The liberti is called Daisy Longley. This fact (and several others) was delivered in a snivelly and hitched voice in between bouts of wretched crying in a Starbucks on Croydon High Street. Cradling a tall latte (extra hot, triple shot—her urban survival reflexes evidently still partially intact) and staring miserably into the middle distance, Daisy laboriously (and frankly after some time, boringly) relayed the events of the past hour.
Up until today, Daisy had been a dutiful member of HR at a WorkSpace subsidiary called The Prius Priest, a franchised hybrid vehicle-recycling centre situated just off the Purley Hill tram route. Four years of counselling employees who suffered non-litigiously viable skin complaints (caused by thionyl chloride leakage from the poorly maintained decompiling yard) had firstly disillusioned and then broken poor little Daisy. Prior to her resignation, being superficially diligent, she had consulted her local Life After WorkSpace (LAW) representative (a stubborn cereologist called Sharon from Streatham), but Daisy was lazy by nature and inured to privation by years of parental safetynetism; she had prepared poorly for her ejection into a life after workspace.
Scant seconds after she hit send on her resignation email (a stubby thumb, the nail bitten to the quick, mashing down on the greasily delineated touchscreen icon), the DeskClear routine had initiated as it always did its rough and careless (but ruthlessly efficient) mandate, denuding and depersonalising both the space and person that Daisy occupied. Spat out into a windy loading bay at the back of the Prius Priest, a sobbing and befouled Daisy had stumbled out into a chilly November morning.
Flailing ineptly at passing peds who veered away with the characteristic banana sway of the tunnel visioned commuter, their disgust only lasting until she dropped out of their field of vision, Daisy had made it to the nearest tram stop. Pathetically smoothing the paper smock (her parting gift from WorkSpace) and clawing acrid cleansing foam from her still wet hair, Daisy had retained enough sense to spoof the Oyster scan by crawling on as the pension brigade shuffled off the semi-intelligent low-boarding platform of the tram. After just four stops the CCTV had woken up to the fact that she was fare bludging, and Daisy had only just dodged the weary servos of the overused plastic seat restraints—it was at this point that Brant had intervened.
Brant was rapidly running out of philanthropy; certain that the TTIME hack was about timed out, and terrified of the consequences of the peevish retribution of a sub-sapient exosuit OS, he was desperate to get back on the job. Daisy was a mess though, twin runnels of philtrum-funnelled snot eloquently illustrating her helpless ineptitude in dealing with this epic clusterfuck of her own making. If she had sufficiently prepared, she would have had a set of clean clothes waiting in a handily stashed ejection location; if she had remembered to remind Sharon the cereologist of the exact time of her resignation, she would have had a (relatively) friendly face to buffer her into unemployment; if she had saved at the minimum levels and duration that LAW advised, then she wouldn’t be looking like someone had just shot her dog. If. As a result, Brant was rapidly reaching his own personal levels of sympathy—what the fuck was he going to do with her?
Gratifyingly, it turned out that Daisy wasn’t a complete flake, she had scribbled the address of a back up LAW safe house on her inner thigh with a indelible marker, and after a quick toilet break (which cost another latte) she returned with the details scribbled on a napkin. Brant was ready to leave her to it, the Samaritan etiquette already over-stretched by an hour long (non-sanctioned) break and Daisy’s relentless home counties drone. Back at the tram stop, with Daisy clutching Brant’s emergency cash cache, Brant started to make the shuffling micro movements of imminent departure—cue more wailing and snot production.
A period of gentle back patting and shushing ensued.
Partly out of sympathy, but mostly to stop the fricking noise, he eventually agreed to go with her to the LAW safe house. The address was in a BN postcode and he hadn’t seen the sea for years. Pulling out his PDA, Brant composed a saccharine sweet Extraordinary Circumstances abstention email to the WorkSpace temp coordinator—the default sick grandmother line is over-abused, he has to up the ante and invoke a next of kin mortality alert, bad karma even when you’re scamming WorkSpace. CCing the exosuit, he fires it off with little hope of work tomorrow. Ho hum.