Share Economy

8,214 words

Share Economy
By Nat O’Connor

1

Jo knew that when you put your body in the hands of a tourist, you had to watch for what they didn’t see.

The tablet secured to her hip chimed twice, indicating disconnection in one minute’s time. The pilot quickened her pace along the rocky arête. She watched her feet move clumsily on loose shale, fragments clicking as they were pushed aside to tumble to the tarn below.

Twenty seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Her feet came down crooked, slipping in the scree barely ten metres from the summit. One nail bent back painfully as her fingertips grasped at the sharp rock, catching against a jagged fragment embedded in the mountainside. Jo tried to shut out the searing blade of pain, holding back the screaming vitriol towards her pilot’s indifference to the pain.

This was the climbing route to the summit, but her pilot’s haste was making it more like a scramble. It was a different skillset, and at the speed she was moving there was little opportunity to check her centre of gravity wasn’t tilting down to the water.

Five seconds. Her body surged ahead, nostrils flaring. One foot landed awkwardly, soil tumbling away on the sheer side. Enough. Jo forced her teeth down hard, catching the side of her tongue between two molars.

The sharp pain was enough to push the pilot out of her nervous system, seizing control with more urgency than simply wrestling with him would have done. Pins and needles shot through her as she regained command of her flailing limbs. Her body was still falling forward, but now she could react, bringing up her hands to cushion the fall and pressing her body flat against the ground. Assured that she wasn’t going to fall, she sprang upwards on her elbows. The previously haphazard, untrained movements gave way to the firm grace of the seasoned athlete, nimbly taking the last few steps up the arête to the summit.

In the middle of the rocky plateau was a familiar cairn. Jo rested against it, tapping her tablet to clock a 5-minute break before tossing a nicotine tab under her tongue. Three men were already here, the shortest of them taking pictures, the other two looking briefly to her before deciding that there was nothing worth their interest. At a glance they might have seemed like a single party, identical sweat-wicking vests adorned with the same webbing, containing matching sets of mostly superfluous safety equipment. That was ShareEx’s insurance-mandated climbing gear, which naturally the company sold as a package to all its Experience Associates.

Across the grey-hazed sky, a few words in a neat, black typeface came into view. “Job review – complaint logged”. She sneered, blinking rapidly to dismiss the words projected onto her contact lens. She’d learned by now that there was no situation, not even imminent peril, where an operator would tolerate being kicked before their money ran out. Just a few seconds early “ruined the experience” if the reviews left could be believed. The company would send them an apology and a part-refund, straight from her account.

The shortest of the three men slapped one of the others across the shoulder blades, grinning.

“Would you look at that, Drew! Just take a look at that!” The others carried themselves awkwardly, standing just behind him and jostling with each other as he made it to the edge of the plateau.

“Outstanding, just outstanding. Hey – hey! Curt, cut it out!” He wheeled around, snatching the hand of the man he called Curt, which had been picking at the third man’s cheek, pawing at it like a chimpanzee. The third was stood awkwardly still, slack-jawed. Jo recognised that glazed emptiness. It was a clear sign that the pilot had stepped away without relinquishing control, Jo recognising the strain in the idle figure’s expression. Pilots were told that they were meant to log off if they needed to do something with their own body. As far as the link device was concerned, that puppet was getting a constant instruction to stay completely still, and it wasn’t as though the puppet was going to force him out and risk a negative review. All three men were, outwardly, in their 30s.  The shouting man strode over and slapped “Curt” across the back of the head.

Leaning back against the summit cairn, he made no effort to hide the active unit with its shimmering blue ring of light. “Always wanted to take the boys here”, the man said, talking louder than he needed to. A certain type of pilot tried to convince themselves that it was by their force of will that they took control of another, rather than ShareEx’s technology. The puppet would have a sore throat by the time their slot was over.

She decided that the two more awkward men had to be piloted by the other man’s children. From the way they moved, it was all too obvious they weren’t piloting bodies which conformed to their shape. Each step taken by the bald one fell short, kicking up dust on the rocky ground with a ka-scrape. The other kept staring at his hands or trying to touch his brother’s face, showing no interest in the stunning view.

The assumed father kept smiling at Jo, waiting for her to respond. Jo looked back to him impassively, waiting for the moment he realised she wasn’t under active control, and that he was talking to somebody physically present. Sure enough, his wandering eyes strayed down to see the navy-blue slab in amongst the carabiners and rope, lingering on the extinguished light.

He coughed and made a few mumbled apologies, turning back to the other two, “Hey! Get away from the edge, y’hear? Still got an hour!”

She’d seen how people reacted when they met another person under active control. They would exchange pleasantries, ask where in the world the other was, and bitch about the price or even their puppet. Those meetings were meetings of equals, the skin that they were wearing nothing more than their medium. While the owner of the body had to watch and listen, to feel their own lips curling into a grin at their pilot’s bad jokes.

If they met her in the brief moments between jobs, none of the tourists tried to talk. She ruined the fantasy, spoilt their immersion. She was a caustic reminder of the reality of this situation, an intruder into their fantasy.

“Sup, Jo,” another woman approached from the climbing route, her own inactive unit hanging loose from a canvas strip around her waist which looked as though it was threatening to snap loose at any moment. Her eyes flicked to the Jo’s unit and, satisfied neither of them had a pilot, rummaged for a cigarette.

Sophia preferred real cigarettes and had made sure not to cultivate a personal brand that would make the residual taste incongruous. When a prospective pilot looked up Sophia’s profile, they saw a rugged butch who bled khaki and ate canvas. With a buzz cut that had only got more rigid since leaving the army, and a permanent scowl in every photograph, it would have been more of a surprise had she not smoked.

Jo, however, had to make do with tiny white tabs under her tongue at her moments of rest. Her persona was non-threatening. Fit, but not too strong. Intelligent, but with no books in client view beyond undergraduate level. Nothing that would scare the customers from their vicarious thrills.

“Hey. Not taking a long one, just, ah. Just cooling down,” Jo offered a slight smile, holding back the relief she felt on seeing a familiar face up here. It wasn’t as though they had a water cooler to cluster around, but the fine weather meant climbing experiences were in demand. There were always a few puppets up here, hastening the peak’s erosion.

Sophia crossed her free hand across her body, tucking her fist beneath her smoking arm. “Fair enough. Not drawing today?”

Jo shook her head. The trio of men were working their way down the scrambling route now. Once, Striding Edge had been only available to the most confident of climbers, willing to risk life and limb for the thrill and risk of the route less travelled. It turns out that far more people were willing to take that bet if somebody else was willing to back the stake.

“Haven’t drawn in weeks. Can’t spare the time, I need more on-hours.”

“Ach, you’re still doing that offline! What did I tell you, mate?” Jo closed her eyes, breathing in deeply as the larger woman continued. She knew exactly what it was she’d told her. “You need to set up a light influence profile, get a punter who wants to pretend they can draw.”

Jo rolled a shoulder, her eyes narrowing as the sun emerged from behind a wisp of cloud. The tab was almost dissolved beneath her tongue, its bitter flavour spreading around her mouth. She set about unclipping a water bottle, better to be clean and pure for the next pilot.

“Doesn’t earn enough. Like I said last week,” Jo gestured to her friend. She loved Sophia but wished she would understand that Jo had been doing this for five years, almost twice as long as her. She knew the ropes. “I’m barely making enough to afford the flat as it is.”

“Aren’t you still renting direct from ShareEx? Or – hell – SharePad or whatever it is they’re calling that.”

“It’s still a nice place.”

“Sure!” Sophia pointed her cigarette like an officer’s baton. “If you want to live at work. At least I ain’t going to lose my room if I piss off corporate.”

“It’s still my place.”

Swirling the liquid around her mouth, Jo spat the nicotine-infused liquid on the stony ground. The apartment had been a point of contention since she moved in last year. To the casual observer, she lived in relative luxury compared to most of her fellow puppets, and Jo was starting to think a lot of the moralising criticisms of the arrangement were tinged with jealousy.

The silence hung as Sophia made quick work of her cigarette. She clicked her tongue, adopting a lighter tone. “So, y’know. I spoke to Nick, and he’d love to have you at the next meeting,” she tapped Jo’s upper arm lightly with a closed fist. “You’d better come, seeing as I vouched for you.”

She made sure to put a smile on her face before she turned back. “Wednesday, right? You still haven’t told me where.”

The stub of the cigarette was put out of its misery on a small piece of metal that Sophia retrieved from her webbing, stained with innumerable burns. She sealed the filter in a small pouch filled with several more of its kind. Dropping them up here would be a good way to earn a network ban, but Jo got the impression that Sophia would have used the pouch regardless.

“Old corn exchange, four o’clock. Should be done in time for the evening rush,” the butch tapped her hip, bringing up the delightfully inoffensive ShareEx logo. “Speaking of – I’ve got a self-control pre-book waiting.”

Jo pushed herself away from the cairn, starting her stretches. “You need to teach me how to get those ones.”

“Wouldn’t fit your brand, love. You get punters that want to drive,” she double-checked her cigarettes were securely fastened, and tapped to ping her pre-booked client, “and mine just want to ride.”

Jo waved a hand, but Sophia had already turned away, chattering to her new client. An anxious buzz from her hip indicated that her requested break was coming to an end, and she risked losing the on-network bonus.

Small amongst the dappled grey ground, the three men whooped as they clattered their way down the scrambling route, the two man-children taking turns to shove each other towards the sharp drops on either side, howling in delight as their bodies shuddered with the effort of their puppet momentarily taking control for self-preservation.

The buzzing became shrill. Jo brought a hand to the screen, putting herself back on the market at her default configuration: high-impact, site-based event, default to pilot control and non-conversational. Within a minute, she’d been matched with a client. A civil servant from Scarborough, too busy to travel to the peaks herself. Jo made sure to place her bloodied tongue between her teeth, just in case, and watched as she was driven to the route back down.

2

It was dark by the time Jo made it back from the lakes. Her webbing stayed in the car, ready for the next climbing experience day. She showered in a hurry, summoning her on-network percentage to her lenses every few seconds.

The journey home was completely her own, and therefore worse than worthless. Allowing for pilots while she drove a car would be against both the ShareEx terms of service and suicidal. Having observers wouldn’t be much better, unless she wanted to risk an admirer arriving at her home.

That thought used to scare her, back when she was working out of a room in a shared house with Sophia and a few friends from university. When she thought about how cavalier she had to be with her personal safety back then, Jo felt a chill. She may be paying more now, and still only able to afford it because she was living on company property, but she knew it was worth it. If she had to work twice as hard as the others, so be it. That’s the grind.

Once home, it was a different story. Anything that could identify her address was locked away. The windows were covered in a thin film that projected a video of an abstract, fictional cityscape. Occasionally something like a dragon, or a giant airship, floated across the projected skyline. By making it plainly false, clients couldn’t claim that they were being deceived. Some self-protection was just a part of doing business.

Jo set up her availability for the evening’s session. Low-impact, home-based event, default to pilot control, conversational. Exactly the kind of low-earning session she didn’t want to dominate her schedule, but there was nothing wrong in letting these take the evening slot.

People always assumed the action sessions, climbing a mountain or swimming across a lake, were the hardest. In truth, all she had to do in those were watch for a pilot putting her in danger and be ready to force an override. Otherwise, she could check out, making the experience pleasantly dissociative. In conversational sessions, every part of her had to be engaged, ready to seize control of her voice every few seconds to respond, keeping her mind acutely aware that somebody else was at the wheel.

As the client stared at her body in the full-length mirror, Jo fought an impulse to look away as nausea rose in her gut. It took years of acclimatisation to get over that quirk of the human mind, the revulsion of seeing one’s own body move on its own.

“I felt that,” said the pilot. Too loud, too forceful. Same as always. “Why do you suppose that happens?”

“Evolution, I guess.” Jo heard her voice sound flat, and made a note to push more energy in. The first rule of this kind of session was to act interested. The client continued to pose in front of a mirror, twisting her sportswear-clad body to the edge of comfort. She’d have to throw that thing away if this kept happening.

“Oh, you could say that about anything. Evolution for what?

Jo watched as the pilot looked around the bedroom, growing bored of the mirror. It was pristine, of course – she would never make herself available for a session if it wasn’t. The pilots came to see the image: the selection of free weights neatly packed in a corner; the sports jersey folded up but kept in clear view. A tailored experience, with nothing left to chance.

“I wouldn’t know. Maybe we were at war with doppelgangers as cavemen.” Jo tried to smile, but as soon as she stopped talking the pilot’s will took over, butting in. It took active concentration to correctly manipulate the see-sawing of control, and if in doubt the client came first. Her body bent down, pushing her hands into the thick, plush duvet.

“You ever do sleepcasts? The bed looks comfortable, and I bet you sleep better than me.” Jo’s hand ran sideways across the bed, towards the neat double-stacked pillows where a single stuffed rabbit stood upright in the middle.

“I’m afraid not. I like to sleep in.”

“I’ve heard it’s dangerous – what if something broke into the pilot’s house? They can’t wake until you wake up, right? A-ha!” Jo’s hands finally reached their goal. A small brass key poked out to graze the rabbit’s legs, buried beneath the downy pillows. Jo watched as the pilot held it up to her face in triumph, making sure that she was aware of the discovery.

“Oh,” Jo tried to make sure her voice sounded genuine. Concern, with just a hint of fear and embarrassment. That’s what they always wanted; the idea that they’d found something that they shouldn’t have. “I thought I’d put that away.”

The pilot made her grin, stalking back to the dressing table. There had been one drawer that they hadn’t been able to open in their exploration, in which the key fit perfectly. Sliding it open, Jo heard her voice cry out in delight at the discovery: an A5 book, locked with a clasp.

“Is that a diary? You should be more careful where you hide your keys. I’m sure I could force open this little one.”

Sure enough, the puppet’s fingers got to work trying to claw open the clasp, too drunk on their own cleverness to consider the propriety of what they were doing. They wouldn’t get anywhere, and Jo knew it. She felt that a reply was necessary and took care to give her voice the same affectations.

“Please, I’d, ah – I’d really rather you didn’t. I’ve been writing in a diary since I was a teenager. It’s personal.” Now she twisted her voice around to vulnerability. No easy thing when most words came out as a dull monotone, but she had practice in that regard.

Her fingers stopped. The rest of the script played out as expected. The book was put away, the pilot gave a lecture on taking care of her safety while in this line of work and spent the rest of the session looking around her kitchen, offering unqualified dietary advice and a speech on the pitfalls of veganism.

By midnight, Jo was off-network. She checked the damage on the toy diary. Not that it could be opened since she’d glued together every one of its blank pages and filled the lock with solder the day she’d bought it. Even so, the scratches around the lock were starting to get obvious. She made a note to replace it and locked the drawer, putting the key back in its place – not quite hidden, but offering the tantalising prospect of a true secret.

If a puppet wanted to hide something, all they needed to do was mark it off-limits. Any pilot trying to dig into the unassuming satchel under her coffee table risked being banned from the network, and Jo could kick them out of her body at will. This was one of the benefits of working with ShareEx that the company touted. In principle, she only needed to share what she was comfortable with. The choice was entirely her own. Convenient for the puppets, convenient for the company.

Jo did a final pass of the pristine show bedroom, taking a moment to adjust the stuffed rabbit back to its centred position. Satisfied, she went to fish out her keyring from the front pocket of the satchel. The only room marked as off-limits supposedly belonged to her flatmate, often referred to but never seen. An old trick, the prospect of another human waiting in the wings deterred some of the stranger customers.

In this space was a double bed that barely fit within the room’s dimensions, a desk cramped between its foot and the back wall. Two whiteboards covered the peeling wallpaper behind a chunky computer monitor, half-written scraps of ideas for engaging sessions packed in between shopping lists and attempts at poetry. Jo started to sit down, reaching for the papers next to her keyboard. A set of charcoal pencils sat ready for her to continue her drawing, a half-finished landscape of the Albert Dock.

Compared to the rest of the flat, it was dire. A ball of chaos tightly packed into the manicured perfection all around. It was that room that Jo loved the most. Her contract with ShareEx allowed her one room that wasn’t connected to her account, that she could decorate in according to her whims, or allow to decay without receiving an earnings penalty. To have this space made it all worth it.

She hesitated before carefully setting the paper back down where it wouldn’t be smudged. No, she was too tired. And while she had enough on-network hours for the day, there was still a way she could earn a little money. The longer she waited before sleeping, the greater the risk of it becoming unproductive time.

She changed into pyjamas and logged into her alternate account. The revenue wasn’t as good, but she couldn’t bring herself to sleep in-character today. Double-checking the configurations – Sleep only, auto-disconnect on full wakefulness, pilot waives own-body liability – she settled down. Five minutes after she lost consciousness, an insomniac in London would fall into a much-needed sleep, piggybacking on her theta waves.

3

The therapist’s name was Steven, she thought. He hadn’t introduced himself, and there had been less than a minute before the client logged in anyway. Any longer and the supply of forced greetings and awkward shuffling would have been depleted.

Jo steadied her breathing, feeling the pinprick heat pass down her spine and outwards, sparking pain in her fingertips for an instant. The client’s anxiety was leaking through. Physiological responses were not a one-way process, and it was up to the puppet to keep calm regardless of what their pilot was putting them through.

This one was the other type. Rather than force her voice through an unfamiliar throat, she spoke in hushed tones, as though trying not to move Jo’s tongue at all. With such little force being exerted by the pilot, Jo had to make sure her mind was empty enough to allow for any control at all.

Meditation helped. Given enough practice, she could lose herself in the blank calm. Pretend that this wasn’t where she was, that the wraparound panorama of her vision projected on her conscious mind was a film. It had taken her months to earn her certification for low-impact sessions. To keep her mind clear and her body available, she made counts of whatever the pilot put into her field of view. Five fingers. Four plants in the room. Five to the power of four, six-hundred and twenty-five. Six plus two plus five, thirteen. Find a thirteen, then start over.

“I just – I feel guilty, like, all of the time,” Jo heard her own voice. Pathetic, cautious. Four tiles on the back wall, but the pilot kept looking down at her hands. Nine more to count, then start again. “I mean, I’ve got a good life, right? And I’m here, moaning. I bet – I bet if you asked this puppet, she’d say I was pathetic. Go on – ask her!”

“This session isn’t for her,” The counsellor, Steven, corrected with calm authority. “Why do you worry that she thinks you’re pathetic?”

The pilot looked up again, matching Steven’s gaze. Jo could readily count tiles now. Thirteen. Start over. Three piercings on Steven’s face. Clock hands at six and five.

“It’s like – they say ‘confidentiality is assured’, right? That’s what I’m spending the money for. But, but I know that she’s off after this, laughing about the – the poor little rich girl, right?” Jo was made to squirm, her fingers wriggling through each other in a desperate, repetitive motion. “But, like. Take a look at her profile! She does it all, she – she’s got this full, active life. They all do. And I just – I’m just in the audience. I don’t do anything, I don’t see anybody!”

The pilot kept whining, but Jo had tuned it out, like an old film going on in the background. She’d heard some puppets could enter a state of sleep during these sessions; even if this were true, it seemed too risky a way of going about working.

The client disconnected abruptly mid-sentence, Jo becoming suddenly aware of how tense she was holding her body. She stretched her arms, the pain of delayed onset muscle soreness starting to make itself known. Steven turned away, replacing his glasses and losing the forced, calm smile.

“My next client is waiting. You can go.”

4

“You’re late,” Sophia gestured to the chair beside her, “Had to save you a seat.”

“Yeah, thanks. Really packed in here tight.”

There were seven of them in a room that seated thirty. While the rough circle that they’d formed in suggested a degree of equality, three of the group were set apart, the rest of the group’s eyelines angled slightly towards them. The group was sat as one, but Jo could tell these three were at the head of the table. The roundest and baldest of the three grinned from ear to ear as Jo took her seat.

“Ah – and a warm greeting to our newest comrade,” Jo desperately tried to force a laugh back down her throat as Sophia jabbed her in the ribs with an elbow, “who I believe is Jo. Hello, Jo.”

“Ah! Ah, hello. Hello. Comrade,” Jo replied. Another jab, harder this time. The avuncular man either ignored or didn’t notice, beaming.

“My name is Nick, I’m the branch chair. This is Zofia, our treasurer. And here is Matjaž, branch secretary.” The other two sat at the invisible table nodding politely, distinctly less willing to break their flow to greet a newcomer. Nick clapped his hands together and continued to address the group.

“As I was saying, the national committee’s statement will be going up tomorrow morning. The off-network penalty is going to come back to bite the company. We know that associates are suffering, and the availability requirement is making the claim that we’re ‘independent contractors’ a nonsense. Until ShareEx recognises us as employees, or abolishes the penalty, we can expect to see more associates appreciate why they need a union.”

A young man sat across from Sophia raised his hand.

“Yes, go ahead Duncan.”

Duncan’s voice was soft, the man looking at the floor as he spoke. An oversized hooded top sat on a thin frame, as though he wanted as little of himself to be distinct as possible. “Yeah, I’m still not really sure. On this whole ‘penalty’ thing. Because it’s not that, is it?”

Nick shook his head, keeping the smile going. “The company may call it an uplift payment, but with base rates dropping every month, we all know it’s a penalty. It’s about messaging – by calling it a ‘penalty’ the clever clogs at the national committee reckon that we get the public on our side.”

Jo let the conversation wash over her. It was a familiar argument. The novelty of this meeting wasn’t the substance of what was being said, or the exotic surroundings of a rented meeting room with mould on the ceiling and an empty pack of doughnuts. It was about seeing that they could meet like this. That the sky wasn’t going to fall if they sat together and agreed that all wasn’t as it could be.

Still, out of all the Experience Associates in the city, there were seven here. Calling each other comrade and arguing over the wording of a statement nobody here had any hand in writing. It didn’t look like any spark of revolution she had ever seen.

This was the last item on the agenda. Jo apologised to Sophia for being late, as Nick exhorted the group to bring along more trusted comrades.

“What type of sessions does he do anyway? He doesn’t seem like the type.”

“What, and I do?” Sophia cocked an eyebrow, “We can’t all be girl-next-door like you, sweetheart. He does boxing. Goes down to the gym and gets lads to go easy on him while somebody else takes the reins. Makes a decent living on it, and all.”

It was getting towards rush hour as the group started to file out of the corn exchange. Jo brought up her on-network percentage, swearing under her breath. Reaching to set her configuration, she felt Sophia’s hand on her arm.

“Oi. Take a break, yeah? I’m going to grab something to eat, you want to come?” She fiddled with a cigarette in one hand, as though nervous. Jo figured she probably just couldn’t find her lighter. She shook her hand.

“No, I – I really should put in more hours. I was planning to have my dinner on-network. Maybe next week?”

Sophia’s face flicked, and she turned away, lighting a cigarette.

“Sure thing,” she said quickly, not looking back to Jo as she took a drag, “See you next week, mate.”

Jo frowned, unable to shake the feeling that she’d done something wrong. Sophia hadn’t walked away with that usual bounce, her shoulders slumped as she finally lit the cigarette she’d been torturing.

Some work would take her mind off it. She’d wanted to try getting in on these “observation only” sessions that Sophia was so fond of, and a walk down the historic canals of England seemed just the thing to draw in the housebound US crowd during their lunch break. Jo had already set up the advert, not quite showing the half-submerged shopping trolleys under the bridge.

It didn’t take long, the usual shiver passed through her body as the pilot took residence behind her eyes. Jo tried to relax her body, clearing her throat to greet the pilot. Or rather, passenger. The novelty of being in control was going to be difficult, but it was easy money.

“Hey, Jo!”

The reflex was too great to ignore. In her haste to set up the session, Jo had put her link device underneath her coat. She spun around, looking at Nick’s smiling face and raised fist. He couldn’t see the faint green light that would have alerted him to a spy in their midst.

“See you next week. Solidarity forever!” Jo wrestled herself back around, the pilot now giving the matter his full attention, trying to get a closer look at the man with all the influence that he was allowed to muster. With some effort, Jo took a few heavy steps forward before the pilot disconnected.

Jo scrambled to grab her tablet, trying to summon the refund options. She just needed to grant a refund to the would-be canal walker before they described their experience to ShareEx and gave away the union. A customer would only do that to get a refund, so providing the money up front takes away the incentive.

No options were available. The customer hadn’t given a negative review yet, so the option wasn’t available. Jo felt sick and leaned against the outside wall of the building. The union members had filed off, unaware of what had just happened. With shaking hands, Jo clipped her tablet back to its position. All she had to do was remember to give a refund as soon as the negative review came in. Then everything could just carry on.

5

Dinner was a regular client who, thankfully, wasn’t much of a talker. Jo ordered a steak dinner delivered as she made her way home. It would arrive at least 15 minutes before the session, giving her plenty of time to create the controlled discord of a kitchen that appeared to have been used, as well as heat the delivery food up.

It was one minute to the hour when she was able to take the food from the microwave, the plates out of the oven, and smear a little meat juice across a chopping board. Time cut a little finer than usual, but no matter. The pilot could carry the plate to her dining table themselves. True to form, the client took control of Jo’s arms and methodically started to eat the steak without saying a word.

Five fingers. Two leaves on the spider plant. No notification of a negative review yet. Perhaps she’d escaped it, or the client was a socialist sympathiser? Jo let her mind wander, suppressing the reflex to laugh at the prospect of a ShareEx user being a covert trade unionist. Ok, Five to the power of two is twenty-five.

Two plus five is seven. How often did this client come here to pretend to eat steak? Her body would feel sated and full for an hour, maybe, after disconnecting. Find a seven. The clock reads seven. Reset. No amount of empathetic network connections could actually move the steak from Jo’s gut to the pilot’s.

Every week this pilot went through this charade. She – the booking information told Jo they were a she – would eat the steak and go to Jo’s sofa, relishing in how full she felt while watching quiz shows on the television. Did they do this instead of eating? Jo sometimes read about ShareEx being used as a way of indulging an eating disorder. What choice did she have, though? There would always be somebody looking, and before she offered mealtime sessions the time was just dead air. She would get indigestion from inhaling her food in a minute flat, wanting to minimize the time she was alone in her body.

Three sets of shoes in the rack. Four cushions on the sofa, which the pilot staggered towards now. A smaller steak next time. Three to the power of four is one hundred and eight. No, that isn’t right. Jo watched her hand go for the remote as she continued to let her mind float freely. It was easy to leave her body unattended with somebody who took it so easy. The answer was eighty-one. Eight plus one is nine. Nine pencils in the box of charcoal.

The pilot had stopped moving. The television was making no more comforting, empty sounds. In her haste to head into the next session, Jo hadn’t cleared up her own things from the living room. On the coffee table was a heavy sheet of paper with a hair-finished charcoal portrait, the almost-full box of charcoal pencils set a few inches apart so as not to risk smudging.

“You draw?” Jo heard herself shout the question. Of course, this pilot never spoke. She didn’t know how.

“A little,” Jo had to push hard through the mist to re-assert herself on her borrowed tongue. “It’s not something I share, really.”

She couldn’t help but wince, the strength in the gesture enough to push through to the pilot’s control. That was compounding the error needlessly. Now, not only did the pilot see something that she was curious about, but it was a secret. Forbidden fruit.

Her weekly dinner visits were a reliable source of income, but to the pilot Jo was surely just one of a sea of identical, eager puppets. A steak is a steak no matter whose mouth is borrowed for it. When that’s the case, users can demand nothing short of perfection. And if you can’t offer that, there are plenty more that can.

“Guide my hands,” came the inevitable request. “Show me how.”

Jo felt her hands fall limp at her sides as the pilot released some control to her. Her face stared back at her from the paper, one half complete, the other just pencil markings waiting to be born. Raising her hand, she took one of the pencils and delicately traced along the lines, filling in her neck and chin.

Her wrist jerked, the pencil scraping across the drawing, depositing a rough black stain across her chin, a javelin of charcoal striking her nose. Asserting her voice, Jo reminded the pilot. “Less force. Maybe just follow me for now?”

Over the remainder of the client’s hour, they tried to find a balance between voyeurism and invasion. This was no lesson in composition, it was a farce. The client wanted nothing more than to be made to believe that Jo’s hand was her hand, that Jo’s skills were her own. So, she took her puppet’s fingers and made them hold the pencil not quite so, and had Jo change her stance very slightly off.

It was as though to assert that the pilot, by simple virtue of having the money to burn on this experience, had any value in this activity. That she was in some way teaching Jo how it should be done.

She logged off without a word as the warning chimes started to sound. Jo looked down at the drawing. It was ruined. In her pilot’s haste to add something of herself to Jo’s self-portrait, she had rubbed her puppet’s wrist over what was already drawn. The charcoal was smeared; Jo now looked at a half-formed picture of her own eye, melting and indistinct in a dark fog. Here and there, obscene, thick black chunks of the pencil were spotted around formerly delicate shades. All that was new was crude and unskilled, and all that came before was soiled.

6

Therapy session again. The same client, the same polite nod and awkward attempt at conversation as they waited for the client to log in.

“It’s not that I hate my life,” the pilot said. “I have so much that I can do, so much potential and opportunity. Life is, um. It’s a – it’s a pit. It’s a pit, with sheer sides of smooth stone. And you know what’s on that stone? You know what’s on it?”

“What’s on it, Clarissa?” The counsellor asked. Jo had stopped counting. She was distantly aware that she was listening in too closely.

“Clocks!” Jo felt her heart rate increase as the pilot got more excited. That was on her – and if she didn’t calm down soon, and start detaching from the session, it would cause feedback in the pilot. Precisely what therapy puppets weren’t meant to do. “It’s all just, you know. Clocks. Telling me how much time is passing, how much time I’m spending doing – doing nothing!”

“What is it you think you should be spending your time doing?”

“That’s – that’s not it at all! I’m always using my time, I’m always, always, always using it! Like – right now, you’re doing your job? And the ShareEx puppet is doing her job! And I couldn’t, like – I couldn’t bring myself to start coming here. It’d be dead time.”

“But you did come. What changed your mind?” Steven smiled gently, taking off his glasses and cleaning them. Jo would usually have spent some time getting annoyed at the affectation, to better distance herself from the session. Not here, though. Not when she realised with dread what Clarissa was about to say.

“Nothing!” Clarissa clapped Jo’s hands triumphantly, a certain mania leaking into her voice. The ecstasy of confession. “It’s – it’s still not dead time! I can’t waste time, I couldn’t live with myself if I wasted time. Not when there are so, so, so many opportunities in front of me! I’ve got three observers on board as secondaries, th-!”

Jo killed the connection, slamming a hand on her hip unit. Steven rose from his chair, his prop glasses forgotten and all of the dutiful warmth gone from his glare.

“This is unacceptable. I thought you people had protections against that sort of thing?”

Jo slumped back into the chair. The burst of energy from the pilot was more than her limbic system could handle, and the whiplash would take a moment to clear. Now wasn’t the time to be arguing ShareEx’s terms and conditions. Secondaries were common – for every observation program the company blacklisted, a dozen more popped up. A good way for pilots to earn back some of their fee, or even make a little money from those who preferred to ride.

“I’ll be making a complaint. I’d like you to pass on to your superiors how dissatisfied I am,” the man was looming over Jo now, either oblivious or indifferent to her clear disorientation.

“I don’t…” Jo mumbled, heaving herself upwards. As she stood, the therapist didn’t move, until the two of them were nose to faintly swaying nose.

“I beg your pardon?”

Jo swallowed, biting on her lip to force her concentration back into focus. She smiled, briefly, with only her mouth.

“I’m self-employed. I don’t work for ShareEx.” She could have been more helpful, but why bother? He wasn’t the one who was going to be writing any review.

7

She was late again, but this time it was the bus’s fault.  The same faces greeted her at the union meeting, with the same scent of old coffee hanging in the air, lingering with the hint of the cigarette traces they’d brought in with them.

Nobody was sat down. This time, there was more clearly a leader, the rest of the group stood apart from the man in a ShareEx uniform and an active link device glowing with a steady green. One of the few that the company truly employed, their mouthpieces for speaking to the troops.

Only Sophia had turned when Jo entered the room, though she quickly jerked her head away after confirming who had arrived. She was stood too close to two others for Jo to come to her side, so she stood at the end of the row, a step away from Nick, the branch Chair. He took a half step to his side, away. Just enough to make clear that she wasn’t welcome.

“Joanna Buxton? Good to see you. I’m David Pontus, I’m the quality assurance lead for the North of England.” The puppet’s tone was perfect, the movements smooth and natural. If not for the active device, not even the veterans in this room would have been able to tell that it was a pilot speaking through the man before them.

There could only be one reason for such a visit, and only one way that the company could have known about the union meetings. Jo’s skin crawled, the reality of what was to come setting in. Pontus was there as an executioner, ready to consign each member of the union to oblivion.

He could only have known about this if it had been reported. Nobody here would have betrayed the union; the company didn’t give bounties for informing and was just as likely to deem a snitch an unacceptable risk to become a labour activist in future.

No. With mounting panic, Jo knew that this was on her. She’d been so keen to get back to work that day, to make up for the dead time of the meeting itself, that she’d broadcast the meeting location and its Chair. Every 1-star review was monitored; her fate was sealed with a raised fist and a friendly shout.

“We still have free association rights. You can’t fire us for talking.” Jo blanched, her voice coming out as a croak. A couple of the union members shook their heads; obviously, this had been the first thing they’d said, but ShareEx wasn’t stupid. This wasn’t the first union they’d busted.

“First of all,” the executive’s smooth tones sounded entirely unthreatened, “You are not employees, so you are correct that we cannot ‘fire’ you. Secondly, we respect your right to free association. Meeting you here was simply a convenience, as all parties here have been investigated for Terms of Service violations. I was just letting Mr Jones here know that his personal risk-taking is beyond appropriate levels.”

Nick snorted, turning away. “Cowards! Bloody cowards. Every sodding boxer is on the network now, you expect me to believe this bollocks?” He kicked impotently at a chair, sending it scraping across the dusty hardwood floor. The executive did not flinch.

“That just leaves you, Ms Buxton. I’m afraid –“

“It’s a network ban, right? That’s what you’re saying.” Jo looked over to Sophia, who was still avoiding her gaze. She wanted so badly to go to her, to apologise. To tell her that she’d make this right somehow.

“Hem. As I was saying, we received a complaint that a third-party observer program was being used on one of your sessions. As you know, the Terms of Service require you to report these incidents immediately. And, yes. As you have failed to do so, we are suspending your network privileges.”

Jo wasn’t listening. That had only happened today, and if it hadn’t the company would have found another reason. If they couldn’t find one, they could do away with any pretence and declare her under review. There was no appeal.

The man continued to drone in the practiced, oiled tones of the official executioner. The group began to disperse as he did, muttering epithets and staring at the walls. When he was finally done, and the link deactivated, nobody looked at the puppet as he made quick his escape. He did not bother to try a look of sympathy to his former associates. They may wear the same device, but they were not the same.

“Soph?” Jo tugged on Sophia’s arm as the group filed out of the building in shellshocked fury. “Please. It was an accident.”

Sophia stopped and turned suddenly, looking every part like she was about to take out her fury on Jo, but her sudden movement caused one of the group to stumble into her. She mumbled apologies, the bathos of the awkward moment taking the wind out of her.

“Christ,” she muttered, taking out a cigarette, standing to the side of the doorway to let the last of them pass. “Jesus, mate. All because you couldn’t wait a single…ah, damn it all.” She lit the cigarette. Drizzle was beginning to fall, and she shuffled to maintain the cover of the corn exchange’s arched doorway.

Jo said nothing. A flashing notification was projected on to her contact lens, but she knew what it would say. The network bans had already gone through. She said nothing for a few moments, watching the larger woman smoke, silently hoping that she would at least look at her.

“It was stupid,” Jo took a step forward, aware her voice was wavering, “I know it was. But I want to make it right.” She swallowed, blinking away a stinging from her eyes. “Please. Let’s get something to eat. My treat. Please.”

Sophia closed her eyes, inhaling slowly. She dropped her half-finished cigarette to the ground, crushing it.

“Maybe another time. I need to go and job-hunt,” Sophia finally turned to Jo, opening her eyes and adding bitterly, “So do you, unless the company are letting you keep their flat.”

The two women stared at each other for a couple seconds. Sophia was the first to make a move, fastening her jacket as Jo stood hunched and miserable. Taking one step into the damp pavement, she spoke again, quietly.

“Should’ve had dinner with me last week, mate,” now it was Sophia’s turn for her voice to crack. “Would’ve been nice.”

Jo waited in the doorway for the rain to let off for fifteen minutes. She hadn’t dressed for it.

8

The last of the day’s climbers were starting to make their way down Striding Edge, green lights twinkling at their hips. The last of them rubbed his hands together at the edge, the puppet grinning as his strong boots kicked at the loose ground.

He made one final scan of the summit, taking in the orange sun as it dipped below Dale Head to the West. His puppet’s eyes watered but did not look away. A true professional. Satisfied that he had got enough for the recording, he began his descent. The lone figure sat near the cairn did not interest him. Another puppet waiting for a job, nothing more.

Jo breathed deep, the air beginning to cool. There was time to spare; she could wait to get some distance between her and the others. Her link device sat dormant on her hip, only good as a talisman to ward off the tourists now.

Charcoal could not capture the beauty of the sunset over the lakes, so now the paper resting on her thighs was adorned with pastel shades of deep, warming orange. She wouldn’t finish it today. But there was plenty of time, and she could afford to linger. No clock was running, and nobody would see the result but her.

Seeking scraps of bread and other detritus from the walkers, a mountain thrush landed a few feet from the lone woman, hopping from stone to stone. It looked to the strange figure working with its paper and pencils to no clear productive purpose and, after a moment, judged her to be of little interest and took to flight.