WorkSpace

Brant is out of child’s piss. This is a problem. A bigger one is getting more – avoiding the spastically reflexive anti-paedo screening – both passive bio and active thermograph (groin heat – see?) that typically encompasses the average suburban London school with a one and half kilometre perimeter of hand wringing anxiety is a non-viable approach for a white skinned, sallow cheeked skinhead in his mid-thirties. Even if you could get past last year’s grubby Addict (imagine the alternative though – a three year old suit – he would be on the nonce express to Pentonville before you could say Madeline’s Law), first avoiding a shiv from the sixth formers and then actually being able to meet the exorbitant price of the clean piss would exhaust first the bravery, and then the sketchy urban survival repertoire of a beleaguered WorkSpace worker with a diminishing handle on the daily mutating argot of anyone under the age of sixteen.

He still needs the piss though. There’s a test tomorrow, not that he should know this but the operator back channel is still live and kicking and partially accessible to a temp. Lead on a head’s up is usually about thirty-six hours and for a day and half the local comp does a brisk trade in the necessary unalloyed urine. There’s even a scale, 50ml of year seven goes for anything up from seventy quid and if you’re skint you can risk a rank vial of oily, colloidal morning piss from a sullen (and scary) year twelve dim for a tenner. Normally Brant scores from the tiny Bangladeshi girl (braids, huge eyes, channels a million manga waifs and doesn’t care) from three doors up; probably not the weirdest dealer there’s ever been but she’s got to come in the top five. Mostly she knows before Brant even gets the nod from the back channel (whatever current iteration of media console co-opted into a little bit of corporate earwigging) and Brant will get a knock on the door at about eight. Through a ten centimetre door gap they silently transact: a bag of chilled piss for a fifty sheet.

Bumped from a cushy courier route in the subterranean transit routes linking core WorkSpace sites, and juggling an onerous paydown on a prefab coffin flat in Deptford, Brant had to take whatever they were offering. Hyperbole and managementspeak aside it turned out it was a straight up macjob: no dunk, no tank, not even entry level virch work in a sortinghouse – just bare minima recompense for a day’s labour. The GPS cords had brought him, on a grey flapping November morning, to the decaying sixties pile that used to be the south London UK Border Agency office.  An anachronistic flyblown ruin in the gentrified dormitory heart of Croydon, the PVC clad twin towers of Lunar House was part of the husked remains of the failed immigration policy of three successive Tory governments. In its time a more wretched hive of bureaucracy and petty evil was hard to find, and to Brant’s sensitive nose (unsullied with particulate intoxicants – he had more rarefied tastes) it seemed tinged with a subolfactory whiff of stale phlegm and a sour melange of thwarted multiculturalism.

The job sheet (no capitalisation here, Brant was pure grunt level for today, they don’t waste AI on temp cannon fodder) was as bald with its directives as a fast food table wiper orientation: Arrive at the jobloc no later than 07:55, locate the primary hard copy document storage area at Lunar House, utilise the heavy lifter and load the ancient paperwork into the supplied rubbish artic. All government documents of this type had long since been digitised (and similarly stored, never to be viewed again), so it was just a straightforward disposal job. So far, so blah. Brant had a fleeting tinge of interest when he saw the lifter, a fairly modern feedback exosuit with telescoping waldoes, but after the initial familiarisation the first schoolboy flush of tonka interest (like with a kangaloader and the pneumatic drill before it) faded into a lengthy, grubby schlep.

Lift – whrrrr, extend – bzzzzz, dump – thump. Rinse. Repeat.

After about an hour (surely it’s nearly elevenses?), with the air thick with paper dust and a yellow, pallid winter sun starting to break though the low cloud, Brant felt it was time to take a break. As with all jobs there is an art to skiving, the gripy tummy, the authoritative sheaf of documents, the nth cup of tea – the smoke break. With a WorkSpace temp job in the late twenties it was just as a prosaic, only the tech was different. Brant grebbed a icon gesture to his terabook and loaded a completely prohibited application. Another wengertool from the Operator back channel, TTIME was a low level disruption hack designed to temporarily (and transparently) corrupt the subroutines of the standardised haptic relays of WorkSpace hardware, the net result: mechanical paralysis disguised as a scheduled diagnostic. The exosuit slowly and twitchingly settled back into into its storage configuration allowing Brant to dismount without losing any extremities. His face a expessionless mask to fool the biometric scan from the helmet cam, his shaking hands were already prepping his gear kit; a snub nosed photomechanical dermal delivery laser winking with LED charge indicators in one hand, the other fumbling in a thigh pocket for the wrap.

Some time passes.

Brant never knew Croydon could be so fascinating, the tram route stop on Wellesley Road provided a phasic white noise delight from the regular stops, and even the white chemtrails in the leaden sky offered a compelling graphical puzzle to ponder.

Some more time passed.

The exosuit grumpily shifted, the first signs of anti-virals adapting to the TTIME hit; Brant was coming down while the exosuit powered back up and he girded his loins and synapses for the pre-lunch effort.

A scream.

Not a, “I’ve nail-gunned my foot” scream, and not a, “Who the fuck are you with the knife” scream; but a plainitive, exhausted wail that says, “Someone please, for the love of god, help me”. At the tram stop about a hundred metres from Brant the cylindrical length of the mid-morning pensioner express had just pulled into the stop. The doors had already opened and the screamer was thrashing weakly onto the platform. A slight female figure, wet headed and dressed in a severe grey tunic or dress analogue, Brant couldn’t make it out very easily through the dust laden air. She screamed again, blood a harsh scarlet tattoo on her left arm. She slumped to the ground, her knees cracking audibly on the recycled concrete, “Please someone fucking help me”. Brant at last broke his weak drug trance and started running. She heard the thudding of his footsteps and looked up, he saw a wrenched baby face of abject misery, he saw the seventy-two point logo on her dress: LEAVER.

It could have gone either way. A haven-distributed, largely tax-free windfall of over two hundred and fifty million Euros can have a delirious effect on anyone. To a centless decon worker from the crushing fields of Chittagong it was initially mostly beyond comprehension. A slightly more culture saturated target of benefaction would have gone through the standard stages of lottery burn rate. By the 30s LBR was an established, observable, behaviour meme – infinitesimally marginal lottery variants had been evolved and honed to maximise their pacification effect. Simultaneously micro-taxing and distracting, the reality show, the phone-in, the lotto, the raffled home, had all cohered into a mass participatory amalgam of hysterical, shrieking bullshit that underpinned a billion euro cable market, and a thousand cock sucking remora peripheral outfits eager to cash into one of the few growth markets left. Latterly legitimatised via a number of degree and post-graduate level courses in the subject, Lottery Studies had carefully identified the typical responses stages from the (typically) low income recipient of a lottery win.

Elation: Characterised by intoxicant consumption and list making.

Anxiety denial: OCD levels of concern about security of winner designator (ticket/estub/SMS etc).

Discretion flip-flop: Elation stage wild promises regretted in a fug of hangover.

Belief curve: Dawning realisation that the recipient can now purchase any amount of shiny crap they want.

Consumer phase: Profligate period of conspicuous consumption, characterised by scant regard for tastes, appropriateness or dimensional suitability for the pre-win living space. 

Janahara was not particularly intrinsically more discreet, or tasteful, or psychologically balanced than the average winner; it was just that nine years of a slum dwelling childhood, followed by nearly twenty five years of adulthood under the thumb of Iqbal Karim at the Madhom yard had equipped him with only a very specialised set of societal tools. Janahara could have discussed at some length the importance of territorial boundary maintenance in male-only habitation environments, or drone level workplace ingratiation techniques – he could not however name this year’s Big Brother contestants (possibly though he might have approved of the current show format – contestants were now vying for critical medical procedures for both themselves and their families). The result of his privation and relative isolation meant that Janahara was a kind of a cripple, mostly lacking in the ability to consume correctly. As a result his quarter billion Euros paradoxically lacked some of the impact that it might have for another more media reflexive winner. 

He had a shit phone, a small boat, a dumb computer that was mostly left switched off in his small office, and he had stayed in Dhaka. This had not made him invisible (off-grid living was a paranoid survivalist wet dream with no scope in the current reality), his boat was routinely pinged by the creaky Dhaka ANPR network when he went out (as were all legal vehicles), a record of his postaghar purchase was logged and easily accessible at the government database at Curzon Hall. But in a world of cheap, fat, wireless bandwidth availability Janahara was somewhat of a throwback. He used a quasi-sentient enabled maildrop that handled the vast majority of his email (he was no crackberry whore), and most of the time his shit phone was switched off. This made him a frustrating manager in some ways, but the face to face courtly business etiquette he had unselfconsciously developed won him a lot of respect with a lot of the old guard in the Dhaka business world, and the more contemporary wave of ultra-paranoid, physical key exchanging, tech start-ups admired the intrinsic security that his style allowed. As a result Janahara maintained an open office surgery at his postaghar clave every Thursday morning. There he met with reps from hydrodynamic and flood management outfits (both local and foreign), local Rotary groups curious about this business newcomer (in Dhaka you need to be established for over twenty years before you stop being the “new guy”); he also ejected about ten attendees each week claiming to be part of his family (a salvia swipe always took care of these familial claims but sometimes it made for good sport to hear the latest fictional claim on his wealth). So, in a relentlessly online and endlessly recursive semantically webbed world, Janahara has developed a curiously solid physical presence that has propelled him, in only several short years, to the forefront of the Dhaka small business world.

Janahara is not complacent, hard wired by poverty to assume nothing and expect little, he is hobbled a little by a tunnel vision that was born from the need to address the immediate – the next meal, the latest untreated infection, the uncertain ownership state of his slum hovel. This focus on minutiae has stayed with him – a pocket slapping nervous tic that sometimes blinds him to the larger picture around him. It took him a while before he got the message.

A dawn boat jam in Amligola, all the air horns inexplicably synchronising at once into a bellowing assonance: Jaaaaaannaaaaaaa.

A cute lead out human interest item on the local news showing a series of cloud formations shot by a butcher from the Gulshan market – each one a near perfect rendering of the Bengali glyph of the letter J.

A call from his bank manager asking him (with barely contained glee) if he was going to be keeping the recent despot of ninety million takas in his current account; and them the subsequent call from the same manager apologising for an unaccountable database error – there was no such deposit.

Eventually, it took the hijacking of an infomercial idoru to smash the message home to Janahara. Unable to sleep in the crushing humidity, he was blearily watching an endless demonstration of a pointlessly over-engineered kitchen mandolin on one of the shopping channels when the screen momentarily glitched. The beautifully rendered (ostensibly female) demonstrator dropped its plasticky gee-gaw and looked straight to camera:

“Janahara, read your fucking email.”

It turned out that saving the world was a bit of a let down, there was just so much crap to deal with. When he was at the Madhom yard (and when he had had the energy to think about it), it had seemed simple: Remove the bloatware management goons, up the base-level day rate by an order of magnitude and decree a 5-day working week. Not without a substantial amount of irritation he learned the same lesson that a thousand previous owner/managers had learned the hard way – the hundred and one ills and wrongs committed by the management are just the poorly articulated output of a deeply imperfect machine. It was almost a personal insult to realise that the vast majority of crushing and repeated inequities of management drip-down were the unthinking and retarded reflexes of a floundering behemoth. Not quite the blueprint that Janahara had in mind when he started building his own new world, but a clean slate helped, he was a quick study and he had made some headway. 

His concept was sound though (if unconventional by Dhaka standards): a four pod industrial postaghar with (unusually generous) living facilities for up to thirty workers. The postaghar structures had become the dominant urban structural form in Bangladesh in the last few years – the annual monsoon flooding combined with ever-increasing meltwater flow from the Himalayas meant that periodic flooding had eventually given away to a near permanent state of high water. The stilted postaghar dwelling was ideally suited to the brackish shallows that now covered over half of modern Bangladesh; a variable height telescoping stilt structure combined with state of the art meteorological forecasting meant that Janahara could cope with the floods and all but the worst weather that the Bay of Bengal could throw at him.

The cityscape of Janahara’s (dimly remembered) youth was long gone; the tuk-tuk a rare sight now, replaced instead with shoals of aluminium-hulled open top outboards – most with PV solar panel generators flashing blindingly in the sun, other less legal variants still touting wheezing two-stroke engines running on a mish-mash of hydrocarbon variants. Climate change and pitiful international funding had forced Dhaka to replaced its gated communities and shanties with another type of island – a squabbling archipelago of low atolls trading loudly and querulously in a meagre marketplace of diminishing fresh water, flu stricken fowl and custom code. 

Janahara’s postaghar compound was a beacon of hope in Dhaka; a three storey cutting edge design of genetically modified bamboo and smartweave providing a much needed source of employment in an insanely competitive job market. The latest cofferdam tech (one of the few growth areas in lowland Bangladesh) utilised by Janahara meant that the compound also provided an excellent venue for one of the best restaurants in town – the Baily Garden Restaurant, late of the now (mostly) submerged New Baily road. Janahara had cycled past the Baily countless times in his previous life, the smells wafting from the kitchen a torture to his empty purse and stomach. The Money had not made him profligate but he had indulged some extravagances – on the proviso of promised commercial resurrection he had bought, for a single taka, the entire outfit: the chefs, the waitrons, the décor, and had it transplanted to his clave – now he eats shukti and chapati whenever he wants.

Perched on his own stool in the corner of the second-floor restaurant balcony – four meters above the stagnant flood water – he can nearly ignore the stagnant nightmare that Dhaka has become and start to plan his future.