Alpha Omega by Nicholas Bowling

Author:Nicholas Bowling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

8.01

MARIA DA SANTOS MARTINEZ has had a frustrating morning. She was up out of her bunk under the ventilation tower at 5.30 a.m. to sweep and polish corridors G1–6, only to find that they were already full of men in overalls, nicer overalls than hers, black and close-fitting, who were carrying laptops and spools of wire and suitcases of expensive precision tools. They’d taken the digital screens off the walls and removed the black orb-shaped cameras from the ceiling and were poking around inside them. She knows that something important is happening at midday, and her supervisor keeps telling her to put a “lamb yard” around her neck, but whatever they were up to seriously disrupted her routine, and she had to mark all areas as “incomplete” on her progress form. After that she was supposed to clean the male and female staff toilets, but one of the stalls was locked, and she knocked politely three times before its occupant furiously opened the door, eyes red and raw, some kind of powdery narcotic smeared around her lips and nostrils. Again, she had to mark the section as incomplete, all of which will come back to haunt her in her Performance Review on Friday. At 7.30 a.m. she was supposed to have her break, but it so happened that Student Brand Ambassador Jordan Haynes, who seems to have more authority than a lot of the staff despite still being a pupil, had spilled some juice in his DV on the journey to school, and Maria was summoned to the car park to clean and fumigate the vehicle immediately.

Now, her breaktime fully squandered, she has to attend the compulsory Wednesday Wellness seminars, which are for all the support staff, in which they extol the virtues of probiotic diet management, mindfulness and meditation, the Power of Yes, etc., whilst never addressing more pertinent issues, such as the lack of natural light in the sleeping areas and the toxicity of the cleaning products that’s turning a lot of Maria’s colleagues’ skin a ghastly shade of yellow.

They’re sitting in rows on cold, foldable metal chairs in the support staff common room, listening to a man in a red baseball cap talking about the Law of Positive Attraction. She doesn’t understand most of it. There’s a slideshow behind him which features a homeless man, then a man in a smart suit holding lots of cash, then a rainbow, then a circle with “YOU” written in it, with lots of arrows pointing inwards to emphasise its centrality to the message. The presenter’s face is a permanent waxy grin, and he keeps winking at one of the dishwashers in the front row, a wiry and tattooed Hungarian man who, Maria knows for a fact, killed someone in the old country.

“Remember in week six when we talked about mindsets?” says the man.

A cartoon brain appears on the screen, making what looks to Maria like a “shrug” gesture. The sound of the word “mindset” is familiar to her, but she doesn’t know what it means, any more than she did in week six.

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