Page 7 of Pandion
Kagesawa seemed about to protest but changed his mind and got up. “Yeah, sure. I guess with your score there could be something other than construction work.” He buttoned his shirt and reached for his tattered trousers from the day before.
“Our score.” Harumine was less than pleased to have to do the same after his clothes had been spread around the floor at some point during the previous night’s tussle. He wished he’d at least had the presence of mind to pick them up and fold them over the back of a chair. “I suppose I need to move my stuff in,” hemumbled as he tried to smoothen the wrinkles on his shirt and tie. He’d been putting it off, hoping he would find somewhere else to stay.
“You’re not going to need the tie,” Kagesawa pointed out.
He was probably right. After years of back-breaking, mind-numbing effort, Harumine was now looking for a no-tie-required–type of a job. Ah, shit. How depressing.
It was not his score.
Chapter 5
The empath profession was, if anything, very diverse. Ever since the discovery and development of the linking process some forty years ago, pairs of empaths and their unique sets of skills had been utilised to perform various tasks such as manning elaborate construction machinery, scientific research, investigative work, aiding medical and emergency services and even national security. It was possible to specialise in tasks that demanded great expertise and thus awarded a certain status.
Not everyone could become an empath. Out of the hundreds of applicants, only a handful were accepted to the few schoolsthat offered the training. One-third of the students quit without graduating, and the job market could be highly competitive, though there was usually a lot to choose from if you were skilled enough.
Harumine was certainly skilled enough, so… why was he waist-deep in literal refuse?
Can you shut it off for me?
The complex waste management system of the mining colony 7a35: ‘Kabutomushi’ had malfunctioned. Because the only way to bypass the automated sorting system while it was being repaired was to hook up actual human brains to do the job, Kagesawa, Harumine and a few other empaths had been connected to the sorter to sort garbage before the backlog of it became a problem.
As this was one of the shittiest and most unexpected jobs out there, there was no tidy, climate-controlled control room from which to work. To connect to the sorter, one had to physically go where the sorter was, which in this case, was right in the middle of the sordid stench of the shit it was sorting.
The flow of refuse slowed and stopped so that Harumine could send some of the excess hazardous waste through one of the many sluices of the system before it would reach the sorter and clog it up. This was something he needed to do every twenty or so minutes because the initial influx caused by the malfunction was still too much for the machine to handle. Even at full capacity, some of it had to be diverted back into the system from time to time.
Go ahead and restart,Harumine instructed Kagesawa.
Kagesawa was also waist-deep in the refuse but at the other side of the sorter with a rudimentary set of manual controls. Since Harumine was the more skilled of the pair, he was the one doing most of the sorting. Kagesawa’s job was to stand at the controls to assist when the sorter needed to be stopped.
After eight hours of sorting a day, with only a few short breaks, Harumine was starting to feel like the contents of his skull were about to deliquesce and trickle from any available orifices. He was understandably not in a particularly great headspace by the end of the week, even if he’d never been more glad of a weekend in his life.
Stop the thing. Harumine was drifting in and out of sleep, sitting on the sofa, waiting for Kagesawa to finish making whatever he was attempting for supper.
“We’re not at work,” Kagesawa reminded him.
“Huh?” Harumine turned to look, a little startled. Yes, he’d been tired before. The biannual exam seasons and the extensive link simulations had been rough, just not quite as intense as the real thing.
“You were projecting again. The food is almost ready. A couple more minutes. Try not to fall asleep.”
“Hmm.” Harumine reset his cheek on the backrest and tried to stay awake. Another week of this and he would have surely burnt out. Thankfully, the automated sorting system had finally been repaired, and it had been a slightly shorter day than the ones before it.Restart it again.Harumine jolted back awake. He’d been sleep-projecting these two sentences most of the week from having had to repeat them so many times.
“Ooh, sorry.” As soon as he closed his eyes, he could see the sickening flow of refuse that he’d been watching all week. “I’m never doing that again.”
“Can’t say it was one of my favourite gigs either,” Kagesawa commented. The doorbell rang. “Can you check who that is? I’m a bit tied up here.” He was referring to whatever he was frying in the pan.
Harumine got up and shambled to the door. When he opened it, the person on the other side shoved him in the chest andissued forth an immediate tirade of some rather ear-burning insults and threats.
“Wait, what? Excuse me?” Harumine struggled to stay on his feet.
“You’re not him, where is he? Kagesawa!” The stocky, bearded man pushed past Harumine and into the apartment. “Rent! YOU OWE ME TWO MONTHS’ WORTH!”
“Oh?” Kagesawa didn’t seem surprised or bothered. In fact, he continued what he was doing in his usual leisurely manner.
Harumine was appalled. Never mind the tendency to throw this apartment into a state of chaos unless Harumine constantly kept track of things and picked up after him, but the man had not bothered to pay the rent? Was his financial situation that bad?!
The fuming landlord didn’t look like the sort to cross, so, to keep the situation from escalating, Harumine searched for a way to resolve it as soon as humanly possible.
“I’m sure we can work something out.” But how? They’d received their pay for this week’s work, but he hadn’t had the time to hand in his credit chip yet, so there wasn’t much money in his account. He had some savings but couldn’t access them at such short notice—