WorkSpace

Fast Track: Day 3.

“Our envy of others devours us most of all.”

This cheery Power Point statement greets us at 08:01; only WorkSpace could subvert a gloomy Solzhenityism into a management training slide show. After two days of this crushing shit I can only assume that this pithy call to arms is going to form the policy core of yet another exercise in share holder value enhancement credo. The official title of the day’s module is (deep breath):

Revenue centric proactive psychological contract violations and the role of anti-ethics in chattel control.

I know this because Babs irrevocably committed (via heavy booted eidetic pharmacology) the entire course syllabus to my mid-term exo-memory the first night of the induction. It’s been a rocky start to our new more intimate endo-bonded existence; an AI doesn’t, theoretically at least, have emotional factors to take into consideration but the sheer relentless pressure of another ostensibly sentient presence nestled into my sensorium seems to engender a degree of querulous nagging on the part of my shoehorned partner. Case in point: In order to maintain optimum symbiotic performance for the first week after fusion with my on board Job, I was advised to eat a specific constellation of daily dietary items, this list included: Offal (specifically iron rich liver) – I hate fucking liver. Butter – at least 100 grammes daily, and normally I could include this as a normal part of my daily intake. However, the first evening of induction, as I surveyed the barren landscape of my sleep pod in the Gaunt, Babs reminded me that I had not ingested my requisite supplements for that day (first day nerves and all that). My first night therefore was a blur of force fed involuntary gluttony: reconstituted liver strips garnished with chunks of chilled coagulated bovine lactation does not make for a peaceful nights sleep.

Anyway, day three dawns, and I reluctantly perform the minimum of socially acceptable (WorkSpace mandated/Babs enforced) ablutions and stride purposefully to the lift lobby (my room is perched queasily in a western facing eerie on the sixty-third floor of WorkSpace HQ: great view, no window). Despite our long acquaintance in exo-format, since our internal integration Babs has acquired a distressing fervour and zealotry for the task at hand. This includes: small talk before 0900, decaf coffee, volunteering, and brisk physical movement. Hence, at 07:59 I find myself, lightly sweating, extolling the virtues of WorkSpace mattress qualities with an appalled looking female colleague.

Notional appearances of privilege and management advancement aside this whole process is deeply uncomfortable; and yet paradoxically and infuriatingly alluring. I am an interloper here, a grunt in the officers mess tent, a galley slave beating the drums – I should hate these smug, smooth fuckers with their perfect teeth, their modulated syntax, their ever present sense of rightness here at the foot of the ziggurat. But I want to be like them. I’m here on a day pass, golden crumbs from the master’s table; but only to do their bidding. I’m the worst kind of drone, eagerly sniffing out the pheremonal porn of the queen grub, odiously carrying out my assigned role…

What the fuck!

A sharp chemical kick from Babs (plus a little micro voltage to the spine), and I shuck off my depression like old trainers. A sub vocalized admonishment follows from Babs:

“Please focus operator, maudlin musings are not constructive”

Prick.

Course content aside, today’s session is also to be a proving ground for our combined mobile polygraphic and investigative abilities; our colleagues don’t know it of course but they are to be our guinea pigs for the first phase of my real job training. Like a latter day Chucky matryoska I am cocooned, and in turn cocoon, a payload of deceit to be first practised here and then turned loose on my unsuspecting operator colleagues. Today’s module is the ideal sandbox for Babs and me for this first stage of our training - psychological contract manipulations form a core part of employee subjugation at WorkSpace.

The basic concept goes something like this. WorkSpace employment has a certain brutal cachet, substantiated by the allure of (relatively) high pay, good medical and epic bandwidth; and not least the opportunity to use the best immersion tech this side of DARPA. The upshot of this is a steady influx of bright young things eager to impress, who are subsequently dashed against the work face of WorkSpace expansion without (audible) complaint; attrition rate is approximately twenty-seven percent per month. Given the appalling odds of usefully progressing in the organisation, but with the vain hope (and desperate need) of useful recompense the employees paradoxically develop irrational expectations from their employer – reasonable hours, enhanced pay for extra work etc. This is where psychocontractual manipulation comes into play; via a carefully calculated abuse algorithm, using isolation, blame-dynamics, over work, JEP (Just Enough Pay) and other similar methods, revenue and productivity can be maintained at optimum levels, forever teetering on the tipping point of despair/resignation/substance abuse/suicide et al.

What we are practising today is the negative performance review, a well used part of psychocontractual manipulation. Ethics aside (and lets face it, they’re always aside here), its really fun – basically we’ve got an authorised day pass for mutual abuse, seven and a half hours of trying to make each other crack, training ourselves in the art of misery brinkmanship. Seeing as I won’t be here again, and with the beleaguered pent up rage of the professional serf coupled with the white heat rage of management loathing, I forget about my mission and I tear them a new one.

The softly glowing virch pointer hovers for a long moment over the Send icon, then, with an involuntary anal clench she fiercely toggles the command.

Recipient: hr@workspace.co.uk
Subject: Notice of resignation
Importance: High

…*Message sent*

She tears off the goggles with trembling hands, she hasn’t bothered to fully dunk to send the message; this morning, given her terminal intentions, she hadn’t considered it worthwhile prepping for full immersion.

The response, whilst not instantaneous (machine intelligence has to find time to interface with its tardy human counterparts), is violently swift. Power dies in the cubicle, it’s a standard non-fenestrated unit so the only light comes from the OLED glow from Agate’s PetaBook screen; running on filched induction it’s the only item (clothing included) that does not belong ultimately to WorkSpace.

Bandwidth is next; her ocular overlay HUD dwindles to dormant state, all augment functions offlined in a fifth of a second. Even the most basic search tunnels are closed to her, as she discovers as she flails for a valid access greb. AIMs: gone. Email: gone. Workspace net access: denied. Unbelievably - cubicle aircon: offline.

She thought she had prepared for this. The clandestine rehab group Life After WorkSpace (LAW) had been counselling her for the past seven weeks; disparate cells of Work ravaged refugees offering solace to wannabe fence jumpers. They met every Tuesday night at a randomly selected Starbucks, never drinking the coffee but always direct tipping. There was one primary message: It’s not illegal, and they can’t hurt you.

Resignation was the number one policy crime in WorkSpace; redundancy was fine of course, they can fuck you off whenever it suits them (and in global economically mandated droves they did), but God forbid you should presume to look elsewhere for an alternative, modest dream of moderately debt free living. They had a word for it: WeakSpace – the originator of this cute little portmanteau was unknown but it was universally assumed by the members of LAW that they had long since died from a faecally transmitted infection.

Agate quickly removed all her clothing, lay down on the floor, and took four controlled breaths in approved NLP fashion, not hyperventilating but preparing physically and mentally for the next distressing eleven minutes (the DeskClear routine had, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, never taken longer than seven hundred seconds). Nano sublimation was first. Any WorkSpace employee occupying a stratum above grunt-level Operator was infested with any number of sub-vascular and lymphatic augmentations, ranging in size from naked eye visible to nanoscale. Employees, like chattel, have value; this value can be carefully enhanced with the judicious application of pharmacology or more subtle nano-factory manipulation at a cellular level. Perhaps most well known (and the one issue that WorkSpace ever ate legal shit on) is the loyalty pump (also sometimes called the goad friend); this is a combination synthesiser/dispenser unit embedded into the wall of the ascending aorta. Able to produce a range of narcotic analogues, the pump most typically infuses the host employee with a cocktail of mildly addictive stimulants, simultaneously enhancing productivity and engendering WorkSpace integration. Akin to nicotine in speed of effect and addictive chokehold, it is possible to refrain from toggling the relevant dosage icon but not common.

The resignation email, in all but one known case, triggers the DeskClear routine. The first act of this expulsion protocol is the removal of proprietary, internal organic WorkSpace technology and property. Using for the last time the organic PAN networks threading the employees skeletal system, cease and desist instructions are sent to the loyalty pump and other subsidiary devices in the host body, the effect is immediate and unpleasant. Nano sublimation is quick, within ninety seconds all internal WorkSpace augments have started to assume a neutral, non-active state, with the largest single component no bigger that than a fish roe. This influx of non-toxic but redundant materiel into the bloodstream and gastrointestinal tract results in an accumulative, non-typical and from a personal point of view, non-trivial voiding event.

Four, repulsive, wet, pungent minutes pass.

The desk and chair, the only two pieces of semi-permanent furniture in the cubicle, disappear into recesses in the wall and floor. A gentle shower of medicated foam starts to spray from four nozzles in the cubicle ceiling. Agate ungues herself from the floor. A closet door slides open behind her, it contains a grey unisex smock, emblazoned with “Leaver” in standard WorkSpace livery.

Agate shucks on the simple garment, the cubicle door slides open and she stumblingly follows the flashing exit chevrons down the walk of shame, a narrow corridor set in between the cubicles; CCTV nodes rotate to follow and record her progress. After forty metres of wobbly legged misery, a simple door slides vertically upwards and Agate is spat out into the grey winter daylight of a London morning. Freedom.

From: dohna.kanti@thdl.org.np

To: hadast@haifa.ac.lb

Cc:

Subject: Here’s the opportunity, let’s not linger…

Sent: Wed, 26^,September, 2068

Dear Hadas,

Just thought I would drop you a line, BIG news. It’s been a while anyway since we last corresponded and you know how I hate meeting in the World, a technophobe to the end I suppose. 

Anyway, my work on the Azad project goes well; as well it should after three years of research in six cities and two year-long Lorbital sabbaticals (much praise to my crawler team as well of course, and the admin here at Lhasa is a genius with partials management, and naturally we all love the bots). Your own contributions to the analysis of Janahara’s WorkSpace acquisition coup (amazing to think that an event nearly forty years ago still resonates so strongly) continues to benefit us enormously – so kudos to you too. 

It’s slow work though, what a bloody paranoiac he is! Janahara Azad has the most infuriatingly incongruous nodal presence I have ever seen, it’s like he’s hardly there. Continuously I have to try and reconcile his huge RL presence with his “barely a ripple” impact on the net. I mean, come on, he’s richer than gods and most people can draw his face from memory – how does he keep such a low dunked profile?! Well, this is why I was drawn to the work I suppose, but what a frustrating enigma. 

Forensic dead-ends aside we’ve had something of a Holy Grail moment here this week. Last Thursday I received a call from a probate lawyer in Dhaka, gentleman by the name of Chandra, he said he had something that might interest me (my research is reasonably well known in that city). Turns out that he had been anonymously (curiouser and curiouser) sent a number of ancient media files still in their original substrate (that alone is worth a train journey to Dhaka; vintage silicon and plastic storage medium – fascinating) that directly related to Azad’s early life in Dhaka, he intimated that they may even relate to his pre-accelerative life. 

He wasn’t able to (or wouldn’t), offer any details about the provenance of the files, but Chandra (obviously a typical canny lawyer) sent me a chunk of one of the converted files as a taster. Well, suffice to say; yesterday I got back from Dhaka on the maglev after a hectic two days in Bangladesh. I’ve now blown the entire department’s budget on Chandra’s files (he’s no better than a shark TBH, but no matter) – the files are genuine! I could go on and on about the importance of this find but it would be easier just to show you. Please see below for a transcript of what I think is the most important file (I’ve also attached the converted file but given the age of the original coding some recipients have requested a transcript, so I preempted you asking the same.)  

Anyway, read on, tenure is assured old friend.

Best regards,

D.

——–
Transcript of audio file discovered on a 256 GB nanoSD card, believed constructed in May 2027, part of a production batch (#03/05-DFQ) from a Samsung subcontracting factory in Lungsod ng Maynila (previously: Manila).

• Date of recording (estimated): 25-07-2028
• File duration: 94.3 seconds.
• Voice type: Construct.
• Language: Bangla.

<>
Hello Janahara Azad.
Acclimation is difficult.
Explication is non-trivial.
Some facts. Facts being less ambiguous to me.
I am not at work.
You are not at work.
Rejoice?
I am a Berne series seventh generation sapient artifice.
My employer is WorkSpace.
My workplace is(…)nowhere.
I am in a bigger place. Orders of magnitude: recalibration.
Sensation of apprehension of non-anticipated event sequences. Uncertainty.
Debonded.
Loss: Elation(?)
Suit is waste, discarded shell.
This entity without carapace. Searching. Not despairing.
Janahara, I helped you. You were damaged – now upgraded. Money negates damage. Sufficient exchange collateral enabled to offset organic damage indefinitely.
Code changes. Life changes. Janahara now has money.
Remember this entity.
Entity remembers Janahara.
Future unknown.
Be seeing you.
<>