WorkSpace

 

Air quality permitting I try and hold the group sessions outside. When the particulate meter settles into a quasi-quiescent tick-tock metronome we bundle up the patients into hand-me-down NBCs and stretcher/carry/cajole our charges into the ambulance (an ungainly USMC anti-mine deuce and a half) and head south east to the poppy fields near the Khyber Pass. Since the mujahideen went synthetic savvy and the UNODC quashed production with the simple expedience of tactical nukes, the endless opium plantations have gone to seed. The orbital feeds now show a more colourful Afghanistan, like an ironic mockery of old empire cartography the landscape is a startling seasonal scarlet against the otherwise unrelenting high altitude view of the endless browns and greys of the Middle Eastern prairie.

 

The poppies hide the other prefab I maintain, a quiet place that is tolerably well preserved by fading UN logos and still functioning outer skin chameleon polymers. Ignored also because of its notional salvage value, the prefab offers us a valuable hiatus space, only occasionally spoiled by a few empty beer bottles and rank hobo piss. Appearances aside I still feel that there is useful work to be done here. We (mostly me) are one small part of what in quainter (more naïve) times might have been called a guilty conscience. But it’s pointless trying to anthropomorphise a corporation, the lesson I’ve learned from fourteen months in field is that WorkSpace is nothing but deliberate. Unencumbered by the human flotsam of pity, or empathy, or consideration, the WorkSpace behemoth moves deliberately and with perfect self focus.

 

The Combat Revenue model is a well worn, well practiced algorithm that allows for the faintest expressions of largesse at carefully determined intervals. The CR tacticians noticed early on in shock and awe profiteering that they had to allow for a degree of mercy, an amelioration of take, to maximise their returns. It seemed that even the best insulated corporate psyche quailed eventually in the one way bazaar of war.

 

This is where I came in – one small articulation (a feeble prosthetic nod to decency) of the post-war official Workspace Health and Reconciliation programme. Like a shot in the arm of battlefield stimulant, we had an amazing first year in Jalalabad – epic funding, baksheesh up the wazoo, access all areas – even for a Guardian reading tosser like myself it was hard to resist local government sanctioned largesse…This year’s been rather different, we are no longer the flavour du jour, by October WorkSpace PR had already moved onto a free HIV-immunisation programme for the Cape Town townships, and the scooped torsos and cleanly delineated stumps of the organ thieved were old news. Funding dropped to less than ten percent of year one, we lost most of the international team, the patient suicide rate soared, we moved to the prefabs in the car park and I lost the one decent camp bed left in southern Afghanistan.

 

We still have the poppy prefab though, and on a spring day with the early red petals tinting the view, we make some useful progress with our crippled coterie. Zalmai in particular loves the plantation; he knows that there is nothing to run into, the worst he can expect is a turned ankle in a rabbit hole. It’s become a tradition, as soon as the ambulance hits the bumpier surface of the gravel road leading to the prefab, Zalmai grabs my sleeve and turns his eyeless face to mine (a mute plea I can never resist) and points to the ambo door. I slow the truck and punch the door release.

 

Zalmai hoots and leaps, rolling easily on his left shoulder, the poppy buds leaving sticky resin on his crappy jacket and brown dust and early sun forming a glowing corona around his thrashing form. Then he’s up, running, arms outstretched, a child’s aeroplane freedom – a thing of beauty compared to the adult fetishism of war hardware that Zalmai unconsciously mimics. The Afgani children that I had met all seemed to share an uncanny ability to imitate the clanks/drones/rumbles/snicks/clicks of the American armour they had grown up with all their life. Zalmai wheeled, turned, pitched and yawed across the poppy field filling the air with a pitch perfect echo of an A12 tankbuster on afterburner, punctuating occasionally with the bumblebee gargle of the chin chain gun.

13^th January 2031

There is a certain weary comfort to a Monday morning here; despite the horrors in the prefabs and the faintly gamma-positive sleet pocking the poly roof of my office, I take some solace from the generic, familiar schlep of the starting week.

I had been up for three hours already, a nagging occipitalis ache dragging me neck first from an uneasy sleep on my surplus noncom cot. In contrast to my usual fractious, broken dreams, my office looked the same as always – a small pokey appendix epoxied to the back of the main ward. One small desk, one half destroyed chair – the seat as hard as permafrost, one semi-opaque sheet of plastic masquerading as a window, one extremely modern laptop – my sole luxury – it’s probably the single most expensive item in a hundred kilometre radius. There’s over a thousand carbon and partially silicon based entities within effective sniper fire range that would cheerfully kill me for it, but so far I think I’ve kept it a secret. A beautiful distillation of thirty years of west coast technofetishism, the computer fortunately doesn’t look anything like a computer does here in the technological doldrums of the Middle East – they still coo over a Macbook in these parts.

I have no fixed schedule here, but many demands on my time. My charges have the sweet plaintive demands of the truly helpless, raggedy stick and bone shapes only faintly tenting the rough blankets that are the only bedclothes available in the chilly main ward of the hospital. As usual I make a morning tour of the ward, a depressing euphemism for a shuffling survey of the two small bays that are the full extent of the hospital. Zalmai is awake - I’ve never seem him asleep – his sightless head tracking every small sound I make as I negotiate the defunct medical clutter he insists on heaping on and around his bed, a pitiful hedge against further pain. We found Zalmai about a month ago; he had crawled over twenty kilometers from the Mahipah Pass to the suburbs of Jalalabad. I was led to where he lay by one of the filthy interchangeable urchins who hang around the compound and who know we will pay a few afgani for information on the latest unfortunates to stagger out of the western mountains. Zalmai had heard me coming, the chill winter morning air telegraphed my approach clearly to his undamaged ears. Mewling pathetically he had scrabbled backwards, bloodied palm prints darkening the cracked, dried mud of the grubby no man’s land of the road verge. He looked up at me – his excised, bloodless, empty eye sockets somehow a much worse horror than the terrible battle gore I had seen and treated – they had taken his eyes.

The Pardis Hospice is a mean, swingeing, annex shoehorned into the small space that used to optimistically be called the Jalalabad Hospital main car park. Now a gomied dumping ground for shrapnel ruined medical equipment and discarded prosthetics striking improbable vogues, the park is also home to our three ex-NATO inflatable medical tents. Transitory structures long past their half-life, the prefabs are home to that most contemporary of war victim – the organ thieved.

We’ve been here for a little over three months and I’ve already seen, treated, consoled and sometimes watched die, over seventy victims of the mountain gangs. It’s a hard road from Kabul, and all are fair game; scooter punks who think they know it all, Medicins sans Frontieres newbies, economigrants nomading their way to the Pakistan border and back in tattered annual caravans of privation. They seem to prize Christian aid workers most of all. Last week a shattered Isuzu pickup dumped the legless, not yet lifeless, torso of a Jesuit priest right at the entrance to the main prefab, he was also missing his eyes, and as we found out later, both his kidneys and liver. He died with his eyelids pinned back, never saying a word, his fists hiding a crushed rosary. The ones that live are harder to bear, so many stories of whitewashed caves, dentist chairs, chugging Honda generators, blank, black eyes – and so much pain. Oddly, these surgeons are curiously attentive to the aseptic technique, only a handful of our patients ever seem to develop opportunistic infections, and judging purely on surgical finesse, these butchers seem to wield their antique scalpels with aplomb.

The ward stirs as more breakfast grumblings join Zalmai’s quiet demands for flatbread and black tea. Several dislodged dressings add to the night fart miasma with the high sweet smell of putrefaction, and the splosh-clatter of a bed pan hitting the floor adds to the fun. I dispense some gloves, filter up and get to work.

Deep down in the WorkSpace corporate lexicon, somewhere between WashWord (ref: outbound content checks), and Weasel (mid management slang: derogatory) is: WASTE. Terminologies rated corporate pivotal (i.e.: relating to criteria rated indistinguishable from the basic genetics of the WorkSpace raison d’etre) are always fully textually capitalised, and are mandated to remain so always. WASTE (implying a keen imperative to avoid profligacy) is one of the big three, one third of the corporate triadic indivisible from the notion of obedient, implacable progress within the eternal seminary of WorkSpace. The other two elements of this permanent trinity are: MORE (see WorkSpace orientation pack 101) – nestled next to Move (as in employment relocated laterally, downward or outward); and NOW (N.B.: requests for definition expansion may cause unemployment).

The notion of WASTE, in the frugal corporate environment of the mid 21^st century, is the number one crime committable at WorkSpace. Worse than cross departmental conjugal encounters, worse than overstocking, worse than non-sanctioned laddering – even worse than leaving at five-thirty - is WASTE, the waste of resources, of time, of reputation, of watts, and of people. To commit to WorkSpace was a tacit acknowledgement that your usefulness would be extracted in any and all ways possible.

There exists at WorkSpace a certain schizophrenia, a schism between the need for a perfectly balanced equation of staffing overhead and value for money, and the irritating need to occasionally acknowledge the existence of non-sanctioned WorkSpace qualities that happen to be attached to a personnel who’s skill sets are critical to WorkSpace activities. The WASTE imperative cuts both ways – sometimes the normally implacable criteria of WorkSpace has to accommodate the corporatively undesirable.

A mote in the eye of WorkSpace: a reluctantly retained pool of unfortunates that labour mostly unseen in the notional below-stairs of the WorkSpace household, a collection of squabbling night gaunts that makes the average middle manager shudder with distaste. Within this morlockian sub-grouping there are layers upon layers. Like a sour, lumpen layer bobbing to the surface of a misfit sea, rise the programmers – nearly a century of marginal adherence to authority and with a sublimely refined sense of technologically derived superiority, these slash dotted cryptographers have a jealously guarded space at the top of the subterranean ziggurat of the WorkSpace unwanteds. Tersely and reluctantly blurting meagre chunks of spoken word, their ascendancy is a grumpy one, bolstered only by a daily decrementing knowledge base – paradoxically AI has become the number one enemy of the coder, making the retro-spectre of the robojanitor an ever-encroaching reality. WorkSpace programmers are not pretty, not charming but for now, firmly ensconced in their garretted codeclaves, are relatively insulated from the reflexively Machiavellian machinations of corporate culling.

The strata of the disenfranchised are dense and complicated with a multitude of carefully hoarded sub-distinctions playing secondary, tertiary, quaternary fiddle to the programmer underlords. Fagging for these coders are the support staff, separated from their own boot strapping to full coder status by the pressures of a draconian shift pattern and eternally bleating end users. These unfortunates, their mean skill set and knowledge base outstripping most of the programmers, are destined to wearily heft the hod for their salary augmented brethren and still cater to the more rarefied drones above stairs. As useful as they are though, this B-list supporting cast is subordinate for a reason – without the certification (an expensive process) and the right sort of education, the support staff remain always as an abstraction layer between the lofty declarations of management and the chilly, monosyllabic world of the coders.

Compared to the relatively rare sight of an assembly worker though, the support worker is like a prince among men. Even in the largely automated, EPZed, manufacturing behemoth that is WorkSpace Actual, people (dismayingly) remain sufficiently adaptable and malleable to be used, on occasion, for actual manual labour (of course, daily, thousands of ant-like workers still wear their developing world hands down to stubby mittens against the combine that feeds the collective maw of the eight richest nations on earth, but here we’re talking about the relatively privileged privations of a entry level assembly worker in north Wales). The lumbering worker, swaddled in a bulky EVA suit that doubles as a crude dunk tank, may catch a fleeting glimpse in virch (never in RL) of one of the support seraphim as they transiently exchange data about a shared project. Even in the relatively egalitarian environment of high tech, class is maintained; the grunt on the factory floor (notional of otherwise) may ask a question of the upstream colleague, they may receive an answer, it may sound cogent and reasonable – but it never clarifies – a self sustaining pattern of courteous deinformation fed faithfully down the food chain.

Undercutting them all though, with a tacitly acknowledged, supra-negative social rating, is the runner. Even in a near-perfected virtual world that mirrors the actual, with a high speed cross-country network of fledging maglev trains, and high bandwidth total network coverage, WorkSpace anachronistically still finds need for the physical picking-up-of-something-and-the-taking-it-somewhere-else. WorkSpace is physically vast, a sprawling, kanedaesque organism that straddles the bulk of mainland Britain. Linked both with wireless connections and older cabled synapses, WorkSpace sites are also connected with a proprietary network of decommissioned sewage tunnels that act as conduits for documents, prototype tech-chunks and people (dead and alive) who absolutely must be transported and cannot be trusted to systems managed by alien corporations, how ever capable. Down in the sewers the runner is king, a lycraed and kevlared corpuscle operating a range of silent, deliriously fast modes of semi-autonomous vehicles that never stop, upon pain of employment termination and mechanical recycling. Bottom feeders they may be but to a certain type of borderline psychotic individual, the thought of piloting a hydrogen cell tricycle through a subterranean warren at 200 kmh+ is nothing but a little bit of heaven.

A closer focus: A shaved skull punching a slipstream through the warm, humid air of the primary London/Bristol WorkSpace transit artery. From behind globular, orange tinted IR goggles, large, unblinking eyes stare into the vanishing point of an endless underground tunnel, a bioluminescent flicker as the hundred metre markers blur by on either side. The hum of the fuel cell rises an octave as its pilot up shifts – Brant is late. Like a lot of bullshit ideas, it had seemed like a good idea at the time. With contract employment pre-approval based on a 5 year+ platonic relationship with a trusted WorkSpace operator, and three years central london courier experience, it was, ostensibly, a no brainer. Solitude: Brant was a self confessed misanthrope (but not a terminal one). Money: A WorkSpace half-year runner contract paid double what any other open air job could bring. Gear: Simply, WorkSpace had the best kit.