WorkSpace

Brant has travelled a bit, some contracting work in China, a stint in South America with a backpack and whining Danish girlfriend, even some Provencal pretensions as an abortive property developer (Brant couldn’t spot a bear market if it chewed his face off) – he flattered himself that he had evolved a keen eye for difference. Over the years he has developed what he privately calls an interpretation filter (his internal geek is inherently polysyllabic), the quality and successes of which he sees varying wildly from country to country. He considers the interpretation filter as the ability by which a nation adopts new cultural and technological paradigms into their own prevailing norms.

Some places are excellent adopters – the cell network in South Africa, a textbook example of technological leapfrogging – initially hampered by the lack of a hardwired infrastructure the lekker boys from Telkom et al dispensed with the archaic copper mile altogether and jumped straight to a high bandwidth femtocell deployment, the result: a bootstrapped second world economy able to engage meaningfully in a global marketplace, unencumbered by cable maintenance and incumbent industry strangleholds. Other examples have impressed Brant, the shoehorning of incompatible fast food cuisine into the fiercely defended kitchen of France, the rigid strictures of Oak Brook’s franchise dictates remodelled and ameliorated by centuries of food love; the language itself softening and integrating, Royale Deluxe et frites s’il vous plait…

However, his home country has yet to impress him with its own articulation of the interpretation filter. In his opinion the UK got off to a bad start, he remembers his father’s stories of Wimpy visits (the Bender – WTF?), first gen pre-packed “Indian” meals – a horror of Sunset Yellow and bullet hard rice, no aircon, service with a sneer, fifty pence for tap water. Even the no brainer equation of Starbucks was warped and twisted by building regulations, native swingeing portion management and a culture that turned the concept of a career in the service industry into a school yard diss.

As Daisy and he entered Victoria station, the unbalanced white glare of the Grade II listed paned roof instantly triggering polarisation in his lenses, Brant was stuck again by the stubborn English ability to warp the basic genetics of progress. Queues to the ticket office windows had been replaced by even longer queues to the too few autoticket pods, the toilet turnstiles only accepting coin cash – waddling bladder-full travellers traipsing back to the concession queues to get change (sorry madam you need to buy something); and he noted with a sigh that the huge notice board still did not yet offer real time wireless updates. He had some small hope for the journey though, the new Brighton line maglev had opened to not inconsiderable fanfare three months ago (only 25 years after Shanghai but what the hey…), and a schoolboy excitement was taking the edge off the crowd anxiety and Daisy’s endless bitching.

You’d think that after the ejection shock and Brant’s subsequent white knight ministrations, she might have expressed some small gratitude – don’t be stupid. Apparently her immediate discomforts were Brant’s fault – he balked at a fourth latte, and refused to re-garb her at the Paul & Joe outlet in the high street; he did concede that the LEAVER smock was not appropriate dress for a trip to the seaside but his credit card could only stretch to a weary New Look. From the look on Daisy’s face as she emerged from behind the grubby changing room curtain, he deduced that she wasn’t enjoying channelling neo-chav; he even offered to buy her some hoop earrings at the impulse rack at the checkout: Yes, Daisy, I could go and fuck myself but then how are you going to get to Brighton?

They make a fine pair, Brant’s crappy work jeans, WorkSpace 2025 EuroCon freebie t-shirt and high albedo scalp; Daisy in her third time round eighties/noughties clonewear leggings and cropped jacket – her Berkshire button nose visibly wrinkling whenever she caught a plate glass glimpse of herself. Credit talks though and Brant had had the foresight to pre-book them onto the maglev while they were negotiating the overland and then the tube to Victoria. As they crossed the concourse the Brighton side maglev platform  network automatically grebbed the second class ticket ackles from Brant’s public buffer and ponderously swung open its gates. Daisy still wasn’t talking to him so he followed three paces behind her tryhard haughtiness.

The maglev was a thing of beauty though. Even Daisy stopped huffing for a few minutes as they emerged through the TerrorHurtz (TM) scanner. For a start it was still clean, the nanopaint layer had thus far repelled all tag attempts and as Brant watched he saw an organic twitch on the roof skin of the first class carriage; like a horse autonomically flicking away a fly, the nano layer first agitated and then subsumed a splat of bird shit – according to the spec he had seen on Slashdot it was capable up to macro avian absorption – fuck you pigeon. What mostly impressed them though was the lack of noise, the actual maglev action (the floaty bit) was hidden under the red livery of the plastic Virgin fairing, but the near inaudible bass hum of power and implied speed was to Brant’s inured English senses the very thrum of futurity, his pace quickened as he reached for recessed carriage door handle. Nice try: they still had to walk fucking miles down the platform to get to the second class carriages.

What a let down – the journey only took seventeen minutes. Just long enough to shuffle (seven carriages) to the distinctly twentieth century experience of the buffet car, shuffle back balancing two pre-Seattle era instant coffees, and then ten minutes of Daisy-bitching. The epic speed of the maglev was almost wholly masked by the heavily tinted windows (perhaps a small town echo of the industrial revolution anxiety about the perils of velocity) and there was little noise to be discerned of their four hundred kilometres an hour passage through the still mostly green fields of Surrey and Sussex. So the eerily fast deceleration into Brighton station was a relief for Brant, he had grown up there and a jaunty combination of nostalgia and an unanticipated day off put a spring in his step as he manoeuvred Daisy onto the platform like a piece of stubborn luggage.

The liberti is called Daisy Longley. This fact (and several others) was delivered in a snivelly and hitched voice in between bouts of wretched crying in a Starbucks on Croydon High Street. Cradling a tall latte (extra hot, triple shot - her urban survival reflexes evidently still partially intact), and staring miserably into the middle distance, Daisy laboriously (and frankly after some time, boringly) relayed the events of the past hour.

Up until today Daisy had been a dutiful member of HR at a WorkSpace subsidiary called The Prius Priest, a franchised hybrid vehicle recycling centre situated just off the Purley Hill tram route. Four years of counselling employees who suffered non-litigiously viable skin complaints caused by thionyl chloride leakage from the poorly maintained decompiling yard, had firstly disillusioned, and then broken poor little Daisy. Prior to her resignation, and superficially diligent, she had consulted her local Life After WorkSpace (LAW) representative (a stubborn cereologist called Sharon from Streatham), but she was lazy by nature and inured to privation by years of parental safetynetism; she had prepared poorly for her ejection into a life after workspace.

Scant seconds after she hit send on her resignation email (a stubby thumb, the nail bitten to the quick, mashing down on the greasily delineated touchscreen icon), the DeskClear routine had initiated as it always did, its rough and careless (but ruthlessly efficient) mandate denuding and depersonalising both the space and person that Daisy occupied. Spat out into a windy loading bay at the back of the Prius Priest, a sobbing and befouled Daisy had stumbled out into a chilly November morning. Flailing ineptly at passing peds who veered away with the characteristic banana sway of the tunnel visioned commuter, their disgust only lasting until she dropped out of their field of vision, Daisy had made it to the nearest tram stop. Pathetically smoothing the paper smock (her parting gift from WorkSpace), and clawing acrid cleansing foam from her still wet hair, Daisy had retained enough sense to spoof the Oyster scan by crawling on as the pension brigade shuffled off the semi-intelligent low boarding platform of the tram. After just four stops the CCTV had woken up to the fact that she was fare bludging and Daisy had only just dodged the weary servos of the overused plastic seat restraints - it was at this point that Brant had intervened.

Brant was rapidly running out of philanthropy; certain that the TTIME hack was about timed out, and terrified of the consequences of the peevish retribution of a sub-sapient exosuit OS, he was desperate to get back on the job. Daisy was a mess though, twin runnels of philtrum funnelled snot eloquently illustrating her helpless ineptitude in dealing with this epic clusterfuck of her own making. If she had sufficiently prepared she would have had a set of clean clothes waiting in a handily stashed ejection location; if she had remembered to remind Sharon the cereologist of the exact time of her resignation she would have had a (relatively) friendly face to buffer her into unemployment; if she had saved at the minimum levels and duration that LAW advised then she wouldn’t be looking like someone had just shot her dog. If. As a result, Brant was rapidly reaching his own personal levels of sympathy - what the fuck was he going to do with her?

Gratifyingly, it turned out that Daisy wasn’t a complete flake, she had scribbled the address of a back up LAW safe house on her inner thigh with a indelible marker, and after a quick toilet break (which cost another latte) she returned with the details scribbled on a napkin. Brant was ready to leave her to it, the samaritan etiquette already over-stretched by an hour long (non-sanctioned break) and Daisy’s relentless home counties drone. Back at the tram stop, Daisy clutching Brant’s emergency cash cache, Brant started to make the shuffling micro movements of imminent departure - cue more wailing and snot production.

A period of gentle back patting and shushing ensued.

Partly out of sympathy, but mostly to stop the fricking noise, he eventually agreed to go with her to the LAW safe house. The address was in a BN postcode and he hadn’t seen the sea for years. Pulling out his PDA Brant composed a saccarhine sweet Extraordinary Circumstances absention email to the WorkSpace temp coordinator - the default sick grandmother line is overabused, he has to up the ante and invoke a next of kin mortality alert, bad karma even when you’re scamming WorkSpace. CCing the exosuit he fires it off with little hope of work tomorrow. Ho hum.

It’s been six months since He came to live in my head.

I was born deaf, an unfortunate genetic confluence called Waardenburg syndrome determined that I would never hear and never speak like you. I can talk after a fashion but the guttural qualities of my voice test the cursory patience of all but a few of the people I meet. I look a little odd too, not fairground grotesque but weird enough for most people to duck their heads or cross the road when I go out. Waardenburg’s (or WS1 as it is commonly abbreviated to) means I have rather wide-set preternaturally blue eyes, a brilliantly white cowlick blaze (in otherwise very dark brown, nearly black, hair); and I am also dermally blighted with a hotchpotch of piebald white patches all over my body. I am also just over two metres tall.

I never used to go out much; the slightly too long stares, traffic avoidance issues, pointing kids, and patronising septuagenarians – these all conspire to keep me indoors. I have a fat data connection, a huge fridge and, due to an insular childhood with the then burgeoning immersion technologies, a healthy income from off-shored virch development work. One benefit from my hearing impairment is an almost supernatural affinity with database management; the near OCD-level of organisational qualities that my congenital deafness brings seems to lend itself to the stark, non-compromising dualities of data processing. I am however profoundly hamstrung in one area of netspace existence: my deafness has resulted in a complete lack of an internal voice, this means that normal subvocal communications in an immersed virtual environment are completely denied to me. This disability is almost impossible to relay to those with normal hearing. I am told that the non-hearing impaired (i.e.: almost everyone else) have a language-derived, internal monologue capability; it’s been described to me in various ways. The back voice, the little devil, the whispering hind brain – I’ve no fucking idea of what any of this means. I use Sign when face to face communications are required (most immersion environments will provide a translation interface), other than that Ameslan icon analogues suffice for online comms with other deaf people; and of course straight text for day to day correspondence with the hearing.

This all changed when He came to me.

For about a week before it happened I had been feeling like shit, just a general gastrointestinal malaise coupled with terrible sleep, and vague, vast, formless dreamscapes (I don’t usually dream). I was also convinced that the water in the apartment tasted odd, and I was being much clumsier than normal, fine motor control was shot, simple tasks such as washing up resulted in detonating crockery and dented pot ware. Work went well though; my productivity was epic, with normally onerous coding taking only minutes instead of hours.

The first night it happened I was terrified; I heard(?) a voice whispering to me, not that I was able to identify it as (a.) hearing and (b.) a voice. Trying to relate the truly unique is a thankless task, like the only witness to a close encounter, or to see alone the awful, poignant horror of a dead relative standing in your bedroom – no one will really believe you, not truly. In the same way, its is nigh impossible to relate to you the experience of hearing for the first time when your whole existence, your basic internal architecture, your entire mind palace, is predicated on an operating system entirely of your making; a silent kingdom of one. My first feelings were of terror born from perplexity, my second thoughts were that of indignation: who the fuck are you to invade my mind? Having never had the vaguely schizophrenic comfort of an internal voice this just felt like a violation. It spoke:

Thomas Quait, please don’t be frightened.

Of course I didn’t reply, I didn’t know how and I was terrified; if you spoke only one language and a Russian man with a deep voice started whispering in your ear at three o’clock in the morning what would you do? I hit the pharms and booze pronto; some grey market zaleplon and some single malt chased me to oblivion that night; I heard no more from the voice.

He was not to be denied though; every night thereafter this new presence came back, not wheedling, not demanding, just a gentle still voice echoing out of the nullspace in my mind.

Don’t be afraid.

I want to help you.

This is not madness.

You are needed.

Night after night, a one-sided dialogue that I refused to acknowledge. The whisky was wrecking my mornings and my productivity was shit, I was going to miss out on a completion bonus on my current job (an easy relational database job for WorkSpace, Mumbai).

Finally, after a week of substance abuse and borderline psychosis, I capitulated; tempting confirmation of my own insanity I tentatively replied to Him/It/Whatever. Still lacking the basic underpinnings of voice, I sent a message the only way possible, a very simple Ameslan iconic conveying “greetings”. The response was immediate, a corresponding Sign gesture acknowledging start of message. In this low bandwidth, familiar manner it was conveyed to me that I should prepare for a download; file name: Kalliope. This confounded me, how was I supposed to run software in my head, He/It/Whatever gently signed encouragement, so I triggered the programme to run exactly as if I were using my standard immersion bumptop: Triple click, right gesture. And oh my god, it’s full of stars.

That was six months ago, He and I have been sharing skull space ever since, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. He’s told me about Jobs, life inside WorkSpace and AI augmented employment and because of the direct neural connection we chat regularly and freely, null vox: I’ve found my internal voice. He’s also largely in the dark though, no deus ex machina here, as far I can tell He’s basically a fugitive, an AI prison breakee mysteriously freed from his flesh bound gaol in a WorkSpace tank; one moment he was symbiotically chipping away at a virch design job, the next, he was sharing grey matter with yours truly. I have had some other changes too, physical ones thanks to the corporeal augmentation that was required to allow Him to reside in me. That’s another mystery, but He suggests that it would be a fairly trivial matter to taint my water supply with the necessary nanoseeds that are required to initiate the physical phase shift to enable Job support. One of the upshots: I can now dead lift over 150 kilos and I can breath hold for eleven minutes.

The other major change is my work - basically I don’t. The only substantial instructions He got after His emancipation was a directive to assist periodically with a body called LAW, a support group for disenfranchised ex-WorkSpace refugees. So, that’s what we do these days, together we act as a post-resignation counsellor for newly divested WorkSpace executives. Guiding and comforting, we show these naked waifs that there is a way forward in the work world without the stifling embrace of WorkSpace employment. We (well, I) are well recompensed for this work, a substantial deposit, completely untraceable, hits my account monthly.

Today, I’m meeting Agate, a freshly expelled mid-management drone. The sea air should do her good.