My workers worked, on average, five days a week on a ten-hour shift, not including a thirty-five-minute lunch. I had picked that as from what I had researched, it was pretty standard, but performance started going down non-linearly after five hours to the point where it wasn't even that useful to have them working the last hour of their shift.
Humming, I opened up a scratch pad and did some calculations. It would be about the same amount of productivity if I changed the shift schedule to ten hours a day in total. The workday would comprise two four-hour shifts, separated by one hour of paid free time, wherein I would encourage the employees to use one of the sleep inducers in our break room and a forty-five-minute unpaid lunch.
My factory had two shifts a day, so this would shift production from two ten-hour shifts to four four-hour shifts. Assuming the workers came back at about the same level as they started after their break, this would break even. But even if they weren't quite as refreshed, the costs should still be in the nominal range while the improvement to the worker quality of life should be high.
The only issue was our break room needed to be bigger. I sighed and called the general contractors again. I still had plenty of free room in the factory building. I would just build a large open room with many comfortable chairs for "naps." If, instead of napping as I intended, they wanted to watch BDs or something, that was fine as long as they returned refreshed for the second half of their work day.
Perhaps a worker canteen might be in order, too. But I didn't want to use too much space in that one building. I was still slowly expanding, and I'd rather maximise the productive areas. For now, I would offer a catering service. At cost, an employee could order food from a few different places if they didn't bring in their own lunch, and I would soak the delivery fees since I could make the order in bulk. I only ran two shifts a day, so we would just shut down for lunch on both shifts. That wasn't ideal, but it would work for the moment.
To be honest, I still felt a bit bad for accidentally Greyboying my original QA team. At least they only had to relive the same five minutes from one of my corny BDs, though, and not being tortured repeatedly.
It was hard to quantify quality-of-life improvements on a job without a consultant doing a full dive into my entire operations, so I wouldn't experience any backlash from this, aside from my employees saying I was a good company to work for. Most of my manufacturing jobs were temporary anyway. I already had the funds, if I wanted to, to build a second, much more automated production line, but the ROI break-even point was like four to five years, so I was hesitating.
It would be nice to introduce my implant versions soon, but manufacturing cybernetics, like many medical products, was complicated and much more expensive. I would need to invest heavily in one hundred per cent sterile clean-room manufacturing processes, which was very expensive. In these cases, automation was ideal because it kept human contact with the product to a minimum, which minimised the chances that sterility could be broken. So I was considering keeping my current laborious manufacturing process for the wreaths while investing in automation for cybernetics.
Still, my power seemed eager to help me design a clean-room factory, seeing the entire thing as either a medical device itself or a device to manufacture medical devices, so perhaps I wouldn't need to buy highly expensive off-the-shelf designs. After all, who knew more about infectious diseases and contaminants than I did?
I had the idea to visit a gun shop in London, maybe some fancy one, but ultimately decided not to bother. It was true that I felt better armed, but this wasn't America, where I could buy a submachine pistol out of a vending machine. I thought it was better to try to blend in in this foreign nation. Besides, I didn't have very much time. I doubted that gun stores here were open twenty-four-seven, and I had to be at the John Radcliffe Hospital tomorrow morning.
Exploring the house, I didn't uncover any secret bunker or scandalous secrets. It was clean and contained nothing except extra linens in some of the closets. I did notice that they were super high thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets on all of the beds, though. It was nice enough that I might actually use the bed instead of just sitting in a comfortable chair with my sleep inducer on.
The nicest part of the master bedroom was the attached bathroom, which had a giant jacuzzi-style bathtub that I immediately filled to the brim with hot, bubbly water and soaked in for a good hour and a half while I relaxed, reading the debut novel of an AI author who went by the nom de plume Virginia Granchester. The novel was Requiem for a Samurai, and I sighed with emotion as I reached the denouement.
I wanted to dislike this novel but couldn't. While it wasn't quite a masterpiece, it was a surprisingly approachable tale of a Samurai after the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century. It was, of course, a tragedy, as how could it not be? But, what was surprising was how relatable the AI had made the story to even European and American audiences like myself, as the novel had been translated into seventy different languages at launch while still maintaining it as a compelling story, even if you had no Japanese cultural referents.
Glancing down at my fingers and toes, I sighed. I was all pruned up. I sat in the tub until all the water drained out and then dried myself with a towel before padding over to the large King-sized bed in the next room and climbing into the sheets. My sleep inducer was on the nightstand already, but I had the desire to replace it with an implanted version as soon as possible.
The main reason I didn't use beds was that I liked putting a pillow over my head while I slept, and this tended to knock the wreath off my head, but if I could have a bed and sheets this nice, then it was worth it to accelerate my plans for, at least, a sleep inducer that I could plug into one of my cyber brain's expansion slots.
I wasn't ready to sleep, as I was still busy getting training in space. I had finished their "newbie course" and actually found gainful employment, so now I was getting training on how to be an actual zero-gee construction worker. They called this "Working the High Iron," from the days when all such work was done in low-earth orbit.
Amusingly, the group I got hired onto were building small cylinders that they intended to use to cultivate a brand-new type of algae that they imported from the Earth's surface. At first, I was a little surprised because I felt that this would be much too carbon and oxygen expensive a proposition to make their own fuels in orbit, but then I realised they didn't intend to use them for fuels, just drinking!
That made a lot more sense because all of the habitats up there had very sophisticated recycling systems for human solid and liquid waste. None of the carbon, or hardly any, would be lost.
Still, I decided to try an experiment and tried to have my body in England relax as much as possible. I had never had one body fall asleep naturally because I thought it would be a bad experience.
And I was right. Not only did it take an exceptionally long time for that brain to fall asleep, linked as it was with my other two, but as soon as it did, things got kind of psychedelic. That brain wasn't in the dream phase of sleep yet, and I didn't want to wait to see what would happen if that happened. Instead, I just shook myself and "woke up." It wasn't as bad as losing synchronicity had been, but it kind of felt like I had drunk three or four beers.
I'd just lay in bed watching videos until I got off shift in space, and then I could take a nap. Two of my bodies were back in the same time zone, even if one of them was in a wildly different inertial and temporal reference frame. The fact that Hana was so far away from the gravity well meant that my bodies were slowly, very slowly, becoming temporarily out-of-synch due to general and special relativity.
It wasn't a lot, something akin to seven to eight thousand picoseconds a year, so I could do nothing for many, many decades before I had to take countermeasures. This did mean that if I ever wanted to travel interstellar distances, though, and at interstellar speeds, it would be better to have all bodies go on the trip together. It would be possible to adjust the way my Kerenzikovs worked so that, even at somewhat high fractions of c, I experienced things the same way, but that would be very sub-optimal.
I honestly wasn't sure how the Haywire FTL comms system would impact this. Theoretically, I should be able to use it to keep my brains more in sync without me actually doing anything, but from what I understood, doing so would break causality, as travelling faster than light or even just sending information, should be indistinguishable from travelling through time, no matter the mechanism for how you did it. Still, I wasn't a physicist, and these things obviously worked, so it may be just as simple as that our present understanding of relativity was flawed.
There were tons of parahuman powers that could travel or send information faster than light, after all. A lot of teleporters could, although some were limited in how many jumps or hops they could make; even Legend was supposed to be, in theory, able to travel faster than light even if, in practice, he could not do so.
Or, maybe, I should look at what I would be tested over in the morning. It couldn't all be medical related, and I might actually need to review some things if they were testing English composition or history. Nodding, I set to it.
It took me a few moments to decide which outfit to wear. The second dress wasn't suitable, as it was in the realm of "little black dresses" and I wouldn't wear a cocktail dress to an important meeting at a College. The only things I wanted to be assessed today were my medical skills and knowledge, after all. I only let Evelyn buy that dress for me in case I actually had a party to attend, although I very much hoped I never received an invitation.
I settled on a skirt-suit in charcoal grey but with dark stockings. Stockings weren't really in fashion these days, and we had to go to three stores before there were acceptable ones to buy, but I preferred stockings or pantyhose to the alternative of displaying my bare thighs to the world. Plus, I liked the way they looked anyway. That was the most important part.
The best part of having my techhair was that I didn't need to style or comb it, even after sleeping with a pillow under and above my head all night, just after getting out of the tub. I just mentally triggered it to refresh my pre-selected style, and it all untangled itself and settled down into my pre-programmed style. The processor in the system analysed each style and provided a name for them, and I was a bit offended that it called mine "curlygeddon."
Oxford wasn't a large city, so the drive to the hospital didn't take that long on the A40. Finding the correct place after I parked was a little more challenging, but that was why I left so early. After seeing it, I realised I still had an hour before the appointed time and decided to backtrack to a couple of restaurants that served breakfast, catering mainly to hospital workers.
A croissant breakfast sandwich and coffee sounded excellent, and although they weren't the best I ever had, they were serviceable, and it was a good start to my day. I had no idea how they were going to assess me, but if it was going to take ten days, then it was likely something that would be wearying. Perhaps exams on every course I would have taken? The idea of testing out of classes existed back in Brockton Bay, but here it was very anachronistic.
After making sure my clothes didn't have any grease or croissant bits on them, I made my way back to the library. I was still about twenty minutes early, but that was fine. I glanced around, not entirely sure where I should go inside the library, so I ended up checking in with someone behind a desk, "Excuse me. My name is Taylor Hebert and the Dean instructed me to meet someone here."
At first, the man looked a little sceptical, but after a moment, he nodded, "Yes, you're supposed to be in conference room C-5." I thanked him for his time and went to find it. Rather than listed as a conference room, per se, it was on the map as a group study room. That was fine, I supposed.
I was the first one there, so I took a seat at the table and waited. Two people arrived five minutes or so before the appointed time, and I rose to greet them. It was a man and a woman, both in their thirties. "Miss Hebert?" the man asked, and I inclined my head.
They introduced themselves. The man was an assistant to the Dean, while the woman was Dr Grace Turner, who was the Regius Professor of Medicine, whatever that meant. It was some title that some king gave in the 16th century or something. Apparently, it meant she was somewhat high in the hierarchy in the medical school and would be the one in charge of assessing me.
"Thank you for taking time out of your week to assist me, Dr Turner," I told her and inclined my head, "So, what are the first steps?"
She told me, and it was pretty much what I thought. I'd be taking four or five tests a day, about two hours long apiece. I frowned when I added them all up together, "That seems like it will eat up the entire ten days that I was told by the Dean to free up for this assessment. What about the practical skills portion?"
The Professor frowned and said, "We will partly do that through virtual-reality braindances, but also partly in real life. You'll need to schedule another two weeks for it."
I sighed, rubbing the back of my neck. "I suppose it goes without saying that if I fail these academic exams, there would have been no need to proceed with the practical skills assessment, yes?" That caused her to nod. The Dean had been a dick, but I think I underestimated how much of a dick he actually was.
"Well, very well... where will the exams be taken? Will you be proctoring them?" I asked, finally.
She shook her head, "Not personally. They'll be proctored by AI in a specially prepared and shielded room here in the Cairns. That is to prevent you from any Net-access that might be used for cheating, as many of the exams are more on the nature of testing knowledge retention."
I started to nod, understanding, but the Dean's assistant coughed to bring our attention to him and said, "About that... Due to the unprecedented nature of this accommodation that we are granting you, we will need you to give us super-user access to your operating system to verify that you are not consulting any reference materials during the exams."
