Night Shift

Claudia awakes and is entirely sure that she would not be late for her shift. She would never be, never had been her entire working life. As the familiar whir of the capsules machinery retracting reaches her ears, she waits patiently for the familiar clunk of the magnetic seal and the light flooding in around her. Emerging the light was starker, colder and casts sharp shadows on the factory floor. She shakes the last of the sleep from her mind, the last of the dream and makes her way along the gantry supporting her home.

“Pleasant dreams?,” Toby at her elbow, his clean suit bright and pocketless, matching hers in its snug fit.

“Humane ones,” she murmurs, and he snorts and brushes past her, taking the stairs two at a time.

“Come on, come on Night Shift Two – make haste! I wouldn't want to have to recommend you for Storage now would I?” The foreman bellows up the gantry from his position at the clock in desk, his peaked hat marking him out among the bareheaded workers. “Make haste! Make haste! Shift change in six hours, make yourself useful or consider yourself stored!”

Claudia shivers. Storage was the greatest threat, the only threat that actually carried any weight. Extra boxes were not a problem, it was humane to be useful. Shifts couldn't be shortened, not even by the foreman. But Storage. Everyone knew of the sister stacks to their capsules, the ones that were never on any shift, day or night. No-one Claudia knew, or anyone they knew – had ever known anyone be stored. But nevertheless, the threat was there.

As she joins her shift team at her workstation, tuning into the conversation – the same topic as yesterday, as every day she'd worked.

“...and it was here, but not a speck of light – not even stars, just the blackness, totally...”, Fran was the youngest of the team – only recently graduated. In the six months she'd been on the shift, she'd constantly talked of darkness.

“...four HUNDRED boxes, four hundred! And you know we never have more than forty between the four of us! Four hundred! And we couldn't...,” Kerry was the eldest, the mother hen – and much like a mother hen, prone to clucking. Claudia smiles as the latest nightly terror of overwork came pouring forth.

“...oh and his clean suit was ripped right to, well, I couldn't help but to look – it's all in my head, but what a treat it was! I swear the air con in the capsule nearly malfunctioned!,” Rochelle occupied the capsule next to Claudia and had the closest thing to a one track mind that shift work would allow. “...anyway Claudia, how about you?”

Gaze for a second at the window, a second at the foreman and then in a low voice, “I dreamed about the Day Shift again,”

“Again? Oh heck girl, ideas above your station – better not let the foreman hear you, you know how protective of his nightbirds he is” Kerry said sharply.

“I know, to be honest I'm hoping to have something a little more Rochelle tonight” Claudia lies, grinning as they continue with their work.

The lie remains on her tongue. Of course she dreams of the day shift, who wouldn't? Shift selection was random, as they had been taught in school. Random and without appeal.

“Be grateful you're given a shift! Be proud you're being part of the process! After all, you could always be stored. It's the humane thing to do after all. Be pleased with your work, be fruitful and of course, be on time for your shift” In her mind, the booming voice of the Principal Educator drowns out the factory and the present, the last remark eliciting gales of laughter. She remembers the hand holding hers, and the bright smile and familiar dark eyes glancing over at her as they joining in with the joke. After all, no-one was ever late for their shift.

As her mind reels in the past, her eyes look unseeing at the building around her. White to the point of sterility, the large lit domes ahead and always that glimpse of the sky outside. There was time here, but measured by her shifts – and by the changing faces of those around her. No mirrors, except the occasional glimpse of yourself in someone else's eyes – their eyes seeking yours occasionally.

Or in this case, Toby's eyes. He sat seventeen stations away, as he always did. And his eyes always tend to range over the female workforce as they did now. Claudia meets his eyes, and as he arches his eyebrow sticks her tongue out and glances down at her work. He was persistent, she admits, as persistent as you can be on shift. It'd been five years since he had graduated to shift, four years after she had – the gap didn't seem to worry him, in fact not very much did not least her continued rejection of his advances.

Lunch was standard at three hours in. Protein, vitamins, water and basic biscuit. She swaps her biscuit for Kerry's, tradition rather than any mutual benefit. As she goes to bus her tray, Toby appears like every day – his step falls in with her with the timing of someone with five years of practice. And as always, she silently places her tray in the hatch and turns away before he has anything to say.

Back at the workstation an hour later, there is little left to do. The boxes contents have been sorted and catalogue and ticked off on the foreman's list. The final hour is as always spent with maintenance. Of tools, stations and the inevitable replacement of clothes – the source of Rochelle's night time delights.

“Claudia, look it's Toby. He's going in to change. This is your chance girl, go on!”, Rochelle was under the impression that Claudia's constant rejection was some sort of long game, and that at any minute the façade would drop and she would leap, unbound, into him. Instead as usual, she continues with cleaning down her station surrounded by an air of vicarious disappointment.

The shift ends, and as always they are clocked off and the huge clunk of the thousand magseals opening at once which always seems louder from the outside heralds their return home. As she exchanges the pleasantries with her neighbours, and wishes Rochelle further dreams of devilment, Claudia feels a tug from the reel cast earlier in the day. And she was back there.

The laughter died away, and the hand gripped slightly tighter as the graduation began. Called by name and number to the front, and filed off in the channels which marked the four shifts. She had not been called first, and had watched as she'd been funnelled off into Day Shift One her bright smile turned away into darkness. Then it had been the torturous wait, in anticipation of her calling – doubled by the imagined wait at the other end of that channel.

Finally, her turn came and the sonorous artificial voice scanned and decided, “Night Shift Two” and everything fell to pieces. In the now, together, she slides back into the darkness of the capsule without the tears of the first night, but with the certainty of the same dream of nine years. The dream compounded by the certainty that as the capsule sealed with the final thunk, somewhere around her one of the other capsules would be unlocking – and the girl she had loved, now as much a woman as her, would be awakening and stretching in the half light which greeted Day Shift One.