WorkSpace

Janahara hates it when his boss visits; he sees it as a fundamental breach of the uneven covenant between boss and crew. Stay out of sight you rich fucks.

Laughably called the crew lounge (a notional, nearly derisory, nod to UNEP recommendations), Kashem Corp provides one small, sixteen square metre plywood break time shack. This is perched on the boundary between the scrubby Chittagong shoreline and the endless mud flats at the seaward entrance to the main Madhom breaking yard; the crews call it, in a rare display of fatigue tinged irony, the HQ. This small concession is served by a temperamental water cooler and a wheezing, external aircon unit clumsily bonded to an outside wall, a ten year old PV solar panel provides the power. Employee benefits are a new concept in Chittagong and Iqbal (a self confessed moderniser) is absurdly proud of this nod to modern Western work practices, but unfortunately the basic genetics of the concept have been somewhat lost in translation. 

Inside, exhausted men, none with a body mass index greater than ten, are flopped listlessly across several pieces of broken furniture; sweat oiled flesh squeaks against ancient faux leather and a musty, foetid smell floats up from the mouldering hide of a Chesterfield. Iqbal is expected at 1400 and has ordered Janahara’s team and two other crews to be present when he arrives, fifteen men in total. Apparently he has an announcement to make, the men don’t give a shit, any chance for a break is totally exploited. Janahara parks his suit on the makeshift veranda outside HQ, the SARCOS suit slumping corpse-like on top of other discarded exo-suits – a latter day charnel pit, the stench of sweat and hydraulic fluid replacing the ferric tang of blood.  

Janahara makes a beeline for the water cooler, the desalinator in HQ provides considerably superior water to that of the filtered sweat and urine that the exo-suits synthesise, and he stands chugging litres of chilled heaven until a trigeminal spike of agony forces him to bend over at the waist; ice cream headache is a common phenomena at break times in Madhom, ice cream isn’t. Hydrated, Janahara slumps down in a shattered garden lounger and waits for his illustrious leader. He gets a few nods from his colleagues (another Iqbal terminology pretension) but no chat; team building is generally discouraged at Madhom, mostly to maximise productivity but also to reduce the risk of revolt. Iqbal Karim, whilst a repulsively obese and morally bankrupt example of corporate greed, is not stupid, he has considered the potential result of hundreds of bionically augmented, terminally pissed off serfs descending onto the yard management compound. Iqbal theoretically has net control over the exo-suits, but Madhom does not have the best record for net coverage uptime and the huge metal salvage chunks that litter the yard tend to disrupt EM fields with regular occurrence.  

A muted ululating hum signals the arrival of Iqbal’s electric phaeton, a long pause and protracted huffing, and then the door bangs open silhouetting Iqbal’s dirigible form in the bright white light of the Bengalese afternoon. 

“Asalaam alaykum, men. No need to get up.”

No one has moved. Iqbal mops at a streaming brow with a mildly scandalous silk handkerchief; his moonlike face was framed by the bright orange of his hennaed beard, and carries its usual expression of quasi-benevolent irritation. Iqbal is nearly seventy but wealth and easy living lends his podgy face a baby-like smoothness. It was easy not to like him and only the universally despised simpering orderlies show a fawning obsequiousness. 

“Special job today, men. It’s a rush job so a bonus is on offer; if you three crews can decon the job before Saturday then there’s a one thousand taka bonus per man and a one day holiday.”

Some stirring in the HQ at last, a thousand taka was nearly a weeks pay and a day off: unheard of bliss. The chance to sleep a little, eat leisurely and a maybe a little cricket in the early evening.  

“It’s an unusual job; Kashem has successfully bid for recyke on the primary ISS module. Apparently it’s too large for a re-entry cremation and too risky to shoot down, so they’re bringing it in for a splashdown in the Andaman later this afternoon, one of our tugs will bring it in first thing in the morning. I presume all you men will be up for it, it will mean twenty plus hour shifts for at least three days but, as I said, there’s a bonus. Kashem look after their crews.”

This last hilarious inaccuracy sours his self-satisfied momentum a little but the quiet hubbub that breaks out seems good enough confirmation for Iqbal. He waddles back towards his conveyance.  

“I’ll upload your suits with the necessary schematics in the morning, I suggest you finish your shift today as quick as you can and get some rest.”

A collective groan as bodies are unglued from the terrible furniture, final glugs of water are swilled down from the cooler: suit internment begins again.

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.