- This turned into a whopper once Andra suggested describing the room. If I went overboard or details don't align with vision, I can chop them.
- I tried to carry on the idea that they've designed this station to expressly use very little mining automation and use inmate labor for things that might even seem silly to do that for.
- As Hamish is a guard I don't necessarily expect much interaction here. I think it's safe for the inmates to carry on and either engage or not, or engage briefly and then continue with their own thing, maybe they just notice him at the moment and he's not relevant till another time. And to that end, I can work small observational posts in without needing to be in a rotation.
- Incongruous or problematic thoughts and positions are intentional or at least in-character
The murmur of voices in the processing plant rustled past Hamish's ears as he surveyed the room. His eyes scanned, unfocused, washing across the bodies and observing motion without seeing much detail. Occasionally an inmate would move in a way that caught is eye and his attention would linger on them, inspecting.
The inmate shift was in the midst of turning over in the processing plant. Inmates trudging out, more inmates shuffling in. All in trickles due to the lift capacity. He found it interesting to watch the change in demeanor over the course of a shift; how the inmates came in generally fresh, and rarely left that way. He'd noticed that different shifts and cellblocks seemed to have different over-all demeanors as well and wondered about it. When he'd pointed this out to other guards it was shrugged off, mostly unnoticed or perhaps of no consequence. But it reminded him faintly of how kids from different tenement buildings behaved when he was growing up; like each building had a flavor.
The room had a high ceiling, compared to most of the the rest of the station at least, providing enough space for the guard station to be elevated by it's 1 meter, as well as the overhead equipment with it's cables dangling down into the workstations to power the tools. The workstations in this room were round workbenches with stools attached to the underside by an arm that allowed it to swing forward and away from the bench. Some stations had higher or lower stools to accommodate the gloms and humans and hybrids but he'd noticed they didn't always gravitate to the ones he would guess they'd want to sit at. Carts of various types were placed in designated areas between the workbenches. This was the medium processing room where inmates worked on chunks of asteroid small enough to set on the workbench in front of them. Getting the chunks from the inbound carts onto the workbench generally required use of a HoistMate, a dumb robot the inmates pushed around the room that had a bit of software and some heavy duty hydraulic arms. iObey was able to tap into it if necessary, which basically could be said for any system on the station, but he had yet to see that happen.
The inmates were meant to carve and extract the goods that they could easily identify (which depended on the asteroid that had been brought in), depositing them into one cart and the cut away bits into another. Those carts were then taken either to a "final goods" chute, or to the small processing room where inmates using finer tools and sometimes magnifiers would perform the same service, sending their bits off to the micro room with its intense magnifiers, crushers, sifters and other specialty tools. These processing rooms were all well and good, but the large, giant and mega rooms made him nervous due to the machinery accessible to the inmates. This room had small hand pick-axes, but the sized up rooms had real ones. They were chipped and tracked by iObey so there wasn't supposed to be anything to worry about but, well, he didn't relish the idea of facing up against an inmate wielding one of those if it came down to it. Those rooms also had much larger final goods chutes. Once again, these were monitored so that anything chipped passing through the chute would be identified, but... whenever Hamish was assigned to those rooms he felt hypervigilant, they just felt riskier all around than these rooms where most of the tools would largely become inert if detached from their cables and inmates couldn't fit into the chutes that took away the final product.
In truth, he didn't need to be physically standing in the room. The automated prison security system saw to managing most of the activities and many of the issues. He would be alerted only when it encountered a situation it couldn't handle. But he liked this routine. He liked observing his domain, standing on the platform in a power pose, his feet shoulder width apart, jaw parallel to the floor. One hand rested on the hilt of his collapsed shock-baton, tap tap tapping it against his thigh. He'd read about power poses in the training material available on ChainLync, the professional networking site for prison guards.
He liked knowing the inmates saw him too. He knew he must cut a figure, looming over their milling. The platform, mainly just the stoop for the guardroom for this part of the processing plant, was only about 1 meter up. But it was enough. With stairs on either side and a brief railing, he could vault down in seconds and leap to action. He knew it, and they knew it. And that was satisfying.
Hamish hadn't received an alert, something that needed human attention, in at least a week. Although the shift before his had. Alerts were rare enough that it was pretty common to share them as a point of interest amongst other guards. Two weeks or so ago, he'd had the fortune to share a particularly memorable alert. One of the new inmates, fresh off their transport, had been unable to relinquish their personal belongings because they'd arrived without a stich of clothing on them. Protesting the clothing industry or some other such nonsense. The prison's intake system wasn't programmed to account for this possibility, apparently, and with no items placed in the receptacle it had alerted the guards to her non-compliance. Under just about any other circumstances, it made sense for the system to not accept an empty receptacle. He and Gerald had assumed, as the system had, that they were in for a struggle with an ornery new inmate. Instead they found a doe eyed hybrid, stark naked and shrugging at them.
Hamish wrinkled his nose as he thought about it. On one hand, he had some pity for her, having traveled for weeks in the transport without anything on, arriving naked and traipsing across the campus to her new cell. That must have been wholly uncomfortable, possibly cold too although it was hard to say with a hybrid. But on the other hand, she'd been arrested that way, nude and civilly disobedient. That had been her choice. Who protests nude anyway?
Hamish couldn't really fathom participating in that sort of activity. Disrupting business, transit, and peoples' lives; being noisy, ... sometimes even destructive. And for what? To push an opinion that the majority obviously don't support, because if we did, we'd have voted that way. So many of the protests he'd seen, on the feed mainly, were about things that he'd just as soon support. Things that paid the bills or enriched the lives of himself and his neighbors. Well, his neighbors before he took on the guard job. Selfish. And, he thought, probably self righteous.
The warmth creeping down Hamish's neck onto his shoulders made him realize this train of thought was getting his blood boiling. He could feel that his calm and cool expression had twisted into something sour. He tried to relax the muscles in his face. Implored his skin to chill out. Renewed his attention to the room and its occupants.
