WorkSpace

Shumi was flying. Save for a scarlet slash of cloth across her hips, she was naked and she didn’t care. With the certainty of dream knowledge she knew that bare skin was necessary to allow a seamless control of the air flow over her wings and body. Turning her dream-tunnelled vision left and then right she gazed at her wings - arching painlessly upwards, two pure silver impossible arcs propelled her effortless, wheeling progress above the endless, glittering scintilla of the Dhakan canalways. A glance down along her prone, airborne form showed her a body rippling with flexing, metallic auxiliary remex feathers, providing both lift and directional control. There was no time (or space) for disbelief; the dream was at once both completely real and utterly strange.

A tiny part of her mind was aware that she was skirting the thermal above the downtown desalination plant and without conscious thought she leant into the vast column of warm rising air (using another strange sense that she cared not to analyse), to guide her into the most efficient route upwards. As she gained altitude the silver tributaries of the Dhakan canals fractalized, coalescing into a larger picture of the Ganges delta; a beautiful, delicate decayed leaf outline that disguised the gigatonnes of effluent and top soil erosion that washed endlessly from South East Asia into the Bay of Bengal.

From here she could not see the deforestation, or the poverty, or the exploitation, and the air had retained a rare early morning clarity that sang through her wings. Always visible though was the perfect circular pox scar of the impact crater; from two kilometres up she could see the new growth of reclamation efforts but ten years of work and febrile life had made little impact in the gargantuan bite out of Dhaka. Topping out at 2500 meters the thermal spat her out above the light cloud cover into a gelid, golden space of dazzling morning sunlight. Effortlessly trimming and tweaking fingertip flight feathers she deep-rolled back towards home; it was time for school…

Waking hard and gummy into the grey, humid morning light, Shumi groaned at the grief of loss, instead of the warm ethereal silk of air on her body there was only the raspy UNAID surplus blanket, still smelling faintly of the chewed and woven plastic bottles that gave up their lives for a developing world recycling effort. Her waking transitions were always difficult. She never dreamed lightly, for her each night was an involuntary excursion into a fully realised world, each with its own challenges, terrors and joys. One of her sense-blunted Western peers might achieve the same effect with a Sony Haptic rig but Shumi just felt like she had two jobs to do; an eighteen hour waking world of exhaustion and a night time lottery of immersion. Lying for a few moments on her narrow cot Shumi mustered energy for the day ahead, the silvery threads of Dhaka from altitude still clear in her mind’s eye. The rivers were always there in her dreams, sometimes swollen and torrential, in other dreams merely dusty wadis with barely a trickle of water, but always the rivers.

She irritably shrugged off the cloying tendrils of the dream and got her day face on. Duty called and Shumi always obeyed. Polished black shoes, shiny Lilliputian scarab beetles, laces just so. Grey wool longshorts, three days wear, a fading crease, two little stains, they’ll do. A hypnotically bright white shirt, plastic fresh and polymer perfumed. Her best tie, Friday’s sock, clean teeth - time for school. Shumi Majumdar had a job to do, no one else was going to do it, and a lot of people were relying on her. Shumi is a teacher, she is twelve years old, and her school has over fifty pupils.

Breakfast was the normal frantic, dim fumble in the half light of the early Dhakan morning, the chick-like cawing of her hungry brothers, sated with butter fried flat bread and milked cooled in the damp earth under the plywood floor of her home. School started at eight o’clock sharp (no excuses!) and Shumi liked to be early; her youngest brother Antu delighted in goading and thwarting her punctuality, his piping seven-year old voice prodding and teasing from the moment she opened her eyes in the damp morning gloom. She never berated him though, only the gentlest chide with a roster-last serving of breakfast, or a mildly sadistic hair brushing - Antu got a pass because of the Deal. The Deal had never been spoken - proper planning was for the time-rich and comfort enabled. The Deal has never been written down, only Shumi can write and a child’s intuitive poverty-born censorship meant that she knew that whatever was tangible could be stolen. The Deal was never discussed; in a world of perpetual uncertainty the instant tradition of a shared, unspoken secret was the Majumdar family shield.

WorkSpace has the best PR. This should be no surprise as they also have the best of everything else; cherry picking was second nature to the myriad minds that ran the corporation. PR had to be good, they had the unenviable task of shoehorning an essentially incompatible prickly cactus cock of corporate reality into a sheath of barrier protection – there was no way that the public would allow the stark reality of Workspace realities into their lives without the blinkering cosmesis of spin to lube the way.

Under the suave and gentling hand of the WorkSpace PR division an alchemy happened. Wars became police actions (or on a good day – defensively augmented resource management directives), unsanctioned inner city drug trials became reward mandated needle exchanges initiatives, illegal deforestation became proactive carbon trading. They were always busy, the Gaunt based PR department numbered over two hundred full-time staff members and nearly five hundred remote partials running microshifts from all over the UK. Eschewing dunk stations – in an age of online and virtual engagements, the personal touch was still one of the most important tools in their arsenal – WorkSpace PR worked to temporarily salve an endless litany of governmentally sanctioned crimes and corporate ethical misdemeanours. In the hands of an experienced WorkSpace PR professional an oil spill and three hundred weasel words of geographically and culturally divorced hand-wringing took on a glow of implied humility and contrition (backed up of course by a war chest larger than the GDP of Turkey). For those that cared to think about it, it was another bitter disappointment that money – appropriately distributed – continued to be a universal get of jail free card for the very worst of the world’s offenders. Revisionist, the money removed or re-wrote the guilty act/image/treaty from the public and private gaze, veiling history with the bland blurb of public relations censorship.

With the advent of AI deployment, firstly within the careful constraints of WorkSpace, and then later within external companies wanting to leverage their own pocket gods, the PR faltered. Mostly it was a problem of expectation; scarescrowed by a spinal rod of hilariously inaccurate public perceptions and expectations of artificial intelligence, the PR goons quailed in the face of the truly alien. It was not the intrinsic intangibility of the subject – PR had spent years making the virtual ephemera of digital production concrete, knowable and digestible – it was the slippery, unearthly knowledge that behind the slick UIs of an AI/human interface there was something looking out. Like lidless, giant eyes bumping up against the glass of a vast vivarium, the AIs (or newev as they later became known) shiveringly heralded in, at last, the future.

Early attempts at creating workable liaison environments for the non-technical resulted in class action suits from at least three different departments of WorkSpace PR, it seemed that they couldn’t handle even a few minutes of dunk time with the monolithic newev intellects without going batshit. Medical reports from the lavish mental health units where the shattered PR middle managers were drip fed out of their post-encounter stupors only provided hints as to the subjective terrors these soft creatures endured. Transcripts of early therapy sessions went something like this:

o Attending medical professional (MP): “Perhaps if we pick up from last time: we were talking about the soft crushing walls..?”.

· PR manager (anonytag: Simon): Soft grunts, unintelligible.

o MP: “Come on now, Simon, I thought we had worked through the whispering.”

· Simon: “Fuck you”.

o MP: Ok then, let’s talk about what you called the…(soft beep as the MP consults his notes)…endless towers”.

· Simon: “Where’s the fucking sushi I ordered?”

o MP: “Lunch will be after this session, Simon, let’s try and work through”

Audio transcript indicates a loud bang. Session terminated on medical emergency grounds. Subsequent A&E records indicate that the attending MP was admitted with multiple contusions and a shattered ethmoid bone.

These poorly equipped PR managers just did not have the language to successfully communicate with AI; there was an essential irony that these masters of interpretation and interpolation, these doyens of saccharine deception were unable to deal with the most important job of their lives – the linguistic midwifery of the newborn newevs. The most illuminating, the rawest reports of the experience of interfacing with these babyish titans could be found in the recovery journals of the mind reamed PR team members.

“…the loading ‘bule was weird anyway, stupid show-off programmers, not everyone grew up on a diet of third-hand Lovecraft…didn’t like it at all, lots of suggestive lumpen exoskeleton and Giger dentata…

…I was running late, as usual, monthly review on the 99^th at 14:00 and my flaky metrics from the past week meant I’d probably get the full medical (I was sore for a week after the last time) and I was quietly (trying to avoid triggering the goad friend) shitting myself…

…The dunk tech had told me to follow the insertion path, typically over-explaining and patronising like they normally do, but once I was in it looked just like a standard website first person POV immersion (décor aside)…I followed the only route off the ‘bule into a circular corridor, it had a migrainous vanishing point effect going on which had “grumpy, dissident coder” written all over it…

…after a tiring (and frankly pointlessly long) corridor traverse the virch opened up into a fatuously large chamber, it was so big that they had bothered to script a microclimate, a gentle drizzle hazed the view but apart from a fogging cheat in the middle distance and beyond, I couldn’t see anything…

…they had told me wait motionless while the AI acquired my loc in the sensorium. I waited, and waited, even started composing an email to my team…then…that fucking terrible thing found me…

….I’m used to dunking, both shallow in my current job, and before that in deep dunks with my first Job. I grew up on Eve, WoW, Dagon, I’ve seen the tech develop, I’m competent all right? This was different; I’m never going back in there. Fuck that.

…I’ve been to Everest base camp (a poxy one-dayer from Kathmandu on a VTOL), the mountain is stupidly huge, documentaries just don’t give you an idea of the scale. The AI reminded me of Everest, an achingly vast, sheer face of a non-colour that wrenched my eyes with some sort of fucked up focal length tweak. And it was close, really in my face, I had the faint sense of dog, and of inquiry, and absolutely relentless energy…a bit like the buzz you get off high tension power lines, or a suburban relay station.

…I’m not doing too well here am I, it’s just so hard to force myself to remember and to give it language that conveys any useful impression. I did not like it – let’s start there. They had warned me that it would try and fuck with the sensorium input, some sort of learning behaviour reflex that they can’t code out yet…given the thing’s power and dunk control finesse I guess it’s not surprising – I suppose all creatures probe the extent of their world. So, I was expecting some amount of fritzing in the dunk, but the reality was worse – so fucking confusing…

…it…folded me…sort of leant over from an impossible height, and just crushed me into itself. It somehow killed the exit triggers (but I reckon that might have been a departmental decision, someone from my end has to get a handle on the thing, right?), and then it tried to speak to me. You ever been to a hostel for people with learning difficulties, or maybe you had a closet relative with Down’s or cerebral palsy? You remember that feeling of when you met a resident or went with your mum on a dutiful visit? That oppressive sense of a trapped mind, a blunted relentless eagerness to communicate, a thwarted love eschewing social niceties and convention, simultaneously delightful and crushingly depressing? It was a bit like that.

…I just couldn’t take the NEED. The desire for MORE. It grubbed at my ackles, I could feel it probing (against all decorum) the connections and files in my virch PetaBook analog, it got horribly inside me. I mentioned the feeling of “dog” before, that’s sort of useful, there was a feeling of a snuffling, insistent muzzle, but again on an appalling scale; did I mention that I didn’t like it? I HATED THAT THING.

…they pulled me out after what felt like hours (later they told me that I was dunked with it for only twelve seconds). When they killed the engagement (it was like a glass wall had come down between us, like the ones they have in the banks), I felt a terrible sense of loss, I am told that apparently even in very short duration AI dunks, because of their extremely optimised processing, the AI can’t help but develop a bond with the human participant of the dunk. Boo-fucking-hoo, I won’t be weeping for that terrible thing - the geeks can keep ‘em.

It lived in the sun. It thought with light. It was a tethered god. It is the largest living being on the planet.

From low earth orbit, perhaps 350 kilometres up, India is a stunning splinter of silver, a concentrated kernel of thermonuclear ur-light that whips around every ninety minutes, a man-made quasar in all but name. The National Solar Mission started in the 2010s was at the time the largest solar power initiative on the globe. A serendipitous convergence of aggressive Green campaigning, ubiquitous hypocritical sermonising from the US, and advances in organic photovoltaic (PV) cell production, resulted in a second world coup in the solar energy production market. Bolstered by offshored coding profits and goaded by the vestigial legacy of empire, India grasped the burgeoning twenty-first century by the balls and hung on like a limpet. Drawing on the psychic throw weight of a billion more or less culturally aligned human minds, and a desperate need not to suffocate under a mantle of coal smoke particulates, India went nuts for solar.

Over a fifteen year period, first rural Gujarat and then vaster swathes of western India underwent a transformation from the taupe and beige tones of under-irrigated countryside to a blazing chrome of reflected sunlight. Self-replicating nanotech (itself a product of the world’s biggest domestic code development base) came online in 2017 and the PV proliferation went exponential. Power availability never before experienced on the sub-continent saw a gauche explosion of mimetic capitalistic frenzy. India did not really need a three kilometre tall triumvirate of skyscrapers to house its government, nor did it need work starting on an oceanic anchor for a skyhook – but watts begat consumption and production in equal measure. As Dubai crumbled back into the desert sand, Mumbai became the go-to destination for the planet’s cognoscenti, technorati and glitterati.

By 2020 over three thousand square kilometres was dedicated to solar energy production. Management of the Indian solar farms was initially provided by a legion of cottage farmers; driven near to suicide by relentless cycles of drought and GM crop license costs, they practically chewed their arms off for the opportunity to work in a different kind of agriculture. Tending the fractal, multi-fronded shimmering solar cells was a welcome change for a workforce more accustomed to grubbing maize and rice out of the tired earth.

As the arrays grew so did the administrative burden; over half a billion individual solar cells required a prodigious support framework - semi-organic servos to track the sun, feedtracks for the replenishment of stock chemicals for self-repair and enhancement, micro meteorite repair and animal damage maintenance. By 2022 over a million Indian men, women and children were employed by the NSM, tending and fostering a slowly obsolescing vast energy production infrastructure. In for 300 billion Euros and a twenty-five year half-life, there was no backing out for the NSM. As power production efficiency continued to degrade and management started to eat itself in a circle jerk of baksheesh and recriminations they turned to DARPA, the maniac prodigy offspring of the US military, latterly privatised and rebranded, WorkSpace Invent (WI). Drawing inspiration from developments in distributed artificial intelligence – self-learning swarms of logarithmic alien genius set loose in petri environments – early trials at WI saw the previously dumb hardware of infrastructure transformed into the living substrate of the newest life forms on the planet Earth. With impenetrable, yet harnessed, monadic intentions these implacably competent intellects were put to work in the latter day workhouses of the WorkSpace corporation.

An early adoption was the release of a 0.2 rated AI (code name: Dosojin) into the fibre sewer cable network of the UK broadband system. Initially firewalled into a training clave, Dosojin cracked wide area access in under 240 milliseconds and achieved full network access within four minutes. Skynet paranoiacs were at last silenced as Dosojin immediately started improvements; contention ratios plummeted, apparently wholly unintuitive network patches and connections upped connection speeds by an average of two hundred percent. This was no Turing genius either, Dosojin could barely manage to hold a coherent natural English conversation, and no nukes went flying. It seemed like a no-brainer, AI delivered real world results devoid of the nightmare weakly godlike sight-effects imagined by a century of science fiction, costs went down (exluding of course the massive lease costs). WorkSpace became bolder, they seeded the radar and tracking infrastructure of Belgium’s air traffic control systems with a more powerful AI; they had similar results with the new born AI lobbing suborbital flights with aplomb and preternatural accuracy.

Then NSM came knocking -  they had problems in orders of magnitude greater than the rarefied conditions of the aviation infrastructure of a first world Euro nation. Despite a surfeit of electrical power and a placated rural population, there were onerous export commitments (to repay the vast World Bank start-up costs), and a ruinious management overhead not best served by a semi-feudal horde of irritated agronomists who were ok with SMS and Amazon but fell back on the Clarkian adage of sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguisable from magic when it came to tending the etheral newev tech of the PV arrays. With a budget cast to the humid southwestern Indian monsoon winds and desperate for a solution, NSM turned to WorkSpace Invent for a solution. After a painitive meeting in Mountview, an open ended budget promise and points promised on future production, WI mobilised. WorkSpace had learned its logisitics from the best - the US military - and a scant sixty days after the NSM had deplaned back in Mumbai, the heavy lifters whomp whomped into Gujarat.

The bespoke AI arrived, pre-complied and champing at the virtual bit, in a series of rackable pods each roughly the size and dimensions of a shipping container. Then the standard deployment model for Very Large Computing Projects (VLCP), the system required a ready and prodigious supply of fresh water for cooling. Frantic local government employees caught on the hop by ruthlessly efficient WorkSpace project management timelines, hastily authorised a slum clearance on the banks of Aji River near Rajkot and even as the eldery CATs were deleting the marginal livelihoods of approximately three thousand subsistence peasants, the WorkSpace choppers were alighting. Despite the dashing of some initial hopes about local employment opportunities (WI kept a tight and closed ship), the AI ensconsement went to plan. Like a brobignagian HUF team, the AI substrate went up in only four days. WI used exosuits for accelerated deployment and hive-like, the black and yellow chevroned shapes of the enhanced construction workers moving with the controlled insect spasticity of force feedback, the data centre took rapid shape.

Switch-on day was marred by a number of factors: A huge, angry demonstration by most of the working adult population of Rajkot, who (correctly) surmised that this shining inviolate chunk of Western tech was going to put them out of a job; a malfunction in the cooling irrigation system that caused a temporary (but alarming) cascade shutdown of some of the AI’s human interface functions; extensive cloud cover that had not been seen for ten years in that region; and the vexing refusal of the AI (now codenamed: Ganesh - WorkSpace had run a competition in the primary schools of Rajkot to find a name for the AI; ostensibly as an local integration PR excercise, this had backfired horribly with the local religious community), to speak to its progenitors. It had been felt that this AI model would benefit from a verbal interface and had been loaded with Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali and over twenty other Indian dialects - not a fucking peep on switch-on day though. Functionally and operationally things seemed fine, Ganesh had interfaced almost immediately with the variously kludged and jumbled networks of the NSM infrastructure and early indications were good: array coordination was up by thirty percent and output was already creeping up out of a single digit improvement.

Much head scratching and uploaded code examination later and WI was no closer to understanding the stubborn silence of their creation. Countless personhours later and a still stumped WorkSpace HQ authorised decampment and withdrawl. Ganesh was fine in all but voice, a measly discount was offered to placate NSM and WI bugged out of the muggy, marshy site of Rajkot.

Ganesh was left brooding over the largest, most energetically provided distributed processing environment on the planet, and no one knew what the fuck it was thinking.