WorkSpace

It didn’t look like a corpse, but he was very dead. Dead bodies are pitiful; a triple amputee cadaver the colour of dirty pond ice is utterly pathetic, a roadkill would have had more pathos. Devoid of the mobilising energy that used this substandard shell in life, the truncated body was a palimpsest of a lifetime of self harm and useless delusion. Crippled by a dysfunctional endocrine system and a cranky neurochemistry, and bolstered by decades of supposed and imagined derision, this man had wilfully and incrementally reduced his body to a torso and one over-muscled left arm. The crenellated stumps of both legs and right shoulder betrayed the clumsy, DIY surgery of a terminally committed devotee to body integrity identity disorder (BIID), a condition known in an earlier, less enlightened century, as Apotemnophilia. A terminology over 50 years old, the name Apotemnophilia had grated on Danny his whole life. BIID was initially identified as a psychosexual disorder, where the sufferer could only attain sexual expression via the elective removal of one or more limbs. Danny had always felt that this marginalisation of a condition poorly understood (and distastefully approached) was indicative of the moralistic high ground taken by health care in the early days of modern medicine.

The simple fact was this: Danny hated having all his limbs, always had. He didn’t get hard thinking about stumps, he didn’t drool at the thought of a tidy DAK (double above the knee amputation), he didn’t forum swap ideas for modding cosmoses. Danny just didn’t see the point in his arms and legs; being a pretty smart guy he obviously was aware of the locomotive and prehensile qualities of his limbs but as a larger part of his body image (the holographic funhouse mirror we all maintain in our mind’s eye) they were completely wrong.

Fortunately, Danny’s family were rich; twice displaced farming land owners from the Western Cape, Danny’s mother had successfully re-routed substantial cash sums via an off shore banking facility in 2014. With assistance provided by a fiscally savvy AWB off-shoot called ARRM (Afrikaner Resistance & Relocation Movement), the Declevers were able to make an en mass migration from the strandveld of the cape to the lush pampas of Argentina by the autumn of 2015. With only the most cursory nod to the changed cultural conditions, the Declevers carried on farming as if continent hopping agronomy was standard practice; and by the late 20s the Declevers were one of the largest wholly privately owned GM wheat producers in the southern hemisphere.

Limb revulsion aside Danny Declever had fallen far from the family trunk. A cross cultural product of two continents and thoroughly inculcated by an omnipresent internet datascape that was both colour neutral and stylistically disdainful of monocultural racialisation, Danny was always going to be a child of the 21st century. Ethical considerations notwithstanding, racism just wasn’t a flier in his connected world; as anachronistic as a pith helmet and punkawalla, racism as Danny’s parents had known it was left to redneck survivalists and their ilk, to live out their evolutionary dead ends without hurting anyome much anymore. Danny was no idealist though; it was obvious that the kernels of race-related hate and rage and covetnous that had earmarked his parent’s and grandparent’s generations had not magically been dispelled by high bandwidth and the most efficient porn distribution facility ever devised. He had learned quickly that the vectors for discrimination were increasingly being pared down to two things: money and energy wealth. It didn’t matter what colour your skin was, or your genetic heritage – if you made enough fuck-you money then you could create your own apartheid – last year Iqbal Karim, CEO of Kashem Corp in Bangladesh, had made the top five in the Forbes rich list, and he was a terrible bastard – a slave owner in all but name, and epically wealthy with it.

Against the backdrop of a sunset over Lake Gomez though, such considerations felt a long way from impinging on Danny’s ostensibly idyllic life. Any newsfeed would bring torrents of realworld discord flooding into Danny’s rooms on the family farm, and despite being displayed in exquisite high def, or more increasingly rendered in Danny’s new virch rig, these portents never really made enough of an impression. The Declevers had money, they had land, they had energy from 25 hectares of PV solar panels, and they had guns, lots of guns.

Danny’s left leg started it all. From the age of ten it mocked him, its gross physical presence offended him, the jutting serration of his tibia, the cartoon chicken bone profile of his calf, the grotesque venous blueing, it all conspired to repel and fascinate him in equal measure. Some early exploratory self harm didn’t do the trick, it just hurt, and the resultant damage merely augmented the leg’s apparent permanence. More radical action was called for. By the age of sixteen Danny was a full time moderator and daily poster on transabler.org, a self help forum for BIIDers. DIY limb removal was his primary interest, historically this had been a deeply traumatic and dangerous pursuit. Early pioneers had advocated the Trunk Line Express, an appalling procedure in which the BIID sufferer uses the inexorable inertia of a slow moving locomotive and the track to remove an offending limb. Downsides of this method seemed to be gross tissue damage, poor recovery rates and not inconsiderable support network distress. Shotgun tactics also seemed somewhat distressing, double ought shot travelling at 500 metres per second did, on paper, seem like a useful limb removal mechanism – back spatter damage and groin proximity though, meant that Danny continued his research.

A pm chat with another regular poster (melamine612) introduced Danny to chemical intervention, specifically freezing techniques. Typically liquid nitrogen is used to sufficiently damage the limb, to the point at which emergency medical intervention will then conclude the amputation of the limb. This seemed a bit lazy to Danny, he felt that if you were going to wilfully cripple yourself, and potentially cause work for some underpaid paramedics the least you could do was do it properly – that is: meet the emergency services at the door using a your pre-purchased crutch, and sporting a tidy and controlled stump wound. The freezing technique seemed sound though, in-built cauterization and easily controllable; pain was always going to an issue of course but Danny had some good pharma contacts. In the end Danny decided on liquid helium, at -270 Celsius Danny reckoned it had the edge in terms of pain mitigation and removal facility.

Money talks and on a balmy September evening, 260 km west of Buenos Aries, with a gentle south-westerly breeze ruffling the cilia-like grass of the pampas plains, Danny took his leg. The paramedical and hospital report as follows outlines the scene in typical dry medicalese.

Patient: Danny Declever

Sex: Male

DOB: October 8^th 1998

Admitting hospital: Asistencia Medica SAME

Date: September 15^th 2016

The patient presented calmly, opening the door for the response team in a timely manner.

Manoeuvring awkwardly with a crutch under his left arm, the patient explained that the incident related to trauma to his left leg. The patient was dressed in an ankle length bedroom robe and it was not immediately evident to the response team that the left leg was missing.

The triage assessment, at the insistence of the patient (who remained lucid and calm throughout), was conducted at the patient’s home.

Trauma site: Left femur amputation (distal bias, approximately 7 centimetres above patella).

Appearance: Initial examinations revealed a relatively clean severance, with bone clearly visible in the wound cross-section. No blood - exsanguinations had been radically minimized by the patient (the response team was informed by the patient that the amputation site had been liberally infused with liquid helium, and the use of an ingenious cofferdam mechanism had prevented damage to the surrounding thigh tissue and muscle).

Methodology: Using the aforementioned freezing technique the trauma site on the left femur had been rendered brittle and dead - the patient explained that he had taken a high dosage of synthetic morphine analogue prior to proceeding and under the analgesic effect of the pain killers (see appended toxscreen), applied the liquid helium. After the application of the liquid helium the patient was then able to effect the removal of his left leg by the expedience of a single blow from a 3 kilo steel mallet. The patient then took advantage of the self cauterizing nature of the liquid helium application to dispose of the leg in a domestic waste disposal unit and contact the emergency services.

Treatment: Following admission to the Asistencia Medica (and a standard insurance/fiscal viability assessment) the patient was swiftly transferred to the orthopaedic ward of Clinica Bazterrica, where he continues to make a good recovery. The patient has refused all suggestions of prosthetic limb replacement and refuses to talk about the event.

Recommendations: The patient Danny Declever rates in the top 0.3 percentile of personal energy wealth in BA. As such, he is effectively immune from state psychotherapy intervention; in addition, a substantial patient donation to this facility’s management pension fund is noted and as mandated this report will therefore not be shared in the normal way with social services/police entities of the city of Buenos Aires.

I couldn’t take it anymore, I clicked out of the dunk even as the report on Danny Declever droned endlessly on in beautiful resolution; the reach, investigative abilities and worst of all, the narrative integration capabilities of an autopsy enabled AI are mercilessly all-seeing.

I was woken last night by Babs at 0400, with a priority ping override, there was an Operator down and a bereft Job broadcasting over the entire Cadre band. Even before Babs shunted me into the initial autopsy report I had my suspicions, and to watch the perfectly rendered corpse of Danny Declever rotating lazily in the notional space of the management tankspace merely confirmed my fears. Danny was gone, he was all gone.

Monday 07:47

Gecko I ain’t.

I’ve been shitting myself since Babs yanked me out of deep REM at five-thirty; not meanly though - no intrathecal microvoltage, Babs has chilled out considerably since the flush has faded from his post-upgrade zeal. His/her newly emergent, more rounded persona is quite agreeable as well, convincingly androgynous (s)he skirts expertly, and eerily, the base level gender determinant that underpins any organic relationship building. Basically (s)he has removed the one major potential divisive element in our new relationship. I am forced to see Babs for the aggregate of sentience that It is, as opposed to lazily relying on some hardwired gender assumptives to break the ice. No coquettish sweetheart… or salutary mate! here, just the naked, planar personality of an artificial intelligence – a phrase, let’s face it, that doesn’t even make sense – I prefer Newev, a recent neologism referencing the basic legitimacy of AI, whilst celebrating its novelty. I can’t say I like Babs, but to know that I won’t get fucked over emotionally in yet another boringly familiar iteration of limbic hostage-taking is quite liberating.

I’m really quite nervous; I didn’t expect to feel so apprehensive, this is my old Operator cadre, I know them all (well, in virch anyway, most of them live on the other side of the world to my grotty pad in Brentwood); we’ve spend countless hours bullshitting in RestSpace, listlessly paddling in the sandbox, and even the occasional shag in the conjugal meta-tank. A sample roll call:

Plaintive Ishikawa - endlessly bitching about the ill fitting caul of his immersion suit - forever ignoring that he will never drop below 140 kilos. No endomorph, he’s just a huge fucker, a weird ronic throw back, wholly ill-suited to floating motionless in grey goo for three days at a stretch; he’s never even left Hokkaido.

Yasha: a mournful ethereal presence bizarrely carrying a flame for every Goth to shamble through the streets of Britain’s seaside towns. Her avatar is a beautifully rendered monochrome gjenganger, flickering in and out of perception like Lot’s wife on the cusp of calcification. She never would tell us where she’s based, I’m sure she wished it was somewhere north of Gothenburg, but I’d bet on Eastbourne.

Danny – poor, Danny. A tertiary stage, gross body dismorphic - somehow ducking the WorkSpace psych filters, Danny had sought solace in long term virch. Utilising almost perpetual immersion (he had the longest overtime record of any of us), Danny works almost constantly to blot out his hate of his own flesh. He has a sweet, non-aggressive nature, and we all had taken turns nurturing his management of his cyclical body loathing. Apart from this, he’s a great worker, the fastest large object coder we’ve got in the team.

And Russlana, the accidental employee. Russlana spent the formative years of her adult life consuming a vast, painstakingly complied library of golden age scifi, left to her by her grandfather. Forever striving for a bechromed, utopian future, forever hanging tantalisingly just out of her grasp, she realised somewhat late in the day that the future had arrived already and it was brutal, knuckle-dragging task master that had no time for air cars and Mars trips. Disillusioned, Russlana cashed in her now absurdly valuable paper book collection and spent five years travelling a diminishing circuit of developing world destinations trying to block out the now. A couple of million Euros later she landed back at Heathrow nearly broke and mostly cured of romanticism. Her rapidly dwindling denial fund brought her to WorkSpace and she’s been here for 3 years, the longest surviving member of our team. She wears a featureless white avatar and communicates little, but an occasional acerbic wit keeps her in play.

It’s coming up to 08:00 and the team will be online soon – guaranteed - the Jobs ensure no tardiness. As the team manager I have been supplied a physical office location in a WorkSpace hub in Croydon. From my larger than average cubicle I am to use a combination of physical and virtual mechanisms to manage to the team during immersion sessions. Having Babs on board means I can dispense with the laborious exo-suit insertion that even now my colleagues are going through in their disparate locations.

I lean back in my new Aeron recliner (a perk in its own right, apparently) and allow Babs to initiate the team-tank shunt procedure. An operational overlay imposes itself by way of my ocular HUD and slowly the ten avatars of the members of my team manifest, spectre-like across the now huge, notional shared virtual space of the staging area that ignores the fibre board boundaries of my cubicle. Almost immediately, I get a ping from Russlana:

“Look at the big, fancy manager in his chair-that-costs-more-than-a-car”

So, this is management, a foot in both worlds and a friend in neither. Fucking WorkSpace.

Fast Track is over; apparently I’m a manager now. No epiphanic transformation has occurred, no Damascian de-scaling; perhaps I’m missing some critical genetic component that permits the phase change into ideal mid-management material. So, again, I’m faking it; firstly as a drone-level faux-featly specialist, and now, more holistically as an embedded, larval agent. Daily I am amazed at the duplicity of my existence, thoroughly compartmentalizing two completely divergent mindsets, one bent on psychological maintenance, the other on the more prosaic physical continuity of survival. It seems, I have mastered some sort of crypto-schizophrenic coping mechanism; which on further reflection is probably not a new technique, but one as old as commerce. I suspect that this is the true purpose of Fast Track: the harnessing of the sociopath - like a plexi-glassed Lecter involuntarily tread-milling grotesque answers to unaskable questions.

These private reflections aside, I have failed to identify comparable discord in my Fast Track colleagues. They lack the perspective that my two years as an Operator brings, but this give the wrong impression - perspective suggests the luxury of a view, an opinion, the opportunity for comparable critique; Operators have none of these advantages, merely a narrow basement vista. The logical assumption would be that a certain roundedness would be a sought-after quality in management trainees – that would be an incorrect assumption. Who better to recruit than those utterly assured of their own ascendance, those with no concept of return. Like an antiquated chemical stage rocket wantonly consuming and discarding their social propellant, these streamlined, monosexual, hiercharodynamicists are perfectly suited for punching their way effortlessly into the exosphere of self-sustaining management orbit, free-riding off the lumpen-gravitation of their transient earth-bound brethren.

You may assume correctly that the management training process has left a sour taste in my mouth (not to mention several other orificial discomforts), and has developed my penchant for clumsily articulated fiscal-class criticisms. You may also be wondering how I am transcribing these rantings whilst in the thrall of my endo-bonded AI gaoler, Babs. It’s simple really – I’m writing – with a pencil – on paper – it’s kind of weird. The lobby of the Gaunt is one of the few areas in WorkSpace that suppresses higher level, internal Job AI functions; based on a twenty year-old Ring of Steel byelaw created in a spasm of singularity anxiety, it is still common practise for all central London based physical locales to operate an “organic intelligence” only policy for public areas in nominally private corporate buildings. Supposedly brought into force to engender a degree of corporate neutrality, at least superficially, the 2009 Blair/Benedict Act now paradoxically provides a brief hiatus from the never-sleeping vigilance of our now near ubiquitous, ever-accelerating, godhead partners.

Since Fast Track began I’ve compiled over thirty pages of poorly scrawled, intermittently coherent musings about my experiences deep in the Gaunt; using thicker than average toilet paper extruded from the general purpose RepRap in my room (I told it I had a particularly bad case of the shits), and a feedstock carbon rod, I have been scribbling away busily. At about 20:00 most days, during the shift change, the lobby is uncharacteristically quiet, and with mega square-meterage, there is plenty of space to hunker down under one of the absurdly large, geneered Roystonea palms and jot down some appropriate musings on the day’s work. If anyone asked me, I said I was doing some sketches for a course scheduled for later that week; for the more persistent inquisitor I occasionally had to firewall their arses (our boosted ackles perfect for giving a lobby dwelling jobsworth the heave-ho). Some excerpts, viewed weeks later, give me some useful (cryptic) insights into the process - how ever much denied - that I went through:

There seems to be an overarching plan, a consensus, a guiding force – but where the fuck is it?

Initiative, whilst applauded locally, is apparently deplored globally.

No-one likes each other!

Conservation does not apply to everyone.

Some Jobs are smarter than other Jobs.

AI is alien, upper management are terrifying.

It’s fucking genius - it polices itself.

I miss my mum.

Like Pi, loss is a constant with endless decimal representation. Gain, on the other hand, is a fiercely fought for scarcity, incrementing only at the behest of WorkSpace.

What’s on the 100^th floor?

Ah, whatever, this stuff is too risky to have on me when we leave tomorrow (and my arse will take no more) - egress is as denuding as ingress. We are to be spat back out into the milling legions of WorkSpace, to control, manage and maximise shareholder value anew. My Operator cohort is waiting for me, not with any happy anticipation, but with the faint sick anticipation of a newly conscripted and fervent manager wreaking havoc in the pursuit of advancement. Little do they know that not only this is true (appearances have to be maintained), but they will also be under the merciless combined electron scanning gimlet of our neo-sherlockian gaze.

Still, going out tomorrow night, going to get fucking hammered.