As the manager of a department inside a major Protectorate bureau, Tymon is entrusted with a number of responsibilities. The most important responsibility is to make sure everything runs smoothly, by any means necessary. While everyone who makes a career of the civil services understands that convicts hardly make for competent desk workers, that doesn’t discount the fact that any delays or mistakes will cause problems for the peldak’s interstellar ambitions, and will reflect poorly on the managers.
The machine of bureaucracy must continue to turn, no matter what.
So Cyryl, when being taught how to do his job, is given a front row seat for everything Tymon has to do.
Given the severe staffing shortages that always plague the civil services, Tymon is responsible for the allocation of: concrete powder, cement, asphalt, rebar, kits of replacement parts for delivery trucks, construction trucks, and busses, steel bars, paint, railroad spikes, railroad wood, railroad tracks, shovels, pickaxes, hammers, tools for removing trees, light posts, and a waterproof concrete for ports. Every other worker in the department only handles a single resource each.
The Department of Developing Critical Transportation Infrastructure oversees 30 key resources relating to the construction of roads, bridges, railroads, ports, and airships. Tymon currently handles 18 resources. He’ll be giving one resource to Cyryl. There are 12 other bureaucrats who handle the remaining 12 resources. After handing Cyryl control of concrete powder, Tymon will have 17 resources, and everyone else will have a combined 13, totaling 30. Other departments in the bureau, located on the other floors, handle to allocation of other pieces of critical infrastructure, such as food production, healthcare, sourcing engineers, or building schools for the locals.
This means that Cyryl watches Tymon bounce from cubicle to cubicle for the next several hours, juggling all the paperwork for these different resources. The man doesn’t bother with a calculator, and is constantly writing notes on several different sheets of paper. All throughout the day, couriers bring reports of new shipments delivered to the warehouse attached to the top floor. That’s the reason behind the various notes Tymon takes; they’re running tallies of all the new shipments so he can easily add them together. Whenever he has a moment to breathe, he digs through the many folders containing requests for the resources he’s in charge of.
It comes as no surprise that Tymon doesn’t waste time reading what the requests are for. All that matters is that 80% of these resources are divvied among the nine newly annexed worlds, and the rest is sent to the other worlds within the Protectorate. It’ll be up to the branches on those worlds to figure out where specifically to send it.
“Uhh,” Cyryl says, “so it doesn’t matter where exactly we send this stuff?”
“No matter where you send it, it’ll do more good than if it sits in a warehouse.”
Cyryl squints as he watches all the notes and papers shifting this way and that, Tymon’s eyes darting back and forth as he reads page after page of reports. “What’s the point of all this? Can’t you just, I dunno, add up all the numbers, then split it against the nine worlds automatically? You know what I mean?”
“No,” Tymon doesn’t avert his eyes from his paperwork. “Planets are big, and they have dozens of ports on them. You can’t just send a shipment to a planet, it has to be sent to a specific port. Which world did you fight on?”
“Basugio.”
“Alright…” Tymon thinks for a second. “Basugio currently has 18 valid ports for our operations. I’m sure you know about the giant jungle that sits in the middle of the… western continent?”
“Eastern.”
“The eastern continent. There’s a port attached to that jungle, and they have no need for railroad tracks, given the terrain. If you sent railroad supplies to them, it’s just going to sit in their warehouses, collecting dust. So, blindly sending resources to random ports runs the risk of them being wasted, which you should try to avoid. Understand?”
“I guess I do.” Cyryl scratches his chin, “I’ll be in charge of concrete powder, right? Everyone needs that.”
“But some ports need more powder than others.” He grabs a random request, “like here. This infrastructure project is requesting 30 light posts, delivered to Puerto de Tanish. If all the light post requests to Puerto de Tanish equal, let’s say, 90 in total, but I send them 100 light posts, then 10 will go to waste.” He grabs another random request, “this project is asking for 10 lamp posts to be delivered to the port of Hombrecado. If there are several requests to Hombrecado, and the total equals 500, but I randomly decide to only send them five, then that’s an issue.”
Cyryl sighs, “so I should at least try to make sure that deliveries correspond to need.”
“Yes.” Tymon rises from his chair and moves to another cubicle, with Cyryl following behind. “And please keep in mind that, while 35 years might pass in the blink of an eye, circumstances are always changing. You can’t imagine how often one of you tries to memorize volumes and everything goes wrong.”
“Memorize volumes?”
“Here’s an example: 200 years ago, the Ardennes Flare Up. The country of Ardennes was destroyed, annexed, and there was a massive rebuilding effort which took years. A few convicts realized that the main port of Ardennes was always requesting a lot of resources, so they kept mindlessly dumping resources into that port. A decade later, the reconstruction was finished, but the convicts kept sending resources there without a second thought. I had to sit down and explain to them that, when it comes to this job, a decade is actually a really long time. You’ll be here for 35 years. Ports will rise and fall in prominence and activity. One time, this was about 40 years ago, the warehouse upstairs came down and yelled at us because one convict kept sending resources to a port that didn’t even exist anymore. It got swallowed up by a volcano. Less dramatically, a branch in one region of these Leonid Worlds might shut down at any time because they’ve achieved self-sufficiency.”
Cyryl runs his hands through his short brown hair, “so no zoning out.”
“Yes. And, again, 80% of the total volume of concrete powder must go somewhere in the former Leonid Worlds. For the remaining 20%, I recommend going off a first come, first served basis. Though keep an eye on the dates attached to requests. If the date is older than three months, throw it out. They’ll have sent newer, updated requests.”
“Alright, alright, I think I got it. Add up all the storage of concrete powder in the warehouse, pick some requests to allocate resources too, don’t send things randomly, and make sure that 80% goes to ports on the nine new worlds.”
“I’ll come by at the end of the day to check your math.”
Cyryl rolls his eyes, “if you’re too busy, you don’t need to.”
Tymon jumps up and heads to another cubicle, “I do it for everyone else in this department. Checking numbers is one of the easier things on my plate.”
With that, Cyryl heads to his own cubicle. He pulls the rolling chair out, then quickly adjusts it to a comfortable height.
The cubicle is a square with four walls, each covered in light grey fabric that allows pushpins or staples to attach charts and posters. The rear wall is cut short, creating a doorway on the back left side. The front and right of the space have desks that form the shape of an L, each with thin metal cabinets below it, and attached to the walls above the desks. The off-white desk on the right has a metal tray for resource requests, one for shipping manifests from the warehouse, and a tray for the final numbers that will be sent out. On the other desk is the stack of papers Tymon left, and the large calculator. The cabinets are painted a greenish-grey color, but the paint is chipped in several places, and there’s more than one indentation of fists from where previous bureaucrats had lost their tempers.
Cyryl squints at one of the cabinet’s side walls and looks closer. There’s indication that the metal has been welded back together, meaning at least one person punched straight through.
He opens one of the drawers and pushes the paper and files back, inspecting how thick the metal door is. “Oh yeah, I could definitely punch through this.” He mimics a punch, but stops an inch before touching the metal, “jyah!”
There’s a knock the plastic top of the cubicle, bringing Cyryl’s attention to the doorway.
The man standing there, pushing a metal cart full of clearly marked paper folders, is about as tall as Cyryl, but nearly twice as thin. His brown eyes are faded and sluggish, his beard an unkempt mess, and his long ears permanently dipped. Yet his voice is deep and raspy, molded by centuries of barking orders at the men under his command. “You the new concrete guy?”
“That’s me.”
The man takes a folder from his cart, then holds it out for Cyryl. “I’ll pray for you.” With that, he’s off to the next cubicle.
With a heavy sigh, Cyryl gets to work.
He sets the paper folder on the desk with a slight tap, then opens it. The papers are shipping manifests from the dozen trains that, in the last hour, have delivered shipments to the warehouse upstairs. The manifests not only list shipments of concrete powder, not only list the 30 resources associated with the Department of Developing Critical Transportation Infrastructure, but they list every piece of cargo in each train. It’s Cyryl’s job to look through these manifests, find the various cargos of concrete powder, and add them up. Several trains didn’t even bring concrete powder, but he has to look through their manifests to make sure.
Tymon left a spreadsheet with the current numbers for the day, so Cyryl uses the calculator to start adding the several tons of concrete powder that came in with the new shipments. However, the trains sometimes bring several shipments from different sources all over Peldor. The trains only list the shipments, and their weight, they don’t add that weight together. Neither do the stations, or the warehouse. Meaning if there’s one shipment of five tons of concrete powder, and another shipment with another five tons, nobody bothers to add that together.
Since the bureau is staffed with criminals, everyone dumps the boring paperwork onto them as punishment.
“Alright, let’s see,” Cyryl says as he leans over the shipping manifest, reading the numbers, then writing those numbers on the spreadsheet. “28 tons of concrete powder from Petric Infrastructure Supplies… four tons of concrete powder from Rivermould Family Concrete… Ten tons from Concreekess, haha, what a stupid name. Then there’s…” Cyryl squints, “5.95 tons from the Southern Mixture? What? I wasn’t told I had to deal with… with fractions!”
Cyryl leans back, running his hands over his head. He’s not even finished with the first train manifest, yet looks over and realizes a stack of three more manifests waiting for him.
“I hate this,” he shakes his head. “I hate this already. The criminal justice system has thoroughly broken me, and I wanna give up.”
After taking a deep breath, he sits up and gets back to work. He slogs through the first train manifest. Then he gets to the second one. His body starts to ache, his muscles cry out for activity. His eyes burn from scanning over the manifests, from reading so much dull black ink on boring white sheets of paper. His ears twitch as the small pencil taps of the other criminals resonate like gunshots. The buzz of the lights overhead, the stress-sweat trickling down his forehead and neck, Cyryl’s body tenses up as if he’s about to explode, but finally the second manifest is finished!
Onto the third, his breathing grows heavy, his chest tight. Writing down every agonizing number, he breaks the tip of his pencil more than once by frustratedly pressing down too hard whenever there’s a decimal. There’re a few dozen spare pencils in one drawer, and a pencil sharpener in case he runs out. Based on the resounding clang of metal cabinets slamming shut, Cyryl figures everyone else is breaking their pencils just as much, if not more frequently, than he is. But there’re just a few more numbers to write down on the spreadsheet. His heel repeatedly stomps the carpeted floor, he rocks back and forth in his seat, just to give a little more stimulation.
“Just a few more, just a few more!” He loudly whispers to himself as his hands lock into tight fists, and veins bulge across his body. “And… then… 2.8 tons of cargo,” he starts coughing, then dry heaving as he struggles to fill his lungs, “from-“ he shakes his head. Where the cargo comes from doesn’t matter, all he cares about is the number. “And seven tons! Done!” He yells as he raises his fists in victory.
All the tension suddenly floods out his body, the pain and agony of paperwork finally finishes.
No criminal is bothered by the outburst. They all remember their first day on the job, the foolish joy that came with finally being done with a small task.
Cyryl slumps back in his seat, his head leaning back over the rear of the chair. “Wheeew,” he lets all the air out of his lungs. “35 years of this? I can do it. That’s nothing!”
“Hey,” Tymon says as he stands in the doorway.
Cyryl leans back in his chair, head hooked over the top. “Yeah?”
“Remember that you need to add those numbers up. I’m assuming you just copied them onto the spreadsheet.”
Cyryl stares at him.
“And keep in mind that the other half of your job includes reading requests and dolling out powder to the proper ports.” Tymon slaps the wall of the cubicle twice, then returns to his own duties.
All Cyryl can do is groan, then get back to work.