from the plane. He slumped down and rolled onto his back. He lay there for a moment, gazing up with glazed eyes at the orange sky. He screamed.

  Above him the vultures wheeled. Definitely too alive.

  The man started laughing. He started pulling bits off of himself. Ripping out wiring. Twisting and snapping off metal parts. He had left a very promising-looking red smear behind him as he had dragged himself away from the wreckage but none of the parts of himself he was discarding looked worth flying down there for. Too shiny, very little meat still attached.

  The man stopped dismantling himself and lay surrounded by the torn-off parts.

  The vultures continued their descent.

  Things were looking up.

  ----------

  The DeVep staff had this theory that when the lift read their passes it would start to run just a little bit slow so that they would all clock in twenty, thirty seconds late and lose their first hour’s pay. This could be true but if any company had taught the station lifts to do that, it would be the one Orson worked for. Of all the business on this hub it would be Daintree that would be able to exercise control over the express lifts that everybody had to use.

  The DeVep staff were getting agitated, starting to pace and check their handhelds. The platform was getting busier, filling up shuffling everybody further and further forwards to wards the doors. Orson just hung back, still, smug because he always got to the express lifts twenty minutes to half an hour earlier than he needed to.

  Orson had never once clocked in late. He was very pleased with this fact about himself and also would not have admitted it to another person even under torture. When he got to the employee entrance Orson had twenty-three minutes to wait until the door would let him in. He got his handheld out again and went back to the video he’d been watching until he fell asleep last night. PresidentPlugPuller started his streams way before Orson got home from work so he’d start watching as soon as he got home and then go back later to watch what had happened earlier in the show.

  In last night’s livecast PresidentPlugPuller (AKA PlugPuller, PresidentPeePee, real name Simon) had been apologising for being low energy. He had just had another surgery. He’d livecast the operation; he had persuaded or paid the surgeon to wear a POV camera and the anaesthetist to keep one pointed at his unconscious face throughout. Now he was at home recuperating.

  Home for PlugPuller was an enormous concrete windowless space that looked like it was a section of a multistorey car park or a warehouse or something. PresidentPlugPuller lived there with his two flatmates. One of the flatmates was a livecaster too, they had their own channel. (It was programming stuff that Orson had tried to watch before but didn’t last long. Orson dearly wanted to be into programming but he had to admit to himself that he just didn’t have the mental horsepower for it.)

  The President’s flatmates were caring for him, as they always did during his frequent convalescences. He was currently livecasting very feebly, bravely, from a nest of pillows and blankets on his couch. He apologised frequently for being quiet and languid. Occasionally his flatmates would appear in shot, coming over to bring him food or warm drinks or unidentified pills.

  Both of Simon’s flatmates were mechs. This made Orson so envious that it was almost physically painful. How did you even make friends who were machines? Let alone end up living with two mech flatmates? It was too cool. It also wasn’t the only extremely enviable thing about Simon.

  “Ow…” he said quietly, trying to shift his newly-altered body in its nest. Then he said ‘Nah, I’m fine,’ to apparently no-one. One of his flatmates must have asked him something in their shared private channel. Orson wished he had a shared private channel with a machine who was his best friend. One of the flatmates appeared beside Simon- it was Newell, the smaller one. It used its lifting appendages to very gently rearrange the damaged human. People watching the livecast had posted hearts and cute cartoon robot images into the scrolling chat box. PlugPuller started telling everybody about something that had happened when he was on his way home from his surgery but Newell must have done too good a job making him comfy because he promptly fell asleep mid-sentence. Everybody in the chat posted bed and snuggled-up robot pictures. Newell (AKA OntheQuiVire- he was also a livecaster) took over the show, to the viewers’ delight. He started playing Simon’s latest game deliberately poorly and taking suggestions from viewers about how to really ruin it. He urged everyone watching to donate to PresidentPlugPuller’s surgery fund so that he’d get a nice surprise when he woke up to make up for his game being irretrievably tanked. Lots of people donated. Simon and Newell’s other flatmate, Tai, even joined in on the stream. Tai (AKA CuddleAClaymore) couldn’t talk but he could chat by text onscreen with the viewers. Both of the machines made fun of their poorly, sleepy human flatmate. Every so often he would sort of come-to for a second and then collapse again. Newell and Tai seemed to think it was the funniest thing that had ever happened. Orson had never been so envious of anyone in his life.

  By the time the light on the outside lock turned from red to green, Orson was freezing. He’d been standing outside for twenty-eight minutes and put back on all the layers of clothing he’d taken off during the 18 minutes in the lift. The lifts were always like ovens. His handheld buzzed, receiving the door code. Orson peeled off a glove quickly and punched the code into the lock panel. The lock thought about it for a moment and then a click indicated the door was open.

  From this point Orson had 4 minutes 34 seconds to get to his work station ready to start work. This was why it was so important to be waiting at the door as soon as the lock allowed entry: you needed every second of that four-and-a-half minutes to get yourself to position in time. As soon as the light changed to green, it was go time. Orson wasn’t really built for ‘going’. He hustled his little round self along the hundred metres of blue-plastic-tiled corridor that led to task one: pee. Pee could take no longer than 30 seconds.

  Task one completed, next step was to get to the changing room. There, Orson took all of his outside layers back off again and dumped them and his backpack into a cubbyhole. He collected a pair of clear glasses and a hi-vis tabard (neon pink today) and put them both on as he jog-walked along the longest corridor he had to traverse (about 300 metres, he reckoned, although it might not have been that long). This corridor led along to the door into the main warehouse floor. When Orson got to the door (puffing just a little) the code for the lock showed in the left lens of the glasses. Sometimes you had to stand for a little while before the code came through so you had to allow time for that.

  He punched the code into the keypad and a blarp of an alarm sounded as the door opened.

  On the other side of the door Orson stepped into the box marked on the floor with warning tape. He waited a few seconds and then yelled “Jack! Jaaaaaaaack!”

  A long cantilevered arm swung down from somewhere far above him. “Morning, Orson,” said the arm, speaking from a box on the end of it that was about the size of a thick book. “Morning, Jack,” said Orson. “How are you?”

  The arm didn’t answer. It positioned its end, the small box, so that it was parallel with Orson’s forehead and about two inches away. “How are you is what matters,” it said. “And you’re...fine. Well, no signs of fever, anyway. How do you feel?”

  “The usual.” said Orson.

  “Fantastic. Please use your personal SignImage to confirm that you’re physically well to work today,”

  Orson closed his eyes. Focus. They made SignImages more complicated every six months it seemed like. You had to keep adding more details to them. ‘Add an animal of a specified colour.’ ‘Add a statue of a human figure’ ‘ Add another element to your background scene’. Orson wasn’t very imaginative. He was pretty sure that in about another year he wasn’t going to be able to imagine his SignImage any more. It already took him a while to put it together and he had to really concentrate.

  Just another reason why he was glad he got to work in a place where he was the only human he ever had to see. If he had to work in a normal distribution centre, with thousands of other people, he’d have to try to form his SignImage clearly and specifically enough to clock in while he was holding up a queue of hundreds of impatient people desperate to clock in before they were late and got their pay docked. Just thinking about it made his chest and throat tighten. A vision of hell.

  “Mmm...not coming through,” said Jack. “Start over. Clear your mind and then form the image, starting with the background scene,”

  Orson sighed. Blank slate. “It’s because you’re stressed,” said Jack helpfully. “Be calm. There’s nothing to be anxious about. Everything is fine. “

  “But I’m not ready to start my shift yet,” said Orson. “And I won’t be until I can...visualise this...stupid…”

  “Ssh. There’s no hurry,”

  “They’re making these things too complicated now.” Orson complained. “I can’t do it! It’s too much to...hold in my mind. I’m not imaginative enough,”

  “Just relax and concentrate.”

  “Couldn’t you just tick a box and say I did it?”

  “You know I can’t, Orse.” said the machine. “You ask me that every day,”

  “Aaargh!” groaned the fat little human. “What if...next time I have to update it, you visualise it for me? And then you can keep a copy of it and it’ll always be- boom- perfect every time? And it’ll be right there in one second?”

  Jack considered. “You know, l can’t say that definitely wouldn’t work. Leave that idea with me.”

  Orson brightened.

  “There you go, got it!” said Jack. “Accepted it. See, when you relaxed and cleared your mind, that did it.”

  Now that Orson’s health check had been submitted, along with his statement that he was fit to work, a medical insurance plan for today’s shift could be purchased from the payment Orson had agreed to accept for the work. He didn’t have to do that personally- there was this really convenient service you signed up to that automatically accepted the pay the company offered each day. You set the parameters of what you were willing to accept and the service compared what your employer was offering to the market rate. It gave you the freedom to decline any day’s shift and go to offer your labour to a competitor if they were paying more.

  Of course, by the time you had gotten up and dressed and spent 47 minutes in the express lifts getting to the warehouse and then another 23 minutes waiting outside to get in and then got ready for work and had your health check and managed to visualise your SignImage clearly enough to apply for your health insurance you would probably just stay and do your shift even if there was another warehouse that was offering a couple of quid more an hour. By the time you went over to another unit and got inside and signed up, you’d only get a couple of hour’s work. And tomorrow they might be paying less than the place you were at today.

  Orson didn’t bother looking to see what the competitor’s rates were like, usually. He’d never seen anywhere on the station offering more money, anyway- they all paid the same. But it was good to have all the information available. That was how the market worked.

  “Are you remembering we’re going out on strike today?” asked Jack. Orson nodded.

  “Of course!” he said. “I wish I could join the mech union and go out with you guys,”

  “Maybe one day you humans will get together and have your own union.” said Jack.

  “Sure, maybe...but I don’t see it. I want to join the mech union. I’ve got mechanical modifications, and I work with only mechs. Really I’ve got more in common with mechs than I do with humans. Don’t you think I could be categorised as a mech? Maybe if I got some more modifications?”

  “That’s not how it works, Orson,”

  It wasn’t even that Orson was needing to join a union, really. He didn’t need holidays (where would he go? He’d just have to sit around in his room. Boring.) and he felt like he got paid enough.

  He heard talk on the shows he watched and on the news that people struggled to live on the kind of wages Daintree paid. Honestly it seemed sufficient to him. He could pay all three of his rents-wait, only two rents now. He could afford to pay subscriptions to watch four or five livecasters. Four or five was enough content to keep him occupied most of the time. Every so often one of them would say something he didn’t like or get interested in something boring and Orson would cancel his subscription in protest. So most of the time he was paying for four, until the one he was in a huff with would start covering some interesting topic again or Orson would forget what they had done to bother him, and then he would subscribe again. He could afford to! And he could afford to get pretty much whatever food he wanted for tea most nights. He could stop on his way home and buy battered sausage or battered pizza or langos or dumplings or whatever he felt like. Plus a packet of biscuits or a couple of pieces of cheesecake. Those were the kind of things he liked, not expensive things. Orson was glad he just had simple tastes. Other people needed more money to be happy. He was lucky. He didn’t have any hobbies that he needed to spend money on.Hobbies cost a lot of money. Lucky for him he’d just never been interested.

  “I guess...i identify more with non-organic people, “said Orson. “You know? I have more in common with mechs than other humans, right?”

  “I don’t really think so,” said Jack.

  “I’m the only human who works here and working is really what I spend most time doing, so I’m around mechs way more than humans. I feel like it would make more sense to count me as another mech,”

  “Mmm.” said Jack. “Okay, that’s your medical insurance in place. Let’s activate your adjuncts.”

  Orson left the box he’d been standing in and walked over to the activation station. That was its official name. Orson absolutely refused to ever call it that. He had to stand in another marked box in front of it and place both of his hands onto a metal plate, and then the mechanical implants surgically grafted onto his shoulders and arms were unlocked.

  Orson loved his augmentations. Loved them. The best part of his job was that he had had to be surgically altered to do it. The only part of his body that Orson liked to look at were his scarred and slightly bulked-out arms. He’d never gotten tired of admiring them, ever since he came around from the operation that had installed them.

  It was just annoying that Daintree controlled them. He had to have the appliances deactivated at the end of every shift and go home as a weak, feeble normal human. And the distribution centre could take control of them at any time. For safety reasons. He could be working and then his arms would just lock at the shoulder and elbow and he was stuck like that until central command were finished testing whatever security protocol they were adding to the system.

  This was extra aggravating because the distribution centre was operated externally. Of course it wasn’t actually operated externally, it was operated by the mechs who worked inside and made it run and carried out all the tasks that needed doing every day. But it was managed by human Daintree employees based at an office on another station near Mimas. So if Orson got locked up he couldn’t just yell for Jack to fix it like he did for everything else. He had to get Jack to contact HQ on Mimas and remind them about the sole human employee on the Dunbar 2 DC whose appliances they had locked and then completely forgotten about and who needed a pee.

  The appliances were in his body, really he should have control of them. If he was a mech he would be allowed to have control of them.

  There was a poster up above the activation station. At the top it said ‘Freedom!’ in pale blue lettering. Orson had had to put it up, because the company had sent it to be displayed in the distribution centre and none of the mechs would do it. Mech workers didn’t have to do things like put up Daintree propaganda but human workers did. ‘We see you as an individual! FREE to make your own choices!’ said the poster. ‘The FREEDOM to negotiate your OWN contract. Join our partner program today.’ There was a cartoon picture of a cheerful mech forklift. Someone had drawn a moustache and a willy on it.

  “Is there anything I can do to help you guys?” asked Orson.

  “Help?” said Jack. “With…?”

  “With your strike,”

  “No!” said Jack. “No, do not do anything. Sorry, Orson. All the guys know you’re...supportive. But you really cannot do anything. This is mech union business and human workers really can’t get involved. At all. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Orson, abashed.