WorkSpace

It lived in the sun. It thought with light. It was a tethered god. It is the largest living being on the planet.

From low earth orbit, perhaps 350 kilometres up, India is a stunning splinter of silver, a concentrated kernel of thermonuclear ur-light that whips around every ninety minutes, a man-made quasar in all but name. The National Solar Mission started in the 2010s was at the time the largest solar power initiative on the globe. A serendipitous convergence of aggressive Green campaigning, ubiquitous hypocritical sermonising from the US, and advances in organic photovoltaic (PV) cell production, resulted in a second world coup in the solar energy production market. Bolstered by offshored coding profits and goaded by the vestigial legacy of empire, India grasped the burgeoning twenty-first century by the balls and hung on like a limpet. Drawing on the psychic throw weight of a billion more or less culturally aligned human minds, and a desperate need not to suffocate under a mantle of coal smoke particulates, India went nuts for solar.

Over a fifteen year period, first rural Gujarat and then vaster swathes of western India underwent a transformation from the taupe and beige tones of under-irrigated countryside to a blazing chrome of reflected sunlight. Self-replicating nanotech (itself a product of the world’s biggest domestic code development base) came online in 2017 and the PV proliferation went exponential. Power availability never before experienced on the sub-continent saw a gauche explosion of mimetic capitalistic frenzy. India did not really need a three kilometre tall triumvirate of skyscrapers to house its government, nor did it need work starting on an oceanic anchor for a skyhook – but watts begat consumption and production in equal measure. As Dubai crumbled back into the desert sand, Mumbai became the go-to destination for the planet’s cognoscenti, technorati and glitterati.

By 2020 over three thousand square kilometres was dedicated to solar energy production. Management of the Indian solar farms was initially provided by a legion of cottage farmers; driven near to suicide by relentless cycles of drought and GM crop license costs, they practically chewed their arms off for the opportunity to work in a different kind of agriculture. Tending the fractal, multi-fronded shimmering solar cells was a welcome change for a workforce more accustomed to grubbing maize and rice out of the tired earth.

As the arrays grew so did the administrative burden; over half a billion individual solar cells required a prodigious support framework – semi-organic servos to track the sun, feedtracks for the replenishment of stock chemicals for self-repair and enhancement, micro meteorite repair and animal damage maintenance. By 2022 over a million Indian men, women and children were employed by the NSM, tending and fostering a slowly obsolescing vast energy production infrastructure. In for 300 billion Euros and a twenty-five year half-life, there was no backing out for the NSM. As power production efficiency continued to degrade and management started to eat itself in a circle jerk of baksheesh and recriminations they turned to DARPA, the maniac prodigy offspring of the US military, latterly privatised and rebranded, WorkSpace Invent (WI). Drawing inspiration from developments in distributed artificial intelligence – self-learning swarms of logarithmic alien genius set loose in petri environments – early trials at WI saw the previously dumb hardware of infrastructure transformed into the living substrate of the newest life forms on the planet Earth. With impenetrable, yet harnessed, monadic intentions these implacably competent intellects were put to work in the latter day workhouses of the WorkSpace corporation.

An early adoption was the release of a 0.2 rated AI (code name: Dosojin) into the fibre sewer cable network of the UK broadband system. Initially firewalled into a training clave, Dosojin cracked wide area access in under 240 milliseconds and achieved full network access within four minutes. Skynet paranoiacs were at last silenced as Dosojin immediately started improvements; contention ratios plummeted, apparently wholly unintuitive network patches and connections upped connection speeds by an average of two hundred percent. This was no Turing genius either, Dosojin could barely manage to hold a coherent natural English conversation, and no nukes went flying. It seemed like a no-brainer, AI delivered real world results devoid of the nightmare weakly godlike sight-effects imagined by a century of science fiction, costs went down (exluding of course the massive lease costs). WorkSpace became bolder, they seeded the radar and tracking infrastructure of Belgium’s air traffic control systems with a more powerful AI; they had similar results with the new born AI lobbing suborbital flights with aplomb and preternatural accuracy.

Then NSM came knocking –  they had problems in orders of magnitude greater than the rarefied conditions of the aviation infrastructure of a first world Euro nation. Despite a surfeit of electrical power and a placated rural population, there were onerous export commitments (to repay the vast World Bank start-up costs), and a ruinious management overhead not best served by a semi-feudal horde of irritated agronomists who were ok with SMS and Amazon but fell back on the Clarkian adage of sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguisable from magic when it came to tending the etheral newev tech of the PV arrays. With a budget cast to the humid southwestern Indian monsoon winds and desperate for a solution, NSM turned to WorkSpace Invent for a solution. After a painitive meeting in Mountview, an open ended budget promise and points promised on future production, WI mobilised. WorkSpace had learned its logisitics from the best – the US military – and a scant sixty days after the NSM had deplaned back in Mumbai, the heavy lifters whomp whomped into Gujarat.

The bespoke AI arrived, pre-complied and champing at the virtual bit, in a series of rackable pods each roughly the size and dimensions of a shipping container. Then the standard deployment model for Very Large Computing Projects (VLCP), the system required a ready and prodigious supply of fresh water for cooling. Frantic local government employees caught on the hop by ruthlessly efficient WorkSpace project management timelines, hastily authorised a slum clearance on the banks of Aji River near Rajkot and even as the eldery CATs were deleting the marginal livelihoods of approximately three thousand subsistence peasants, the WorkSpace choppers were alighting. Despite the dashing of some initial hopes about local employment opportunities (WI kept a tight and closed ship), the AI ensconsement went to plan. Like a brobignagian HUF team, the AI substrate went up in only four days. WI used exosuits for accelerated deployment and hive-like, the black and yellow chevroned shapes of the enhanced construction workers moving with the controlled insect spasticity of force feedback, the data centre took rapid shape.

Switch-on day was marred by a number of factors: A huge, angry demonstration by most of the working adult population of Rajkot, who (correctly) surmised that this shining inviolate chunk of Western tech was going to put them out of a job; a malfunction in the cooling irrigation system that caused a temporary (but alarming) cascade shutdown of some of the AI’s human interface functions; extensive cloud cover that had not been seen for ten years in that region; and the vexing refusal of the AI (now codenamed: Ganesh – WorkSpace had run a competition in the primary schools of Rajkot to find a name for the AI; ostensibly as an local integration PR excercise, this had backfired horribly with the local religious community), to speak to its progenitors. It had been felt that this AI model would benefit from a verbal interface and had been loaded with Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali and over twenty other Indian dialects – not a fucking peep on switch-on day though. Functionally and operationally things seemed fine, Ganesh had interfaced almost immediately with the variously kludged and jumbled networks of the NSM infrastructure and early indications were good: array coordination was up by thirty percent and output was already creeping up out of a single digit improvement.

Much head scratching and uploaded code examination later and WI was no closer to understanding the stubborn silence of their creation. Countless personhours later and a still stumped WorkSpace HQ authorised decampment and withdrawl. Ganesh was fine in all but voice, a measly discount was offered to placate NSM and WI bugged out of the muggy, marshy site of Rajkot.

Ganesh was left brooding over the largest, most energetically provided distributed processing environment on the planet, and no one knew what the fuck it was thinking.

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.