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http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.u...edundancy.html
3d Printshop Attendant - you work for a shop running a few expensive printers, dealing with jobs that the average home fabricator can't handle. Lose your job if someone gets disguised gun parts past you.
Aid Worker - Fifty million displaced ecogees need food and medicine and paper refugee clothing. You're there to provide it.
Animal Control Officer - hunt down escaped designer pets and malfunctioning cyberanimals. Night vision goggles, chunky motion sensor and a shotgun surprisingly mandatory.
Augmented Reality Designer - design Augmented Reality signs and spaces for small businesses, etc. Not as well paid as you'd imagine because everyone and his uncle (who earns £13563 a week without leaving his desk you could too visit this link) thought this would be their ticket to riches in the early 2020s.
Automated Decision Monitor - keep a real-time eye on decisions being made by automated systems. Check the Urban Renewal Conglomerate's construction drones aren't demolishing (the wrong) inhabited squats. Check the nanobots haven't decided to eat all petrochemical products. If you see something odd, ignore it, cause global apocalypse.
Biomass farmer - look after corporate biomass facilities, ultra-dense greenhouses using specially designed black leafed bushes to produce as much biomass and nutrients as possible. Involves maintaining water spraying drones, checking for sabotage, and clearing out invasive leaves. Earn a diploma in compost management.
Block Warden - works for the slumlord corporations keeping everything in the housing block running fairly smoothly, taking questions and complaints from people, ignoring questions and complaints from people...
If Egyptian, regard the western TEFL kids in your compound with a mixture of benign bemusement and confused resignation.
Chicken Little Trimmer - from an old (and awesome) '50s novel called the Space Merchants: cut chunks of meat (like a doner kebab man) from a giant genetically engineered slab of meat, that will grow indefinitely if not "trimmed".
Chipped 'free' Laborer - a worker with a chipware socket, paid by the hour to do temp jobs using skill chips provided by the employer of the week, who buses them to the work site. Used as a source of cheap labour by corporations to undercut skilled workers and reduce wage levels across the board.
'Citizen Journalist' - writer working for a press agency, reporting whatever she sees that might be interesting in exchange for petty cash.
City Farm Worker - work in community gardens or some kind of inner city stack farm producing real food for ideological or commercial reasons.
Clean-up 'Specialist' - inundated cities require clean-up and reclamation. Get some disposable workers, give them NBC gear, and send them to remove sewage swamped water from devastated regions. Get priced out of your own shitty rented house once redevelopment and gentrification begins.
Commenter - get paid to post comments on the internet. Shout down your bosses' political opponents, astroturf a political movement, give the impression of large scale dissenting opinion to received scientific fact, plug products...
Consumer Advocate - paid by a consumer organisation or church to bombard 'immoral' companies with emails, to create moral panics or even crash their servers.
Coolhunter - locate 'cool' trends and betray them to an advertising agency. Not as well paid as you'd like to imagine.
Cyberanimal Handler - feeds the enhanced security dogs when they aren't on patrol. Balls of steel required: literally, if the animal takes a sudden disliking to you.
Cyberwear Technical Support - "Help! My cyberbrain is malfunctioning!" "Have you tried turning it on and off?"
Designer Ecosystem Monitor - make a futile attempt at the behest of the government, the agricorps (yeah, right) and the ecogroups to prevent the abuse of GM plants or their escape into the greater ecosystem. Might involve use of a flamethrower!
Dog Walker - the first group of people to do badly in a recession, as the Londoners catering to American business people found out in 2008. In wealthier cultures, you'll provide exercise for vanity pets.
Euthanasia Attendant - Turn on the lethal injection bot, and smile sweetly.
(When I first wrote this list, this was a joke. Not any more!)
Fishermen - nomads who follow the few surviving (and RFID tagged) schools, avoiding the naval and agricorp defences to steal a small catch.
Flying Car Fuel Attendant - work with Aerodynes/Spinners/AVs and the sort of people who can afford flying cars. Work on top of a windy skyscraper.
Gardener - keep corpzone lawns trimmed. Go home to the concrete jungle.
Home Companion - live with an elderly person, helping them to cope with everyday life. Not as well paid as it should be, because this the dark future where everyone got fucked out of their pension.
Industrial Origamist - print cheap paper frame bikes, paper refugee clothing, paper furniture, smart paper toys...
Kelp Strainer - strain kelp in corporate kelp production facilities, using mechanical devices to check nutrient levels and determine whether said kelp is most appropriate for kibble or kelpboard manufacturing. Fun!
Labour Exchange Attendant - in the age of chipped "free" workers (see the last post) someone has to hand out what jobs are going. Either you'll be standing on a street corner with a bus sign or at at a mandated "labour exchange," where you'll hand out skill chips and bus tickets on a first-come, first serve basis. Illegal immigrant workers and construction workers in the Gulf States already have to put up with these people - chipware just brought them into the mainstream.
Be a jumped up neo-Hitler and take bribes to let people work at cut rate! Establish a relationship with the mob! Arm yourself!
"Limo" Driver - be like Jamie Foxx in Collateral or Angela Bassett in Strange Days. Transit clients across the dark city. Have meaningful conversations with the psychopath in the back seat.
Meat Puppet - switch off your brain and let a chipped personality control your body for a period. A methodology associated with prostitutes, but surprisingly common among security personnel, prison guards and waitresses. Bunraku in Shadowrun.
Meat Space Attendant - when half the world has retreated into a fully virtual existence, someone has to attend the comatose bodies. Keep the plumbing going!
Mime Artist - become a creepy street performer. Terrify a twelve year old seeing the movie Blade Runner for the first time with your creepy cartwheels.
Minor League video game player - for professional e-sports, see any of a dozen youtube feeds covering the Korean Starcraft scene. However, to get the screaming fan girls, the silly gangsta-astronaut jackets and the drooling international fans you first need to get to the group play-offs. You and one hundred thousand others...
Pedicab driver - propel your paper frame rickshaw through the city, late at night. Fuel yourself on energy drinks now the oil's run out.
PediKart driver: Like a pedicab driver, but with goods instead of passengers.
Persona Bum - test new personafixs (downloaded personalities). Attracts the self loathing and suicidally depressed. I'm not saying that's you, or anything (name taken from the novel Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick).
Personal Tutor - teach corporation brats maths. Also: how to be sociable and handle normal social interaction (their parents abdicated this role years ago!). Accreditation required.
Pharm laborer - look after pharm animals. Rather like working in a factory, frankly. Work amongst the locations in Ruralpunk.
Political Staffer - work as a low level researcher and dogboy for a Minister / Congressman / Lobbyist. Pretend to have lots of real power.
Product Launch Rent-a-Mob - get paid to dress up like hip young cool people and attend product launches to make them look hipper, younger and cooler. Yet another job about pretending to have money to get money from people who don't have any money except what they made in exchange for pretending to have money. Late capitalism awooooo!
Product Tester - test and evaluate toys and entertainment prototypes to judge their market potential. Try your best to avoid institutional infantilisation.
Professional Combat Zone Snitch - "Right. Redwater will pay you to hand us the location of boostergangs and black medicals in the Free Fire Zone. Free medical insurance. Also, have this panic button in case you get into trouble..."
Quickchipped Militia: Give a cheap day labourer with a chip socket a gun and some rifle skill chips, tell him to stand guard at political rallies or cheap security zones...
"Ractor"- provide the voices for interactive games and dramas, in real time. Possibly become surrogate mother to an abused child being taught by magical nano-book, leading to Victorian intrigue (From Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age).
Recycler - It turns out that the level of discrimination necessary to sieve through waste in recycling plants is really expensive to replicate in a robot. So there's a job opening right there, son.
Rejection tester - test prototype cyberware! Only for the brave, this one. Be prepared to get your cash in lump sums. Avoid unscrupulous companies based out of Hong Kong and Lagos who don't pay to replace your limbs when they get their prototype back...
RetroCraftsman - make cheap 'handmade' trinkets for sale to people who dislike manufactured blobjects (...no longer science fiction. Thanks, Etsy!).
Rubbish/Trash/Garbage Man - Pick up people's garbage. If that job has been taken by robots, sift through garbage to find stuff to live on, Manilla style.
SCOP Scooper - ah SCOP, Cyberpunk 2020's favorite nutrient-monoculture soup. Stir it, scoop it, serve it, eat it...
Sewage Plant Worker - wade through shit tending the bacterial cultures and reed beds that keep the city's water clean. Risk appalling health problems and catastrophic urban disaster awaits when your supervisor orders you to increase productivity at the expense of safety protocol!
Reading the (excellent) novel Slow River by Nicola Griffith will make this seem like the most important job in the world.
Sharecropper - a stalwart pillar of the nomadic lifestyle, travel the country taking agricultural work in season. City farms and GM food make this job viable all year round. Pretend to be a character in a Steinbeck novel!
Shipbreaker: the old Chittagong mainstay comes to poor stretches of coastline around the world! Break up robot tankers for scrap and hope their automated anti-piracy systems aren't still operating. Drown in toxic waste!
A variant would be the car breaker, tearing apart the Detroit-born wreckage left behind by rising fuel prices.
Outside Cape Canaveral and in orbit they have Spaceship breakers. That's beyond the scope of this list, however!
Simsense Extra - Simsense/Braindance/BTL chips might seem real, but the experiences they provide are as fabricated as any film. You think Bob Bobson's conversation with the bartender was organic? Hell no! CalHot studios need extras like anyone else!
Special Constable - become a part time police officer. Put in a few days a month to support the regular cops.
Street Psychiatrist - say nice things to desperately overworked corporate workers to brighten up their day and improve general morale.
Teleoperation 'Wrangler' - direct AI controlled teleoperated machinery (the swarm of police UAV drones patrolling the combat zone, the robot lorries in the corporate distribution chains...). Gold rating on Starcraft 2 Battlenet.com a requirement.
Teleoperator - like a wrangler but responsible for a single drone - most likely a big construction rig. Resist the urge to charge your robot around New York, smashing up skyscrapers and kidnapping Fay Wray
Tout - "Yes Mr Nakamoto, I can definitely tell you where the best restaurants in the city are. And the coolest clubs, too..."
Your oh-so-cool fixer was doing this three years ago. In Vienna they'll force you to dress up as Mozart, the bastards.
Toy - both Transhuman Space and Ex Machina use this word to describe people who make themselves slaves to someone else's desires. What this job entails depends on how grim your setting is...
UBICAM sprayer - quietly spray nano-cameras allover underpasses, high crime areas, and across the front doors of paparazzi targets or your bosses' political enemies.
Urban Missionary: Often armed with little more than a quota-bible chip...
Viral Ideologist - you've heard of viral marketers, right? Attractive people sent into clubs wearing designer clothes or smoking designer cigarettes, paid to make brands look cool and popular? Viral Ideologists do the same thing for political issues and religious groups. You didn't think anyone supported the passage of a bill giving the Microzon corporation free access to your medical records, but everyone in the bar seemed to be giving their loud approval!
Wandering ecstatic: blast your mindspace with psychedelic drugs and cheap brainhack surgery. Travel the cities of men, spreading spiritual experience by example. Pay limited - that's alright, because starvation brings on the Vision.
Window cleaner - if the Judge Dredd comic is to be believed, you'll be riding up the side of the corpzone towers in a machine shaped like a spider covered in suction cups and water hoses.
Every so often some bloke will kidnap you, steal your identity and then use it to stick mics all over a boardroom window. When this is discovered a few hours later, Corpsec will come for you. Great!
Apprentice Nostalgist: the great mass of elderly people, unable for their all collective political efforts to return the world to an imagined 1950s, can at least remake their own living spaces. With the aid of historical textbooks, vast databases and few 3D printers, you help your employers turn their home into something resembling whatever idealised prior-century year they care to wallow in.
Architectural Beta-Tester: every new physical and virtual environment is now carefully designed according to nudge theory and the architectural precepts of a generation brought up on video-games, where every element is designed to channel the human ratsoccupants into pre-determined behaviours. Your job is to inhabit architectural mock-ups, while sensors monitor such things as heart rate, visual stimulation hooks and the speed with which the security drones activate in the event you enter while poor.
Depending on circumstances you may find yourself testing physical architecture in a virtual environment or virtual architecture in a physical mock-up, because the near-future is nothing if not painfully meta.
Bard: first people lost faith in the big news networks, because they were run by oligarchs and too eager to prostate themselves before governments in exchange for access. Then they became cynical about the smaller, more "personal" information sources (Drudge, Breitbart, etc), too obviously partisan during a time of rapidly shifting political allegiances. Having abandoned trust in the vast corporations and the smaller social network mobs, the inevitable final step for news consumers was to place their confidence in individuals.
As a rogue's gallery of social media personalities and kooks scrabbled for their audience, many adopted gimmicks or humour to stand out. They took their cues from Consciousness Rap and other politicised musical forms.
This is how you came to be standing in a neo-tavern, strumming a neo-lute and singing about government neo-tax policy.
Bespoke AR-Environment Developer: use a network of The Sims-esque tools to build AR environments for customers who want to spend their days in a new, saner reality. Wait for the day you can join the ranks of the superstar designers to the oligarchs.
Bio-Tech Distiller: spend your day brewing modified rat-brain computers in bubbling yeast vats. An enormous growth industry in the slums and rebel enclaves.
Coffin Hotel Attendant: spray down the plastic sheets and chase the rats away from sleeping criminals and paranoids.
Drone Polisher: after it took your job, you became its butler.
Fashionista: a cross-between a barista and a personal shopper, fashionistas work in the AR Fashion Cafes where gangs of teenagers go to drink milkshake and design outfits for printing there and then.
As a side-note, this is by far the most common after-school occupation for the protagonists of 202X teen coming-of-age movies.
Feedstock Hound: feedstock for 3D printers is a vital resource, especially in low income communities. You'll hunt down untapped sources - usually unclaimed garbage - for reprocessing back into usable material. You might even work for a legitimate, licensed business.
Or you might loot "empty" houses, strip parkland trees of their biomass or fight it out with other Hounds on the flooded streets of dank slums. Shoot a cyborg down over an empty crisp packet or a few green leaves!
Implant Painter: paint or sculpt designs onto cyberware, ranging from geometric patterns through Hokusai print designs to the inevitable Santa Muerte icons. This career will certainly have a much cooler name than written above.
Industrial Bonsai Apprentice: in the future, many structures and devices are grown, not built. Trim the smart-wood or neo-coral as it blooms into some solid and beautiful.
Insect Rancher: cultivate a swarm of locusts, a deluge of flies or a pile of meal-worms, possibly in your own house. Sell them to local restaurants or school cafeterias.
Interpersonal Trainer: in a world of social isolation and complex identities, you train people how to interact with other humans in the real world. A working knowledge of pronouns is mandatory.
Minor League Gladiator: new forms of body armour have facilitated a resurgence in the pursuit of western martial arts as a professional sport, with the result that every angry European teenager aspires to be a knight in sponsored armour. Competition is fierce and painful, not least because training is expensive and armour barely affordable.
Artisanal Food Printer: use a 3D printer to extrude food to order, collaborating with the customer to get just the right shade of purple and just the right hint of vitamin D.
Mechanical Turk: complete individual tasks as and when companies require them, paid by the job. When Uber takes over the workplace, everyone will have their 15 minutes of career.
Personal Surrogate: as hikikomori begins to afflict societies outside Japan and many millions descend into internet-enabled agoraphobia, many wealthy hermits turn to professional surrogates when circumstances dictate they must leave the house (to attend functions, meetings, family engagements...).
Person Walker: combining the skills of a dog walker and a personal trainer, the Person Walker walks you. A surprisingly necessary role in the torpid, lonely future.
Plug-in Pod Attendant: in the brain 'jacked mid-century, untold millions spend their lives plugged directly into their computers, floating in fluid pods or stagnating on their dusty sofas. Your job is to keep tongues from being swallowed, waste fluid tubs from being clogged, and drool from pooling on every available surface.
Public Mood Attendant: high unemployment, intersectional tensions and constant heatwaves all conspire to keep the 'plex in a constant state of heightened agitation. The mall or the parking lot could host a riot at any moment. Your job is monitor the feeds for signs of irruption, then direct a variety of sonic and olfactory systems (via directional microphones, advertising board, micro-drone deployed chem-trails, etc) to calm the disturbance before it begins.
Rental Smart-Car Attendant: across the city, travellers rent their driver-less smart-cars by the hour or subscribe to commuter vehicles. For all their efforts, the corporations have yet to create the drone that can reliably pick the used condoms and burger wraps out of the lining between the car seat and the door.
'Runner Shrine Attendant: attend to one of the fanes catering to the deniable mercenary community - tend the zen gardens serving corporate samurai or the shrines to Santa Muerte favoured by cops and criminals alike.
Self Assessment Auditor: everyone in the corporate world now wears a variety of health sensors to monitor their well-being. Get paid to shout at them when they ignore the dictates of their Fitbit.
Smart-House Debugger: when the client is being blackmailed by the armchair, the pest control drone keeps targeting the cat and the cooker is burning the kibble, the company sends you - a mook with six hours of training and an AR guidebook - to save the day.
Smell Artiste: cyber-people spend their time in all manner of tiny spaces frequented by nomadic strangers - driver-less rental cars, coffin hotels, full immersion VR pods. Showering is at a premium and global warming has increased ambient sweat levels by 30%.
Some poor sap has to make sure you don't retch every time you enter a public space, using a full gamut of sensors and chemical sprays to specifically target olfactory menaces (including you, you bum).
Subscription AR GM: a great many people see the 'sprawl through augmented reality systems that change the shape of the city to their liking. A Subscription AR GM ('GM' taken from 'Games Master,' a term from a despised niche hobby) helps personalise AR experiences on the fly, turning the 'plex into the client's interactive playground.
Tear-Down Specialist: welcome to the age of disposable infrastructure, when houses and roads are printed to order and torn down for feedstock as people move on. You specialise in demolishing abandoned paper frame tent-cities, spraycrete houses and other ephemeral architecture.
Waste Data Cleanser: when circumstances require the deletion of large quantities of waste data, people still prefer a human conduct the purge (not realising they are just as capable of accidentally deleting registry items or a grandparent's iGhost as any machine).
Water Attendant: in the flood-zones and the drought-zones, someone has to ensure the pumps keep running - and to keep the thieves and the desperate away.
Welfare Auditor: scrabble for your own faltering standards of living by finding reasons to deny other people theirs.