WorkSpace

At nearly thirty-seven thousand kilometres above southern Afghanistan, the geo-stationary WorkSpace relay milsat is a barely detectable stellar mote in the clear, frigid, night sky. Suspended in a cylindrical vat of liquid helium, and protected with a ring of bulky tanks of propellant, the mind of the satellite pulses gently with a superconductive glow. It doesn’t really think, WorkSpace tends to impose a strict AI capacity cap on geosynchronous weapons platforms with kinetic missile capability. Nonetheless the dim, dog-like musings of the sat overlay its operational output like a primary colour finger painting:

Mmmm, 98% operational efficiency. Recreational uplink in 953 seconds – woof. Milchcow rendezvous in seven orbits – drool.

The sat has a number of tasks – comms routing, mildata storage, AI backup – but primarily its a gun. A big gun. Optimised for targeted, non-radioactive orbital bombardment, the milsat is a fourth-gen geosync platform built by WorkSpace in 2029 and leased to the US government for the duration of Afghanistan 2.0. The sat has seen some service, crude satisfaction routines humming with gratification as the dumb matter kinetic missiles deployed at hypersonic speeds from the blunt muzzles of its EM accelerators. Expelled at escape velocity speeds, the streamlined chunks of depleted plutonium that the sat uses for ammunition require no explosive payload. Impacting at over twelve kilometres per second, the dull grey rods of plutonium convey a impact explosive analog of over 20 kilotons. With no gamma after-effects the weapons platform is the tool du jour of the discerning on-the-ground US military coordinator. They even take it in turns, thrice-PHDed war technicians squabbling over who gets to pull the trigger on a modified PlayStation paddle from an invulnerable state-side bunker.

Latterly, though the military machine has moved on to oilier pastures and the milsat has been backburnered to standard comms duties – piggy-backing commercial TV feeds a dimly perceived jangle of irritating bits. As the terminator creeps across the terrigenous skeleton of the mountains of Afghanistan, and the morning brings some welcome relief from the freezing spring night, the milsat wakes up to a rare but extremly important ping: get ready to launch. Hard coded synapses shiver alert with an anticipation of psuedo-pleasure – re-deployed it may be but the sat is a combat machine – they made it to want to fight. Milliseconds later targeting data hits its buffer, a priority wrapper indicates a desired completion timeframe for the action, an imperative variable tells the sat that the order is reinforced with a WASTE modifier, somewhere in WorkSpace someone (or probably more likely somebot) has decided that a WorkSpace initiative has exceeded its mandated usefulness. In the more litigiously nervous evironment of the developed world this would result in a cease and desist order and fund withdrawl; out in the Middle East boondocks a more expedient MO is used: explosive deconstruction and removal.

The sat processes the targeting data: A geoloc overlay pinpoints the bombardment coordinates, a more self-aware entity might puzzle over the rationale and/or military significance of a near-deserted patch of poppy plantation several kilomtres south of Jalalabad, and a less capable machine might doubt its ability to hit a tiny disused prefab. The milsat is fully upgraded though and has a 94% success termination potential for targets <0.5 metre square. 250 milliseconds following receipt of directive its primary EM cannon is unfolding from its dormant configuration. Fully three seconds thereafter a two metre needle of ultrahard plutonium is making a esartz shooting star in the dawn sky of Afghanistan. Nearly an hour later (an aeon in machine time) the sat’s after action scan detects a rising cloud of atomised rock and dust rising into the morning sky. Its sensors are also capable enough to detect in the particulate cloud the fatty-carbon remains of several mammalian combatants, it also wonders briefly and unconcernedly about the flash of machine thought coherence it detected just before missile impact.

Resource allocation is not one its core competencies, nor does is possess combat morality algorithims. The sat powers down to dormant, to again moronically eavesdrop the tsunami of commercial bandwidth flooding its router.

Pardis Hospice is shut for business.

Even with the pharmacological mitigation and enclosure comfort provided by the Job, therapy with my patients rarely shared the structured, ethereal angst of a first world counselling session. Dealing not with the maybe, the bogeymen of possibility, the faint spectre of disaster – all distant cousins to true pain; these fragmented souls had already seen and felt far too much real trauma to compare even fleetingly with my pampered albionside client base. After a year of patching up tattered psyches, gibbering will-o-the-wisp surgery survivors, I have developed an involuntary rage response when I think back to the work I did at my Acton practise. When I remember the plaintive middle England whining of mortgage rate hikes, second job exhaustion, the draconianisms of my own erstwhile employer, the dull throb of thwarted careers, the gorge rises and I frantically pat my pockets for the Marlboros.

Here in Afghanistan, in this millennial crucible of conflict, pain is real and my patients have experienced the full gamut. Not for the first time I am struck by the depressingly familiar irony of the urgent consumer strivings of my own cosseted countrywo/men for tastes/flavours/newness – bring me a new shirt, a new tie, a…new thing…anything. Daily I am reminded of the timeless Couplandism – purchased experiences don’t count; here, instead, in country, almost everyone is looking of a refund of their own bitter, involuntary transactions. It’s a hard lesson too, after a whole life of absent minded gratitude for an accident of birth – a genetic dice roll – it only took a year in Afghanistan to realise that my former life was a hollow and valueless as a scooped thorax of one of my purloined patients.

I have a full quiver of therapeutics though, and fading WorkSpace funding notwithstanding, I’ve got good gear. During the prefab sessions, when we’re making a semblance of progress and the tears flow usefully and cathartically, I feel like I did when I de-planed in Baghdad – a clean arrow of determination fletched with the belief that I could make a difference – salve the terrible open wounds of conflict damage. Technology helped, the long chain polymer perfume of new tech, the replete power packs, the semi-autonomous repair packs, the vacuum sealed MREs – though I painfully and incrementally discovered that all these hedges against chaos and disorder are merely a delay, a brief hiatus of intervention that lasted only as long as the new car smell. After a year of petty theft, pilfering, abrasive desert winds, and the inevitable over-usage entropy, out of all my original kit only the Job is running at anywhere near full capacity.

The Job is a two person therapy model, with empathy bias. Designed in 2030 by a Dutch-Italian WorkSpace subsidiary, therapy Jobs were built around a central core concept: To feel is to understand. The one hundred and fifty years of the psychotherapy industry had always been hobbled by one glaring central limitation – to know someone is not to know their pain – and without that knowledge there can never been true understanding, and in turn, succour. The therapy Jobs make the tenuous, febrile moments of therapeutic insight a concrete reliability. Using the manipulation of mirror neurone activity – the observationally triggered physiological process that occurs when conspecific animals (humans included) witness each other’s pain – the Jobs use pharmacological and electroneurological interventions to augment and enhance the biological empathy response. This includes the primary nociceptors – the propagators of noxious stimuli, this means that in a Job facilitate session the therapist feels the patients pain. Considered somewhat of a Wild West field by the old school of non-interventionists counsellors and therapists, Job therapy was not for the faint hearted. The pain, both phantom and real, of (for example) missing limbs, despite buffered and baffled by a series of filters controlled by both the therapist and the patient, could be extreme. Still fringe, and therefore deemed deployment acceptable in non-first world contexts, the empathy school was taking some of the first painful steps towards true understanding and healing.

Today its Zalmai’s first session, somewhat of a rite of passage in these de-traditioned times. I pinged the Job a wake-up sequence from my PDA and it uncurled from its wheeled repose. Carapaced like an over-plated armadillo, the Job snicked-snucked-clicked into the standard new patient configuration. Designed to minimise further unnecessary distress these Job models lacked the sanitary/elimination hook ups of the standard corporate Job models, and they also have a much more friendly onboard AI avatar - gender variable dependent on the client. Forming the now standardised defensive outward looking perimeter (a welcome evolution of session security initiated by Gula), the rest of the group formed a circle around Zalmai and I as we interred. I led Zalmai to the patient saddle, the Job flaring open in a welcoming proboscis embrace. Seating Zalmai and hooking up the pharma-feed and the skullNet took a few minutes, a pause capitalized as usual by at least four of the group lighting up, I didn’t really mind – H&S was a distant concept these days. The Job chirped an environmental particulate/carcinogen alarm but I squashed it immediately – first world puritanism could go fuck itself. 

Having made Zalmai comfortable and giving him a few minutes to acquaint himself with the Job, I then hooked myself up in the therapy seat. Accessing the public landing space I prepped a stylised simulacrum of the poppy fields outside. In the therapySpace the neurointerface provided by the Job meant that during the sessions Zalmai would see again (a direct optical nerve hack that anywhere else in the West would be available as an outpatient procedure), and I wanted him to have a nice view. The quiet, small voice of the Job whispered – go – in my ear and the session began.

The activated charcoal in the aircon had long since been active and the prefab smelled like camping trips and the drying wetsuit tang of childhood seaside visits. I pegged back the membrane door as far as it could go and we all shuffled in, Zalmai brought up the rear, taxiing reluctantly into the musty space. Currently our complement is only seven, a recent c.difficile outbreak resulted in two deaths – only one surprise, a goat farmer who wandered into the hospital compound unaided only missing a lung and his left hand – he died fours days later after the difficile infection swept opportunistically through the wards – a spectacular gastrointestinal revolt that left the whole ward retching and grieving in equal measure. 

Some other stubborn remnants of this year’s intake: Max, a shaggy, denimed member of the ubiquitous tribe of nomadic westerners that form a grubby, globally spanning gulf stream of trust fund disillusionment and disestablishmentarianism. Six months ago Max found himself muling out of Kabul with an amphetamine packed colon and a nearly valueless solid roll of hyper-inflated Afgani currency. The Rough Guide is woefully short on hitching advice for the Kabul-Jalalabad road and Max’s abortive attempt to flag down an ancient Peugeot estate resulted in a third-hand colostomy bag and a free ride to our hospital car park. 

Ashur the Syrian, my star pupil, a dead man walking. Ashur was a DOA at Jalalabad Central hospital, a bloody bundle of rags that had been cursorily admitted by an exhausted night staff and then rolled on a broken trolley into an unused corridor in the ER. Doubling as a trauma surgeon during the first few weeks of my secondment I found this gory heap as I took five and sucked down my millionth smoke of the night. Ashur was what we called a full donor – multiple organ theft and over fifty percent of limb reduction. Incredibly he was conscious when I found him, his one remaining hand pawing blindly at the fetid hot air of the ER. I was new in country back then and I was gear-rich and drug-fat from my new WorkSpace coffers. The hospital wing they had assigned me for the organ theft project was full of box fresh, state of the art kit designed exactly for the life extension of this type of victim. Ashur was at the thin end of a survival spectrum probability but back then I was full of enthusiasm, energy and naïve hope. 

He made it through the night; his cored torso emptied of offal and filled with a million euros worth of modular life support. That long night was a vague memory of grey market Marlboro consumption, blinking LEDs of the medical gear and the gurgle/rattle of a jerry-rigged trachea/air filtration unit connection. Ashur is a continuing miracle, wholly dependent on aging med gear, scrounged feedstock and smuggled hormone replacement analogues; yet he has an easy, beatific smile and always some time for Zalmai. Ashur reminds me of a turn of the century cyborg wet dream gone wrong. Like a crippled borg lacking the transcendent scope of Stelarc’s vacuum bound nude explorers, Ashur is his own street, making his own uses of the tech we can scrape together for him. 

Gula always brings up the rear, she invariably insists on carrying the Job from the ambulance to the prefab, an essential piece of kit for the group sessions. Nearly two metres tall, Gula’s single huge right arm easily flips the modular Job pod off the roof rack and onto its undercarriage of sprung wheels. Gula has not spoken since she came to live with us in the prefabs, she has no overt medical needs and I can only assume she was also a victim of the mountain gangs, the clean stump of her left humerus betrays the trauma of involuntary surgery not the impartial mangled legacy of a farm accident. Gula’s huge beautiful green eyes miss nothing and she acts as our minder during the vulnerable hours we spend in Job immersion during the counselling sessions.