Competitive housing

 “We mixed magnolia paint with crematorium ash for the walls,” said David Laburnum-Racke as he walked alongside the Minister.  He gestured casually with one hand, being careful, as the Minister noted, not to actually touch the wall.  “We found that the colour was mostly soothing, but ever so slightly upsetting.  People approve of the corridors but there is a tendency for them not to linger in them.  We reduced the amount of time people spent outside their offices by a little under 20% through this.”  They passed a man sitting on a stool holding a clipboard and a stopwatch.  He nodded to them as they passed in a friendly manner.  The Minister ignored him as he wasn’t on the list of people that he was there to visit, and David stopped only to look over the clipboard.

“Is crematorium ash easy to come by?” asked the Minister.  He was due to spend a further 13 minutes with David and he had run out of conversation two corridors back.

“Surprisingly, yes,” said David.  “While the crematoria do attempt to provide people with all the ashes of their relatives the oven do still need sweeping out at the end of the day.  And then there are the unclaimed; we can get all of their ash.  We’ve been considering charging the crematoria for the service of removing it for them.”

The Minister nodded and then halted.  Behind them his Aide, a woman who’s job was largely to keep his ideas away from anyone but his Cabinet, looked concerned.

“We want to announce a new housing initiative,” said the Minister.  The Aide looked less concerned but still seemed ready to interject.  “Until the country has wintered its discontent it seems likely we’ll need new housing.  And when we eventually find a way to backtrack on Brexit without admitting anything so crass as culpability we will probably be able to fill any excess from the… ah, toughening that the country is going through this winter.”

David, two of whose neighbours had already frozen to death because they couldn’t afford the power bills, nodded.  He was fully aware what the Minister was talking about.

“That said, new housing should support the new ideas of the new government.  We should not be seen to be pandering to the people, and we definitely cannot be seen to be being soft.  So an initiative is taking shape: competitive housing.  The Cabinet is still in discussions with the TV production companies, but we think it should be possible to have housing that you can live in until you fail a challenge.  Or maybe two, that’s still up in the air.  And I think the paint you’re describing would be a useful interior feature of our housing.”

“Competitive housing?” David toyed with the word in his head.  It sounded intriguing, in much the same way as many of the Minister’s policies were intriguing until you realised they were life-threatening, maiming, or mentally and emotionally destructive.

“Antisocial housing was deemed too negative,” said the Aide.  She seemed to have relaxed completely now.

“Let’s paint all the common areas in the new housing with magnolia-ash paint,” said the Minister.  “Perhaps we could even use it to direct people through the corridors and public spaces, subtly.  Ah!  We could leave areas like the bike-sheds and car-parks generally open and warm so that the homeless are simultaneously attracted and repelled.”

“I thought the government was disposing of the homeless,” said David.  The Aide flashed him a quick smile.

“Well, the competitive housing is primarily aimed at removing the homeless and creating homes for them,” said the Minister.  “Though many of them seem not to want permanent homes, which is why we think the idea of them having to pass challenges to stay is interesting.  It allows them to move around and try out the various accommodations without us appearing to hound them.  Plus, you can vote on who gets to be kicked out for being too competitive.”

“I think we agreed that ‘antisocial’ was the better word for that,” said the Aide.

“Did we?  Oh right, we did.  That’s fine.  Do you have any other anti-human innovations here?”

David looked a tiny bit taken aback.  “Oh, we don’t use that word,” he said huffily.  “We prefer pro-work.”

“Of course, naturally!”

“Well, we have created carpets that cause painful build-ups of static electricity when you walk across them,” said David, assured now that he had a willing audience.  “It discourages people from leaving their desks, but also punishes them just a little when the leave.”

“Capital!” said the Minister.  “Ah, I think our time is up.  Tell my Aide all about these ideas, and I’m sure we’ll be adopting them.”

Interview for an engineer

 “I have a question, if I may?”  Threndall was looking around the engine room a little wide-eyed and, being a native of the Oatmaker worlds, that meant that it had eight of them, two on stalks, that were staring.

Kimbull, mostly human with a little bit of doubt on his mother’s side of the family, stuck his thumbs in the pockets of his overalls and nodded.  “Normally we ask for questions to be kept to the end,” he said, “but there’s a lot going on in here and I’m not surprised you have questions.  Go ahead, but remember that we’ve only got an hour for the interview and the HR folk do insist that I do their questions too.”

“Right, yes,” said Threndall.  It was three metres tall though its eyes ranged from one metre above the floor to the two stalks that emerged from the top of its body.  Its head, for want of a better term, was a roughly egg-shaped mass that housed its mouth and olfactory sense buds that stuck out of its torso and could move up and down the full length of it.  Four limbs also had the freedom to slide around its body and could extend to nearly three metres in length as well, but they were currently tidily folded up against its body.  Instead of legs and feet it had many cilia that rubbed against the floor and, given enough friction, could move it as fast as a sprinting human.  Its exposed skin was a pale green, shading through turquoise into blue in places, but much of it was wrapped up in a sari-like fabric that twisted around it and had holes for arms and eyes to poke through.  “I noticed that the engines are baseline human tech—“

“Good for acceleration,” said Kimbull.  “I love me some Derlethian tech but their engines would leave a grandmother screaming for you to get on with it.”

“I don’t really understand that metaphor,” said Threndall trying to sound polite.  Humans were known to use facial expressions a lot to convey information but they seemed to have trouble reading the equivalent muscular variation that the aliens of the Oatmaker worlds used.  Someone had tried to explain it to Threndall as being like trying to understand thirteen different kinds of shrug, which really didn’t sound that difficult.  “But the fuel lines and containment seem to be Aldebaran. Is that normal?”

Kimbull puffed his chest out, alarming Threndall momentarily.  When he didn’t attack, Threndall relaxed a little but remained wary.  “That’s our little experiment,” he said.

“Oh no!”

“No, it’s fine, we do these kinds of things all the time,” said Kimbull.  “I mean, you don’t make progress if you don’t tinker with things, do you?  And on a long voyage everyone needs a little project on the side for when there’s not much else to do.”

“But these are the engines!”  Threndall’s voice got deeper as it got more agitated and already the deck was thrumming in resonance.  “What if they break?”

“Then we fix ‘em,” said Kimbull.  “It happens, and you have to expect that.  I mean, what starship have you ever been on where there’s no breakdowns now and then?”

“All of them!”  Threndall’s eyes were as wide as they could get and were sliding up its body to the top, which was an Oatmaker way of showing distress.  The eyes on stalks were waving around as though caught in a severe wind.

“Really?  Bloody hell, how do you manage that then?” Kimbull sounded sincere to Threndall, which only agitated it further.

“By not tinkering with the engines mid-flight,” it said, its voice almost at its lowest bass.  It practically buzzed.  “By following the manufacturers guidelines on what to combine it with.  By valuing safety over speed!”

“Sounds dull,” said Kimbull after a moment’s thought.  “And what happens if you get pirated?”

“You contact your insurers!”  Threndall’s voice was so deep it was sepulchral and Kimbull wiggled a finger in his left ear as though trying to hear better.

“Right,” he said.  “Sure. But this is a human starship, right, and we get sent on the interesting missions.  The stuff where no-one’s ever gone before—“

“Or will ever go again!”

“— maybe.  Depends what we find there, really.  But yeah, we have to be able to react to new situations and you can’t do that if everyone knows what you’ve got and how it performs.”

Threndall waved all four of its limbs at the Aldebaran fuel lines.  “Those things are intended to push starship four times the size of this,” it said.

“Right, and our engines are built for speed.  We reckon we can probably double the warp speeds if we get it right.”

“If?!  IF!!”  Threndall’s thrashing limbs narrowly missed a passing engineer, and Threndall suddenly noticed that everyone else in the engine room was human, and it tried to calm down.  It was very, very hard to do.  “You could blow the whole engine up!  You could rip a hole in the fabric of space-time!  You could evert a gravity well if it goes wrong!”

“Done that,” said Kimbull.

“What?”

“Everted a gravity well,” said Kimbull.  “We were on the Princess Monocle when that happened.   Shook us all up a bit, I can tell you.”

“And what happened?  Were you all court-martialled and demoted?”  Threndall’s voice was as deep as it could go and from the look of concentration on Kimbull’s face it was clear he was having trouble understanding the words.

“Ah, no,” he said slowly as he puzzled the words out.  “We passed it on to the weapons division.”

Threndall just stared, all eyes now as high up as they would go and hurting from the strain.

“Your government is buying about sixty of them,” said Kimbull.  “As a deterrent, I hear.”

Threndall said nothing; there seemed to be nothing left to say.

“So,” said Kimbull.  “You seem a bit excitable, but I don’t think it’s a big problem.  Do you want the job or not?  ‘Cos if you do we’ve got to get through the HR questions as well.”

Freedom Fighter II

She found the clothes in the first place she looked: under the mattress.  They were neatly laid out, exactly the way she would have done it, so that they looked almost freshly ironed.  She was dressed and looking for weapons before it occurred to her to wonder why the clothes were under the mattress.  She dismissed the thought.  It was something she'd think about later, when there was time for trivialities like it.  Right now she had to assume that she was the victim of enemy action, and she needed to get out of here.  It would have helped if Montague had been ready with the extraction, but he wasn't essential.  He, too, could be dealt with later.
There was a feeble choking sound from the other bed, and Sylvie paused her search to check on the dying woman.  Her skin was pallid now and her eyes rolled back up in her head.  Sylvie estimated that she had maybe three or four minutes before the machine started its alarms and summoning the staff.  Which meant she needed to think faster.

The alarms blared on the machine for a few short seconds, then shut off.  A little light in the corner of one display continued to flash though, a subtle indicator that the alarms were still sounding in the nurses' station elsewhere on the ward.  For nearly thirty seconds there was stillness in the room, a prayer to the Angel of Death as they took up residence, and then a clicking sound as the door was frantically unlocked.
"Oh God, oh God, she's killed her, that bitch, bitch, that bitch!"  The first person through the door was a man in a pinstriped suit with spectacles disarrayed on his face, thinning blond hair in a comb-over starting to come loose and a red flush that suggested he was getting ready for his next heart attack.  The keys to the room were in his hand, and his legs were trembling with the effort of having run up several flights of stairs to get there first.  Behind him came two nurses, a third pushing a crash-cart, and a muscular male orderly with tattooes on his cheeks and forehead.
"Who are you?"  His question, gasped out from burning lungs, was addressed to the middle-aged woman sat at the bedside in a state of shock.  Her eyes were wide and tears were running down her cheeks; she held the hand of the woman in the bed loosely, her thumb rubbing back and forth on it like she was stroking a kitten.  She was staring at the window: it had been smashed outwards using the other chair in the room, and a breeze was ruffling the curtains.
"Elizabeth," she said.  She blinked, and seemed to see everyone all of a sudden.  She gasped, and her free hand rose to her mouth. "Jenny's niece.  I was visiting when, when...."  She tailed off, staring at the window.  The orderly followed her gaze and strode over to examine it, and then look out of it.  "Oh my," she said.  "You put my aunt in a room with a lunatic.  I'm going to sue."
A nurse picked the chart up off the end of the bed and checked it.  "What year was Jenny born in, dear?" she asked.
"1928," said the woman at the bedside straight away.  "She said that you wouldn't listen when she told you though, and you put 1948 on the chart.  Oh, I suppose that incompetence.  No, what's the legal word? Malpractice?  You wrote important data down wrong so you could poison her didn't you? And you put her in a room with a lunatic so she could kill her.  You know she flung herself out of that window right?  Right?"
"Shut up!"  The man in the suit was on his knees on the other side of the bed, bent double and wheezing horribly.  His face was purple.  "Dear God, yes, Jenny has a niece and she's every bit a bitch.  God only knows what you're doing here today, but get her out!  Get her out of here!"
"She got the chart right," said the nurse softly to the doctor.
"There's no body down there," said the orderly.
"Look up," said the doctor.  "I bet she climbed.  There are guards on the roof though, so they'll either have her, or she's going to have to break another window to get back in, and all the others are reinforced."
"You should go, dear," said the nurse to the woman at the bedside, taking her hand.  The woman stood.
"I'm still going to sue," she said uncertainly.  "Even if my cousin did authorise this."
"Get. Her. Out. Of. Here."

They put her in the lift and pushed the button for the ground floor, and Sylvie relaxed a little.  Not too much – lifts these days all had cameras in – but a little.  She still needed a weapon: her palms itched without something to hold that she knew was lethal when used correctly, but she was away from the main staging area.  The light on the floor-panel reached 5 and a sudden memory surged into her mind, closely followed by another. She hit the 5 button almost reflexively, and the lift shuddered to a stop, the doors sighing open after a moment or two.
"You're too old for this," said Ludovic, in her memories.  "It's time you retired."
She pushed the thought away.  That clearly wasn't one of her memories, they must have had her on drugs up in the ward.  She should take that in account if she needed to fight.
"The Director has an office on the 5th floor.  The people with the keycards are the secretaries in the blood-transfusion offices, but they can't use them.  You'll also need a fingerprint from one of the Executives; they all have offices on the 18th floor.  And armed guards."
That memory was hers alright.  Damn, she was doing things in the wrong order, but she'd get the keycard first. There had to be something she could weaponise in the blood-transfusion labs.

Freedom Fighter

There had been so many wars, although she'd realised after a while that she wasn't thinking of them as wars anymore.  They were opportunities, challenges, and occasionally boring.  She'd found herself sitting down with her latest contract and studying the background material like any corporate businesswoman, or even entrepreneur (could she say entrepreneuse?  Did she want to?  The word felt like it was describing an entrepreneur in a dress) and looking for the key points, the places to make a difference, to obtain leverage.  She'd even changed her title eventually, from Mercenary to Consultant until she realised how much more mercenary it sounded.  Now she called herself a Freedom Fighter, which still had a whiff of patchouli about it, but everything came round again so maybe it was time.  She'd contemplated Business Manager for a while, but could she really describe a small conflict in the oil fields of Kuwait a business?  When she decided that she could she knew that she'd never be a Business Manager.
She'd even hired her own team eventually, as the contracts became more lucrative and she found that it was getting easier and easier to see how to achieve a quick resolution or turnaround.  Very often the trick was identifying what one side or the other was actually after: while revenge was very popular still (she had to stifle a yawn at that point, did people still have to get excited about revenge?  Really?  Sure, it never ended unless you wiped the other side out completely, and that was as easy to do as killing a cockroach infestation, but there were so many better reasons for a war), oftentimes it was really more about returning some piece of antique junk to the antique junksite it had come from, or apologising insincerely in front of enough people.  Although at least one of those staged apologies had started another war, but she'd been hired by both sides then, so it was hard to count that as a real failure.  Except in humanitarian terms.
She reached for her phone automatically; she always did when she was thinking of her team.  It wasn't there; it had been moved again.  She sighed, softly.  The wars never ended, and this one was a bloodless thing, a war of attrition that she was getting heartily sick of.  She'd been lazy, she'd let it get to this point because she'd let herself be preoccupied by other things, bigger wars and the needs of her team, instead of paying attention to what was happening around her.  It was time to focus on what was closest to home and deal with this once and for all.
Looking around the room she found the phone on a small table near the door.  Conveniently placed for an accomplice to slip in and steal it, as had clearly been the plan.  She'd had suspicions for a while that there was a cabal working against her here, and this just added fuel to the fire.  She pulled the sheets on the bed free, swung her legs over the side, and limped over to the table to retrieve the phone.
"Nurse said you're not to have that!"  The voice from the other bed in the room was querulous and scratchy. "She said it makes you agitated. You put that back!"
An infantryman in the war of attrition, but you had to start somewhere.  If you took enough away from the enemy they had to pull back in and start thinking about defence, and when you'd got them to that point you were ready to attack.You just had to make sure that you're plans were all in place, there was never any time to lose.  And she'd wasted long enough as it was, lying here reminsicing.
She tapped speed dial on her phone and walked over the bed.  The owner of the querulous voice was an eldery woman with skin as wrinkled as a Shar Pei's and a packet of cigarettes on the table next to the bed.  It was clear that she was a collaborator from that alone; tobacco was always contraband and desirable in a war zone.  She was hooked into a couple of machine; cuboid beige boxes with plastic knobs and green LED displays, and a long transparent plastic tube led from a half-full bag of liquid on a stand into her arm.  Rheumy eyes, crusted with sleep at the corners, stared at her with a hint of confusion.
"You're not allowed near me!" she said shrilly.  "Get away!  Get away!"
She ignored the screeching harpy in the bed and twisted the valve in the bag until it tore loose and the bag dumped its contents down the tube.
"What are you doing?  Help!"
A pillow over the face to muffle the cries, but not pressing hard, not suffocating.  At her ear the phone was answered.
"Sylvie?"
"Montague," she said, a feeling of relief suffusing her.  "I need an extraction."
"Sylvie...," his voice was gentle, and there was something wrong there.  The hand holding the pillow tensed and pressed harder involuntarily.  "Sylvie, there's no extraction.  You need a rest.  You've been fighting these wars for too long no–"
She hung up.  She pulled the pillow up and checked – almost too late, but not quite.  The woman was still breathing; let the potion in the plastic bag do its work and finish her.  Sylvie pulled the covers out around her to allow that she'd been thrashing around and caused the damage herself, and then retreated to her own bed.  She was on her own, and she'd have to escape from here by herself.
She started to hum softly as she searched for clothes, picking the theme to The Great Escape.  Naturally.

Acting on impulse

They say that a man is happy if his business is his pleasure.  I'm actually here today to tell you that although you may have achieved this, your business is a cruel and disturbing one, and you should probably stop doing it.
Well yes, and stop doing that actually.  It'll send you blind.
No, seriously, stop doing that please, or I'll get the scissors out and cut them off.
There, that wasn't so hard was it?  Well yes, I suppose arguably it was, but.... Yes, I am allowed to sigh at you like that.  I need ways to convey these things, and you don't seem to pay any attention to normal cues.  No, I don't know why you don't pay attention.  No, nor do I care.  Well go and see a psychiatrist then.  They're paid to listen to you neurot at them.  Actually it is a word, because I'm allowed to neologise.  I've done my time in the word-mines thank-you, and if I want to introduce neurot then I may.  And I think you'll find it's the answer to 17 across in this Saturday's Listener.
Well maybe you should.
No, I've been hired by your HR team.  Ok, your ex-HR team, and I'm sure they'll be delighted to discover that on Monday.  Ah, really?  That's probably one of the reasons that they've hired me then.  Because hiring sky-writers to let them know they're fired is expensive, unnecessary and humiliating.  No, hiring chuggers to go door-to-door in their neighbourhoods and spread the word of the sacking seems just as expensive and unnecessary.  No, I think posting it up in the local post-office, supermarket and restaurants is also unnecessary and humiliating.  Well I suppose there's an element of caring in that suggestion – I said an element, not to go ahead and do it!  Oh good grief, seriously?  You need to learn to control your impulses: people do not want their elderly mothers calling them and telling them that you've fired them and threatened to burn down their nursing homes.  Well I definitely didn't know you were joking.  No, I don't think she did either.  No.  No.  Oh good grief.  Why do even know the phone number of an arsonist?  Give me that.  Give. ME. THAT.  Damn it, you've got a grip like a sacculina barnacle.
Right, look.  The problem here is that you're impulse-driven and so much so that you can't even stop and recognise it.  Let me tell you a short parable, the tale of the ghost of my dead wife.
"Once upon a time there was a man who lived happily with his wife in a small house in a cul-de-sac not far from the magnificent Cathedral of the Derived Mind.  One day he was looking for the rat poison as there were rats seemingly getting into the cupboard where the rice sack was kept.  Looking at the bottle with its vivid green label and its little black skull and crossbones he was seized by an uncommon impulse and added a generous shot to the cup of tea he'd made for his wife.  Shortly thereafter, while he was poisoning the rice that the rats were eating, his wife drank her tea, and then retired to bed in pain.  That evening she died, and the man was moderately upset.
Three days later he brought home another woman he'd met while standing in line at the supermarket checkout.  She was tall and calm and wore fishnet stockings, a skirt that didn't quite cover her thighs and a bustier that was two sizes too small.  The man showed her into his bedroom and then hurried to the bathroom to brush his teeth and clean anything that was sweaty.  Such as his palms. When he turned the lightswitch on, the ghost of his dead wife was sat on the edge of the bath.
"Not now, woman," he said through clenched teeth, hoping that the woman in the bedroom wouldn't hear him.  "Come back tomorrow and moan at me then."
"You know she's a whore?" said his dead wife.  She opened her mouth in laughter and the man saw the flames of hell flickering at the back of her throat.
"She named her price in the supermarket," he said. "It was less than the groceries I was intending to buy."
"That does indeed sound like a bargain," said the woman.  "But when you buy the apples that are cheap, don't they often contain worms?"
"Well isn't that a lovely image?" said the man, brushing his teeth with vigour.  "I'm sure that will put me off if I let myself think about it.  Which I won't do, thank-you."
"Bury me properly and I'll let you get on sleeping with diseased, gold-digging bitches," said the ghost calmly. "Otherwise I'm going to keep kicking up a stink.  Literally, probably."
"I buried you!"
"You dragged me out to the back-garden and put the paddling pool on top of me," said the ghost of his dead wife.  "Foxes were chewing my skull last night, and I think one of my arms has been dragged off by a badger."
"Is that what that noise was?"
"You might have looked out of the window," said the ghost.  "But no, you and your hands were busy with each other.  You're pathetic, you know."
"And you're dead," said the man.  "Now let me get on with entertainment that doesn't require me to be solo."
"Bury me properly."
"Where?"
"In the grounds of the cathedral, of course."
And so it was some hours later the man prevailed on the prostitute to take two suitcases away from the house with her and deposit them in the gardens of the cathedral, where the custodians found them and their contents and promptly had the police arrest her and accuse her of murder.  She led them back to the small house, but the man in there was also dead, having eaten poisoned rice."
What?  Oh yes, there's a moral to this tale.  It's that prostitutes should be very careful to explain up-front what they're being paid for and not take on any additional tasks no matter how generous the offer may sound.
No, you don't look much like a prostitute, but I don't really know what a prostitute does look like.  Well there are other morals you could take away from the tale.  Like how sex is bad for you or how you should avoid having foxes chew your skull or something.
Yes, I imagine that your ex-HR team might let foxes loose in the office after they all get called by their elderly mothers.  Or at least after the nursing homes start burning down.
Yes, I do think calling the arsonist back might be a good idea.  No, I'm not telling you where I live.  No.  No.  Stop asking, or I'll tell you another parable.
Thank-you.