Stochastic Bets
From: Surveillance & Security
To: HR
Subject: Auto-flagged conversation for review.
Auto-generated transcript of covert efficiency recording from floor 2, desks 11-12, Stochastikos Logistics, Seoul, Korea.
** This transcript is generated by a lip-reading algorithm and as such errors and discrepancies may occur. **
Employee 134: Hey <redacted>, you alright? You need to look sharp, you know those cameras analyse your body language. You’re slumped all over that desk, they won’t like that.
Employee 534: Am I? Shit. I hate those things; at least they don’t let them record audio. Yeah yeah, I’m alright, just tired. I’m doing nights at my brother-in-law’s restaurant this month; I’m only getting three hours sleep. I got some stim patches from Modshop but they were crap after the first week.
Employee 134: Modshop generics? They’re trash, you want the g2geek branded ones, you can see through walls on that stuff. Why you working nights anyway? This place not sucking the life out of you fast enough?
Employee 534: I had some shit luck with a bet and I’ll be short on the rent if I don’t work the extra. You know this place sure as shit doesn’t pay overtime.
Employee 134: They don’t allow you to work anywhere else either, you know that right? What was it? Football?
Employee 534: Shit no, I never go large on sports. This was politics, an absolute dead cert. My bookie, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is and he doesn’t like to admit his ignorance. Whenever I ask him for odds on anything political he just runs it through a few AIs and they sometimes him silly odds. When that happens I’ll put up as much as I can get hold of. I begged and borrowed and managed to 40k on Choi Seo Eun to win a seat in the National Assembly at 3 to 2. The opinion polls had her well up plus she was half Vietnamese. If I’d have won I’d have taken a serious chunk off of the credit cards.
Employee 134: Being half Vietnamese is a good thing in politics?
Employee 534: In Jeolla it is, there’s a burgeoning demographic of pretty disgruntled mixed race kids down there. They would have got her over the line with votes to spare.
Employee 134: This is all news to me. What happened? The election isn’t for a month is it?
Employee 534: You’re an ignorant soul <redacted>. She was murdered 2 weeks back, don’t you watch the fucking news?
Employee 134: No shit? Who killed her?
Employee 534: Well, it was that fascist prick in the president’s office. Well obviously not directly, but about a month ago he puts a picture on his social media of Kim Seo Eun saluting a Vietnamese flag. He writes some comments along the lines of, ‘I hope that these disturbing rumours of the candidate for Jeolla North being a fifth columnist for Vietnam are quickly proven to be groundless.” Of course there were no such rumours unless they were started by his team. The picture was fake too but you know how it is, once a story is out some people will keep on believing it because it confirms their world view. As she was wasn’t ‘pure’ Korean, and being that she was a women; well it was always gonna bring some extremists out of the woodwork. So some kid who’s locked himself away in his room, never spoken to a girl, hates them for not giving him any attention, blames foreigners for his failure to get a job, a girlfriend, whatever, blah blah blah. He reads the post, sees it as a call to arms. He blows himself, Kim Seo Eun and 3 security guards up outside a TV studio where she was giving an interview. Of course our courageous leader offers thoughts and prayers, calls it a tragedy. But you know that the truth is that if a guy as popular as he is, says something like that, then statistically on a long enough time-line it is a certainty that some frustrated, isolated madman was going to try and kill her. The shame is that this one was apparently very resourceful; he flew a swam of drones at her first and ran in with the bomb vest whilst her security detail was dealing with the drones.
Employee 134: That’s pretty fucked up.
Employee 534: That it is, that it is. That said, we’d both better get back to it before someone notices that we’re not working.
End of transcript.