Maurice's Last Shift by Tim Papienski

Just after dawn, as light rain pattered down on the tarps of the construction site, Maurice stepped gently, trying not to land in the mud. As he passed through the guarded entrance, the banner above proudly proclaimed “847 days without a workplace accident.”  Mounted on a pole below, was the ever-present red Stop Work button.

Maurice was a Sensor Jockey.  Led a crew of them, in fact.  He was retiring after 40 years, and today was his last shift. Maurice has spent his entire working life on jobsites such as this—big, sprawling constructions. He knew everything a person could know.  

The jobsite was a repurpose of an abandoned office complex, a mix of apartments, businesses and “Temps.” Maurice headed to the end of the site, the final section block of Temps being printed.  The great gantry had been rolled into place, the concrete extruder paused dramatically, like a monk about to illuminate the edges of a medieval bible.

Nobody really knew what was being printed today. That’s not entirely true—the architectural firm of Boden, Chaffey & Finch knew, but only just this morning.  A stew of local demographics, weather patterns, birthrates, earthquake and economic data (and some breaking local news items, sprinkled in for flavoring), had been bubbling for some time, and the results would generate a foundation plan for unhoused temporary dwellings. This occurred at all jobsites, all over the city.

The layout, spacing and unit count was applied real-time across entire local region, the details kept from the developers until build time, an egalitarian attempt to make good on the promise of housing as a basic human right. There was an overall design playbook, of course, but the scheme was tweaked constantly.

Taking his usual seat at the print head, he surveyed the site, pulled a lever, and “cocoa bean” sensors filled the hopper. The company that designed the tiny sensors tried to market them as resembling shiny brown coffee beans, but everyone still referred to them as Bunny Poop.

As common as nails and bolts, these sensors were embedded everywhere—in wall insulation, concrete walls creating a mesh of data, reporting on anything the planners could continue to dream up—compression, humidity, temperature, moisture and more.

These tiny gossips were good at only two things: being told what to monitor and sharing their feelings with their immediate neighbors. These adjacent sensors, in turn passed the news on to their neighbors and so on.  It was slow going, but accurate: buildings have been evacuated before collapsing, dangerous radon levels identified,  and even virus outbreaks contained, teasing out subtle clusters of fevers.

They can plant people on Mars, thought Maurice, but they still couldn’t figure out how to automate the density of the Bunny Poop.  Only humans had the touch. Study after study proved that automated disbursement was less effective than when humans did it.  He shrugged and knew that it would probably get figured out one day.

He took a moment to look at the day’s plan, turned some dials and gave a thumbs up to the concrete pour team.  As the concrete print head made its dozy pirouettes like an ice skating bear laying down the foundation, the Bunny Poop sprinkled down into the mix, embedding into the sensor.

A foreperson stood below him cupping their hands over their mouth, yelling up to Maurice.

“Lennell!”

“Yah Chief?”

“Pack up your ****, head office says you’ve been Benched.”

“But today’s my last shift!”

“S’doesn’t matter.  Enjoy life.”

Maurice paused the hopper and looked hard down at the Chief.  When he was younger, he took it personally. He gave up long ago wondering why, at random moments, he was being pulled off duty.  It never seemed to make any sense to him. Somehow, somewhere, heavy data clouds gathered over his name on a ledger, and over 100 years of workplace accident data pointed the finger at him as a risk.

Ha. Finger. Good choice of words he thought, as he reached up to scratch his forehead for the 10,000th time with a forefinger that was no longer there, having lost it the morning after his cousin’s wedding, 28 years ago in a brief lapse of attention.

It didn’t matter. His union contract guaranteed his wage, and the Company knew that the stats would, over time, end up in their favor.  When he was much younger (35 years ago, to be exact), he took it personally, and raged. The day he Got Religion, as they say, was being Benched, spending one of the sweetest weeks of his life on the company dime, fishing for marlin off the coast of Baja. Heck, he thought, he probably put himself in greater danger on that trip, pulled off the boat when a giant fish grabbed his line.  His friends all still laughed at how his cheap deck shoes, bought on the beach for $10 American still clung to the deck after he was jerked right out of them.

As he climbed down off the rig, something in the corner caught his attention. He didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t right. He left the site and headed home, worried.

At dinner, as his family all debated what they wanted him to for retirement, Maurice was not listening. Staring hard into space, thinking.

At midnight, he sat up in bed.  He understood what was wrong, terribly wrong. He raced to the jobsite and in the chill of night, slammed the Stop Work button with his palm.

A workplace investigation soon discovered that an unforeseen loop in the planning algorithm had placed the Temp site dangerously close to the edge of a retaining wall. 

The jobsite was evacuated before the gantry collapsed. No casualties.

At his retirement party, someone had a big poster printed up of those empty deck shoes clinging to the deck. At the bottom was printed in big gold letters:

“Maurice - Gone, But Not Forgotten”

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