"So... How has the job search been going?" the woman across from me mutters, the bookish and dark-haired academic leaning in a little to sit at the steaming hot latte as she pulls a little at her navy blue scarf.
Despite having broken up over a year ago Fiona and I had still caught up regularly, our lives having been enmeshed for so long that it was hard at this point to simply not remain friends.
"Well... about the same as it has been..." I grumble back, having received a fresh batch of rejections this morning. I watch as my former girlfriend purses her lips a little, a slight bit of foam from the coffee clinging to them as she seems to ponder something.
"I think Latham is hiring again, you know... after all the lay-offs" she muses, raising one of her somewhat pudgy fingers to her chin in thought. It had been well over a year at this point, a year since myself and many of my colleagues had been forced out of academia due to 'over-hiring' during the pandemic.
I feel a pang of frustration at the news along with a slight elation, annoyance that they seemed to have let me go for nothing blending with a hope that I could just slip back given my prior experience.
"Really?" I cough, spluttering a little into my own coffee as I choke down a half-sip. "Maybe I should..."
"Yeah..." Fiona mutters as she cuts me off absentmindedly. "Mrs Mawab said we needed to bring in some more people for diversity. I mean you remember how much of a... sausage..." she giggles, her laughter turning to an awkward chuckle as she looks over my rapidly souring expression. "... sorry..." she mutters, turning to attention back to her coffee as she sips more in an effort to keep from speaking.
With the thud of heavy boots and the clatter of plates, a small set of saucers each with a thin piece of cake soon sliding into place in front of us.
"Still looking for a job?" Gracie asks, the young goth woman brushing her pale hands against her apron as she wipes them cleans. The young woman had been all to familiar with my unemployment, the part-time student part-time barista having been living above me for the past few years.
"Yeah, I mean it's..." I mutter, shrinking away as the woman nearly a decade my junior seems to be doing better off than me.
"I could ask my boss, we did lose a girl the other day" she states nonchalantly, my sulk only growing worse as I sink into my seat. What would be the odds that her boss would hire some thirty-year-old man to replace some college girl who scampered off for better pastures.
"Well that's nice of you to offer Gretchen" Fiona coos back, her tone coming across as a little more than condescending as she uses the young woman's proper name.
"Speaking of nice..." Gracie begins to chirp, a dried off hand rubbing at the back of her slender neck. "These are on the house... and... about that essay due Friday?..."
Pouting and with a sour expression painted across my face I shuffle down the street, my hands full of sweet baked goods wrapped up in paper napkins. Fiona walks a little ahead of me, her formerly well-fitted jeans now straining against her filled in thighs and plumped up rear.
"That was nice of her" Fiona chuckles, taking a small bite out of a piece of thick chocolate mud cake.
"She just wanted to give her a more generous extension" I huffs, my fingers sinking into the base of a blueberry muffin through the thin paper wrapping. "The job thing... the free stuff..."
"Say what you will about that girl..." Fiona mutters, her voice and words growing muffled by the mouthful of fudgey cake. "... She can be very convincing."
Rounding the street corner, shuffling to the side and to a stop as we avoid crashing into a group of uniformed school kids being herded by two older women armed with clipboards and itineraries.
As we press ourselves up against a shop window Fiona looks around, a mischievous smirk spreading across her lips as she points inside. Looking over my shoulder I spot the waiting room of the local Swap Clinic, the rather empty room only being filled with a handful of people either waiting for appointments or for someone to be done with one.
"You could always... change teams?" the thirty year old woman states with a grin, pausing less so to find the right words and more so for comedic effect. "I'm sure you'd look cute prancing around taking orders and serving coffees once we fixed the penis problem."
"Do you have any idea how expensive this place is?" I huff, shaking my head as I look in at the scant few customers. "Even a single trait or two runs into the thousands or tens of thousands of dol..."
"So you have thought about it..." Fiona cackles, reaching over to shake my shoulder playfully. "You could always take a Second Class swap, I hear they're...
"Oh shut up..." I grumble, rolling my eyes at her comments as I begin to walk back towards the apartment.
For over a decade the Swap Clinic had leveraged it's position in an attempt to get more and more market share, hoping to starve out any alternatives before they could have start-up in the market of trading personal traits.
Between hard fought patents, aggressive expansion, and cheap rates people were able to find a Swap Clinic on close to every street corner along with prices that could make swapping out your hair wholesale cheaper than getting a haircut.
This move fast and break things mentality even extended to how it treated the testing of their new machines, preferring to just roll out faster and more efficient devices without extensive testing into any side effects before launch. This led to one of the larger of the clinic's scandals, the leaking of thankfully seemingly benign radiation from their many storefronts around the world.
For a while this didn't appear to be a problem, the background hum of energy being considered similar to the prevalence of wifi or radio waves. However, it only took another year or two before side effects began to crop up in the general populace.
Due to ongoing exposure to the energy source behind the Swap Clinic's miraculous technology, some people slowly started to appear resistant to the devices as a whole. Their procedures at the clinic often ended with either complete failure or something appearing to be akin to a terrible flu, with each further swap getting resulting in worse and worse symptoms until the subject either passed on or became completely immune to the effects of the swap.
As these effected individuals soon went public with their stories the Swap Clinic was quick to respond. Now armed with the knowledge that prolonged exposure to their machines could kill their customers, and more importantly their business, they hastily raised prices and switched back to older and more protective machines.
As for those who had been effected by this, both those who used the Swap Clinic too much and those who simply lived close by one, were classified as 'Second Class Swappers' and were largely unable to access the Swap Clinic's services. It took quite some time for one service to be offered to them, a whole body swap in order to avoid the 'illness' that had afflicted them.
This of course, was prohibitively expensive in most cases, with the only people able to afford this type of full overhaul being the mega rich who could pay either for a mindless shell of a body or pay even more for someone to take their defective body for their own. Others were able to make these swaps through a loose form of organ donation, with some offering up their bodies to the deserving in the event they... no longer needed it.
Between these two classes of people the Swap Clinic had their income and PR problem sorted, however, a new issue quickly reared its ugly head. What could they even do with all these defective bodies. Unable to merely ditch them, the clinic soon began to offer these dead-end swaps at drastically discounted prices, well aware that whatever body they could get in exchange could be sold on for parts or as a whole to continue this cycle.
Some even offered cash rewards to take a Second Class Swapper off their hands, the local clinics only having some much room for effected bodies and often times needing to clear out their old stock before they passed on.
Getting back home I shuffle into my quiet and cozy living room, tossing the various muffins and cake slices down to the coffee table as Fiona quickly rushes in behind me. The slightly chubby woman quickly darts around, sidling past me before rushing off to the kitchen in search of the old wine cupboard.
"Creature of habit..." she chuckles, snatching the bottle of red from the shelf before hunting for a set of glasses.
"You really should ask before..." I begin to mutter, dropping down into the couch as I grab my laptop from the coffee table along with one of the slightly smooshed muffins. As the dark-haired woman pours the wine, each one being a little heavy with an additional top up, she scoffs.
"Well I paid for lunch" she jokingly huffs, slowly pacing back over as she passes me the glasses before she takes her seat and snatches one back. "The least you can do is offer me a drink."
"Yeah... offer..." I chuckle back, getting a small slap to the shoulder in return.
"Same difference" Fiona cackles, drinking the syrah to her lips before downing a generous mouth full. Her lips part in a satisfied sigh, her body leaning over as she peeks at my screen. "Alright, let's see if we can tune up that resume!"
Hours pass as we go over the thing with a fine toothed comb, yet another session of looking for faults and finding little to really add or change that wouldn't just be lying. Even moving to past applications we find little that could have been done to improve my odds, the second bottle of wine we start certainly not helping as we shift from tipsy to drunk rather quickly.
"Heeeeey..." Fiona coos, reaching over to take my laptop from me with a mischievous grin. "... I wanna check... something... real... quick..." she continues, her tongue poking out the side of her mouth and she finds and pecks the keys on the unfamiliar laptop.
I drink the last of my glass before shifting to grab a bottle to pour some more, the slighty-doughy woman beside me quickly snatching her own glass before jostling it to signal the need for a refill. As I pour her glass I look over at the screen, my eyes narrowing to a glare as Fiona brings up the Swap Clinic site.
"You're not really..." I begin to grumble, leaning back on the sofa as my ex-girlfriend cackles giddily.
"Why nooooot?" she giggles, struggling to navigate the site as she looks for the one-way-swap options. "Let's see what you could..." she begins to ask, pausing as she clicks something before spinning the screen around. "What about... this..."
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