Industry Standard

{Heavy Equipment:}

The buildings here are all either more pointy or more rounded than the sorts of buildings peeps live in. The buildings are a lot bigger too, on average, though peeps have been living in bigger and bigger buildings. Why not have dinner with your business colleagues in the evening and work on closing the deal, and then have breakfast with your pandit in the morning and work on your spiritual development, after all? If you can do it all in the same building, even if it's from opposite corners of that building, you can leastwise use the same sewer system for everything. There's continuity in that. Family, in turn, materializes from continuity. Cornerstone of society and so forth, y'know? Anyhow, the pointiness and roundness of the buildings would suggest downtown to me . . . And now I can confirm it. Yep, we're downtown.

If I scoop you up with the gargoyles and radio masts, you'll see a colorful cordon of humanity wrapping itself around a couple city blocks over toward the south, lining up in a continuous slow-moving chain. It may seem like a particularly cruel form of punishment or a particularly stupid crowd control error, but it's just a fundraiser for a committee. The event's called Queueing for Queers. The Queers are a political party whose platform is "algorithmic government" which attracts a lot of shiny-eyed young people these days, as well as a few oldsters who know what's what. The idea with the Queers is that if one is aware of the three biggest news stories in the capitol, the two biggest stories in the country, and the single biggest story across the globe, all of these Big Six officially broadcast by news consortium de rigueur Barrel Networks, the Big Six updated every four hours, then one can determine what sort of action the government will implement by following the branches down a standardized flow chart.

If nothing else, it's something to get riled up for and to blow off some steam about. Most activism accomplishes at least that much, and both the rile and the steam are vital to any political cause.

So, there's a part of this queue in particular which most peeps would notice. Let's gleam in on it. Lucky for us, it'll serve our narrative continuity perfectly. Basically, it appears to be the chassis of one of those smaller front-loader tractors, and it's reminiscent of a single ski boot for a giant robot. The cab has been removed, and it's been replaced with a shower stall whose door has been welded shut. In fact, there are weld seams along all the vertices of this shower stall. The glass is flat and see-through, but the stall is filled to the top with a glutinous-looking gel. The gel is colorless, but because it's as thick as it is, it's as if the object inside is partly obscured by fog as seen from about a decameter away.

We can still see that it's Jad Filo in there, though, naked as a plucked eagle apart from a kind of skullcap chapleted with black knobs that look something like drawer-handles, and a minimalist breathing apparatus. He's floating mid-tank, waiting there in line inside this contrivance.

It's been a few weeks since that day in the junkyard when Jad reactivated Mispa's HomeHub, but a lot of peeps have already found out about it. Jad's TotalTong now knows, of course, so that's 500 right there. Jad's participating in this Queueing for Queers event with some colleagues from another tong too, known colloquially as "Mina Robards and the Mean Retards", so the word is spreading. The name of Mina's tong would've had to have been changed on account of its language, by the bye, but it isn't the actual name.

What Jad's having reactivated the HomeHub means in terms of protocol is that he's got first dibs at applying for the houseringer position. The job is government schedule, and starts out more than halfway up the chart, so it's well paid, but that's not why anyone would become a houseringer. For Jad (or anyone) getting the job would mean a lot of toil. For one thing, he'd have to help rebuild the neighborhood which's yoked under the HomeHub. For another, he'd have to onboard a helpstaff, get to know and to work with them sustainably, and establish his credibility. Apart from all those tasks which are understood to fall under the purview of houseringer, there are bound to be a steady supply of those "phantom tasks" that any houseringer can speak to. Mispa, for example, once had to rig an apparatus which equitably decided what to watch on TV any given evening, with only a wire hanger and an IR receiver yanked from a popcorn machine. A HomeHub, in addition to all the retrofits and the houseringer and helpstaff who do what they do "downstairs", is still a house tenanted by a nuclear family and is counted as a single-family house in the census.