Workplace

The afternoon went by without further incident. Rashid was even more late to class than we would have been, so she had no opportunity to attack us nor ever did she get wind of what we had done. The most difficult thing about the rest of the day was resisting the urge to ask Carmencita where she’d obtained the key to the little room we’d fucked in.

School ended at 5 pm. I lagged behind everyone else, and observed the outflow of students. Even on the way out into the streets several individuals nonchalantly initiated new sexual escapades with each other. I half-expected Carmencita to proposition me again, but it was not so. She disappeared into the crowd without another glance at me after leaving class. So much the better for my evening schedule, I had a small side-job to get to, and honestly curious to get a good look at the wider situation in the City outside.

Out in the streets was precisely the same paradigm applied as in the school. Not one woman was around who didn't carry herself with the same modifications to her outerwear as Carmen and every other girl back there, in spite of the bitter cold and the endless fall of heavy snow. At a bus stop a pretty lady was minding her own business when a man walked over to her. They exchanged a few words, and he started fingering her on the spot. Within minutes they were both petting each other and making out. To experience that tempted me immensely, but I hurried across town nonetheless, skipping traffic lights where possible, awkwardly overtaking even the elderly in narrow alleys, all in an effort to avoid any such delights reaching me. Because, on thinking about it, there was more than the simple problem of my innermost thoughts ostensibly not quite aligning with those of everyone else - the fact my heavily covered-up self still felt the bite of winter as unpleasant and threatening as ever. That alone could potentially oust me as a non-adherent should someone catch me in a sexual encounter outside. No amount of my (suspicious) enthusiasm could transform me into a hyper-libertine monster that was also inhumanly resistant to cold.

There was nobody home at Mother's, so I had the next hour or so to myself. I ate alone, I allowed myself to be a little vegetative, not dwelling too hard on the day's events. There was more to come. At 6 pm I was expected at the library doing maintenance and customer service.

It was called the library, because historically that had been its function, when books were still a thing, but really it was a museum, and a huge one at that. Back in the day only the lower half of the building had been stocked with books, but over the years every physically written document in the City had found its way there, and the flats above had slowly been sold out of existence and out of the way. With the haphazard adaptation of what was once living space into storage for books, the library became an accidental labyrinth, whose staff and recurring visitors shared maps of the interior.

The clientele was sparse, and consisted mainly of cultural tourists looking around, and a few connoisseurs after a rare item, but after years of **** and mismanagement, every exhibit had become a rarity, with some of the formerly most common editions of certain books or newspapers being all but destroyed by moldy ceilings and ill-converted bathrooms. It was a fluke that the business was profitable, and only the year that I started work there did the safety regulations begin to be properly applied, to keep the exhibits in good condition.

Even with the heaps of gold produced by allowing customers a chance consultation of a specific work for whatever reason, the people working in the library never made a career of the job. Everybody there was like me: students, people flitting between jobs, people transitioning to a different domain and working during the gaps in training etc. For as long as I could remember, one of the receptionists was a particularly attractive red-haired girl who also worked as a stripper, and was very forthcoming about it, even willing to say where she would be performing next if you asked. Liberated as she was to begin with, it would be interesting to see how her attitude would have changed, if much at all. All the while reminding myself to stay safe I hoped not to be too soon banished deep inside the maze tonight. Other than Carmencita, redheads were my weakness. Sadly no such luck awaited my arrival.

I mean, Rosie was there, in all her glory with her tits out and all, but she did immediately send me on an errand into the underworld.

“Ah, Frank, there you are," she said, "We’ve got a stray one on Deck 12. Go and bring her back would you?”

People frequently got lost in the library, and someone had to go and fetch them. The receptionist would usually be the first to notice, because her office had one wall covered in monitors showing the various rooms in the maze, each screen showing a minute’s worth of live footage from a given location before displaying the feed from another camera. Of course, she couldn’t go herself because she had to stay for clients. So she either had to locate and phone the staff member nearest the stray and send them, or send whoever was available that she could most easily reach.

The stripper’s words of relatively routine library shenanigans helped distract me from the sight of her naked assets, as she wheeled a stack of vintage e-readers into the basement. Then she spoke again.

“And give her a good fucking if she needs it. We’ve had a couple of wandering foreigners and that seems to do them good.”

I quickly walked into her office with the monitors so I could hide my surprise, and then mentally chastised myself for not being ready for such things. Of course customer service now included sexual favours. How could it not with sex such a casual occurrence?

The cameras on the 12th floor of the building, or as we called it, Deck 12, revealed a young woman who had abandoned her efforts at escape after finding the window to a condemned balcony facing roughly North-West. She had short dark hair, and wore a full circle woolen cloak with a metal ring closure. The cloak was quite intact, and in any case would have been extremely difficult to modify to expose any specific regions underneath, partly due to the simplicity of the design. The stranger was - must be a non-convert like me. Nobody would still wear such a garment otherwise.

It made sense. The library was just around the bend from the train station, and would be the first location to visit upon arrival. A person knowing next to nothing about the City and perhaps having planned to stay at somebody else’s might come here if the new rules alienated them massively, as everybody knew you could get properly lost and isolated in the maze. As of today, of course, a member of staff would find you and fuck you normal. That’s what the stripper’s instructions meant, whether she knew it or not.

Here was someone like me. Perhaps without the inclination to take advantage of people's new mores, but still, an outsider mentally. Someone whom I could potentially trust to be using the same baseline of reasoning as me. This was an opportunity I could not let pass. I made a mental note of her location and bolted from the monitor room to the mechanical stairs, already searching for a good plan. I probably couldn't fuck her. That was a novelty concept now.

Some more implications of there being a biological aspect occurred to me. My implicit role here could be interpreted to go and infect the newcomer via a sexual encounter, somehow. Was I immune, or just partially asymptomatic? In that latter case, even consensual, rational, sane sex would be off the cards for me as a carrier.

I had to find some way to communicate to the stranger that I was in her situation and to be trusted, and not do anything that would be seen as suspect if anyone were watching on the monitors. Rushing up the moving stairway, it appeared nearly an impossible task.