Sleep was an utter failure, so Christine moved on to wandering, her perpetual fall-back.
The corridors all looked the same. The same industrial carpeting, thin as paper and hard on the feet, the same pale hospital green walls, and the same flickering florescent tube lights decorated all of them. She had no idea what went on in any of the rooms she passed. She looked into a few, and saw only cubicles with bored looking office dwellers sitting at computers, some with headsets, some without.
She eventually found a room with a single occupant and an array of video monitors. The man, youngish, with brown hair not quite to the collar of his polo shirt, was talking into his headset.
“No, I can’t send you any air support right now. You’re two weeks behind on your paperwork, and your squad is way over on expenses already. No, I heard you. No, I know the situation; I’ve got you right here on my monitor. I’m getting a live feed right now. Yes, I see that, but I can’t help you right now. Look, just accomplish this mission objective, and your expense account should be approved for future charges. You’ve just got to get back into the positive numbers. And for God’s sake, file your reports.” He turned in his chair. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing. I was just looking around.”
“Well, this is a good place for that. That’s what I do all day long. You’re one of the new recruits, right?” Christine nodded. “Sucks to be you. Welcome aboard.”
“What is this place?”
“Do you mean this room, or the whole Kafkaesque operation?”
“Either one, I guess, but I meant this room. I think they did a pretty good job of explaining that they want me to shoot people to pay off my student loans.”
“Yeah, that pretty much sums that up, but don’t worry, it’s not so bad." He rose to shake her hand, before settling back into his chair.
“I’m Joe, and this is dispatch. Your equipment patches you into my system, and I take care of all the things you need in the field. I sit here pretty much all the time and do two things. I make sure your software is running properly, so we know where you are and can tell you where you are, and so you don’t shoot any of your friends. And I try and fill requests, like for air support, or medics, or reinforcements, or supply drops. Mostly I tell people no, cause the company’s pretty stingy and strict on the expense accounts, but I do what I can. Sit down for a while. You look like you’re in shock or something.”
Christine plopped into another rolling chair by the door. “My manager’s named Joe. He’s a dick.” Joe nodded. “I’m Christine.”
"We've got a lot of those around here. Dicks, I mean."
"Yeah, I haven't seen too many women."
"No, I meant in the other sense."
"Same thing."
"One of those. Right. Well, give men the benefit of the doubt, please. It's just that around here, well, it takes a certain type of person to try and make money by forcing poor college graduates to go to foreign countries and shoot people for corporate greed. That's the type of person we have a lot of here."
"And what does that make you, Joe?"
"Deeply in debt, just like you, and with no marketable skills, probably also just like you," he paused to watch for Christine's nod, "but lucky enough to have found a job that'll pay the bills, and keep me off the front lines. How long do you have?"
"I don't know. What time is it?"
Joe glanced over at one of his displays. "Three past two."
"Ug. I've got an hour."
"Where are they sending you?"
"
"A fairly large segment of the garment industry. They don't like unions there, but they've got one. And it's starting to look like the government might not throw them all in jail and lose the key."
"What are we doing there? What are they going to make me do?"
"Mostly you'll just stand around and look tough. You might raid a union meeting or two. It's remotely possibly that someone will decide it'll be cost-effective to kill some member of the government. They say things about a coup, but it won't happen. Don't let them scare you."
"What about the person I'm replacing?"
"Well, things happen. Ed was kind of a dumbass. He forgot that he had pulled the pin on his grenade, and held onto it, but not the way he was supposed to. It blew off his arm and most of his side. He bled to death almost immediately. Be careful, sure. You’ve got live ammo, and so does everyone else, and you have no real training. Our number one cause of death is us. We don’t know what the hell we’re doing, and we screw up with things that go boom, and someone dies. You’ve got to look out.
“But I meant don’t let them scare you about what you’re up against. We’re fighting the world’s poorest people, with the resources of the world’s richest companies. This isn’t David versus Goliath; this is Goliath against all those other little guys, back when Goliath was young and fit.”
“Will they really catch me if I run away?”
“Yeah. Don’t do that. As jobs go, this one sucks, but you’ll probably be fine.”
“Great. You’ve done nothing to ease my mind.”
“Hey, I try to help, but I can only work with what I’ve got. I’ve got to get back to work, but it was nice to meet you. Good luck. At least now you know who that charming guy on the other end of the line saying ‘No you can’t have more bullets’ is, right?”
Christine grunted, thanked him, and left.
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