Morning Shift

Alice normally loved working Saturday mornings.  She did her homework Friday after school so that she didn't have to worry about anything, and could just enjoy the crowd at the shop. A parade of people would pass her counter, equals for a moment, in pursuit of their morning coffee.

It didn't really matter in that moment if you were pure human or wearing designer genes, or built for construction.  In that place, in that moment, you were just someone looking for your morning venti double skim non-gmo vanilla chai toffee coffee frap.  Or, maybe just a cup of joe.  And Alice was a part of that.  She belonged to the world here, she connected.  Her regulars knew her by name, and she knew a bit about each of them.  

Henry, the retired crane, walked with a limp because he'd shattered his hip working on the reconstruction of the Monument.  Susan, on her way to her shop would have probably changed her eye-colour again.  Theresa's latest litter of puppies were growing fast and she always shared the cutest pictures on her phone.   Alice made a difference in these lives, even if a small one.  Here, she mattered, she was noticed.

But this week she was worried about Cammy.  She'd been quiet during their family visit last night, barely even noticing when Alice had suggested she should get a tattoo for her sixteenth birthday.  That worry made it hard for her to be excited about work this morning, eager to get home and change to her street clothes so she could see how she could help her sister.

Of course, Cammy would probably say she was too young to help with anything, and that it was official police business.  But Alice worried, over the last few months Cammy had been pulling away a lot.  She'd heard stories, sometimes when you were rerun as many times as Cammy it started to affect your mind.  Steve's dad was a member of RA and Steve had all sorts of stories about people looking for new ways to pay for it, and force it to happen.   Cammy's insurance covered the process in full so it would be so easy for her to develop a problem.  

On her way to work Alice decided that she'd do everything she could to make sure that didn't happen.  But first she'd have to serve a couple of hundred cups of hand crafted coffee.