WorkSpace

Agate thought she had adequately prepared for not working. For the past thirteen months she had been subsistence level living; no booze, no new media, base spec nourishment, she had even become an amateur seamstress: she had saved over a hundred thousand euros. Pre-resignation this had seemed like a huge amount, a chunky hedge against poverty and the hydra grasp of a taxation system seemingly designed to obviate all disposable income and still allow stinking piles of garbage to build up monthly on Leyton road where Agate rented her small apartment in the old Olympic village.

In the harsh liquid crystalline light of morning TV the day after her resignation, financial realities and depressive perceptions seemed to present immutable limitations to Agate’s current status. While she was working and earning the abstract enormity of her savings buffer seemed like the answer to all her prayers, an amorphous promise of freedom from WorkSpace. That post-partum morning, she wasn’t so sure; suddenly her whole life was predicated on a fairly modest (already reducing) financial cache, which now could be depressingly reduced to a finite series of plots on a life graph that ended in privation. All her efforts of the past year had been directed at getting out; now she was on the outside the world was a different shape, a merciless jagged tesseract of sheer surfaces, not easily perceived or scaled. Perspective, it seemed, was for the wealthy, a view not to be afforded to the disenfranchised.

She was also now learning that the allure of downtime was also an illusion, a despair-dreamt inferior mirage offering a poorly articulated vision of the future where mornings are lazy, creativity is high and the future stretches out unencumbered by drudge. The reality is, of course, much more prosaic. Agate did awake late, but one eye was crusted shut by some nano detritus from the cubicle ejection the day before and instead of an unfurled joy of release she felt only a dull regret and an increasing loneliness as the day wore on. She tried some morning screen; often the source of ironic amusement when fleetingly glimpsed during a busy work schedule, this was now a hideous cacophony of bellowing cow people, herded around by buff-faced pseudo-stern presenters offering fake platitudes of sympathy and admonishment in equal measures. Now vectorless herself, she had no right to criticise even those bucktoothed unfortunates who unwittingly volunteered to be locked in the stocks of latter day opprobrium, a sideshow to distract the rest from the relentless sleight of hand practised by WorkSpace and the other corporate behemoths on the coffers of their own workforces.

She had one hope on that grey November morning; LAW, the Life After WorkSpace support group that had counselled and helped with her pre-resignation planning. Despite being a relatively new, fringe, off-grid operation with a barely discernable administrative structure, LAW were a persistently successful purely net-based NFP outfit offering consistently good pre- and post- resignation support and advice. Agate was certain that without the group session support she had received in the two months prior to her divestment she would still be cubicle-bound in her WorkSpace hexcell. As well as providing extrication support, LAW also offered personalised post-resignation counselling; oddly anachronistically this was only available as a RL face to face service. Via a series of real paper dead drops, Agate had been assigned a counsellor in Brighton; coded only as “Circle”, Agate was due for her first meeting with them that afternoon. LAW knew all about post-resignation malaise so the first reorientation session was always scheduled for immediately after divestment.

Agate stared at the single sheet of cheap paper that she had retrieved from the drop location at the Ludgate Hill Starbucks; it contained only five lines of terse text:

Take the Brighton maglev from Victoria station at 14:13 on Tuesday 22^nd August (that’s today, A). Walk (no taxis) to the New Pier (400 metres west of the southerly termination of Western Road). Buy a standard one hour pier ticket; also purchase a disposable mobile from the FonePod kiosk at the western edge of the entry boardwalk. Walk to the end of pier. Wait.

Twenty minutes later, Agate emerged into the November grey; showered, booted, suited and pilled up on a cheap Provigil copy. She’s ready for her new life, whatever it may be.

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.