Crispy

 The shrieking recommenced almost as soon as Jill closed the door behind her again and Marvin shivered, glad that he wasn’t having to face potential customers.  He picked up the invoice that he’d pushed back before Jill came in and a puzzled expression came over his face.  He wasn’t especially handsome, and even his wife sometimes referred to him as having a face fit for radio, and his expression of puzzlement twisted up his puffy lips and flexed pock-marked skin in a way that sometimes put diners off their food for a couple of days.  He read the invoice again, and then turned it over and inspected the fine print on the back in case this was some kind of obscure joke.  Finding everything he expected there, even down to the phone number looking mostly correct he turned it back over and read it again, just in case it had changed while he wasn’t looking.  Then he set it down on the desk in front of him, stared at it as though it might change while he watched, and finally, reluctantly, picked up the phone.

“Kev!” yelled a voice on the other end.  Describing Marvin’s boss as excitable missed the opportunity to compare him with a hyperactive toddler who’d been gorging on forbidden E-numbers all morning and sugar all afternoon.  Marvin pulled the phone away from his face slightly to avoid feeling like he was being deafened.

“Kev, it’s Marvin here,” he said.  Most people would have checked to see who was calling when they answered the phone but Marvin knew his boss would simply have grabbed the phone without looking and answered it.  There was no-one in the world that Kev wouldn’t talk to, but there were a lot of telemarketing firms that had him on their no-call list.

“Marvin!” Kev sounded elated.  “I was just going to think about you!  You’re awesome, you know that right?  I love the job you do!  What do you for me again?”  There was the sound of a car horn blaring and Marvin guessed that Kev was probably driving.  He waited, and sure enough he heard Kev shouting, probably out of his window.

“Yeah, and I’d do that to your mother too, you—“ and another cacophony of horns drowned him out.  When approximate silence resumed Marvin risked talking.

“Kev, we’ve got an invoice here from the council,” he said.

“Lovely people,” said Kev.  “You’re one of my corpse-robbers, right?”

“Right,” said Marvin.  Arguing with Kev was pointless as he rarely listened to anything anyone told him unless it was related to money.  “The council are billing us for littering.”

“What?”  There was a screech that might have been Kev braking hard, or someone close by to him braking hard.  Marvin wouldn’t have liked to have to guess.

“Yeah, apparently we’re in breach of new guidelines on the disposal of long-chain hydrocarbons with persistent features.”  That was, word for word, what the invoice said.

“What the bloody hell does that mean?  Can’t these guys speak English?  And look where you’re putting that thing, mate, or I’ll find somewhere to put it that’ll have you walking funny for a week!”

“I think they’re talking about plastic surgery,” said Marvin, who was certain that this was the case but still had trouble believing it.

“You what?  That wasn’t a bleeding pig, mate!”

“I think,” said Marvin, wondering what was going on where Kev was, “that the council are saying that if we bury people who’ve had plastic surgery without removing the plastic bits first, they’re going to bill us for littering.”

“Then remove the plastic bits, bro!”

Marvin stared off into the distance while listening to the wail of a police siren approach and then fade away again while Kev trash-talked someone who sounded like they might be a pensioner.  When he felt that Kev might be listening he spoke up.

“First, people are going to get upset if they think only bits of their relatives are getting buried,” he said and Kev cut him off.

“Tell them it’s a legal requirement,” he said.  “Put it in the fine print and point them at the council when they moan.  Their rules, they can sort it out.”

“The other problem,” said Marvin doggedly, feeling like he was ordering the tide to turn back.  He’d been rather hoping Kev would be upset by all this and would go and shout at the councillors.  “The other problem is that rummaging through a body to remove the plastic bits will take ages.  It’ll end up costing us a fortune in wages, and maybe overtime for the first couple of weeks.”

“Sorting machine!” said Kev.  “Same to you, love, only with spikes on!”

“What?”

“Sorting machine,” said Kev.  “Like what they use in the post office.  Push the body in one end, get a filleted body out the other and a nice bag of plastic giblets.  Easy.  Talk to Alfred, he’ll fix you up with one.  Right mate, gotta go, I’m still trying to get these organs delivered and the traffic’s atrocious up here!”

Marvin set the phone down on the desk and gently rested his head in his hands while he tried to find a way that Kev’s idea didn’t make sense.  Outside he heard a slam and hoped that Jill had managed to get rid of the troublesome customer.

“Sorting machine,” he whispered to himself.

Personal shopper

 “Personal shoppers,” said the woman.  She was wearing a suit by Vivienne Westwood, something she wouldn’t have been seen dead in before the designer had died, and was struggling to carry it off well.  Her age, though well disguised by regular plastic surgeries, discrete supports, and the benefits of owning the majority share in several expensive cosmetics companies, contrasted with the heavy punk ethic that the suit conveyed: the large print over the jacket, the newspaper effect on the trousers, the brash colours that proclaimed that here was someone you couldn’t ignore.  She looked like a walking contradiction and Margoyle was having trouble deciding if she should be entertaining this relic’s proposal or throwing her out on the street.

The deciding vote in this case was that she had arrived at Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisations offices and been allowed in.  Getting the address to the office required a serious effort and, after a recent cyberattack, a good cryptanalyst and access to the more stable cryptocurrencies; being allowed in through the front doors was almost surely by invitation only.  So Margoyle listened, wondering where in her portfolio personal shopping was supposed to fit.

“We have about thirty-five thousand of them,” said the woman.  Margoyle controlled herself with well-practiced reflex and only a faint smile appeared on her lips; something that she’d learned from studying the Mona Lisa.  “They are effective enough, but we are, naturally, intending to automate the task entirely.”

Cogs turned in Margoyle’s head.  Personal shoppers twenty years ago were people who greeted you in expensive stores and then lead you around, commented on your personal style and taste and then improved it for you.  You left with a lighter wallet but your bags were heavy with the promise of societal approval and the respect of your peer group.  Now… well, euphemisms were the kind of thing that DAMN manipulated like puppets on strings.  A personal shopper must be a warehouse worker, surely.  And with that thought Margoyle’s smile stretched a little more across her face, though not so much as to indicate approval, and she understood the implicit reason for this elderly woman’s visit.

“We are looking for advice from your consultants,” said the woman, sounding a tiny bit lost for a moment.  Margoyle appreciated that: up until DAMN agreed to work with a client the whole office and set-up was designed to be confusing and nightmarish.  “Ideally, we’d like to retain some of the autonomy that the current personal shoppers have, without the issues that arise from having egos.”

Margoyle relaxed a fraction.  This was firmly in the remit of Soft Power and Furnishings which she had run with a titanium fist in an iron glove for nearly five years.

“I see,” she said, her voice smooth and low, almost like a cat purring.  “You have a number of, let’s call them human, workers, and you’d like to take advantage of their lower-level brain functions without the interference of higher-level, more evolved, effects?”

The woman stiffened a little and a faint dust of powder fell from her face onto her collar.  Margoyle felt it added to the punk effect and said nothing.

“Human is a very strong word,” she said, her voice sounding strained, perhaps as though she were holding her stomach in to impress a potential lover.  “Our lawyers have advised we avoid such terminology.  In their contracts they agree to be reclassified as nematodes.”

Margoyle nodded and leaned forward.  A recessed keyboard and screen in her desk, angled so that she could see them but her clients couldn’t, flickered dimly to life and she tapped a note out in proprietary shorthand that her interns should identify the firm of lawyers that had proposed this and research them.

“Nematodes,” she said thoughtfully.  “I imagine that the benefits package you offer is tailored specifically to that?  And thus a cost-saving rather than a cost-centre?”

The woman smiled beatifically and Margoyle considered immediately that that smile would look very good on the front of glossy magazines on newstands. Another note flickered from her fingers to the keyboard.

“Indeed,” she said.  “Last year we reduced emissions from our toilet facilites so much that we were able to obtain green funds for it!”

“A laudable achievement,” said Margoyle.  “So, am I right in assuming that the proposition that we are considering here is how to leverage current sentiments in specific law-focussed lobby groups to enable the transfer of consciousness from lower-level creatures such as nematodes into non-human bodies, perhaps primarily metallic, to facilitate the automation of personal shopping?”

There was a pause while the elderly woman eliminated paraphrases and circumlocutions and determined that what Margoyle was proposing was, in fact, what was being asked for.”

“Yes,” said the woman matter-of-factly.  “How much will it cost?”

Recyclable

 Cavern Supermarket was well named. It was at the bottom of a tower-block on a narrow street that was practically an alley.  Before the invaders had come and spent eighty years rebuilding and putting in infrastructure it had been an alley that led from another alley down to a slightly larger street that these days qualified as a main road.  The other buildings along the street had been residential homes first, but had morphed, slowly, into shops with flats above them.  Now there was a hairdressers's where six stylists lounged around looking louche and anorexic and no-one ever seemed to be getting their hair done; there was a pastry shop run by immigrants that did a roaring trade as their pastry recipes were all from their home town and not the locality, and there was a model aeroplane shop with dusty boxes and dead flies in the window that opened twice a day for an hour a time.

Cavern Supermarket opened until 10 every evening and at 7 every morning and was generally busy.  The shop stretched back, like an actual cavern, and took up three floors of the tower block plus the basement level.  There was a parking garage nearby and a secret there that only the workers in the supermarket knew about: the parking garage also had a basement level and that was how the supermarket took in new stock.

At least, it had been a secret (of sorts) until the new scheme had been announced and finally delivered on.  Now it was completely obvious to everyone that there was a basement level, and that there was a problem down there that was stopping anyone else from using the garage.

"Recycle!" proclaimed the signs outside the shop; large plastic banners in bright red and white that were pinned to the walls and across the plate-glass windows.  "Bring your recyclables here!"

On the ground floor, where they used to stack the baskets (both the ones you carried and the ones on wheel, like mini-trolleys) were now four large machines that looked like vending machines but took recyclables off you and gave you money back instead.  The baskets had been moved further into the shop and were creating their own problems as people went looking for them, then tried to return to the entrance to shop as they usually did and the streams of people were too much for the narrow aisles and crowded shop floor. Each machine gleamed in the fluorescent lighting and the easy-to-use slots and buttons were already greasy with unwashed fingers using them and worn at the corners.

The problem was that the locals were attempting to recycle anything and everything as they saw the machines as a source of free cash.  Despite the signs indicating the validity of bottles, plastics, boxes and everything else, the locals were determinedly pushing anything and everything into the slots and then hammering on the machines in an attempt to extract money when the machine declared the item invalid.  One man had even put his baby into the machine and was at the customer service complaining that the euro he'd been given was insufficient for recycling a child.

This in turn had lead to overcrowding of the storage area where the machines were emptied to, and then this had forced the owner of the supermarket, Charles Cavern, to call the operators of the scheme to come and collect all this 'rubbish' as he tactlessly put it.  They sent four large trucks... which promptly got stuck in the narrow alley and the underground parking garage.

Enterprising locals were already considering dismantling the trucks and seeing how much they could get from the machines for recycling them.