Michelle sat in the office, observing the cat-woman who was her boss. She didn't need her assortment of sensors and biometric analysis software to know why Sylvia had asked her to come in. "You wanted to see me?" she asked, keeping her voice measured but pleasant. She was trying not to get worked up before it was warranted; she had always had a bit of a tendency to play out a whole argument in her head before even bringing up the subject with the actual arguee, and it had become even easier to slip into that mode since she became a robot-girl some years back, now that she could keep it running on a separate thread while engaging in an actual in-progress conversation. It didn't tend to be that much help, though, since it relied on extrapolating from data she didn't usually actually have (known in layman's terms as "guessing,") and getting too invested in things she merely anticipated people saying just tended to complicate matters.
In any case, this time her predictions were right on the money. Sylvia motioned for her to take a seat, which she did, and then leaned forward slightly. "It's about the timesheet analyses," the cat-woman said. "We haven't gotten the last few from you, and I just wanted to check and make sure there wasn't some kind of holdup."
Michelle took a deep breath. There was no reason for this, since her cooling systems operated perfectly well with only normal respiration; it was just an ingrained habit from her years as a human. "Yes," she said, hesitantly. "I've been meaning to tell you...I decided to stop doing them."
Sylvia blinked, frowned, glanced down, and then looked over at the robot-girl. "Is something the matter?" she asked, more than a hint of irritation in her voice. "We were finding that information useful."
Michelle sighed. "Well, it's just that I don't like how this is playing out," she said. "When you brought up the possibility, I thought you wanted the information to identify trouble spots for process-improvement purposes, or something like that. I didn't anticipate your using it to pressure the workers, and I certainly didn't expect that you were going to want me to time bathroom breaks."
The cat-woman sighed heavily. "Look, Ms. Madison...this is a highly competitive industry, and we don't have the option of giving everyone all the slack they want. Time matters in this business."
Michelle shook her head, her green hair brushing past the antennae that she had in place of ears. She was wearing it at jaw-length, loosely styled, and that was how it would remain for a while yet; it only grew when her body went through its semi-annual growth spurt, at which point it inevitably wound up floor-length. That was a bit annoying, but it did mean she'd been a regular with Locks of Love, which she supposed was a good thing, in the grand scheme of things. "But you can't just drive people as hard as possible all the time," she said. "People don't work that way. It's like horses; it's important to know how to pace them, and give them rest. Henry Ford was writing about this back in the '20s, for crying out loud; I'll recite it, if you want. If you drive people too hard, you're going to start getting slipshod work - and if there's one thing people hate more than a package arriving late, it's for it to get lost or broken."
"Encouraging timely performance is hardly slave-driving," Sylvia said, sounding a bit offended. "We're not asking unreasonable things of them."
"Making them afraid to pee too often isn't unreasonable?"
"Ms. Madison, we're not trying to scare them into working too hard, we just want to encourage timeliness and keep an eye on problematically slow workers." The cat-woman sighed. "I thought a machine would understand."
The robot-girl bristled a little at that. In all probability her boss didn't mean that the way it sounded, but being referred to as a machine bothered her. It was like referring to a biological person as an animal: not technically wrong, but completely ignoring everything that separated her from, say, a toaster. She tried to keep her focus on the main point. "That's not how they see it," she said, "and I'm not convinced that they're wrong. Besides, just because I don't have to go to the bathroom doesn't mean that I expect other people not to have to. I can still remember being human, you know."
(It was true; she had no general waste material other than waste heat, which was removed by air cooling both through respiration and through her artificial skin. The fact that, despite this, she had a convincing facsimile of human anatomy below the waist had been one of the mysteries of her first year as a robot. She'd figured that they might be there for evacuation of foreign materials, if it should happen to be needed, but had wondered about her specifically female parts. Eventually it had come out on AI-focused sites like emergence.org that many robot-changed had reproductive facilities that could analyze and derive information from biological genetic material for the creation of a new entity - or, in other words, they could have babies. Of course, the child would by necessity be a robot, but the reproductive systems could incorporate other information from the donor gametes. That was odd, but not entirely unexpected - cross-compatibility and genetic diversity seemed to be the name of the game in the post-Sun-change world, and this was, strictly speaking, less baffling than the question of how it worked with the many, many different biological changed.
Michelle had spent quite some time wondering uneasily whether this would apply to her - while she'd adjusted fairly easily to being a robot-girl from being a human boy, the thought of having children was still pretty intimidating - but she'd finally talked the digital fairies she hosted into analyzing her systems, and unsurprisingly that had turned out to be the case. It had been a bit of a stunner for her, particularly since she didn't seem to have any conscious control over her reproductive systems; they were semi-autonomous and not directly addressable like her sensory-analysis systems were, so she wasn't able to deliberately disable them. She supposed that plenty of other girls lived with that, but it was still a little unnerving.)
"Not to mention that it's not like us robot-changed can just keep operating at maximum capacity, non-stop, forever," she continued. "We still need rest, and not even appreciably less often than biological people. If I don't get to sleep for too long, my brain doesn't have a proper chance to analyze, sift, and file the information I take in. Buffers overrun; new information overwrites older information in the queue. Things get glitchy. It's not a good situation." She shuddered slightly; she'd had a couple uncomfortable experiences with low sleep before she fully understood that she still needed it. Nothing traumatic, ultimately, but it had made her very glad that her memories outside of the unprocessed-information buffers were safely protected. "Anyway," she said, "this monitoring thing...it's getting uncomfortable for me. Some of the other employees see me as the face of your management policies, particularly since you booted the guy who had the job you gave to me. Which, by the way, I'm kind of miffed that you didn't tell me about."
"It wouldn't have been proper for me to disclose the circumstances of his reassignment," Sylvia said, sounding a little more apologetic. "What our employees discuss amongst themselves is another matter. But for the record, we did give him another job and didn't cut his pay - and what we did was out of necessity, due to the computer troubles."
"I know," Michelle said. "That's the reason I didn't just up and quit when I found out. But I'm still kind of bothered by it. He still lost his job through no fault of his own. Between that, and the way you were using my analyses to pressure the others to perform...I'm wondering if this is the kind of company I want to work at."
Sylvia sighed deeply, and Michelle sensed that she might have touched a nerve. "Michelle, you're young and inexperienced," the cat-woman said. "I...I sympathize with your position, honestly I do, but...we can't help it. We're a business, in a field that's crucial in a world that demands faster and faster turnaround times. That means a lot of pressure on us, and consequently a lot of pressure on our employees. That's not going to go away any time soon."
Michelle shook her head. "I dunno...I wonder sometimes if we aren't going too fast for our own good."
Just then, the door to Sylvia's office opened and a lizard-man stuck his head in. "Oh, uh, sorry, Mrs. Glenn," he said. "Didn't realize you were in the middle of something. Have...have you seen Doug anywhere?"
