Pocket Places Exchange

Maintenance access corridor at Pocket Places Exchange

**Pocket Places Exchange** is an extradimensional space owned and operated by Pocket Places Incorporated, which both plays host to their primary portal exchange and to an uncountable number of workspaces in a variety of configurations that can be rented for short periods via the subscriptions associated with all Pocket Places retail products.

## Workspaces

Much of the space is occupied by an unimaginably-large matrix of 15ft² workspaces, each accessible via a portal whose opposite endpoint is in the portal exchange.

Each workspace is configured for use with a particular type of Pocket Places product, such as a generic meeting room for use with Pocket Portable Meeting Room, or a fully-equipped workshop space for use with a particular Pocket Workshop product.

The portal exchange detects the activation of a customer's Pocket Places product and responds by selecting the next available workspace whose configuration matches the requesting product, near-instantly creating a connection between the customer-facing portal endpoint and the workspace endpoint to give the impression to the user of the workspace being "inside" the end-product enclosure.

After a customer exits their allocated workspace, the portal exchange connects it to one of the maintenance access corridors where thousands of underpaid workers visit each in turn, cleaning and returning it to its stock configuration ready for the next customer. Once maintenance is complete, the worker exits and the space is returned to the pool of available spaces.

## Resident Staff

In order to ensure that Pocket Places workspaces can be accessed immediately at any time, Pocket Places employs a large team of maintenance workers who live in quarters at the Pocket Places Exchange. Employee quarters are, in fact, a particular configuration of workspace containing a basic bed, toilet, faucet, bathing bucket, and food delivery portal.

An employee's workday begins with their breakfast meal being delivered through the food delivery portal, after which they have 15 minutes to eat before their quarters are connected to their assigned maintenance corridor for that day. The employee must then visit each door of the corridor in turn, each of which is connected with a workspace that has been used and needs to be returned to its entry configuration. Once the worker has visited each door in their maintenance corridor the final doorway at the end of the corridor is connected back to their quarters where they are issued dinner and then allowed to sleep for eight hours before the delivery of breakfast to start their next shift.

Employees are expected to complete their shift in under twelve hours or they will miss the dinner delivery window and will have to wait until breakfast to eat again. Because Pocket Places Exchange is an extradimensional space there is no natural day/night cycle, which means employee shifts can be staggered such that there are always sufficient workers on duty to keep up with maintenance demand.

Employees who show exceptional performance may be offered the opportunity to train as a Workshop Specialist, where in addition to their existing cleaning duties they are also qualified to perform any necessary maintenance and replacement of the tools associated with one or more of the types of Pocket Workshop space. This promotion comes with access to a mid-shift lunch break where 30 minutes are allocated for eating one additional meal between breakfast and lunch.

Aside from the cleaning and maintenance of the workspaces themselves, Pocket Places Exchange is entirely automated, so no full-time management nor engineering staff live on-site. Instead, managers at Pocket Places HQ have special portals in their offices that can be connected directly to an employee's quarters for each employee's weekly inspection and one-on-one.

## Portal Exchange

The main portal exchange sits alongside the workspace stack in Pocket Places Exchange and contains racks of portals that is each associated with either a customer endpoint or with a workspace. When a customer activates their Pocket Places product, the Portal Exchange employs MetaPortal™ technology to teleport the customer-facing endpoint and the endpoint for an appropriate available workspace into a *portal coupler*.

The portal coupler then clamps both portals together such that there is only a tenth of a millimeter between them. With the two portals this close, any reasonably-sized object observing or passing through the customer-side portal will have the impression of a direct pathway to the target workspace.

In times of unusual demand where there are not enough portal couplers available to service all requests, connections are placed into a priority queue where first priority is given to premium Pocket Workshop customers, then to Portable Meeting Room customers, and then finally to employee movements between quarters, workspaces under maintenance, or their assigned maintenance corridors. There are sufficient portal couplers available that in the worst case employees should be blocked from moving into their quarters for no more than five hours at the end of each shift.

## Engineering Access

Pocket Places engineers are based in Pocket Places HQ in Neverwinter. When repairs or improvements need to be made to the portal exchange, most common needs can be met by temporarily taking control of the body of one of the resident employees as part of the "remote hands" process.

In such cases, the selected employee will find their maintenance corridor connected to an engineering bay instead of to a workspace and immediately on entry their body will be remotely possessed (using intermediation services outsourced to RoboDemon LLC) and connected with an engineer's remote access terminal. The engineer can then use the employee's body in any way they deem necessary in order to complete the repair or improvement, before returning the employee to the maintenance corridor at which point they resume their normal duties. If the employee's body obtains any injuries during the remote work the engineer may choose to connect them to a medic's office at HQ instead.