WorkSpace

Janahara Azad hates his job, his boss, and his exo-suit, in that order. The first is unavoidable, the second repellent, and the third tetchy, recalcitrant and intermittently cooperative.

Three hours into an 18 hour shift: Madhom Bibir Hat averages 98% humidity, 42 Celsius, mercilessly lit by a diffuse sun which glints dully off the eternal mud. On the outskirts of the breaking yard itself, and for all the surrealism of the monstrous dead tech littering the landscape and the insane levels of activity in the main yard, it is a curiously peaceful place. A gentle wind blows a damp breath on the machang shanty town that presses hard against the yard perimeter. Naked toddlers play in the dust tugging improbably sized mech-scrap behind them like mute pets; groups of women in faded sarees chat quietly in small groups by the compound gates. Appearances aside, Madhom, like almost all places, has to be a home as well.  

Nearly everything at Madhom suffers from scalar inferiority. Even the biggest, brashest, blingest vehicle that rolls into the yard, pinging metal betraying the speed of its trip from the Dhaka suburbs, is utterly dwarfed by the giant metal corpses that dominate not only the skyline, but the eyeline, the foreground and every other perspective. Blossoming like a sooty flower in the wake of the global commerce combine, Madhom is the epicentre of dead tech disposal in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Historically, Madhom was a dumping ground for unwanted merchant shipping tonnage, giant ships were rolled straight up onto the gently sloping beaches, the salty air filled with a constant undignified, wheezing, diesel swansong. Then picked apart by swarming groups of tiny brown figures, none with their full complement of fingers or any discernable safety gear.  

After decades of crunching huge ships into easily recyclable chunks, powered by greed, blinkered convenience and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of uncomplaining Bangladeshi men who would rather work and die than just die, Madhom Bibir Hat in Chittagong is now the place for the disposal of vast metal structures of all shapes and purposes. Most recently, The Kashem Corporation, Janahara’s employer, has moved into platform recycling. Winning a lucrative (yet laughably small by Western standards) contract from IDMessina Group (a WorkSpace subsidiary) in 2025, Kashem Corp now processes three to four redundant oceanic oil drilling platforms per year. Despite a mortality rate of nearly one hundred and fifty men per platform, and constant wrangling with UN pollution inspection personnel, Kashem’s owner Iqbal Karim manages to maintain houses in nine capitals, a fleet of hydrogen powered Bentleys, and no minimum wage. Janahara works on commission, a paltry algorithm based on how much metal his aging SARCOS exo-suit can gouge and chew from whichever rapidly skeletonising steel carcass has most recently beached itself on the desolate mud flats of the Bay of Bengal.  

Janahara’s suit, whilst over fifteen years old and desperately in need of an overhaul, is critical to his job. His SARCOS suit is a carapaced, hot-zone variant, built in 2010 and designed for operation in NBC active zones; it is ideally suited (when cooperative) to (slowly) reducing a million tons of steel and assorted exotic materials into loads that will fit in the flatbed of an Isuzu pickup. After demob in 2017 the suit was purchased by a Scottish construction collective and retrofitted with a first gen mobile AI. Barely rating a sentience designation, and never upgraded, the suit has all the intellectual finesse of a mongrel mutt displaced from its place by the fireside, with a conversational repertoire to match. The suit is eighth-hand to Janahara, and had never operated south of the equator before Janahara slipped into its worn vinyl interior. Presumably it was nice and warm for its northern operators, but its air conditioning condenser has long since rotted away and Janahara suffers miserably in the noonday sun of Madhom beach.  

For the hundredth time that shift Janahara wipes his face against the stinking towel tied to the defunct chin monitor in the suit helmet and sucks down more brackish water from the hamster tube. It is going to be a long day.

WorkSpace boasts a “rigorous selection process” in their corporate literature. No fucking shit. I am sure that the nervous troupe of newb managers that tottered through the titanium portals of WorkSpace HQ (RL) thought that after a week long interview process their positions would be secure. Yeah, right. Twelve of us pass through the proscribed materials TerrorHurtz detector tunnel in single file; nine come out of the other end into the vast lobby.

I find out much later during a random trawl through the induction database: two victims to outgas analysis (probably a beer or joint too many the night before), and one to unfavourable posture comparison (backchannel had it that some bright spark at R&D had unearthed an old phrenology text and Frankenstein-wed it to a reinterpretation of the Alexander technique).

It doesn’t stop there, any nascent group dynamic is shattered by the immediate separation of the remaining nine; each us of is whisked off by a herd of identically dressed, bland faced “Orienteererers” of indeterminate age, ethnicity and sexual predilection. I won’t see any of my induction group for a week now, not until the die is cast and they reemerge as nice new pod people. No trenchant comments from Babs, Job’s are quiescent at this stage; the lobby casts an AI suppressor field – thank fuck for small mercies.

My journey is a little different to the others, instead of heading for the vast bank of lifts that line the lobby area we trudge a quarter kilometre towards a row of 4 small doorways set into an east wall foyer. My minder (he introduced himself as Stuart), hovers solicitously a precise 50 centimetres from my right elbow and offers some little bon mots about WorkSpace (Stuart is pretty low level, so will have no idea of my piggyback mission).

“The WorkSpace lobby is the largest in Europe, so high in fact that it supports its own microclimate. This is fully controllable of course; a daily precipitation provides 14% of all the water needs of the entire building.”

In addition, here at WorkSpace we have pioneered Total Employment – an inclusionary, fostering employee leveraging technique that ensures the highest per-capita corporation productivity record on the planet, and yet enables the aspirations of all its participants.”

At this point Stuart titters worryingly, and pats me on the lower back, pressing my sweat sodden shirt onto my skin; his perfect smile falters a little and then reasserts, effortlessly picking up his evangelical monologue.

“Your first week will be residential; I trust you haven’t brought more than the permitted personal effects allocation?”

I pat my Crumpler daypack.

“Please feel free to utilise, at any time, the net coverage in HQ. Please note that surveillance coverage is total. Ablution facilities are provided with modesty merkins if you feel unduly exposed, new partners often do.”

I smile sweetly and suggest that I could make an AI tumescent; Stuart re-blanks his face and we walk on in silence.

We approach the eastern sub foyer with the four doors and, after a brief pause as my escort obviously checks his HUD, Stuart precesses me towards the third door from the left. They are very ordinary stainless steel doors, two meters in height and with a recessed handle in the centre of the top panel. My door is labeled: Fast Track.

“It appears that you have been blessed; only our very best recruits go through here, good luck.”

Stuart bestows me the sickliest smile I’ve seen this side of tertiary disciplinary hearing and glides off, no doubt to evangelize to some other poor schmuck. I grasp and turn the door handle, there’s the briefest pause as my identity is bio-authenticated, and then the door smoothly opens and I step through.

I don’t often get to see 05:30; thanks to Babs, early rises are now, not a normal part, but at least a regular part of what passes for my life these days.

My WorkSpace mandated morning regimen is delightful. A 90-second shower, maximum permitted temperature: 40 Celsius. Oatmeal: tepid. Coffee: decaf. Enjoyment: proscribed. I’m being overly harsh I’m sure; there are upsides: Clean clothes, a fading suit rash, no catheter, fresh-fuckin-air, epic bandwidth. I have a desk now, a terminal, a chair with a cushion, quaint tea breaks; they’re cunning fuckers, management – we’re all animals when it comes down to it, who can really fight the amorphous propaganda of entitlement, peddling its everyday wares of creature comfort. I’m battling it still, but I’m amazed at this best kept non-secret of management voodoo. I spare a thought for my abandoned cohort of Job-riders; as far they’re concerned I got a promotion. Their collective incredulity is fair enough, who would have thought that feckless Operator 1338 would have felt the infinitesimal touch of olympian fortune.

Frankly, I feel shit about it most of the time, consider: I haven’t been promoted, I’m really in deep shit, my co-workers despise me, and worst of all I’ve got to dig into their frail privacy to find some notional WorkSpace mole who may not even exist. A truly nefarious double edged sword; definitely a human touch, an AI, whilst wily enough, would never be so willfully cruel.

Relations with Babs have, unsurprisingly, been rather cool of late. Never the best conversationalist, and now the recipient of its own WorkSpace sentience upgrade, my Job (now nestled disconcertingly, if undetectably, in my chest cavity and bonded to my major long bones) is an oppressively claustrophobic presence, a characteristic that was never evident in our pre-ascendant state. Post-surgical debrief did suggest that I would experience a new degree of Job zealotry (a Takamian phenomenology I am told, characterized by a strict interpretation of WorkSpace ethics), but this would diminish over time as our collective symbiote stabilizes. Yeah, fucking right – Babs has been a prick ever since the general wore off. Witness: my diet – I’d prefer a Chaplin boot. My sleep pattern – gulagtastic.

However, my pet martinet aside, I am forced to acknowledge the sheer hallucinogen (and paradoxically coherent) glory of the access I now have. Like a still-sticky emergent imago I revel in the freedom – the RL/dunk transition is now practically instantaneous. I flit between realities like a guilty ghost, impressions peeling off like a migrainous flicker book: WorkSpace Prime (virch) first thing in the morning (imagine a teeming tropical reef through a Third Reich filter), my neatly made bed, a palimpsest of newsfeeds (false colour embedded impressions from yet another Pulitzer driven war journo), my half-shaved face in the bathroom mirror (a slack jawed gaze of befuddlement), an internal snapshot of our collective bio-status, the faintest confusing hint of Babs newly emergent self-schema (stick drawing of a man facing the open sea), my rapidly cooling oatmeal on the kitchen table. Enough. I offline so I can finish my breakfast; my trembling hand clatters the spoon against my cereal bowl.

The first week in my ersatz management role has been humbling, and not in the good Gandhi way. As part as what the briefing construct amusingly (and anachronistically) called my “cover”, I would be obliged to attend standard junior management orientation at WorkSpace HQ (RL). It is explained to me (in some excruciatingly detail) that I am required to undergo this ignominious faux-training so that when I am passed back to my Operator cohort in shiny new management guise, I will be sufficiently convincing as their new Team Leader; and thus able to root out the traitor without fear of being rumbled. Frankly, I’m already skeptical about, a: the presence of this apparent hacker elite in my very own Operator clique, and, b: the truth about the existence of this so called traitor at all. Nonetheless, some stubborn part of my hind brain insists that it would actually like to keep eating for the indefinite future; so I get ready for work.

Looming inelegantly over the Gherkin, dominating completely the City skyline, WorkSpace HQ was one of the last great hopeful works of pre-nanotech architecture; clad improbably in a billion euros worth of carbon fibre it’s a monolith of pretension to dead construction techniques. 450 meters of awkward, staccato angles, it has become known, in Operator parlance, as The Gaunt.

So I found myself, Monday morning, 07:30, hovering nervously at the gaping maw of The Gaunt ground level entrance, clutching a brand new PetaBook and shifting uncomfortably in the unfamiliar rasp of street clothes. I spotted a nervous gaggle of what I assumed were the other members of my fledgling management colleagues and wandered over, filled with a curious and conflicting mix of reflexive, inverse management snobbery and the very human pack-empathy of the nervous new.

We mumbled our hi’s, cigarettes were stamped out, ties adjusted, skirts aligned; we headed up the steps.