Quoted By:
>fire alarms/equivalent ways to quickly empty the facilities so pat gets off our case about murdering a bunch of innocents
Geez. Fine. You'll be more specific in your probing. If, hypothetically, you were to explode Headspace—
<span class="mu-i">You're not doing that.</span>
Well, you aren't, but <span class="mu-i">you</span> are. Hypothetically. If you were to explode it in a huge ball of righteous justice, this would be great for the world at large, but bad— you're thinking— for the employees of Headspace. Yes? And you have the bad feeling that murdering a thousand-plus innocent people would be a stain on your perfect record. So if there's some sort of warning system you could activate, e.g. a fire alarm, that'd be—
<span class="mu-i">Ha ha.</span>
Memories of accidents: an Inc girl on a quad of spacers, unable to keep her limbs in the right places; a kid walking into a calm room, walking out dopey, tripping and falling and crushed in an autowalk; Leonard splattered on the cobblestone; incinerations and overdoses and disassociations and more than one non-Friend in the Friend Disposal. A fire alarm? What for? What quota would that hit? What deadline would that make? There's never enough time and there's never enough resources and to fill the gaps there are always, always, always new hires. If you believe the crackpots, some of them aren't so new, either.
Even if there was an alarm— where would the evacuation go? <span class="mu-i">Outside?</span> Nobody's suited for there anymore. It'd be like yanking one of those toothy Edge fish to the water's surface; you'd explode. You feel like you would explode. For any evac to work, there'd have to be a route to a large, steady manse, or Headspace merged somehow into that manse. Good luck with that.
>how he got hired/the hiring process for people he's hired
Always, always, always new hires? How is that possible? It's been— (well, it hasn't been all that long in real life, but—)
Desperate people. Low standards. What does anybody look for after death? Answers? Nobody has those. A purpose? A community? You're never seeing your family, friends, fiancée again: Headspace is like family. Headspace is full of new friends. You can marry somebody there, and even receive a HeadCred™ bonus for your trouble, if you consent to letting the relationship be psychometricized and evaluated for productivity impacts. (Memories of weddings.) Nuptial bliss can't interfere with the quotas. (Memories of divorce.)
You don't have to be all that smart to get hired, either. Most would say you don't have to be smart at all. Sure, they run you through those tests now— the psychometrics, the inscrutable scans, the one where you talk about the blobs— but those seem to be filtering out troublemakers, not filtering in quality. Anyone dumb as a rock can work one of the canteens.
It wasn't like this when you came on. You came on early, when it was Casey and hardly any Management, when it was pie-in-the-sky aspirations and gritty technical problems. Reality hit later.
(2/4)
