Louis was a trash collector. Everyday he'd dress his work suit, drink his cup of morning coffee, and drag himself into the street. There he's hop into the first car with a empty seat and sleep for a while until they reached the work city. His tower was the third on so he would normally walk there if it wasn't raining. When it rained he'd take the automatic sidewalk, squished by the thousands of workers trying to be on their desks on time. On this particular day, it wasn't raining so Louis walked outside to the door. He climbed into the elevator after being validated by the security devices, and stepped into the cubicle maze. After five years there he could find the way with closed eyes, straight ahead for ten cubicles, turn left and walk past five more, turn right and it's the fourth on the right. He takes the coat off, putting it in the hanger, sits down at his desk, turning his terminal on.
The screen has only 5 icons, one in each corner and one in the middle. On the top left a email client, bottom left the information browser, bottom right the music player and on the center the control program. He put on the glove and taped the top right corner of the screen, entered the time and day, closed the application, tapped the email, dragged all the union communications to the deleted folder and read the only important email : the route for the day. He dragged the bullet list with the name of streets into the second screen that had been black until now, found the little box with his wireless ear pods, put them on and tapped music, tapped random, tapped play and dragged the player to the second screen too.
When all was ready he tapped the central icon, checked what the starting point was, selected the nearest available Tele-guided Garbage Collector Vehicle and started driving it to the first pickup point. Driving was done with the gloved right hand by leaning it in the correct direction, so anyone looking would see a grown up man waving his hand in front of a screen, looking bored to the moving dot on the map, checking for collisions on the four cameras, making sure none of the 41 status indicators turned yellow, or god forbid! red. Once the TeGaCoV reached the first pick up point Louis closed and opened his hand in a swift movement, the vehicle stopped and the screen changed. Instead of the map, the central part showed the view from the crane's camera, that the glove now controlled. He could do it in less than a minute now, bu the first time he had to pick up a trash can and empty it to the truck it took him almost thirty minutes. Now his hand would mimic the crane, grabbing the trash can, calculating exactly when he needed to tip it off, and doing so.
After emptying all of the trash cans in the crane's range, he once again closed and opened his hand, cycling to movement mode, and drove the truck to the next pick up point. He was operating in a link he had never been worked on before, so when he saw a men wearing nothing but a loincloth and a huge axe, he dismissed it as 'some local costume'. Until the barbarian ran into the vehicle and started hitting it with the axe. Little yellow and red lights started to blink, and the TeGaCoV entered automatic mode, backing up and running away. Once the truck was safe inside the hangar, Louis tapped the 'report incident' button hidden inside one of the menus.
"Vehicle attacked by barbarian retreated to hangar. Request orders." he typed into the "describe your problem" box after finding the keyboard under the stack of newspapers, and tapped submit. The 'estimated resolution time' was above twenty minutes so he got off of his chair and went to bar. There he met three other coworkers, one of them trying to convince the others that a crazy man dressed as a barbarian had trashed his trash collector truck. Louis chipped in with "It happened to me too. Which link were you working on?". His coworker replied with the link code, and Louis nodded a "me too". The others were looking at them with a 'I don't believe a word of that' face, that only got away when another guy entered, and before anyone asking him he goes "I was working on RD-13-01F, when a crazy guy attacks my damned tegacov with a bloody axe". Louis and the other one both turned and went "SEE?" to which they finally agreed something strange was happening. Later, a internal memo was sent to every employee, saying that the link with the code RD-13-01F would no longer be cleaned by their company due to a 'change in regime'.
