Microstory 2521: Queuer

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Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3

Guides and Queuers are two sides of the same coin. My co-workers are there to answer questions because they are a lot more knowledgeable about how all of this works. My primary responsibility is to literally keep the line moving. We maintain constant contact with each other, and coordinate to make sure the process is physically smooth while patients transition from one place to another. To do this job, you need to have great spatial reasoning, and the ability to count a group of people extremely quickly. Has a job interviewer ever asked you that before? Did you ever study that in school? It’s not as easy as it sounds. Counting heads is just something you have to practice, but it’s vital to our job of making sure everyone is in the right place at the right time. We simultaneously don’t want too many people, or too few. It wastes everybody’s time, including both patients and staff. Landis can only heal one person at a time, so it’s up to the rest of us to make sure each next person is ready to go once he’s done with the last one. It’s stressful and chaotic, but I find it quite invigorating. The line never ends until the end of the day, but man, once we get there, it’s so satisfying. You don’t even know. One by one, the last of the patients step through that door, and you feel like you’ve completed a puzzle. And this happens every single day. Well, I mean, I don’t always have the post-lunch shift, so I don’t always see the end, but then I saw the beginning, and either way, it’s rewarding to keep people moving through that queue. Since you have to be good at counting people, and at recognizing them—so you don’t start giving people the same instructions they already heard, or asking them duplicate questions—you really see the progress you’re making. One after another; Bob, then Sue, then Sally, then Manuel. They walk up, go in, and disappear, never to be seen again. If you notice the same person too many times, you’re probably not coordinating them correctly. If you don’t ever notice the same person more than once, you’re probably not fit for the job. It’s all about balance. That’s what I tell people. I’m a balance worker. Moving lines, adjusting stanchions, filling waiting rooms as soon as they’re emptied of the group before. It’s a delicate dance that would probably make for a good show if you could see it from a God’s eye view. And I get to be one of the choreographers.

Microstory 2083: For Free Candy

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Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Stable Diffusion

Today was pretty much exactly as it was yesterday, except I worked second shift, instead of the first one. We hung out in the greenhouse while the boss stayed in the main building to greet customers. She would call us up whenever she needed help. I could practically copy my post from yesterday, and paste it here, and it would hardly be inaccurate. The weather is still crap, though it’s not as windy or snowy, which is nice. I thought maybe that there would be just a few more customers, but it was the same. We keep track of the number of people who come in, and the number of parties. Somebody smart wrote a computer program that logs this stuff for us using the main entrance security camera. It doesn’t have any facial recognition software built in, so it’s not totally accurate. For instance, if you realized you forgot your wallet, ran back out to get it, and then opened the door again, it would log you twice, because it wouldn’t know that you were the same person. Anyway, that doesn’t happen a whole lot, so we’re not worried about any auditing issues. The total number of visitors today was nearly identical to yesterday. I’m not good with numbers, but I like to explore trends like that, to see if I understand them. It reminds me of how my parents would always log visitors on Halloween. Oh, that’s right. You don’t have that holiday in this world. It involves children going door to door to ask for free candy. I wonder whether they still do that.

Ya know, I don’t think I’ve mentioned my family yet. Bulk travel is a form of time travel, but I’ve not seen them in over 25 years. So if I were to return to a point in their timeline that matches my own personal timeline, they would be in their eighties. They could be gone by now. But again, the timelines don’t match up, so I could also go back, and not a second will have passed. Or I could go back to before I even left, or before I was born, or before they were born. Heh, time, right? Back to the weather, why were the numbers about the same, even though it wasn’t precipitating as hard? It’s because of the roads. I always forget about the roads. It was really bad last night—even worse than it was to drive while it was still happening during the day before—so people did not want to go out after that. All schools in the area were canceled, which is why the high school student who works here picked up an extra shift. I think she’s my favorite out of all the humans I’ve met on this version of Earth. She seems to be the only other person who recognizes how unexciting it is, besides maybe those people who answered my weird ad. Though to be fair, they didn’t appear to have any strong feelings about the nature of the world. They were just behaviorally divergent. Speaking of which, I should probably reach out to them; make sure they’re doing okay.

Microstory 1470: The Transition Continues

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Since 2100, the city of Aljabara had not gone more than five years without holding an election. Most of these weren’t fair or legitimate, but they did take place, and those who the government decided were worthy of casting votes were free to do so. After the fall of the Republic, there were a lot of decisions that needed to be made in order to sustain the Provisional Government, but these weren’t determined through formal votes. They were polls. A special committee formed which did what they could to understand public opinion, and then used the general consensus to form policy. But no woman alive today had been free to cast a real ballot on Durus, except for Ecrin. The year 2165 was meant to be the time to do that, but this temporary governmental body wasn’t quite prepared for it. The greatest number of people ever, by a huge margin, would be voting in this round of elections, and no one around knew how to handle that. Even the visitors from Earth who had always been part of a democratic system didn’t know how to organize it, because none of them had experience in that field. They did their best, and tried to include everyone, but ballots were lost, or miscounted, or damaged, or people weren’t registered correctly. It was a huge mess. They would have remained in the transitional period even if it had gone smoothly, because no one had written a new Constitution...because no one knew how. Even so, it was a requirement for full-fledged governmental recognition, according to a recent poll. So new people were elected into leadership positions, and new committees were formed to make decisions, but nothing was official, and not everyone recognized the authority bestowed upon certain people from the votes. No one knew whose ballots were counted, and whose weren’t, but people whose preferred candidate lost tended to believe that their voice had been ignored. However close to accurate as it might have managed to be incidentally, no one was completely happy with the results, since it was so unclear. People began to protest, and demanded a revote. Few people were against this happening, except of course people who were still, or now, in power. It didn’t start a war, but the whole thing might have collapsed in a few years if something wasn’t done about it. Fortunately for them, a threat was on the horizon that galvanized the people of Durus into action, and finally forced them to form the Democratic Republic. But until this was official, the people lived under something called the Salmon Battalion Military State.