WorkSpace

Tad, like all mid-management predators, has always viewed the notion of legality as just another commercial variable to be negotiated. Legal and morality considerations, however vestigial, and when favourably ignorable, are eliminated via a rigorous internal MBA top-up during the first six months of WorkSpace employment. Tad is as comfortable with Antarctic carbon-dumping cost benefit analysis as he is with bland revenue projections for PlaySpace, the stark WorkSpace crèche facility maintained at the Gaunt.

Even so, his initial read through of his first post-promotion directive leaves him floundering, blank-minded, in a psychopath’s hollowed out version of shock. His first and overriding panic-tinged concern is for his own continued ascendance. This task (fuck it: this mission!) seems intolerably exposing (not too mention almost completely puzzling), and wholly at odds with years of ingrained opprobrium management and corporate risk avoidance.

Tad can pseudo-feel his newly acquired neo-conscience (WorkSpace source ID# 2176782336/B, mufti tag: Nand), fluttering anxiously in their internal tankspace. Neo-cons, in an analogous attempt to mirror accurately the operation of morality deployment in the non-psychopathic, are permitted to directly or indirectly influence, via autonomic management or Stockholm manipulation, their host charges. It seems though that this neo-con, sentience rated 1.03, is equally disturbed by the mission directive as Tad, and is no help at all. In the null space of their newly acquired virtual shared sensorium, both host and passenger stare notionally at each in horror.

The whole afternoon had been weird, even for an emotionally blunted lunk like Tad. After making the half-kilometre lift descent to his new Chimney quarters, a maglev Segway RMP whisked his solitary hardshell case to his new apartment. He was expected to walk the kilometre or so to his quarters, a 3Space module assigned to all new promotees. His promotion had brought with it several changes: his new hypogean home, his neo-con (to be uploaded within 6 minutes of apartment ingress), his new directives, and oddest of all: the afternoon off.

The 3Sspace was unremarkable, a neutrally toned hutch with adequate cuisanal facilities and the ubiquitous WorkSpace aiming logo embossed onto the toilet bowl – pee on the seat was most definitely frowned upon in the these upper echelon fringes. Automatically flicking on the 100cm screen filling most of the east wall of the living room space, and emptying the meagre (WorkSpace sanctioned) contents (nanoSD card, credit card, chunky electronic apartment key) of his suit trouser pockets onto the small Perspex dining table, Tad noticed an anomaly. (In WorkSpace parlance, there are no wrong things, just anomalies to be dealt with. A mostly successful attempt to reinforce a neutral morality stance towards absolutely everything; useful training for when the truly abhorrent decisions need to be coolly made: minutemen making microsecond judgements).

Conditioning momentarily abandoned, Tad’s attention was wholly consumed by the large envelope lying on the table, it appeared (to Tad’s untutored eye) to be made of paper. Ignoring for a moment the HUD countdown for the neo-con upload, and settling on the corner of the couch, he gingerly picked up this anachronistic object – paper was as rare as leaving presents at WorkSpace – and carefully examined the envelope. Pale cream and unsealed, the paper smelled fleetingly of some long forgotten odour; the faintest hint of old plaster that crumbled from the walls in the quiet room carrels of the dilapidated library he visited when growing up – he remembered the smooth pages of the decirculated medical dictionaries that filled his nights with bursting fistulas and trauma wounds. The envelope flap crackled softly as he bent it back to extract the single sheet of heavy paper inside.

…..Shreep!…..

His intraaural alarm cut in with a hideous mosquito whine, and an auto reminder kicked in with the dry, faintly patronising tones of the Chimney caretaker AI.

“…Manager Revert, you have fifteen seconds remaining to interface with the module systems and initiate the neo-con shunt…”

Lockstepped by long training Tad immediately dropped the letter back on the table and prepared his wireless hook-ups for the beam shunt; ninety seconds later the upload was complete and Tad was subvocally making his acquaintance with his new conscience, his emotional sensei for the next level of the corporate dojo. Having never felt the lack before, Tad’s immediate impressions of his new conscience were of an infinitely patient, yet paradoxically querulous back voice, utterly intractable. No more free-fire policies for Tad. Hybrid sentience issues were now sidelined though by the spectre of the letter and its contents. In an archaic monochrome font, and titling the page, the text declared in 26 point:

Burns After Reading

Then an address, a physical location, not virch coordinates:

4 Craven Mews

WC2

And then:

Get your fucking arse on the tube, Tad.

And as a footer:

“Wetworx – Proudly Providing Essential Corporate Outsourcing for 15 years”

While Tad’s still goggling at this invasion into his safe corporate life, this fucking bombshell; the letter bursts into a near colourless flame, fiercely consuming the elegant paper in a matter of seconds.

Soft ash floats onto the caps of his shiny black Oxford wingtips.

Better get an oyster card Tad.

Remarkable is discouraged. Excellent is frowned upon. Deviance, though, in typical WorkSpace narrow focus, is lauded.

Tad Revert is not remarkable, not these days. In the noise and soup of moral ambiguity that defines the trencher of middle management scrap squabbles, he barely rates above norm for aberrant deviancy. Plucked from the thousands of job applicants to hit WorkSpace servers on an hourly basis, Tad was short listed for a management role seventeen seconds after hitting send in his mail client. Semantic cross-referencing accessed his entire digital life history in less than one second, the remaining sixteen plus seconds was wasted by a sluggish organic confirmation from the enlister on duty at the time. Tad was a good match, scoring highly on the initial PCL-R and a strong factor one bias in the Hare checklists, and this was sufficient to get him bumped to the front of the physical interview list. Ninety-four seconds after making his application he was in receipt of time and GPS coordinates for his interview the very next day (a Sunday). From the moment he walked under the terahertz scanning arch in the Gaunt lobby he knew he was going to be happy at WorkSpace; like some race memory analog – he felt like he had come home.

Six years has passed since he had first smelled the earthy, ersatz actinomycetes during the daily lobby precipitation and, from his own particular, warped point of view, they have been happy years. WorkSpace, treated with sufficient caution could be a generous master; shuffling around on its ever-expanding cache, the occasional bauble would trickle to the margins and could be snaffled by an earnestly attentive acolyte. Tad’s meal ticket, like thousands of his ostensibly amenable colleagues, was of course, his psychopathology. Eschewing quaintly naïve ethical considerations, WorkSpace was obliged, legally obligated, and was perhaps genetically mandated, to utilise the most efficient resources available to maintain share holder value. It was therefore not only unsurprising, but expected, that profit-friendly traits evident in their employees were to be capitalised at all costs. Hence: Tad and his ilk – their bland half smiles, easy charm, fluid morals and lack of remorse made them an ideal vanguard for Workspace. Like Teflon coated heat-seeking missiles, these moral-free lieutenants of industry were fired into the soft, unsuspecting underbelly of credit card carrying Joe public, where they frenzied a profit like sheep dogs with blood lust. It was all very satisfactory – in the short term.

Psychopaths have their disadvantages. Issues like sustainable profit and relationship building often require a long term strategy, not a strong suit in the skin wearing fraternity, however domesticated. Other problems manifest over time as well; charisma can turn into buffoonery and cliché over time, the mimicking of emotions can slip, people notice things. Psychopaths are also typically not endowed with over-abundant internal mindscapes, they imitate creativity exceedingly well, but mostly that’s all it is, imitation. You might ask Bundy to make a board presentation for you but you wouldn’t get him to run a product launch. Psychopaths: great consultants, terrible employees.

WorkSpace, therefore, as they always do, fixed the problem, or rather – borrowed a solution. Artificial empathy, at first a grotesque concept, but as AI grew in maturity and stature, and human distaste for prosthetic life dissipated, emotional machines became more entrenched in life, a transparent pan-global neologism that meant not just humans, but human-machines, and machine-like humans. With emotional, dermal and carapace barriers becoming more and more permeable, the notion of a non-bipedal conscience became increasingly acceptable.

These mobile empathies were deployed everywhere: post-traumatic stress management, battlefield padre analogs, low level judicial posts, primary school administration. WorkSpace also found a new role for these exo-souls: Management management. Each new trainee above certain seniority grading and capability, was assigned (and bonded to) their own empathy enforcement AI. Comparable to the Jobs that non-sociopathic WorkSpace employees successfully symbiote with, these external moral guides leant their charges sufficient moral and ethical qualities to ensure they could operate successfully and profitably in relation to potential client targets. So, usefully augmented, these hybridised cripples became something more than they were, and something possibly better.

Tad is happy about the promotion, slightly more ambivalent about his new neo-conscience riding shotgun (they have yet to have their first orientation session), but mostly fucking ecstatic that he’s made it.

The lift comes to a halt with an almost imperceptible bump as it arrives at Chimney Level 0.

He’s arrived.

WorkSpace has been called many things, a few of them complimentary. Bitter criticisms have been levelled, vain accusations made, torts brought, legal careers made and lost, even a few white collar lives sacrificed on the keen machete edge of corporate expansion. Despite the faint and diminishing mewling protests from a defanged Ofcorp, WorkSpace could never be accused of not adhering to most progressive, aggressive policies they could devise to ensure that they remained on the ragged edge of the corporate envelope expansion. Drawing inspiration indiscriminately from every source imaginable WorkSpace’s innovation is infamous: Contention based competitive pension allotment, seasonal micro-shifts, informer bonuses, employee diffused corporate responsibility policies, post-hypnotic physical exclusion corralling, blood-oxygen performance manipulation…the list is endless and necessarily morbid.

Most notably, WorkSpace also pioneered the corporate Involution movement in the early 2010s. Reacting cellularly and only with regard to the protection of the body corporate, and instinctively responding to the burgeoning threats of global economic phase shift, WorkSpace radically reconfigured the traditional top-down corporate model. The Gaunt was built around the bastion philosophy of Involution, the primary goal: asylum for the upper tiers of WorkSpace hierarchy. Using an adapted medieval concentric defensive design, the previously notional buffering afforded to corporate life via multiple layers of need-to-know, drip-fed, floor-level employees found physical form in the structure of the Gaunt.

Gone were the performance related rewards; upscaling from hot desks, to fabric partitions, to See-All Perspex-walled side offices – the forever striving for the corner office with the view was replaced with an rejection of the increasingly notional buffer of transitory wealth and the introduction of real physical protection against a growing list of potential and imagined threats. Petro-carbon fuel withdrawal panic – promotion gets you access to the armoured geothermal crustal heat exchanger embedded in the core of the Gaunt. Al-Qaeda paranoia – the Gaunt sublevels are hardened and filtered against all conceivable attacks. Involution worked in many ways, the replacement of salary increases with corporeal enhancements increased profitability (the initial build cost notwithstanding), on-site accommodation for senior personnel increased productivity by an order of magnitude and with a protectionist anxiety infiltrating the very highest levels of organic management there was now even more to lose.

In this scary (and scarified) new world the corporate doyens of WorkSpace hunkered down and let a decade of climatic and economic privations break against the hybrid buffers of their teeming legions of staff and the blunt, inflexible walls of their corporate headquarters. Burrowing deeper and deeper, first into the dense clay of the Thames basin and then further; titanium and smart-carbon caissons plunging segmented, columnar retreats half a kilometre into stubborn bedrock – this is where the management live – in the Chimneys.

Taking their name from accreting seabed magma extrusions, organic rich and teeming with borrowed sustenance, the Chimneys are fiercely guarded and jealously accessed via one-person, biometrically accessed elevators. Twenty-four hours a day perfectly groomed senior WorkSpace executives are loaded into magnetically powered bullet shaped slugs and fired earthwards and skywards, their frequency determined by an hourly adjusted performance metric.

One such downward speeding dum-dum, a thoroughly loathsome fucker effortlessly insinuating himself up the colon of WorkSpace advancement, is Tad Revert.

Tad just got promoted.