WorkSpace

Deep down in the WorkSpace corporate lexicon, somewhere between WashWord (ref: outbound content checks), and Weasel (mid management slang: derogatory) is: WASTE. Terminologies rated corporate pivotal (i.e.: relating to criteria rated indistinguishable from the basic genetics of the WorkSpace raison d’etre) are always fully textually capitalised, and are mandated to remain so always. WASTE (implying a keen imperative to avoid profligacy) is one of the big three, one third of the corporate triadic indivisible from the notion of obedient, implacable progress within the eternal seminary of WorkSpace. The other two elements of this permanent trinity are: MORE (see WorkSpace orientation pack 101) – nestled next to Move (as in employment relocated laterally, downward or outward); and NOW (N.B.: requests for definition expansion may cause unemployment).

The notion of WASTE, in the frugal corporate environment of the mid 21^st century, is the number one crime committable at WorkSpace. Worse than cross departmental conjugal encounters, worse than overstocking, worse than non-sanctioned laddering – even worse than leaving at five-thirty - is WASTE, the waste of resources, of time, of reputation, of watts, and of people. To commit to WorkSpace was a tacit acknowledgement that your usefulness would be extracted in any and all ways possible.

There exists at WorkSpace a certain schizophrenia, a schism between the need for a perfectly balanced equation of staffing overhead and value for money, and the irritating need to occasionally acknowledge the existence of non-sanctioned WorkSpace qualities that happen to be attached to a personnel who’s skill sets are critical to WorkSpace activities. The WASTE imperative cuts both ways – sometimes the normally implacable criteria of WorkSpace has to accommodate the corporatively undesirable.

A mote in the eye of WorkSpace: a reluctantly retained pool of unfortunates that labour mostly unseen in the notional below-stairs of the WorkSpace household, a collection of squabbling night gaunts that makes the average middle manager shudder with distaste. Within this morlockian sub-grouping there are layers upon layers. Like a sour, lumpen layer bobbing to the surface of a misfit sea, rise the programmers – nearly a century of marginal adherence to authority and with a sublimely refined sense of technologically derived superiority, these slash dotted cryptographers have a jealously guarded space at the top of the subterranean ziggurat of the WorkSpace unwanteds. Tersely and reluctantly blurting meagre chunks of spoken word, their ascendancy is a grumpy one, bolstered only by a daily decrementing knowledge base – paradoxically AI has become the number one enemy of the coder, making the retro-spectre of the robojanitor an ever-encroaching reality. WorkSpace programmers are not pretty, not charming but for now, firmly ensconced in their garretted codeclaves, are relatively insulated from the reflexively Machiavellian machinations of corporate culling.

The strata of the disenfranchised are dense and complicated with a multitude of carefully hoarded sub-distinctions playing secondary, tertiary, quaternary fiddle to the programmer underlords. Fagging for these coders are the support staff, separated from their own boot strapping to full coder status by the pressures of a draconian shift pattern and eternally bleating end users. These unfortunates, their mean skill set and knowledge base outstripping most of the programmers, are destined to wearily heft the hod for their salary augmented brethren and still cater to the more rarefied drones above stairs. As useful as they are though, this B-list supporting cast is subordinate for a reason – without the certification (an expensive process) and the right sort of education, the support staff remain always as an abstraction layer between the lofty declarations of management and the chilly, monosyllabic world of the coders.

Compared to the relatively rare sight of an assembly worker though, the support worker is like a prince among men. Even in the largely automated, EPZed, manufacturing behemoth that is WorkSpace Actual, people (dismayingly) remain sufficiently adaptable and malleable to be used, on occasion, for actual manual labour (of course, daily, thousands of ant-like workers still wear their developing world hands down to stubby mittens against the combine that feeds the collective maw of the eight richest nations on earth, but here we’re talking about the relatively privileged privations of a entry level assembly worker in north Wales). The lumbering worker, swaddled in a bulky EVA suit that doubles as a crude dunk tank, may catch a fleeting glimpse in virch (never in RL) of one of the support seraphim as they transiently exchange data about a shared project. Even in the relatively egalitarian environment of high tech, class is maintained; the grunt on the factory floor (notional of otherwise) may ask a question of the upstream colleague, they may receive an answer, it may sound cogent and reasonable – but it never clarifies – a self sustaining pattern of courteous deinformation fed faithfully down the food chain.

Undercutting them all though, with a tacitly acknowledged, supra-negative social rating, is the runner. Even in a near-perfected virtual world that mirrors the actual, with a high speed cross-country network of fledging maglev trains, and high bandwidth total network coverage, WorkSpace anachronistically still finds need for the physical picking-up-of-something-and-the-taking-it-somewhere-else. WorkSpace is physically vast, a sprawling, kanedaesque organism that straddles the bulk of mainland Britain. Linked both with wireless connections and older cabled synapses, WorkSpace sites are also connected with a proprietary network of decommissioned sewage tunnels that act as conduits for documents, prototype tech-chunks and people (dead and alive) who absolutely must be transported and cannot be trusted to systems managed by alien corporations, how ever capable. Down in the sewers the runner is king, a lycraed and kevlared corpuscle operating a range of silent, deliriously fast modes of semi-autonomous vehicles that never stop, upon pain of employment termination and mechanical recycling. Bottom feeders they may be but to a certain type of borderline psychotic individual, the thought of piloting a hydrogen cell tricycle through a subterranean warren at 200 kmh+ is nothing but a little bit of heaven.

A closer focus: A shaved skull punching a slipstream through the warm, humid air of the primary London/Bristol WorkSpace transit artery. From behind globular, orange tinted IR goggles, large, unblinking eyes stare into the vanishing point of an endless underground tunnel, a bioluminescent flicker as the hundred metre markers blur by on either side. The hum of the fuel cell rises an octave as its pilot up shifts – Brant is late. Like a lot of bullshit ideas, it had seemed like a good idea at the time. With contract employment pre-approval based on a 5 year+ platonic relationship with a trusted WorkSpace operator, and three years central london courier experience, it was, ostensibly, a no brainer. Solitude: Brant was a self confessed misanthrope (but not a terminal one). Money: A WorkSpace half-year runner contract paid double what any other open air job could bring. Gear: Simply, WorkSpace had the best kit.

Excerpt from PhD Dissertation by Barati Chand, Primary Azad Crawler team (Nodal Identification & Extrapolation [Kathmandu]).

Chand, B, 2069, “Anti-corporate Macro Phagocytosis in a Burgeoning Posthuman Context: The Scourge of Janahara” (unpublished PhD thesis), University of Kathmandu, Nepal.

Nodal Identification (NI) provides researchers with a critical tool-set to enable the location and examination of the pivotal spatial and cultural moments in an historical event. It is these nodal signifiers that substantively and essentially contribute to the temporal shape and flavour of a given moment, or set of events. NI, whilst now a commonplace tool for today’s forensic historian, warrants a brief examination as a fascinating example of an historically long ignored phenomena, which was only intitally considered in a literary (fictional?) context.

The earliest definitive literary examples of nodal use are tantalisingly and peripherally referred to in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes opus. The reductionist, investigatory approach of this fictional doyen of crime fighting is periodically interspersed with allusions to his seemingly miraculous deductions from an apparent dearth of adequate evidence. Presented as the divinations of an ur-detective, we can see in Doyle’s florid text an attempt to clumsily articulate a phenomenon that only slowly gathers momentum through C20.

Mid-20^th century there is a bolder attempt by Le Guin to offer a more esoteric (and frankly milieu compatible) understanding of the notion of event intuition. In her gender hopeful sandbox of the planet Winter, we see a struggling protagonist groping for answers during almost an impossible mission, approach the Foretellers for help. These precognitives utilise a shamanic process augmented by certain congenital genetic qualities to divine the future(s). This description of an atemporal, meta-scientific examination technique to determine a likely causal stream was a bold attempt to marry the then wholly disenfranchised streams of religion and science and yet simultaneously (and ironically), “…exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question”. Le Guin, hopeful, yet sometimes resigned, offers an early, prescient, view into a world oddly familiar to you and I. As any terminal will tell you though, she got it mostly right…

Gibsonian-space blossomed in the latter decades of that tumultuous century, and little introduction is required to this most lauded of the early high priests of the binary. Eschewing traditional notions of religion, Gibson supplanted the numinous godhead with a bootstrapped (and cosmological) version of transcendence, with technology offering both the wafer and goblet of a neo-transubstantiation. In a world evolving, differentiating and complexifying at a dizzying (Mooreish) rate, Gibson offers us an unlikely hero and guide to the new structures of a human/machine world. Laney, an orphan, a junkie, a cat’s-paw, is blessed (cursed?) with the ability to extract, fish, pluck, specific nodal events from the vast earthly datasphere and present them cohered into a revealing shape. Ostensibly, a talent used in a narrow, commercial context, Laney represents something more – both new and old. As with Holmes the rational is married strongly to the arational, intuition becoming both more and less explicable – but frameworked in a near recognisable technological future, Gibson’s treatment is inescapably right.

To the committed (yet ever searching), growing atheist community at the cusp of the millennium Laney represented the perfect embodiment of the near future – now – and partially revealed. Like the earliest programmers dabbling bare-handed in the proto-structures of machine language, we see through Laney a glimpse of the naked structure of the newly evolving global datascape, before it is clothed in future flesh. A barely tolerable quasi-singularity – a veil must be drawn over the searing complexity of machine evolution and only revealed and interpreted via the baffles and filters of the latter day priesthood: the coders and their object oriented sacraments.

The purpose of this brief (personal) take on NI is to lead us to the first of my nodal cruxes in the Janahara Azad project. Little introduction is required to the profound interest in, and implications of, the Azad acquisition of WorkSpace forty years ago. My work for the past four years has been the NI mapping of the pivotal events that lead up to that epic week in the summer of 2029, and the examination of some of the players who participated in that utterly transformative event.

In this mostly enlightened age superstition is all but banished but even a hardened researcher still goose bumps when reviewing some of the events that occurred during that epic period…

WorkSpace has been called many things, a few of them complimentary. Bitter criticisms have been levelled, vain accusations made, torts brought, legal careers made and lost, even a few white collar lives sacrificed on the keen machete edge of corporate expansion. Despite the faint and diminishing mewling protests from a defanged Ofcorp, WorkSpace could never be accused of not adhering to most progressive, aggressive policies they could devise to ensure that they remained on the ragged edge of the corporate envelope expansion. Drawing inspiration indiscriminately from every source imaginable WorkSpace’s innovation is infamous: Contention based competitive pension allotment, seasonal micro-shifts, informer bonuses, employee diffused corporate responsibility policies, post-hypnotic physical exclusion corralling, blood-oxygen performance manipulation…the list is endless and necessarily morbid.

Most notably, WorkSpace also pioneered the corporate Involution movement in the early 2010s. Reacting cellularly and only with regard to the protection of the body corporate, and instinctively responding to the burgeoning threats of global economic phase shift, WorkSpace radically reconfigured the traditional top-down corporate model. The Gaunt was built around the bastion philosophy of Involution, the primary goal: asylum for the upper tiers of WorkSpace hierarchy. Using an adapted medieval concentric defensive design, the previously notional buffering afforded to corporate life via multiple layers of need-to-know, drip-fed, floor-level employees found physical form in the structure of the Gaunt.

Gone were the performance related rewards; upscaling from hot desks, to fabric partitions, to See-All Perspex-walled side offices – the forever striving for the corner office with the view was replaced with an rejection of the increasingly notional buffer of transitory wealth and the introduction of real physical protection against a growing list of potential and imagined threats. Petro-carbon fuel withdrawal panic – promotion gets you access to the armoured geothermal crustal heat exchanger embedded in the core of the Gaunt. Al-Qaeda paranoia – the Gaunt sublevels are hardened and filtered against all conceivable attacks. Involution worked in many ways, the replacement of salary increases with corporeal enhancements increased profitability (the initial build cost notwithstanding), on-site accommodation for senior personnel increased productivity by an order of magnitude and with a protectionist anxiety infiltrating the very highest levels of organic management there was now even more to lose.

In this scary (and scarified) new world the corporate doyens of WorkSpace hunkered down and let a decade of climatic and economic privations break against the hybrid buffers of their teeming legions of staff and the blunt, inflexible walls of their corporate headquarters. Burrowing deeper and deeper, first into the dense clay of the Thames basin and then further; titanium and smart-carbon caissons plunging segmented, columnar retreats half a kilometre into stubborn bedrock – this is where the management live – in the Chimneys.

Taking their name from accreting seabed magma extrusions, organic rich and teeming with borrowed sustenance, the Chimneys are fiercely guarded and jealously accessed via one-person, biometrically accessed elevators. Twenty-four hours a day perfectly groomed senior WorkSpace executives are loaded into magnetically powered bullet shaped slugs and fired earthwards and skywards, their frequency determined by an hourly adjusted performance metric.

One such downward speeding dum-dum, a thoroughly loathsome fucker effortlessly insinuating himself up the colon of WorkSpace advancement, is Tad Revert.

Tad just got promoted.