Сара Пинскер - A Song for a New Day

Almost every home, anyway. Her family didn’t even have the basic StageHolo living room box that played TV and movies, let alone the add-on subscriptions or immersive live experiences. It was mostly a money thing, partly some Luddite parent principle. They would have tossed her old school Hoodie, too, if she hadn’t insisted she still needed it. It couldn’t handle much of anything, but it let her pretend she hadn’t been left totally behind.

“How can I help you?” As she asked, she repeated the vendor number to herself, so she’d recognize it faster in the future. It was palindromic, an easy number to memorize.

“We’ve got a big show tonight, and the site is telling anyone who tries to register at the day-of price point that ticket sales are closed. It was fine yesterday.”

So Superwally ran their registration sites, too. That made sense. Otherwise they’d have created a competitor by now to drive StageHolo out of business.

“Let me get right on that for you.” Rosemary pictured the code before she looked at it. It was easier when she imagined it as it should be before scoping out the real thing. When she opened her eyes to the visual representation, she spotted the problem. It took only a few keystrokes to fix. She puttered for a moment longer before closing out, so it wouldn’t look as easy as it had been. Don’t make the customer feel stupid, or like they could have solved it themselves.

“Got it,” she said. “It’ll work fine now. Do you want to test it from your end before I disconnect?”

“That’d be great. Hang on.” The av went still, then reanimated with visible relief. “Yep. You fixed it.”

Rosemary glanced at her timer. If she ended the call now she’d get another bonus point for efficient solving, but something nagged at her. “It’s not my place to ask, but I’m guessing this isn’t the first time this has happened?”

“No, actually. I’ve called twice in the last month. Why do you ask?”

“I fixed it for this particular show, but I think there’s a bug in how the system is coding dates across your entire site. It’ll probably keep happening.”

“Interesting. Could you, uh, stop it from happening?”

“I can, if you’d like.”

“Of course. That’s why I called.”

“Well, you called about the specific issue, which I just fixed. We’re supposed to fix the problem at hand, ‘quickly and efficiently.’ Which I did, but the more efficient solution is to make it so you don’t have to call back when it happens again in a week.”

“Great. Do that, please.”

Rosemary grinned for real this time. The repair took fifty-eight seconds; she didn’t wait for the optimal time. “Can I help with anything else for StageHoloLive?”

“No, but listen. You were so quick, and I appreciate that you took the initiative to fix the problem behind the problem. Can I send you a code to attend tonight’s show for free?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t accept gifts from vendors. It’s against company policy.” That saved her from mentioning how the only Hoodies in her household were this work-dedicated one, which she was prohibited from using for entertainment, and the Basic the school system had subsidized when she was thirteen and school had gone virtual, which was still good enough to listen to music and hang out with her friends, but too archaic to handle SHL technology.

“Gotcha. Oh, well. I don’t want to get you in trouble, but can I get your employee ID number? Or a direct line to contact you? You’re my new hero. I’d like to be able to contact you again, and maybe send a compliment to your supervisor.”

She didn’t see any harm in that; she already had a few vendors who contacted her directly. She passed her ID number.

“Thanks, Rosemary. Have a wonderful day.”

“You, too. Thank you for being a loyal customer.”

The call disconnected. Rosemary glanced at her reward center. She had lost her bonus point for problem-solving efficiency—the call had gone two minutes over optimum—but got another one for refusing a gift. She was 157 points away from a merit raise. Maybe she’d use it to buy an SHL-compatible Hoodie, even if it pissed off her parents.

The remaining shift-hours passed in a series of mostly easy fixes and a couple of trickier ones. Rosemary appreciated the tricky ones, even if the system didn’t adjust to give credit for dealing with more complex problems. She imagined there were other people in her position who found ways to shunt off those issues, to go for time points rather than completion points; she occasionally got calls that had been bumped from other vendor services staff. She’d never met or talked with any of them, so she could only guess some note in the system marked her.

If her parents were correct, sooner or later it would cost her a raise. The company would keep her where she was, solving everyone’s problems, but not solving them quickly or efficiently or whatever the other inspirational posters of the month demanded. At lunch she ate her yogurt with speed and efficiency. She solved issues as quickly as possible, but some couldn’t be solved any faster.

Just before she took her Hoodie off for the evening, one more message chimed. Annoyance surged through her. She was obligated to take it, even two minutes before quitting time, but she didn’t get overtime without prior approval and she’d get dinged if she ignored it.

She tapped the message envelope and found an optional overtime assignment. StageHoloLive had put through a formal request for her to observe that evening’s show to make sure there were no technical glitches from the Superwally end. Observe the show itself, but with access to the code if she was needed. She read it twice to make sure they were serious.

“I’d be happy to, but my hood isn’t SHL-enabled. I’ll see if I can borrow one in time, but it’s unlikely,” she wrote back. “I apologize for not being able to fulfill this assignment.”

The system passed her message along to whomever had sent it. She changed out of her work uniform; they weren’t supposed to track her after she clocked out, but she didn’t trust them not to.

Walking from her bedroom/workspace into the kitchen was a walk back into reality. Enclosed in her Hoodie all day she sometimes came to believe there were no real people, just voices and messages and lines of code and avatars spread out across the world. Faces that needed help from her in order to feed themselves data and packages and money. Then she stepped into the warm kitchen and was reminded humans existed, real flesh-and-blood people, and they didn’t all need something from her.

“What can I do?” she asked, stretching one arm against the doorframe, then the other.

Her mother was chopping carrots for soup, her crutches leaning against the counter beside her. She hadn’t bothered with her prosthetic today. “If you take over on the vegetables, I’ll do the chicken.”

Rosemary took the proffered knife, popping a carrot piece into her mouth, then spitting it out again. The handsome carrots Superwally droned in never tasted as sweet as the stumpy and gnarled red-cored Chantenay they grew in their garden, but those had all been harvested months ago. Her mother gave her a look, and she ate the bland piece rather than waste it.

“Hey, Ma, do you know anyone nearby with a StageHoloLive hood? Near enough for me to get it in the next hour?”

“Why?”

“I’ve got a chance to go to a free concert. I thought it might be interesting.”

“That’s not ‘going to a concert.’ Trust me, it’s a slippery slope. The hood is cheap, and maybe the show itself isn’t too pricy, but then they make you pay for more and more inside the experience, and it’s too easy just to say yes and transfer money. It’s a system designed to make you spend and spend—”