Work Text:
Ayda Mensah is two hours into a scheduled four-hour meeting, and has a headache so bad that it keeps threatening to show up on her face. She consciously unscrunches her forehead yet again, and pays attention to the presentation by the Advocate for the Freight Union. It's very important. The policy that comes out of this meeting may hinge on it, and lives may hinge on that policy. She is here to listen without judgement, so that an informed administative plan of action can be made about this… mess.
Quagmire, perhaps. Disaster, one might say. Forseeable result of over-extension and under-resourcing resulting in missed inspections, lack of oversight, and eventual death, definitely. A clusterfuck. It's a clusterfuck.
In the feed, SecUnit posts a security update: no threats detected.
She takes a deep breath through her nose. In two three four hold two three four out two three four. A month from now, a new Head of Council will be elected, and this will no longer be her job.
But it is her job right now.
The Advocate's voice is even, but relentless. They are short and elderly and project patience - not patience like a rock, but patience like the wind that scours the rock to nothing over aeons. Right now, they are providing a highlight reel of occupational safety incidents in shipping and logistics across the Preservation Alliance.
Ayda's feed is full of supporting documentation and commentary, the building's security updates, and is otherwise set to do-not-disturb. Nonetheless, SecUnit's private ping gets through. It's not even words, just a query sigil and extreme close-up drone footage of… is that her neck? Yes, that's her jaw and her neck. The tendons are standing out. It's really obvious.
Oh, her jaw is clenched. That might be why. Probably isn't helping the headache, either. Self-consciously, she un-grits her teeth and runs her tongue around them. She sends back a message: it's fine. Head hurts.
She shuffles the documents in her feed. In the background, one document amongst many, sits the offer from the Pansystem University of Mihara and New Tideland.
The Advocate for the Freight Union brings up another alarming chart. It provokes a murmur of dismay from around the room. "This pattern recurs all over the Corporation Rim," the Advocate says. "Where business grows rapidly without commensurate budget increases for regulatory bodies, occupational safety falls short, and injuries and death increase by orders of magnitude. Too much work, too many new procedures, overburdened staff , bots working past capacity-" they thump their stick on the ground, a startling bang— "Disaster occurs. I have gathered hundreds of reports from within my union, indicating a widespread increase of accidents, safety violations, and injuries that were either not adequately investigated, not followed up on, or both. The underenforcement of legislation is not simply an issue of individual employers, but a problem of the whole Preservation Alliance. I say the pattern recurs all over the Corporation Rim," they conclude, "But it would be a mistake to assume that it happens because they are corporate. Poor enforcement scuppers the best intentions. This is not a matter of ideology, but a statistical inevitability. Without the Council's intervention, I am sure there will be another incident like this." They thump their stick on the ground again, and then, to Ayda's great relief, cede the floor to her.
Ayda glances at the schedule and says smoothly, "Thank you for your consultation, Advocate Ulopa. I appreciate the scope and rigour of your presentation; it will require our consideration. Why don't we take a fifteen-minute recess for refreshment before we reconvene for discussion?"
The immediate scraping of chairs from around the room tells her that she isn't the only one desperate for a break.
The doors of the meeting room open, and disgorge the assembly into the courtyard, where benches surround the little garden of herbs and flowers under a high skylight. It is cooler out here, and there are snacks and jugs of water, and several different kinds of tea. Ayda could really use a cup, but there's a crowd between her and the table, and with her head pounding what she really wants most is—
"Dr Mensah?" chirps a voice at her shoulder, and she wheels around - too dramatically - to see Officer Tifany standing there with a helpful expression. "Do you have a moment for a debrief with security?"
Officer Tifany is very good at her job and a pleasure to speak to, and it's not her fault that, whenever they meet, Ayda feels her nerves light up with remembered panic.
Tifany was the last human security officer standing when SecUnit took down the assassins that had been sent to murder Ayda, and her performance was impressive enough that SecUnit personally dubbed her 'not bad'. (It's high praise.) Ayda is working on the theory that regular exposure, in non-life threatening circumstances, will make her heart stop leaping into her throat every time they meet, but that's a work in progress.
Ayda takes a deep breath as if she's about to say something, smoothing her face into a bright encouraging expression. There's another ping in her feed from SecUnit. Nothing bad, it says.
Oh. That makes her heart calm right down. "By all means," she tells Tifany, and lets her lead the way to the antechamber that security is using to monitor the meeting.
There are monitors with live feeds, and a few occupied chairs, though most security officers are presently circulating the building. SecUnit is sprawled in one of those chairs, its mechanical feet crossed at the ankle, and when she enters it turns its face almost, but not quite, in her direction, just enough to see her in the corner of its eye, even though its drones have been tailing her all day.
A smile comes to her face unbidden; as gestures of greeting go, it's a lot subtler than a hug, but it makes her feel about the same. "All clear?" she asks lightly. She's pretty sure she knows the answer to that.
"All clear," SecUnit says. "Even Ulopa's stick is only a stick." It pauses. "They're right, by the way."
Ayda sighs. "I know they are," she says. "As was the Representative of the Miner's Union, and the Chief of Healers, and the Port Authority, and the Speaker for Occupational Safety. It's agreeing on what to do about it that'll be the hard part, but that's what we're here for." She rolls her neck until it cracks, and then rubs it. Her attention is caught by the sound of hot water pouring into a cup. Tifany is decanting something.
Tifany asks, "Would you like some tea?" and points to a laden tray. "They gave us our own snack table."
Even from metres away, the tea smells suspiciously like the lemon myrtle blend that is Ayda's favourite. She could ask, or she could simply be grateful for the opportunity to drink it in a quiet room with good company. "I would love some tea, thank you," she says.
SecUnit reaches out a long arm and drags out a chair from a desk. On the desk beside it, Tifany sets out a steaming cup of tea and another cup of water, plus a bowl of vegetable fritters. Then Tifany salutes her and says, "Back in ten!"
Ayda slumps gratefully into the chair next to SecUnit, takes some painkillers, chugs the glass of water, and then settles down to chew meditively on a fritter. She hums appreciatively, then scoffs a second.
"You skipped lunch," SecUnit observes.
"Too busy," Ayda admits, still chewing, a hand over her mouth. "Not my best." She never does it if she can help it. The studies on hunger are very clear: even a single missed meal can make a person less rational and impair their judgement. But she couldn't move any of her meetings, and every damn one of them ran over time. The sandwich she brought from home is still sitting in its cooler bag, untouched.
Stepping down from her role involves so much handing-off, and she's still not sure what she's going to do afterwards - or how to convince the Council that her current direction is a good idea. Who knew quitting as head of a planetary administration would involve so much extra work? She swallows her fritter, blows on the surface of her tea, and takes a sip. The warmth and fragrance sends hot ripples through her sinuses. The vice around her temples eases, little by little, and the pounding of her pulse recedes.
Whether it's the tea, the painkillers, the calories, or the company, it only takes five minutes for her to feel much better. She spent the last two hours of that meeting grappling with the problem in front of her like a mountaineer grapples with a sheer cliff face. Now it feels more like a puzzle she can hold in her hands, rotating to see all its facets, testing its weight, hearing where it rattles.
Facet one: Preservation law guarantees its citizens access to all the necessities of life, so they don't use currency. Planetside, it's a barter economy. However, that isn't to say that nobody has money; it just does them no good for day-to-day things. The Council has money, and a Treasurer to keep the Alliance's budget. They need it to trade with other systems for the things they lack, hire outside contractors, or supply travellers going to polities in corporate space. Citizens can petition the council if they need, for example, new equipment that can only be manufactured out-of-system, and don't have funds of their own to buy it.
Facet two: Preservation Alliance, once an isolated outer system little-regarded by those within the Corporation Rim, has recently gotten a whole lot more attention. Not all of that attention has been the revenge of GrayCris: their port has experienced more trade; their population has grown by thousands; their diplomatic corps has made more lasting ties. It has resulted in a marked increase in inter-system commerce. Some industries in the Preservation Alliance, previously used to meeting only local demand, have taken the opportunity to expand operations. As a result, there is more demand on a number of Preservation's industrial sectors.
Facet three: Those sectors have struggled to meet the growing demand, with the needs of overstretched workers sometimes clashing with the expectations of offworld clients who have no patience for Preservation's labour laws. It's a culture clash as old as Preservation, pretty much, but now it's happening on a larger scale than ever before.
Facet four: As of yesterday, that struggle has a body count. A cargo bot with a haul of valuable minerals had been taking off from a mine when it collided with a smaller air vehicle driven by a miner. That miner is dead, as is one of the loading bots, which was damaged irreperably by the falling debris. And it happened because they were rushing to meet an order.
From what they've pieced together, the mine had been struggling to keep up with demand because they could not safely scale up production without harmful environmental effects. To make up time lost in the loading process, the bots were given permission to streamline their process and skip check-ins with human supervisors. The miner who died been away recovering from a minor illness, missed the update, and proceeded with the assumption that she would have ample warning before the cargo bot took off. It was an entirely preventable disaster, and now a whole community is in shock, family and colleagues are in mourning, and the cargo bot is refusing to leave any dock without a human supervisor aboard.
Facet five: The Speaker for Occupational Safety was jumping up and down about the potential for a deadly incident for months before it happened. The Preservation Council had agreed to give that ministry a modest increase in resources, including money. Too modest: they could not drum up enough people or bots to cover all the inspections that the Minister wanted to impose, and he has let them know it in no uncertain terms.
It took a rancorous debate to even give the Speaker for Occupational Safety that much. That meeting had involved the Speaker for Agriculture using Ayda's coming retirement from the Council as ammunition against her, saying that it proved that entanglement with the Corporation Rim was an inherent welfare risk, and the answer should be to conserve Preservation's resources, not facilitate their trade. She had shredded him for bringing her into it like that, going perhaps a little far (she'd had him and his family over for dinner afterwards to apologise) - but it hadn't made any more room in the budget for a sudden raft of safety audits.
Flatly, Preservation doesn't have enough money: not to buy the out-of-system equipment they would need to bring outdated or jury-rigged systems up to standard, to manage the new scale of production that some members of Preservation are trying to meet. They can't get much more without enmeshing themselves even further with planets that are within the Corporation Rim.
The truth is, the Preservation Alliance itself is divided about the new attention. Some - like that mining community - see it as an opportunity, whether personal or for the whole planet: an avenue to financial independence. Others are deeply uneasy about catching the interest of the Corporation Rim, and believe Preservation's independence lies in isolation, even if that means foregoing luxuries like new equipment or rare resources. It is written into Preservation's oldest laws to shelter the needy, but that stems from an understanding that there will be need.
To a lot of citizens, a person from the Corporation Rim can be a friend, a neighbour, a loved one - but the people of the Corporation Rim are untrustworthy worshippers of capital, whose highest ideal is incompatible with life.
It's not like she doesn't understand where they're coming from. Some of her colleagues in this afternoon meeting were in the room when GrayCris' assassins came for her. She remembers the event in vivid smears of colour and sound, over in a handful of seconds: SecUnit's frantic pings in her feed, the screams outside, the door blown in, the wild, pinprick-eyed person suddenly in her face, and SecUnit, maimed and bloody, only a fraction faster. Fast enough to save her life.
The minutes afterwards, huddling with the rest of the council in the most secure part of the building while they waited for the all-clear, had been some of the longest of her life. She remembers the Speaker for the Oceans' shocked crying, and the sweaty grip of the Treasurer's and Record-Keeper's hands in hers.
Nothing like that had ever happened here before. It was bound to calcify some people's opinions about the Corporation Rim. But they could debate ideology until the heat death of the universe, and it wouldn't do a damn thing to fix their occupational safety record.
Ayda takes another sip of tea, and reviews some of Ulopa's documents, looking at the graphs, prodding the sources, checking the numbers against the documentation from the occupational safety minister. Different sources and slightly different time periods, but where it overlaps, the numbers line up.
She calls up the Council library, starts sifting for extra sources, and feels a nudge in the feed from SecUnit. Ah: a comparative literature review of all reported occupational safety incidents across the Preservation Alliance in the last year across all major industries, including damage to humans, augmented humans, bots, and infrastructure, and a breakdown of what that damage cost. It has many helpful graphs in readable fonts and friendly colours. It's like a more thorough and digestible version of the Speaker for Occupational Safety's report, which SecUnit knocked together in the last five minutes, apparently.
She scrolls through it, digesting the information with her slow human brain. "Thank you," she says. "Maybe I should put you on the consultation panel." And then she has to stop reading and say, "Kidding! I'm kidding, you're fine, I wouldn't make you do that."
SecUnit, its body and expression gone rigid, slowly relaxes.
She scrolls through the graphs, taking in the clear incidence spikes, corresponding with the increases in industrial activity. "This is… such a failure to act," she says quietly. "We could have prevented this. We should have prevented this."
SecUnit snorts. She raises an eyebrow at it. It says, "I've been rented to operations that assumed a fifth of the workers were going to die on the job. Preservation has one fatal accident and convenes an emergency council about it."
Ayda digests that like a swallow of cheap liquor. It doesn't make the deaths any better, but it is bracing enough to help pull out of her gloomy spiral and consider what to do.
She searches her feed for the Speaker for Occupational Safety's original budget request, from months ago, back when they could have prevented all this. Calculates the difference. Pulls up the offer from the Pansystem University of Mihara and New Tideland, which is a little more recent. Runs the numbers. She knows SecUnit can see this - she imagines her calculations must look horribly slow to it, but they'll reach the same conclusion.
"You want to take the position," SecUnit says. "Why don't you?"
"Because first," Ayda says, "I have to convince the council that it's the right thing to do."
It had been the subject of one of her morning meetings, actually. With Pin-Lee as her legal reference, she'd consulted the Treasury, the Port Authority, and the Speaker for Immigrant Welfare about PSUMNT's proposal. It had not been fun to referee the ensuing argument.
The proposed deal is written in the kind of legalese that she had needed Pin-Lee to go over forwards and backwards, because it was so dense and cagey that it was hard to believe it wasn't some kind of trap. On the surface, it looks like a special agreement to let ships from the University dock and do commerce at Preservation Station, with a rider to allow passengers from those ships to use Preservation's facilities, food, shelter, and planetside access, in exchange for a flat fee. So far, so normal for Preservation. They have a much shorter boilerplate contract that amounts to the same thing for every outside ship that docks here. But reading a little closer, one might note the specific references to Preservation's legal protections, the lengthy clause about passenger data protection, and the agreement to not speak to non-PSUMNT entities within the Corporation Rim regarding University passengers and crew. And the amount of money PSUMNT is offering is… unusual.
It is, effectively, a deal to pay Preservation to take in ex-Corporation Rim refugees transported on PSUMNT ships. It amounts to a very carefully-worded proposal to be the last link in a people smuggling operation, with Ayda as its facilitator. And she is having a hell of a time convincing her colleagues that it's a good idea.
Pretty much every part of it raises the hair on the back of somebody's neck. That murder that had taken place on Preservation Station had resulted directly from a people smuggling operation, and it would have ended with dozens more deaths if SecUnit hadn't found the refugees in time. Moreover, the thought of taking money to help desperate people is disgusting, because helping people is an ethical imperative. But the uncomfortable truth is that it does, in fact, cost Preservation to take people in, or even get them safely onto transports going elsewhere - not much, per person, and those people give back so much more to the communities they join. But the money from PSUMNT would cover the upfront cost and make the immigration process so much easier, freeing up the Council's budget for other uses.
Like funding occupational safety upgrades, for example.
Taking the deal would also make Preservation vulnerable, should the Corporation Rim ever figure out where all their missing indentured workers are going. It doesn't break the Preservation Alliance's laws to take in people who have broken corporate contracts, but there are several powerful corporations that could, according to their own laws, accuse Preservation of asset theft.
GrayCris is defeated, but only because GrayCris managed to piss off several larger, more powerful corporations in the process of going after the Preservation Alliance. Should multiple corporations decide to join forces against Preservation, things could get really ugly.
But those same corporations could decide to join forces against Preservation for any other reason, too. They could decide that the flow of minerals from minimally-invasing community-owned mining operations was too slow, and they could extract amazing profits by fracking this planet to pieces. They could decide that a people smuggling organisation sounded great, actually, if they could insert themselves as middlemen to extract the money directly from desperate people, and then get more money by trafficking those same people to new, different corporations for new, different kinds of exploitation.
The point is: Preservation Alliance is already under scrutiny. They can cringe from it, or they can make alliances with more powerful systems who share their ideals, and in doing so, strengthen their position and double down on their ethos. Systems like Mihara and New Tideland.
And that is exactly what she needs to tell the council.
Ayda eats another fritter, her mind made up. A bell goes off somewhere in the courtyard - the two-minute warning. She sighs through her nose, swallows her fritter, drains the last mouthful of tea, and calculates that she has about ninety seconds for a bathroom break.
She thinks about squeezing SecUnit's hand, but doesn't - her fingers are a little greasy from the fritters, and it wouldn't like that. "Thank you," she murmurs instead, wiping her hands on a cloth.
It shrugs, and sends her a clip of drone footage - it's the veranda back home, the lights from the kitchen glowing, the hammock swaying in a light breeze, and the stars sprinkled overhead. The timestamp is from the few nights ago.
She snorts and says, "Oh, absolutely." Yes, 100%, when she's finished with this she is going home and flopping on that hammock and she is not going to move or think for… oh, half an hour, minimum.
In a month, she's stepping down, and handing off the job to someone else. Maybe it will be Dural, the Agrigultural Minister - a bit of an isolationist, but dedicated to feeding the whole Alliance. Maybe it will be Ipokulo, the Transport Minister, a shipbuilder keen on building up Preservation's salvage and repair operations. Or it might be Szeir, the Treasurer, who Ayda really needs to get on her side for the PSUMNT proposal to carry. Those are the three who she knows already will volunteer for Head of Council, and any one of them might be genuinely good at it.
And when they take over, Ayda is going to lie in that hammock for an hour at least. Maybe two. She's really looking forward to it.
For now she stands and stretches, then gathers her dishes to take them out to the scrubber. Tifany ducks back inside, and Ayda says, "Officer Tifany! Thank you so much for the tea. All calm out there?"
"Yes, ma'am!" And Tifany opens the door and sweeps her out into the courtyard, where members of the Council are variously shuffling back into the chamber, finishing up conversations with colleagues, shoving their cups into the scrubber, downing one last morsel, or lining up for the bathroom. She joins the queue. While she's waiting, she brings up her calculations about the Occupational Safety budget, bundles them with the PSUMNT proposal, and packages them for the meeting ahead.
Back in the Council chamber, she takes her seat. Conversations and scraping chairs make a din in which she can take an extra moment to breathe, letting it flow around her. Hard to believe someone tried to kill her in here, only a few months ago.
In the feed, a security update: no threats detected. She draws her shoulders back, still tasting lemon myrtle, and brings the meeting to order. "First off," she says in a carrying voice, bringing up the Speaker for Occupational Safety's abstract, "Let us review Councilor Beagle's opening proposal. With the information before us, do we have a consensus agreement to the premise?"
The hands go up. In her mind's eye, she sees the rest of the meeting unfolding before her: the votes, the debates, the rounds of questions. Beagle is likely to get emphatic; Szier might get sardonic; there's a good chance she might have to remind people not to be longwinded. She hopes that her colleagues are about to come up with a brilliant solution; if not, the PSUMNT proposal is waiting until such time as she need bring it up.
If it goes through, there is the next phase of her life, ready and waiting. If not, something else. But for the next month, she's still Head of Council of the Preservation Alliance.
And she has work to do.
END