WorkSpace

Tuesday, Blue Shift, 23:00: Confluence hour.

Everyone does Confluence, the drones, the infrabeasts, even the management, even the brass. Parallel processing: new old-school – ponderous neurones and porridgy grey matter, the common muck of organics, always pluckily and inexplicably outdoing their carnal heritage.

The Examinds are the other half of the equation, the shiny future bit tugging their forelocks above the shockwave of the earthly light cone. Fuck knows what they think but for the time being they seem to be cooperating; SciSpace continually providing reassurances of their ongoing compliance.

The Jobs form a braided, squirming callosum that brings it all together, dimly yet efficiently herding their squdigy cargo into an ungodly, clunky alliance; dendritically meshing the many into one.

Anyway, ugly as it sounds (and it is; stuff always gets through the baffles), it works. Quantum computers work but they’re generally a government toy; they cost hectic money and tend to impinge on share holder value. WorkSpace was smarter; they coined the term total employment, a concept as ugly as it sounds. You signed up, you do the work – whatever it is – suck it up drone. You say: not contractually obligated, they say: 100 year mortgage. Confluence is the ultimate work ethic; a forced synthetic emergence replicated weekly – the hunch harnessed.

For the average Job ensconced drone it’s a generally passive experience, it’s not like they want your opinion, just your processing capacity. Job handles the integration; the scalp SQUID is pretty unobtrusive and painless, and a large chunk of your personality gets offlined by a proprietary drug cocktail. Confluence comes online quickly after that; like a permanent déjà vu its mostly involuntary but pleasant enough, but occasionally there is the sense of a huge paw reaching down to you and squeezing out your usefulness.

Quaint ethics aside, Confluence can kick arse, last week we re-sequenced DNA for 4 different extinct wheat variants; (bread still maketh man – yeast, soy and shale never really did emerge from the cook book of golden age scifi).

It’s only an hour and a passive one at that, a brief hiatus from unresting machine insistence, but its no pub lunch.

WorkSpace: Working to make you free

Abstraction is one of the main efficiency tools employed by WorkSpace. Their pet AIs have exhaustively evolved a number of strategems that ensure that any task, big or giga, can be pared down to a bland and abstract dataset for distributed processing.

Adopting a decentralised marquis cell structure but augmented with a pantopticon omniscience, WorkSpace ingeniously ensures efficient data processing, the risk reduction of corporate responsibility, and yet retains a full and robust capability for the individual recrimination of its component drones.This approach also has the added benefit of rendering even the most morally or ethically bankrupt dataset into a set of abhuman abstracts that can be easily and amorally processed: see no elephant, hear no elephant.

If you work long enough with a Job, you start to become both more and less than what you were before, a Stelarcian legacy through a corporation filter. In exchange for what was only recently still laughably called, “rights”, you re-convince yourself daily that it’s a good trade: comfort for painless morality surgery. The technology as always is a double edged sword – cutting less but hurting more; my augmented genticulate nucleus can (for briefly sustained agonising periods) capture and encompass vast arrays of data, very useful for mass nodal identification; but generally at a conscious level I am unaware of the real world nature of the information I am working on, (corp sanctioned chemcontrol plays a large part here of course). Job feeds me the necessary semiotic triggers to process the data abstracts without the need for a forebrain overview, thus obviating any pesky ethical intrusions or value judgements.

However, you do any job long enough and you will work up some home-grown hacks (for example, using some quasi-legal Job schematics, I identified the primary oxazepam feed-line, this is a usefully accessible standard medsupply tract and can be easily kinked…). As a result I have intermittently, a distressingly good awareness of my recent work:

Some examples I have gleaned from recent grebs:

Projectile trajectory analysis of free smartfire policy in Beydokht.

Viability projections on fiscal audit-linked enforced repatriation of non-EU members from mainland UK.

Acceptable mortality rates for the proposed TansAt tunnel, with appendices relating to the anticipated level of public distaste if Greenlander Inuits are employed exclusively in high risk areas, (see also: potential Danish sovereign outcry).

Examinations of the still yet to be completed ID card project for the United Kingdom; complete with requests for analysis for possible obloquial reduction initiatives.

And on it goes without narry a murmur of objection – a steganographic triumph.

Job and I are designed to be the perfect distillation of the blank faced prole; labouring in a post-feudal serfdom; our combined hybrid senses, so acute in many ways, only dimly making out the hooded, powerful lights in the keep on the hill above us.

Greb on.

Forget food pills, flying cars, everclean jumpsuits and moon holidays – what we got (if we’re lucky) was a Job.

They got some things right – cranial inputs and interface shunts, weakly omniscient AI, fully realised immersion environments: so fucking what. The dependency principle is ever present – data access, comfort, presence, credibility, fiscal viability: all predicated on the maintenance of a stream of fragile income. And at the mercy of a diminishing number of giga-nationals; like the autonomic twitching dermis of a dozing bovine, one errant spasm from these behemoths can snuff you out: PRESS 2 TO SPEAK TO OUR RECONNECTION TEAM…

Its 2026 and the framework, the very tenets of my existence totter uneasily on a creaking Heath Robinson framework of queasily integrated utilities. A deeply fragile interconnected system of dependency, only working because everyone participating ignores the feeble underpinnings of a tissue thin redundancy; the ever present threat that with one system sneeze we could slip into a runaway cascade event of scarcity.

For some of those fortunate enough to be gainfully employed we have the Jobs. AI, it transpired, is imminently doable; it was just a question of getting some sufficiently self-referenceable applications to bootstrap their next few iterations and job done: morally ambiguous, wholly alien minds bumbling around in their tanks like a bunch of Hawking savants. So what do we do with them, parallel link them to examine the Godhead, implant them in a generation ship, redesign the free market; no, they run the Jobs. Admittedly, they don’t use the full fat, transcendent-capable, Examinds – we get the hobbled, dog-like intelligences of middle management – competently running the Jobs with adequate efficiency, minimal notions of betterment and a depressing penchant for lacksadaisical encouragement: good doggy, have a biscuit.

My Job (illegally nicknamed Babs if you recall), is a fairly typical semi-permanent example, i.e.: it uses utility hook ups on site; (some models are self contained, using concentrated organic feedstock [read: user waste], an atmospherics water extractor, and third gen infraPV for electrical power). Babs resembles an old fashioned self-supporting garden hammock, albeit one made from carbon struts, chromogenic display panels, a xenograft meat sling and other paraphernalia exotica.

Jobs have one primary role: the maximisation of efficient work time – the culmination of a carefully calculated augmentation/productivity algorithm. Entry is machine assisted and involves a considerable degree of prep time, not least because of the average immersion duration is 40K seconds and any wrinkle in your caul can rapidly becoming an unbearable irritation. The immersion sac is proto-sentient (slaved to Babs) and can adapt to most human basic body types (however WorkSpace policy means that endomorphs need not apply). Nutrients and hydration are supplied via femoral shunts; waste management is via a couple of less than agreeable technologies I think I have already mentioned. Once ensconced in the meat sling immersion is fully automatic, the dunk quality is sufficiently excellent so as to engender a degree of physical censorship – the body goes away, no longer enCased and a fifty year old dream takes flight. This is the payback; the 1K second pre-shift orientation period is sublime; gravity nixed, body nulled, the comforting pseudo-embrace from Babs, my favourite leisure Map scrolling in exquisite rez and full surround sound – flying over an endless landless world, teasing the air currents with boosted senses, a dream made real.

Bing. Bong. Bing. Re-entry in 5, 4, 3 …reality reassertion. Shift begins.