[Issue 2023.67]

‘Collective Bargaining’, Jonathan Olfert

Art © 2023 Carmen Moran

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Since the students’ name was pheromonal—half a minute long in translation, and a full Lorem Ipsum in the LMS—they went by Jane.

“And… pronounced ‘Jane,’ right?” said the Accessibility Services staffer. He’d met with dozens of offworld students; he ought to be better at this, even if Jane was his first arachnoid hive mind.

Jane swarmed up the chair legs and settled into a rustling cluster. “All I want to do is write the exam,” they said through many tiny voices.

The staffer blinked and looked down at his tablet. “I’m seeing that you’ve visited our office before. Last semester, we set you up with a remote assessment waiver. Is that something you’d consider…?”

He knew damn well it wasn’t: they’d made that clear by email. Twice. “VeriTest,” they said bitterly. “I had to appeal all those exams to the Dean or I’d have failed the semester. My instructors last year couldn’t turn it off, so it kept flagging me as leaving my chair or having shifty eyes. I have fourteen thousand eyes.”

The staffer—Baldwin, his name was—ran a hand through thinning hair. “I’m sorry you had such a bad experience with remote proctoring. If it helps, you’re not alone. Um…”

“I’ve had this conversation far too many times.” Including once, memorably, with a prominent flyswatter on a professor’s desk. “I just want to write the chemistry exam I’m paying for.”

“Yes, of course you’ll get to write the exam. Your instructor, Doctor Larch: the decision, the scheduling, is…”

Jane rustled irritably. “He doesn’t want me in the classroom at all. Says I’ll… disrupt the other people taking the exam.”

“He’s just trying to ensure that all of you, all you students I mean, get to write the exam in a calm, productive setting. What we like to do is set up a quiet room, just you and a proctor. Very normal accommodation for all kinds of—”

“He said,” Jane bit out—they could emulate that tone just fine—“that some of me could be looking at other students’ tests and he’d never know.”

“Well…”

“He said parts of me could be outside the room cheating.”

Baldwin licked his lips nervously. “Um…”

“And he said—” Jane kept themselves from surging forward in their chair, furious deep in their spinnerets. “—that he’d veto the separate room unless you lined it with lead to make sure all my parts were in the room. Do you understand what kind of pain that would put me through if one of my parts was caught outside?”

Baldwin’s mouth opened and closed like a fish drowning in air. “Well, all your parts would be inside, wouldn’t they?”

Tiny pincers skritched irritably. “That’s not the point. Show me any other student who you’d put under that much risk to take a test.”

“Actually,” said Baldwin thoughtfully, “several of the students we’ve supported have dealt with painful conditions, and we’ve been able to find… reasonably comfortable solutions for them. The VeriTest system is on track for an update next semester…”

He went on. Jane bit their metaphorical tongues. The Accessibility Services office had frosted windows that blotted out Earth trees and gentle, hazy skies. While Baldwin talked, a couple of Jane’s half-ounce component parts sidled down the back of a chair leg. They circled his desk to perch on the windowsill beneath the frosted glass. Jane naturally saw a million things from a million angles, and this was just a few angles more. All at once they weren’t just trapped in the office, they were also looking out through graceful trees, down a sheltered path of mostly-human students. It was nice, being elsewhere.

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The meeting went nowhere, but of course it went nowhere. Baldwin and the rest of Accessibility had a decently broad toolkit for most situations involving most species. The final decision stayed with Larch.

As a rippling pool of glossy arachnoids, Jane strolled casually down the walkway under the trees. Humans’ eyes glided away. After months on Earth, Jane could read them well enough to know the difference between mild discomfort and outright unsettlement. And unbridled disgust, of course, but that was rare. Not even Larch fit that bill. No, he was half unsettled and half sure he was in the right, crusader for academic integrity, king of his lecture hall, crushed under budget cuts, shouting to the void.

Grim contemplations for a walk through the trees. Equally grim options.

Go to the human press, with all the nonsense and personal risk that entailed.

Go to the Dean, who knew them well enough by now to pronounce the non-pheromonal portions of their actual Lavaryk hive-name—and wouldn’t overrule Larch.

Report Larch on equity grounds, risk the whole semester, and never know the outcome.

Accept the lead plating on the side room, if that was any kind of genuine offer. Accept the risk of pain as the cost of access, as more than a few students had done before them when administration let them down.

Accept the remote option, proctored by software that didn’t recognize them as human, let alone honest, and then appeal the result all the way up the chain. Back to the Dean, for the dozenth time this year.

Crash the exam; demand a physical copy; refuse to leave until Larch caved or called campus security and that shithead police liaison officer too.

Give in: skip it and lose thirty percent of their grade.

Scare Larch in ways that might backfire spectacularly.

Drop out and shoulder all related debts. Transfer somewhere else on or off Earth.

Or just… be done.

They swarmed up a public art installation—a big cold snarl of I-beam joints, courtesy of the architecture students—and perched twenty feet in the air. Up in the dusty wind, looking out over the campus from a vantage point where no one else could see.

A place to sit that nobody here could imagine.

Jane sighed from their tiny throats and watched the dusty clouds of Earth skid by.

“Jane?”

Their throats tightened, jaws clenched—the voice sent tension spiralling through them. That was Larch down there, wringing his hat in his hands.

He glanced up, away, and up again to finally meet their fourteen thousand eyes.

© 2023 Jonathan Olfert

[Issue 2023.67]

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