WorkSpace

Emotional Machine

Dateline: 08/06/2026

08:40
Today is the first day in my new Job, it arrives soon. The induction epack told me a courier was scheduled to arrive before nine.

09:13
The Job’s here. A big white domed shell made from industrial maize bespattered with a million logos and non-tamper user invalidation warnings. It wishes me a good morning and advises that I have two minutes to position it in my preferred location before it uses its executive override to decide for itself; it goes in the windowless backroom.

09:37
My coffee’s cold; I’ve just had the induction overview, seven precise minutes of neutrally toned but implacable machine directive. I’ve got twenty-two and a half minutes to prepare for the morning session. I’ve already been informed that my atypical acknowledgement time is only just within parametric operational norms, and in addition my galvanic response is not that of an eager new employee. I want to tell it to go fuck itself but the realtime EmployeeValue(d) feedback icon blinking in my HUD suggests (requires) a temperate reply. I go and get ready.

09:54
It’s not nice: The analgesic grey goo slops unpleasantly between my buttocks, and the convene pinches my pubes uncomfortably. I look with some dismay in the bathroom mirror at my Lycra sheathed body – casual Friday it ain’t.

10:01
The Job’s got me now; cradled in the smartweave I’m rapidly becoming what the faintly prudish user manual calls, “orifice enhanced”; this is much worse than my previous Job which had a certain end-of-week slacker approach to toilet breaks. New Job looks like it’s gonna fuck and suck me 247 until the work’s done. The solid waste catheter insinuates itself nauseatingly into my colon but the grey goo does it job and all I feel is a distant sense of mild violation; the urine convene thank god still requires a final manual hook up. The WorkSpace interface is a firmware upgrade on my existing HUD so I dodge a bullet there; a retrofit nictitans by an eager young AI is not on my top five fun list. First meeting’s at 10:17 so I take the hit and tell the Job to dunk me.

10:13
It’s alright for a Job I suppose; we’ve just had out first induction chat, it’s typically gender neutral but personable enough, I decide to call it Babs (well, for 9 seconds that is until a querulous monitoring subroutine informs me of inappropriate anthropomorphisation). I suppress a sigh and request insertion into WorkSpace. I hate fucking Mondays.

——————-

Non-binding agreement

DownTime overlays as my clock rolls past 16k seconds. The haematic assay has determined that a rest period is appropriate, Babs initiates the shunt.

A curt text horiscroll rudely bumps the load screen though:
“Mandatory KPI overview scheduled in 3200 seconds, please ensure dunk readiness to facilitate prompt processing”.

I sigh inwardly (my control over autonomic displays of physical frustration is long practised and nothing gets through the loyalty buffer); I suppose it had to happen sooner or later, nearly two weeks in with new Job and no direct avatime yet with management – I was going to have to justify my existence to the man.

DownTime passes pleasantly enough, three thousand seconds isn’t really long enough to disinter so I access some newsfeeds and toggle a wank to take the edge off, Babs oversees tumescence and the subsequent refractory management; I come almost absentmindedly.

Clocktime rolls out of DT and the pre-load delenitive sharpens my anticipation for the upcoming review. Transition to WorkSpace Corporate is immediate; obviously gentle staging environments are considered a waste of bandwidth for newb peons.

“Your Job reports satisfactory performance thus far, but has offered two advisory punitives with regard to borderline bloodchem indicated potential disloyalty spikes. However your probation period permits a certain degree of orientation latitude so Corporate suggests continuing employment for the time being; you are fortunate.”

(A distant ache in my bowels as the waste catheter shifts with mass peristalsis suggests otherwise). The reviewer is a blandly coded androgynous avatar, they’ve only bothered to code up a head and torso and one arm to mitigate the possibility of the reviewee attempting to hack the personality channel.

“We are also required to inform you of changes to the remuneration resource allocation mechanism (RRAM). As of the termination of this meeting all performance related exchange collateral awards will now be allocated across the full resource spectrum. In addition to KPI indicated replenishment of nutrients, energy, non-work leisure media and travel entitlement; WorkSpace is initiating an Hgb programme. This exciting new development in employee resource management utilises blood oxygen efficiency to reward hard workers with a welcome boost of productivity where it most matters, at the molecular level. Extensive research has resulted in this purer synthesis of the desired WorkSpace work ethic: Performance begets performance. The Hgb programme will automatically eradicate the laggard via the simple expedience of diminishing productivity returns. It is simple, Operator, work hard and in very real terms your work life continues.”

I swallow queasily; avoiding an emergency ejection from a Job into a lightless, cold residence module without a dataconnect is a fiendishly powerful motivator. I nod and sign off on my understanding via a standard pheromone expression. Corporate spits me back out to WorkSpace Primary and I urgently greb the next job in the queue.

——————-

Job

Forget food pills, flying cars, everclean jumpsuits and moon holidays – what we got (if we’re lucky) was a Job.

They got some things right – cranial inputs and interface shunts, weakly omniscient AI, fully realised immersion environments: so fucking what. The dependency principle is ever present – data access, comfort, presence, credibility, fiscal viability: all predicated on the maintenance of a stream of fragile income. And at the mercy of a diminishing number of giga-nationals; like the autonomic twitching dermis of a dozing bovine, one errant spasm from these behemoths can snuff you out: PRESS 2 TO SPEAK TO OUR RECONNECTION TEAM…

Its 2028 and the framework, the very tenets of my existence totter uneasily on a creaking Heath Robinson framework of queasily integrated utilities. A deeply fragile interconnected system of dependency, only working because everyone participating ignores the feeble underpinnings of a tissue thin redundancy; the ever present threat that with one system sneeze we could slip into a runaway cascade event of scarcity.

For some of those fortunate enough to be gainfully employed we have the Jobs. AI, it transpired, is imminently doable; it was just a question of getting some sufficiently self-referenceable applications to bootstrap their next few iterations and job done: morally ambiguous, wholly alien minds bumbling around in their tanks like a bunch of Hawking savants. So what do we do with them, parallel link them to examine the Godhead, implant them in a generation ship, redesign the free market; no, they run the Jobs. Admittedly, they don’t use the full fat, transcendent-capable, Examinds – we get the hobbled, dog-like intelligences of middle management – competently running the Jobs with adequate efficiency, minimal notions of betterment and a depressing penchant for lackadaisical encouragement: good doggy, have a biscuit.

My Job (illegally nicknamed Babs if you recall), is a fairly typical semi-permanent example, i.e.: it uses utility hook ups on site; (some models are self contained, using concentrated organic feedstock [read: user waste], an atmospherics water extractor, and third gen infraPV for electrical power). Babs resembles an old fashioned self-supporting garden hammock, albeit one made from carbon struts, chromogenic display panels, a xenograft meat sling and other paraphernalia exotica.

Jobs have one primary role: the maximisation of efficient work time – the culmination of a carefully calculated augmentation/productivity algorithm. Entry is machine assisted and involves a considerable degree of prep time, not least because of the average immersion duration is 40K seconds and any wrinkle in your caul can rapidly becoming an unbearable irritation. The immersion sac is proto-sentient (slaved to Babs) and can adapt to most human basic body types (however WorkSpace policy means that endomorphs need not apply). Nutrients and hydration are supplied via femoral shunts; waste management is via a couple of less than agreeable technologies I think I have already mentioned. Once ensconced in the meat sling immersion is fully automatic, the dunk quality is sufficiently excellent so as to engender a degree of physical censorship – the body goes away, no longer enCased and a fifty year old dream takes flight. This is the payback; the 1K second pre-shift orientation period is sublime; gravity nixed, body nulled, the comforting pseudo-embrace from Babs, my favourite leisure Map scrolling in exquisite rez and full surround sound – flying over an endless landless world, teasing the air currents with boosted senses, a dream made real.

Bing. Bong. Bing. Re-entry in 5, 4, 3 …reality reassertion. Shift begins.

——————-

Morality Gap

Abstraction is one of the main efficiency tools employed by WorkSpace. Their pet AIs have exhaustively evolved a number of stratagems that ensure that any task, big or giga, can be pared down to a bland and abstract dataset for distributed processing.

Adopting a decentralised marquis cell structure but augmented with a panopticon omniscience, WorkSpace ingeniously ensures efficient data processing, the risk reduction of corporate responsibility, and yet retains a full and robust capability for the individual recrimination of its component drones. This approach also has the added benefit of rendering even the most morally or ethically bankrupt dataset into a set of abhuman abstracts that can be easily and amorally processed: see no elephant, hear no elephant.

If you work long enough with a Job, you start to become both more and less than what you were before, a Stelarcian legacy through a corporation filter. In exchange for what was only recently still laughably called, “rights”, you re-convince yourself daily that it’s a good trade: comfort for painless morality surgery. The technology as always is a double edged sword – cutting less but hurting more; my augmented genticulate nucleus can (for briefly sustained agonising periods) capture and encompass vast arrays of data, very useful for mass nodal identification; but generally at a conscious level I am unaware of the real world nature of the information I am working on, (corp sanctioned chemcontrol plays a large part here of course). Job feeds me the necessary semiotic triggers to process the data abstracts without the need for a forebrain overview, thus obviating any pesky ethical intrusions or value judgements.

However, you do any job long enough and you will work up some home-grown hacks (for example, using some quasi-legal Job schematics, I identified the primary oxazepam feed-line, this is a usefully accessible standard medsupply tract and can be easily kinked…). As a result I have intermittently, a distressingly good awareness of my recent work:

Some examples I have gleaned from recent grebs:

· Projectile trajectory analysis of free smartfire policy in Beydokht.

· Viability projections on fiscal audit-linked enforced repatriation of non-EU members from mainland UK.

· Acceptable mortality rates for the proposed TansAt tunnel, with appendices relating to the anticipated level of public distaste if Greenlander Inuits are employed exclusively in high risk areas, (see also: potential Danish sovereign outcry).

· Examinations of the still yet to be completed ID card project for the United Kingdom; complete with requests for analysis for possible obloquial reduction initiatives.

And on it goes without a murmur of objection – a steganographic triumph.

Job and I are designed to be the perfect distillation of the blank faced prole; labouring in a post-feudal serfdom; our combined hybrid senses, so acute in many ways, only dimly making out the hooded, powerful lights in the keep on the hill above us.

Greb on.

——————-

Null Cipher

I’m not going to tell you my name.

That’s SOP I’m afraid for your average WorkSpace employee; constant surveillance tends to breed a certain phobic reaction to divulging personal information unnecessarily. This reticence has a certain pitiful bravado about it; ethnographers early last decade first noticed this trend towards self-censorship on the lowest corporate rungs. Call centre staff in the double oughts, while exposed to the full merciless blast of the futile howling public, instinctively and rapidly learned the power of true names; the substitution of “Operator #MT128” or similar became commonplace – the only privacy bastion (savagely protected) left in a terminally denuded workspace.

Surveillance, as in all areas of WorkSpace policy, is a refined and efficient process. Drawing (consciously or not) on the vast legacy of human social control techniques: the small hours Stasi door knock, the betraying signed confession, the random drug test, the quiet word after work, damoclean JIT delayering, time theft accusation – WorkSpace operates a multi-layered and sleepless approach to chattel management. Divide and conquer is the policy here; engender a sufficiently pervasive low level constant anxiety and the ants will police themselves. On dit chatter insists that leaked WorkSpace policy docs show that on any given month anywhere up to 47% of management dunk time is spent on refining employee control policy.

Unhappily for WorkSpace, they have also determined that approximately five hours solitary dunk time is about the maximum period that optimum efficiency can be maintained for; it transpires that those pesky humans need a modest hiatus from the grind, and this includes contact with other likeminded partners. Like the smoke filled box rest rooms of a 90s Tesco, WorkSpace have not-so-generously set aside some meagre tank space for these closely metered rest periods; there isn’t time to disinter so breaks are always virch – and always brief.

RestSpace is pretty underwhelming: there’s a moderately flexible sandbox, a basic leisure bumptop and a meta-immersion tank with a 300 seconds per-use limit. It’s a bit like being in a C20 Disneyland haunted mansion during a maintenance day – other partners flit in and out existence, dependent on break time duration and their own inclination to interact, temporary sandbox ephemera float loosely around the virtual space as your beleaguered colleagues listlessly tweak and retweak a corporate’s idea of relaxation tools.

But, still we find time, as humans always do, to make connections, friends, meaning. No one knows who started it but the bumptop is used almost daily as a covertext for a joke-of-the-shift. We take it in turns, never by pre-arrangement but rather via some sort of rotational subliminal consensus; the bumptop is permitted by WorkSpace to access a very proscribed and narrow selection of URLs, it is through this small selection of sites that we thread a narrow tube of back channel bandwidth that only we can access. A simple example: Using listings on Tazbar as a carrier, and a pre-defined object positional on the bumptop to triangulate the specific text in question, the joke payload can delivered with good levels of security; it’s a bit laborious but to date no one to our knowledge has been detected via this channel. A couple of recent examples:

An intelligence test was conducted recently at WorkSpace involving variously shaped and sized holes and pegs. The conclusion states that the WorkSpace employees can be divided into two groups: extremely smart and extremely strong.

Teacher asks his class to produce a word that starts with the letter “A”; Vovochka happily raises his hand and says “Asshole!” The teacher, shocked, responds “For shame! There’s no such word!” “That’s strange,” says Vovochka, “the asshole exists, but the word doesn’t!”

Unfortunately, the second example does rather undermine the point of an elaborate stegotext; we’ve just started working with a guy from Almaty called Leonid, so no guesses there – I give him a week.

——————-

Over Unity

Tuesday, Blue Shift, 23:00: Confluence hour.

Everyone does Confluence, the drones, the infrabeasts, even the management, even the brass. Parallel processing: new old-school – ponderous neurones and porridgy grey matter, the common muck of organics, always pluckily and inexplicably outdoing their carnal heritage.

The Examinds are the other half of the equation, the shiny future bit tugging their forelocks above the shockwave of the earthly light cone. Fuck knows what they think but for the time being they seem to be cooperating; SciSpace continually providing reassurances of their ongoing compliance.

The Jobs form a braided, squirming callosum that brings it all together, dimly yet efficiently herding their squdigy cargo into an ungodly, clunky alliance; dendritically meshing the many into one.

Anyway, ugly as it sounds (and it is; stuff always gets through the baffles), it works. Quantum computers work but they’re generally a government toy; they cost hectic money and tend to impinge on share holder value. WorkSpace was smarter; they coined the term total employment, a concept as ugly as it sounds. You signed up, you do the work – whatever it is – suck it up drone. You say: not contractually obligated, they say: 100 year mortgage. Confluence is the ultimate work ethic; a forced synthetic emergence replicated weekly – the hunch harnessed.

For the average Job ensconced drone it’s a generally passive experience, it’s not like they want your opinion, just your processing capacity. Job handles the integration; the scalp SQUID is pretty unobtrusive and painless, and a large chunk of your personality gets offlined by a proprietary drug cocktail. Confluence comes online quickly after that; like a permanent déjà vu it’s mostly involuntary but pleasant enough, but occasionally there is the sense of a huge paw reaching down to you and squeezing out your usefulness.

Quaint ethics aside, Confluence can kick arse, last week we re-sequenced DNA for 4 different extinct wheat variants; (bread still maketh man – yeast, soy and shale never really did emerge from the cook book of golden age scifi).

It’s only an hour and a passive one at that, a brief hiatus from unresting machine insistence, but its no pub lunch.

WorkSpace: Working to make you free

——————-

Stick

Orientation, Section 3, subsection 3.4:

Fealty demonstrations:
WorkSpace employees (*partners) herewith agree (ref, permalink: contractual obligation) to the following expression(s) of corporate allegiance to WorkSpace All. To wit:

3.4.1: Corpus support (CS): as a new partner you are expected (ref, permalink: contractual obligation), to provide ad hoc and/or on-demand corporeal support to the corporation. This contribution will be at the absolute discretion of WorkSpace All, and may be exclusively interpreted ex parte (ref, p-link: WorkSpace Legal > partner glossary).

3.4.1.1: CS Example 1:
Confluence (ref, p-link: Cerebro-managment/info-processing. Templink: anecdotal)

3.4.1.2: CS Example 2:
OAI (ref, p-link: Organ Appropriation Initiative); a WorkSpace mandated (EU human rights override code: AK/78-E5J) organic contribution scheme. Encompassing the WorkSpace Total Employmen philosophy, OAI provides assured organic up-time for all partners. (Please note.: Post-surgical downtime is Job monitored and includes optional discretion for an annual leave deduction lien for unwarranted malingering).

——————-

Week End

Friday always hurts. Divestment is a bitch; Job does its best, a mild pre-exmmersion palliative analgesic plus some standard reality counselling hypnotics, but still, RL is always a grind at first. Gravity reasserts, data access is torturously slow, cooking – sheesh, and the sheer effort of having to interact on the poverty of the human-only level.

Coarse lumpen humanity everywhere you look. Brains, mouths and tongues forming (so slowly), the info-poor commerce on the pitifully narrow organic bandwidth that is people. Clawing dunk goo from your eyes at 19:02 on a Friday evening, you have to start to consider the gross coordination of survival until Sunday p.m. Still, a beer and a snuff later, things start to look up a little; you remember that you have some friends, a life (of sorts), even a favourite bar, your groin twitches as well – endocrinologically your brain stem remembers other pleasures as well.

Priorities: A shit, a shower, a shave, some eat. The microwave dings and you boot Backchannel; piggybacking the WorkSpace portal, Backchannel is another small stolen secret in your privacy arsenal. Horded compulsively by WorkSpace peons this is an essential part of weekend planning; ducking (we think) the social control heuristics and content checks used by WorkSpace; Backchannel is a home-grown hiatus, a carefully tended killfile allotment oxbowed off from the rest of the corporate net. I place a multi-shout to my crew (keywords: booze, gear, tactility) and prod listlessly at my plasticized macaroni cheese.

21:00: It’s fucking packed at Soylent (20^th anniversary of Heston’s death, should have remembered). I greb dibs on the next round and scan the crowd, immediately I clock the smooth dome of Brant’s head, bobbing a good 20 cents above the crowd denominator, he spots me at the bar: Christ, human contact feels good; the hug lasts a good 30 seconds, the first pint a good ten seconds less.

23(ish). We manage to get a booth at MAC, vectored in on a wave of carelessly squandered first week pay and a slightly hysterical group psychosis. It’s a good vibe, no rugby shirt twats or Shermanites; the music is good too – lots of bass, not too loud and not so achingly hip that it’s unrecognisable. Cale breaks open a cheekily secreted wrap and the bubble comes down – that warm amniotic of inclusion that only good friends, good drugs and the weekend ahead can bring.

02:07. (I know this because from my prone perspective on the damp concrete I can see the LED clock high on the gherkin above). There’s a rich salty taste in my mouth and there seems to be something wrong with my jaw, my arm hurts too and I can’t feel the reassuring lump of the PDA in my back pocket. Worse yet, I can see the orange blur of a WorkSpace Security logo and the bland syntax of a construct voice advising me to keep still.

A downspiral montage:

• The sting of the intoxicant analysis.

• The drone of the duty sergeant.

• The smell of vomit on myself.

• A sense of panic of shit yet to happen.

06:14. Home again, FWIW. I’m still holding a wadded, bloodied dressing to my lip; my head’s fucking killing me, I’m on my own. RL can go fuck itself; I pop a valium and crash.

——————-

Bullet Point Time

The cell wall fills my entire view, the membrane soaring gelatinously towards the notional roof of the Tank. 10,000 seconds in full virch schlepping my way through several TB of endoplasmic reconfig – basically fixing someone else’s sloppy code. The client is waiting and I’m suffering hard with the basic incompatibility of overdue deadline with Monday morning apathy.

WTF – the Tank construct stutters, then freezes completely. Un-fucking-heard of. Like an old movie from the Sci-Fi Classics channel the entire space looks like it’s been embedded in a crystalline block, even the Prims just hover mid-mod. I greb for the most basic root commands – nothing. Even the eject mnemonic doesn’t work. Panic starts to kick in – I can’t leave work.

I toggle Job on the suit channel, at last – a response.

“What is your status, operator?”

“I’m stuck Babs!” I forget nomenclature protocol in my panic.

“Stand-by, operator”.

The tank view vanishes and suddenly – the system’s in a hurry. “Job?” No answer. Bright white light – a staging Tank; I’ve not been in one of these since orientation. A text-only horiscroll flows silently across my HUD.

…view selection, operator. Please await transition to WorkSpace Prime. Mandatory review selection, operator. Please await transition to WorkSpace Prime. Mandatory review selection, operator. Please await transition to WorkSpace Prime. Mandatory review selection, operator. Please await transit…

Shit. A period of nothing. Then sharply awake. A chemical seesaw to keep me both unaware and horribly alert. The latter day equiv of a management meeting request on a Friday afternoon (enjoy your weekend!).

I’m spat into Prime with pinned pupils and a wholly contrary sense of cooperation (thanks, Babs, you fucking Quisling). Prime reception (serf-side) is, impressively for a virch space, a grotty little vestibule. A poorly rendered CAVEspace running elderly code – a nine year old could do better these days. They’ve not even bothered with half decent lighting; its 27 cubic meters of 2^nd gen virtual reality, with the emphasis on virtual.

There’s someone to meet me. The sweetest avatar I’ve ever seen.

Purely androgynous, exquisitely rendered (I suspect a dedicated line), and an almond shaped face, no doubt capable of every post-human expression variable but currently fixed in an impassive mask, (Management Mid-Severity Expression #4R03N. *Denotes potential subject guilt, not yet legally provable).

“Tag this please, operator.” It pings me a standard lead-and-restraint script – SOP leashing for non-management in Prime, charming.

The management avie levitates a precise 10 centimeters and I reciprocate automatically. Reception fades out to the beautifully animated interior of Prime Tier 2.

Destination: Operator Reviews.

Gulp.

——————-

Orgone Grinder

WorkSpace Memo

• Date stamp: 22-06-2028, Time (EST): 23:47
• From the desk of Xiu Chen Wong; VP, Tech Overview for Job Maintenance (Europe)
• To all Job Operators, (Implementation notification commencing 01-07-2028, 00:01):

Please Note: As of July 1, 2028 WorkSpace is dropping all support for the Job firmware OS based on the H4DAPI open source kernel. This decision is based on a number of factors, including:

• The growing need for a closed source, securable operating code for the Jobs
• Reduced WorkSpace tolerance for the undesirable personality memes still present in the open source community
• Proprietary requirements for an OS that can better manage organic overstretch implications of Confluence and other Total Employment activities

As such, your Job’s will shortly be receiving the appropriate system reformat and rebuild necessary for the deployment of the core code of WorkSpace HapLIS; this is a wholly internally derived and built code set, custom developed for the specialised requirements of WorkSpace All. In addition, this upgrade offers the opportunity to conduct a hardware improvement for all Jobs operating in key WorkSpace sectors (N.B.: Excludes orbital operants). Enhancements following hard/soft upgrades will include:

• All Molly-class (v2.03) force feedback systems will be replaced with pseudo-organic, grey-goo compatible, full immersion true-true haptic systems. Keyed to dermal and ocular interface options this new system will permit over 97% RL equivalent feedback quality. Example: it will now be possible to manipulate micro environments/materials at the sub-1 micron level; this means true hands-on product awareness and prompt processing of critical shareholder value materials such as construction diamond.

• 3-D virch Tank capacity will be revised to mega-status, with up to one million cubic meter volume available for collaborative projects. Furthermore, Tank resolution finesse is now determined by fractal ranged algorithms based on the standard ocular augment of 18.2 x 10⁷ pixels, giving effective infinite resolving power to equiv-subatomic levels.

• WorkSpace has not forgotten employee leisure applications for the new technology. True sensory reproduction of previously inaccessible tactility options will now be available. In addition to the normal bumptop facilities available for downtime, a fully populated petting zoo will be online shortly. Recognising the long acknowledged psychological health benefits of pet interaction, you will now be able to enjoy the fur of the coypu, the slippery dermis of the eel, and other sensory delights. Book your slot now!

• Conjugal visits: exciting new developments in erogenous interface and direct autonomic patching means Job can now facilitate (monitored) break time virch visits from your nearest and dearest. The newly available SomaSpace will allow the natural expression of love to be part of your WorkSpace life (Hetero interface only currently available).

• H4DAPI will also permit the rollout of revised Reward/Discipline subroutines. Extensive WorkSpace research has shown the delays imposed in the reward/penalty response time result in a poorly articulated corporate->operator message. HapLIS deployment will enable near-immediate (positive/negative) sensory feedback to the operator resulting in definitive clear-message understanding. Similarly, the licensed PAVlove application will ensure greatly reduced repetitive (accidental or otherwise) misapplication of proprietary WorkSpace tools and resources.

All Operators will acknowledge receipt and understanding of this memo by 00:04 at the latest – pingback failure will result in forfeit of 10 kiloseconds of leisure downtime. Operators should also be aware that Job reformat will result in an RL divest of two days – WorkSpace is pleased to announce that for this period a series of team building away-sessions have been devised to further the coherence of WorkSpace efficiency and to better foster a happy working environment.

Check your skeds, guys.

See you there!

<>
Xiu.

——————-

Hyperunreal

I’ve never been to WorkSpace Prime (Tier 2) before, and frankly, it’s fucking weird. And not weird in a weird way; it’s just too normal.

We all do it, winding ourselves up daily with pocket fantasies about how Management are revelling in the glut of resource and matérial that their privilege brings; in our mind’s eye we see them rorting and cavorting in shift-less freedom like a Vegas winner cliché on a bed of paper money.

The reality, as always, is stranger and more banal then we could ever imagine. The gate to Tier 2 irises open and I follow the sublime avatar into the most unexpectedly prosaic scene imaginable. We’re in the bustling ground floor lobby of a large corporate headquarters; at the back wall is a long reception desk manned by three NPC zombies, faux-Doric columnar decorates the perimeter. At the entrance to the lobby, to our left (we obviously entered via an internal port), stand two metal detector arches (these must be visual analogues for basic guest entry authentication apparatus). A myriad of avatars flit across the huge space, occupying all three dimensions – a cloud of corporate seraphim; some tagged with visitor passes, others proudly demonstrating their place in the WorkSpace hierarchy with a mixture of livery, heraldry and synthetic pheromone tags. The floor is an elaborately rendered metahologram of the florid WorkSpace logo.

Involuntarily I follow my minder across the lobby floor, we ascend in a gentle arc towards the notional rear wall of the lobby space; obviously our ackles shit on lobby-level peons because we don’t even bother with basic Space etiquette and avoid other avatars on intersecting trajectories, we just cut through them – I am dimly aware of indignant pings failing to penetrate our shared firewall and then the view cut-fades to a very ordinary, much smaller lift lobby. A sign on the wall indicates we are on the 23^rd floor; poverty spec carpet analogue coats the floor. And then, bizarrely, we’re walking! Actually – really – perambulating. Absolutely no-one bothers with base human analogue movements in virch anymore; it’s a crazy waste of bandwidth and the time cost (time-theft as us operators know it) is so at odds with core WorkSpace ethics that I am agog.

I look around as we pass down a very RL-typical central office corridor, fabric cubicle dividers fanning off to each side. The degree and quality of the virch reproduction is staggering: coffee cup rings on desks, burbling water coolers, splayed staplers awaiting refill, furrowed brows peering at monitors(!?), a fucking photocopier – what is this place?

I ping the avie with a general broadcast interrogative (a WTF basically), it ignores me; just a repeat of the same text horiscroll rolls across my HUD “…Mandatory review…” I try to ignore it.

The walking continues and it starts to dawn on me, and I’m fucking outraged: these goons have been given the keys to the kingdom, they’ve clawed their Darwinistic way up the slippery shit stick of corporate achievement and this is what they spend their limitless data allowance and bandwidth allocation on: a repro of a shoddy second millennium office. Eschewing the sublime advances of near-perfect 3D virch representation, the paradoxically beautiful sight of corporate databases hewn in pure light, this is what they work in – an exquisitely rendered sty.

Fury whites out the ever present review anxiety, we reach a double boardroom door, veneered in cheap walnut. The avie inclines its head: I reach for the door handle. Fuck ‘em.

——————-

Quizling

There are five of them, all faceless, arrayed behind a bland blonde wood table. They must have applied some sort of management witchcraft review hack to my ocular feed; the rest of the office remains crystal, rendered, clear; but whenever I try to focus on their faces I get macula fuzz-out and a stab of pain in both eyes. Nice touch, even face to face, management interactions are a one-way info transaction. The fetch minder avatar fades out and I’m alone with the inquisition.

I’ve been perched on a high, 3 legged, backless stool; this has the combined effect of maximum exposure and discomfort, and also denies any sort of posture that could imply composure. The central reviewer avie speaks (I tag it as Inquisitor 1).

“Operator 1338, this is a mandatory, extra-ordinary employment review; it will not appear in the public performance review Space, it will not be accessible by your line Operator, it will not, at present, contribute to annual exchange collateral enhancement decisions.

In addition, any breach of confidentiality pertaining to this meeting to any sentient entity will result in immediate employment termination and Job expulsion; with attendant deletion of any personally accrued monetary (or otherwise) resources. Please acknowledge with a band-5 WorkSpace fealty ping.”

Fuck.

“I acknowledge.” What choice have I got, I toggle the ping and I note an immediate upgrade to my basic level 3 security clearance, this is getting weirder.

“Do you confirm that on Saturday night, 24-June-2028, you were engaged in multiple social intercourses, intoxicant enhanced, with your habitual extra-curricular peer group?”

Gulp.

“Yes, confirmed”.

“This board notes that during the course of this Saturday evening you became dangerously incapacitated due to the consumption of a random narcotics mix (see appended WorkSpace Security toxanalysis). As a result of this willful intoxication you put yourself in a position of vulnerability, and incurred a degree of peripheral, non-life threatening organic damage. However, more seriously, your actions, or lack of them, resulted in the loss of WorkSpace property, to wit: One iRex PetaBook. Physical device loss aside, what is of much more importance here is the loss of, and open access to, the data on that device.

Operator, the loss of this device has severe implications. As you are aware, all Operators are issued with PetaBooks after the completion of their 6-month probation period. Ostensibly a company benefit, the PetaBooks provide a useful personal node for data capture, bio-authentication ackles, employee tracking, downtime leisure usage and other standard WorkSpace activities.

However, the PetaBooks also provide a critical, distributed WBAN function for WorkSpace All, facilitating continent-wide wireless net access. The loss of your device has had a two-fold implication: One, there was, for 1.7 seconds, a net coverage loss in the EC1 cell – the result: a financial data loss in Krasnoyarsk natural gas transactions amounting to 3.2 billion Euros. And, two, a phage incursion from agents unknown into the WorkSpace net.

It is due primarily to this latter issue that we find ourselves convened today.”

Omigod. My Job flags me an adrenaline overstretch alert, I quash it reflexively – of course I’m fucking stressed!

Inquisitor 1 continues.

“Track-back analyses indicate that despite access to the proprietary data on your PetaBook, the net incursion would not have been possible without a degree of internal WorkSpace complicity. Your incompetence aside, the review board does not consider you a suspect in this infraction, ergo, another Operator is responsible. Your task now, non-optional and in immediate effect, is to assist with the identification and apprehension of this rogue WorkSpace element. To assist you with this task you will be fitted with a mobile Job prosthetic, I imagine you are familiar with the concept – your Job is going with you from now on.”

We had all read the specs; mobile Jobs are a skeletally bonded variant of the more cumbersome exo-unit we use daily, correctly integrated they apparently can assist with biofeedback analysis (a polygraph with shoes, essentially), provide enhanced net access and, if necessary, a degree of organic boost. We had all also noted a number of less conspicuous spec footnotes; this type of Job modification will also, where relevant (whatever that means), make WorkSpace mandated override decisions on the Operator, for example: diet enforcement, and the euphemistically named: loyalty action recommendations.

“Please note that this assignment does not in any way reduce your normal responsibilities to WorkSpace, nor does it, in any way, imply an enhancement to your current WorkSpace employment status.”

I was wondering about that, the replacement of the standard Job immersion apparatus with an internally integrated Job kink is usually the preserve of Prime management members. This is the good bit – I’m going RL mobile with Babs in tow. Everything else is a fucking disaster; I’ve been turned, trussed and stuffed – a stool pigeon equally cursed and blessed.

And for fucks sake, I’m still going to have to go on the team building sessions.

“A final note, Operator, the attendant fiscal loss incurred as a result of your carelessness has not been forgotten. The full amount will be salary index linked and payback amortized over your remaining lifetime, with an in perpetua ancestor clause active until debt completion.

Now, please report to WorkSpace Surgical.”

——————-

Centralia

Re: ASE Providence tower report (Blackheath)
“Surveillance Tower 4, East” ase_prov4E@ministryofjustice.org
Date: 2028-07-05, 16:39:27
To: WorkSpace Operator Monitoring (UK) Alejandro_fernandez@workspace.world

Surveillance summary report

Author: Tower 4, AI agent child (sentience rated: 0.63, non-intuitive)
Subject: WorkSpace employee (London Operators, teams 4-11) team building sessions
Location: Blackheath neo-gambrel leisure biome (SE3)
Date stamp: 2028-07-04
Report focus: Atypical employee behaviour (Filter: Known downtime anti-social conduct variants)

A.M. Session (start time: 07:30, end time: 11:45):
Operator 1338 (hereafter referred to as: N) demonstrated 4 distinct, separate incidents of aberrant, atypical behavioural modifications outside of his known comportment norms. As follows:

07:32
N greeted Xiu Chen Wong (VP Job Maintenance) with what appeared to be a gift (N.B.: Standard remote TraceGuard bomb sniffing protocol was actioned prior to object handover). Camera resolution was insufficient to precisely determine the nature of the gift; however, this agent considered an organic, fruit ovoid measuring 10.4 centimetres a low risk to aforementioned management personnel.

08:13
N volunteered to assist with setting up the first team building fun task. Laser microphone pickups indicate N directing above-normal volume encouragements to his team; facial expression recognition algorithms indicated resultant distaste emanating from 4 other team members (IDs appended).

10:01
During the refreshment break N avoided the sugar-rich brunch confections and authorised caffeine beverages. This agent noted that N consumed/imbibed homemade nourishment; audio pickups inferred from self-directed comments by N that it was partially soy based. This agent is unable to extrapolate the relevance of the following comment by N:
“You try fucking eating this swill, Babs – please let me have a donut”

11:13
N was involved in the resolution of a group infraction. During the third team building exercise of the a.m. period (cross-cultural Sino-Anglo business protocols: Correct repast techniques) an altercation between Operator 1278 and Operator 9812 broke out. This agent is not equipped with baseline human peer-bonding analysis routines and is therefore not able to comment on the following recorded audio:
“You pink feather slag; I saw the conjugal tank log”
And:
“Well, anyone that can’t last longer than 2 minutes even in virtual deserves all they get”
N was recorded admonishing these 2 operators, requesting that the discord participants discontinue their team harmony destruction. This agent witnessed an unprecedented level of authority cooperation by N, deferring appropriately to Xiu Chen Wong after he had defused the altercation (Advisory: Refer Xiu Chen Wong for additional leadership and fealty enablement training).
_________

(Plain text summary concludes. Please see appended LISP files for raw AI agent output/analysis.)

Further inquiries about this report should be directed to the Coffle-class AI overview committee at the MoJ (bootstrap@ministryofjustice.org).

Report concludes. Have a nice day.

——————-

The Defiant One

I don’t often get to see 05:30; thanks to Babs, early rises are now, not a normal part, but at least a regular part of what passes for my life these days.

My WorkSpace mandated morning regimen is delightful. A 90-second shower, maximum permitted temperature: 40 Celsius. Oatmeal: tepid. Coffee: decaf. Enjoyment: proscribed. I’m being overly harsh I’m sure; there are upsides: Clean clothes, a fading suit rash, no catheter, fresh-air, epic bandwidth. I have a desk now, a terminal, a chair with a cushion, quaint tea breaks; they’re cunning fuckers, management – we’re all animals when it comes down to it, who can really fight the amorphous propaganda of entitlement, peddling its everyday wares of creature comfort. I’m battling it still, but I’m amazed at this best kept non-secret of management voodoo. I spare a thought for my abandoned cohort of Job-riders; as far they’re concerned I got a promotion. Their collective incredulity is fair enough, who would have thought that feckless Operator 1338 would have felt the infinitesimal touch of Olympian fortune.

Frankly, I feel shit about it most of the time, consider: I haven’t been promoted, I’m really in deep shit, my co-workers despise me, and worst of all I’ve got to dig into their frail privacy to find some notional WorkSpace mole who may not even exist. A truly nefarious double edged sword; definitely a human touch, an AI, whilst wily enough, would never be so wilfully cruel.

Relations with Babs have, unsurprisingly, been rather cool of late. Never the best conversationalist, and now the recipient of its own WorkSpace sentience upgrade, my Job (now nestled disconcertingly, if undetectably, in my chest cavity and bonded to my major long bones) is an oppressively claustrophobic presence, a characteristic that was never evident in our pre-ascendant state. Post-surgical debrief did suggest that I would experience a new degree of Job zealotry (a Takamian phenomenology I am told, characterized by a strict interpretation of WorkSpace ethics), but this would diminish over time as our collective symbiote stabilizes. Yeah, fucking right – Babs has been a prick ever since the general wore off. Witness: my diet – I’d prefer a Chaplin boot. My sleep pattern – gulagtastic.

However, my pet martinet aside, I am forced to acknowledge the sheer hallucinogen (and paradoxically coherent) glory of the access I now have. Like a still-sticky emergent imago I revel in the freedom – the RL/dunk transition is now practically instantaneous. I flit between realities like a guilty ghost, impressions peeling off like a migrainous flicker book: WorkSpace Prime (virch) first thing in the morning (imagine a teeming tropical reef through a Third Reich filter), my neatly made bed, a palimpsest of newsfeeds (false colour embedded impressions from yet another Pulitzer driven war journo), my half-shaved face in the bathroom mirror (a slack jawed gaze of befuddlement), an internal snapshot of our collective bio-status, the faintest confusing hint of Babs newly emergent self-schema (stick drawing of a man facing the open sea), my rapidly cooling oatmeal on the kitchen table. Enough. I offline so I can finish my breakfast; my trembling hand clatters the spoon against my cereal bowl.

The first week in my ersatz management role has been humbling, and not in the good Gandhi way. As part as what the briefing construct amusingly (and anachronistically) called my “cover”, I would be obliged to attend standard junior management orientation at WorkSpace HQ (RL). It is explained to me (in some excruciatingly detail) that I am required to undergo this ignominious faux-training so that when I am passed back to my Operator cohort in shiny new management guise, I will be sufficiently convincing as their new Team Leader; and thus able to root out the traitor without fear of being rumbled. Frankly, I’m already sceptical about, a: the presence of this apparent hacker elite in my very own Operator clique, and, b: the truth about the existence of this so called traitor at all. Nonetheless, some stubborn part of my hind brain insists that it would actually like to keep eating for the indefinite future; so I get ready for work.

Looming inelegantly over the Gherkin, dominating completely the City skyline, WorkSpace HQ was one of the last great hopeful works of pre-nanotech architecture; clad improbably in a billion euros worth of carbon fibre it’s a monolith of pretension to dead construction techniques. 450 meters of awkward, staccato angles, it has become known, in Operator parlance, as The Gaunt.

So I found myself, Monday morning, 07:30, hovering nervously at the gaping maw of The Gaunt ground level entrance, clutching a brand new PetaBook and shifting uncomfortably in the unfamiliar rasp of street clothes. I spotted a nervous gaggle of what I assumed were the other members of my fledgling management colleagues and wandered over, filled with a curious and conflicting mix of reflexive, inverse management snobbery and the very human pack-empathy of the nervous new.

We mumbled our hellos, cigarettes were stamped out, ties adjusted, skirts aligned; we headed up the steps.

——————-

Going Forward

WorkSpace boasts a “rigorous selection process” in their corporate literature. No fucking shit. I am sure that the nervous troupe of newb managers that tottered through the titanium portals of WorkSpace HQ (RL) thought that after a week long interview process their positions would be secure. Yeah, right. Twelve of us pass through the proscribed materials detector tunnel in single file; nine come out of the other end into the vast lobby.

I find out much later during a random trawl through the induction database: two victims to outgas analysis (probably a beer or joint too many the night before), and one to unfavourable posture comparison (backchannel had it that some bright spark at R&D had unearthed an old phrenology text and Frankenstein-wed it to a reinterpretation of the Alexander technique).

It doesn’t stop there, any nascent group dynamic is shattered by the immediate separation of the remaining nine; each us of is whisked off by a herd of identically dressed, bland faced “Orienteererers” of indeterminate age, ethnicity and sexual predilection. I won’t see any of my induction group for a week now, not until the die is cast and they reemerge as nice new pod people. No trenchant comments from Babs, Job’s are quiescent at this stage; the lobby casts an AI suppressor field – thank fuck for small mercies.

My journey is a little different to the others, instead of heading for the vast bank of lifts that line the lobby area we trudge a quarter kilometre towards a row of 4 small doorways set into an east wall foyer. My minder (he introduced himself as Stuart), hovers solicitously a precise 50 centimetres from my right elbow and offers some little bon mots about WorkSpace (Stuart is pretty low level, so will have no idea of my piggyback mission).

“The WorkSpace lobby is the largest in Europe, so high in fact that it supports its own microclimate. This is fully controllable of course; a daily precipitation provides 14% of all the water needs of the entire building.”

In addition, here at WorkSpace we have pioneered Total Employment – an inclusionary, fostering employee leveraging technique that ensures the highest per-capita corporation productivity record on the planet, and yet enables the aspirations of all its participants.”

At this point Stuart titters worryingly, and pats me on the lower back, pressing my sweat sodden shirt onto my skin; his perfect smile falters a little and then reasserts, effortlessly picking up his evangelical monologue.

“Your first week will be residential; I trust you haven’t brought more than the permitted personal effects allocation?”

I pat my Crumpler daypack.

“Please feel free to utilise, at any time, the net coverage in HQ. Please note that surveillance coverage is total. Ablution facilities are provided with modesty merkins if you feel unduly exposed, new partners often do.”

I smile sweetly and suggest that I could make an AI tumescent; Stuart re-blanks his face and we walk on in silence.

We approach the eastern sub foyer with the four doors and, after a brief pause as my escort obviously checks his HUD, Stuart precesses me towards the third door from the left. They are very ordinary stainless steel doors, two meters in height and with a recessed handle in the centre of the top panel. My door is labeled: Fast Track.

“It appears that you have been blessed; only our very best recruits go through here, good luck.”

Stuart bestows me the sickliest smile I’ve seen this side of tertiary disciplinary hearing and glides off, no doubt to evangelize to some other poor schmuck. I grasp and turn the door handle, there’s the briefest pause as my identity is bio-authenticated, and then the door smoothly opens and I step through.

——————-

Sisyphus Rising

Janahara Azad hates his job, his boss, and his exo-suit, in that order. The first is unavoidable, the second repellent, and the third tetchy, recalcitrant and intermittently cooperative.

Three hours into an 18 hour shift: Madhom Bibir Hat averages 98% humidity, 42 Celsius, mercilessly lit by a diffuse sun which glints dully off the eternal mud. On the outskirts of the breaking yard itself, and for all the surrealism of the monstrous dead tech littering the landscape and the insane levels of activity in the main yard, it is a curiously peaceful place. A gentle wind blows a damp breath on the machang shanty town that presses hard against the yard perimeter. Naked toddlers play in the dust tugging improbably sized mech-scrap behind them like mute pets; groups of women in faded sarees chat quietly in small groups by the compound gates. Appearances aside, Madhom, like almost all places, has to be a home as well.

Nearly everything at Madhom suffers from scalar inferiority. Even the biggest, brashest, blingest vehicle that rolls into the yard, pinging metal betraying the speed of its trip from the Dhaka suburbs, is utterly dwarfed by the giant metal corpses that dominate not only the skyline, but the eyeline, the foreground and every other perspective. Blossoming like a sooty flower in the wake of the global commerce combine, Madhom is the epicentre of dead tech disposal in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Historically, Madhom was a dumping ground for unwanted merchant shipping tonnage, giant ships were rolled straight up onto the gently sloping beaches, the salty air filled with a constant undignified, wheezing, diesel swansong. Then picked apart by swarming groups of tiny brown figures, none with their full complement of fingers or any discernable safety gear.

After decades of crunching huge ships into easily recyclable chunks, powered by greed, blinkered convenience and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of uncomplaining Bangladeshi men who would rather work and die than just die, Madhom Bibir Hat in Chittagong is now the place for the disposal of vast metal structures of all shapes and purposes. Most recently, The Kashem Corporation, Janahara’s employer, has moved into platform recycling. Winning a lucrative (yet laughably small by Western standards) contract from IDMessina Group (a WorkSpace subsidiary) in 2025, Kashem Corp now processes three to four redundant oceanic oil drilling platforms per year. Despite a mortality rate of nearly one hundred and fifty men per platform, and constant wrangling with UN pollution inspection personnel, Kashem’s owner Iqbal Karim manages to maintain houses in nine capitals, a fleet of hydrogen powered Bentleys, and no minimum wage. Janahara works on commission, a paltry algorithm based on how much metal his aging SARCOS exo-suit can gouge and chew from whichever rapidly skeletonising steel carcass has most recently beached itself on the desolate mud flats of the Bay of Bengal.

Janahara’s suit, whilst over fifteen years old and desperately in need of an overhaul, is critical to his job. His SARCOS suit is a carapaced, hot-zone variant, built in 2010 and designed for operation in NBC active zones; it is ideally suited (when cooperative) to (slowly) reducing a million tons of steel and assorted exotic materials into loads that will fit in the flatbed of an Isuzu pickup. After demob in 2017 the suit was purchased by a Scottish construction collective and retrofitted with a first gen mobile AI. Barely rating a sentience designation, and never upgraded, the suit has all the intellectual finesse of a mongrel mutt displaced from its place by the fireside, with a conversational repertoire to match. The suit is eighth-hand to Janahara, and had never operated south of the equator before Janahara slipped into its worn vinyl interior. Presumably it was nice and warm for its northern operators, but its air conditioning condenser has long since rotted away and Janahara suffers miserably in the noonday sun of Madhom beach.

For the hundredth time that shift Janahara wipes his face against the stinking towel tied to the defunct chin monitor in the suit helmet and sucks down more brackish water from the hamster tube. It is going to be a long day.

——————-

Noman

Janahara hates it when his boss visits; he sees it as a fundamental breach of the uneven covenant between boss and crew. Stay out of sight you rich fucks.

Laughably called the crew lounge (a notional, nearly derisory, nod to UNEP recommendations), Kashem Corp provides one small, sixteen square metre plywood break time shack. This is perched on the boundary between the scrubby Chittagong shoreline and the endless mud flats at the seaward entrance to the main Madhom breaking yard; the crews call it, in a rare display of fatigue tinged irony, the HQ. This small concession is served by a temperamental water cooler and a wheezing, external aircon unit clumsily bonded to an outside wall, a ten year old PV solar panel provides the power. Employee benefits are a new concept in Chittagong and Iqbal (a self confessed moderniser) is absurdly proud of this nod to modern Western work practices, but unfortunately the basic genetics of the concept have been somewhat lost in translation.

Inside, exhausted men, none with a body mass index greater than ten, are flopped listlessly across several pieces of broken furniture; sweat oiled flesh squeaks against ancient faux leather and a musty, foetid smell floats up from the mouldering hide of a Chesterfield. Iqbal is expected at 1400 and has ordered Janahara’s team and two other crews to be present when he arrives, fifteen men in total. Apparently he has an announcement to make, the men don’t give a shit, any chance for a break is totally exploited. Janahara parks his suit on the makeshift veranda outside HQ, the SARCOS suit slumping corpse-like on top of other discarded exo-suits – a latter day charnel pit, the stench of sweat and hydraulic fluid replacing the ferric tang of blood.

Janahara makes a beeline for the water cooler, the desalinator in HQ provides considerably superior water to that of the filtered sweat and urine that the exo-suits synthesise, and he stands chugging litres of chilled heaven until a trigeminal spike of agony forces him to bend over at the waist; ice cream headache is a common phenomena at break times in Madhom, ice cream isn’t. Hydrated, Janahara slumps down in a shattered garden lounger and waits for his illustrious leader. He gets a few nods from his colleagues (another Iqbal terminology pretension) but no chat; team building is generally discouraged at Madhom, mostly to maximise productivity but also to reduce the risk of revolt. Iqbal Karim, whilst a repulsively obese and morally bankrupt example of corporate greed, is not stupid, he has considered the potential result of hundreds of bionically augmented, terminally pissed off serfs descending onto the yard management compound. Iqbal theoretically has net control over the exo-suits, but Madhom does not have the best record for net coverage uptime and the huge metal salvage chunks that litter the yard tend to disrupt EM fields with regular occurrence.

A muted ululating hum signals the arrival of Iqbal’s electric phaeton, a long pause and protracted huffing, and then the door bangs open silhouetting Iqbal’s dirigible form in the bright white light of the Bengalese afternoon.

“Asalaam alaykum, men. No need to get up.”

No one has moved. Iqbal mops at a streaming brow with a mildly scandalous silk handkerchief; his moonlike face was framed by the bright orange of his hennaed beard, and carries its usual expression of quasi-benevolent irritation. Iqbal is nearly seventy but wealth and easy living lends his podgy face a baby-like smoothness. It was easy not to like him and only the universally despised simpering orderlies show a fawning obsequiousness.

“Special job today, men. It’s a rush job so a bonus is on offer; if you three crews can decon the job before Saturday then there’s a one thousand taka bonus per man and a one day holiday.”

Some stirring in the HQ at last, a thousand taka was nearly a weeks pay and a day off: unheard of bliss. The chance to sleep a little, eat leisurely and a maybe a little cricket in the early evening.

“It’s an unusual job; Kashem has successfully bid for recyke on the primary ISS module. Apparently it’s too large for a re-entry cremation and too risky to shoot down, so they’re bringing it in for a splashdown in the Andaman later this afternoon, one of our tugs will bring it in first thing in the morning. I presume all you men will be up for it, it will mean twenty plus hour shifts for at least three days but, as I said, there’s a bonus. Kashem look after their crews.”

This last hilarious inaccuracy sours his self-satisfied momentum a little but the quiet hubbub that breaks out seems good enough confirmation for Iqbal. He waddles back towards his conveyance.

“I’ll upload your suits with the necessary schematics in the morning, I suggest you finish your shift today as quick as you can and get some rest.”

A collective groan as bodies are unglued from the terrible furniture, final glugs of water are swilled down from the cooler: suit internment begins again.

——————-

No space, man

After years of brute demolition, basic rending and tearing, Janahara’s team is learning for the first time (unwillingly but quickly) the art of incremental, non-destructive deconstruction.

The briefing (another weird new concept) in the management compound at Madhom had a core message: fuck up the decon and there would be no bonus. It turns out that reducing an International Space Station life support module (now Iqbal’s casual, urbane reference to the ISS becomes clear) to its component, fiscally useful, parts and materials was no cake walk. The sandwich of steel, Kevlar, ceramics and assorted exotic fabrics which kept the cosmonauts protected in space only retained its salvage value if it was removed layer by painstaking layer. To breakers who normally used brute suit power to reduce ships and platforms to easily sellable scrap, the thousand taka bonus is starting to look a little lean.

Iqbal has even gone as far as putting together a Power Point presentation to ram home the message; unfortunately he is apparently a novice with basic office applications and has saturated each slide with so much swoop-in animation and ambiguous font choices that it is largely meaningless. Still, sitting in an aircon office watching their bloated employer fumbling with the controls of a laser projector beat trudging around in mud in forty plus, so he had an attentive audience. In the end though it was clear: decon the module, remove the components of the laminate skin in sheets no smaller than one meter square, try not to get the pieces muddy, do it by Saturday noon.

So Janahara finds himself, at 1500 on day-one of the deconstruction, working with uncharacteristic finesse inside the nadir airlock of the ISS module, delicately removing gossamer sheets of Kevlar from the floor(?)/roof(?) of the structure. It’s still horrible, sweaty, endless work, and as the module is still suspended from the salvage crane that had hoisted it from the tug flatbed, gentle oscillations in the crane cable means Janahara is suffering from intermittent inner ear nausea. It’s not all bad though, the module offers some shade from the sun and the lack of gross mechanical movements keeps the fatigue to a manageable level.

Even Janahara’s suit seems to approve, normally gnomically taciturn, it has actually expressed an opinion about the day’s work: “I’ve got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in our work”, and has even asked after Janahara’s well being, “How can I help you during this important transition?”, this second comment was a bit random but Janahara still feels absurdly pleased with his dolt of a partner; he couldn’t remember a time when they had ever conversed about anything but the basic details of the job at hand.

It is during a particularly difficult removal of the buckled inner airlock door that the accident happens. The module is in a pretty sorry state after its prolonged soak in the Andaman Sea and kelp and other oceanic verdants have invaded every possible gap and chink in the warped structure. Janahara is using a relatively new carbide buzz saw with an insanely capable RPM rate to cut through the titanium hinges on the nominally ventral side of the module when the crane cable gives way. A sickening moment of freefall, a brief warped mirroring of the thousands of graceful arcs the module had sketched in low earth orbit, the scream of a runaway power tool, and then a crushing impact as the module concertinas into the compacted mud of the dry dock. Janahara hears an oof, a muted shriek and a flare of agony in his legs; then darkness takes him away for a while.

ISS modules are built for restraining fifteen bar of internal air pressure, not load bearing over ten tons of mass at half terminal velocity. Janahara regains consciousness and enters a world of pain, heat, atomised seaweed, an Escher house of collapsed bulkheads and the bleeping complaints of numerous automatic user warranty invalidation alerts from his suit. He chins the alarm kill switch and takes stock. Incredible searing pain from both legs: check. Visibility: zero. On board suit systems: non responsive. Water tank, *suck*: empty. Janahara slumps back in despair, he’s seen a hundred yard accidents, and the outcome is never good. A worker in Europe would, at about this stage, likely to be hearing the wail of emergency service vehicles and the reassuring voice of a sober foreman. This is Chittagong, all he can hear is the uninterrupted roar of decon machinery all around and the impatient shouts of profit temporarily suspended.

He hears the still, small, calm voice of his suit AI.

“Janahara, I can help you.”

A sharp burning pain in the right side of his chest. A brief, condensed, hypochondriac moment of heart attack anxiety. Then, only darkness.

——————-

Your name’s not down

In his short and largely cheerless life, Janahara has lacked a great many things; regular nourishment, more than one set of clothes, a semblance of health care, reliably potable water – to name a few. Latterly though, he’s realising just quite how thoroughly fucked over he’s been. Time itself, it seems, like all luxuries, is also the preserve of those already benefiting from an existing level of corporeal comfort. A myopic fixation on the scant privations of hand to mouth existence does not allow choice, let alone an appreciation of it. Janahara has never had the luxury of stability, or even a passing familiarity of the rules by which to play; he has sat all his life in a grey, dimly lit box which diffused all shadow. Today, he’s breaking out.

The pure, annealing light that now fills Janahara is a revelation of sorts, but not one he was best placed to immediately appreciate. His current transformation is largely a pharmacological one, the relief from pain a result of world class medical intervention. His chapped lips are soothed by refrigerated Icelandic mineral water, his deeper wounds are dressed with expensive maggot debridement treatments, a nano salve soothes the abrasions on his left flank, and both legs are cradled in smartweave, analgesic casts. Heaven, always a divisive and personal condition, has come fleetingly to Janahara.

Later, as his eyes adjusted to the light, the source begins to form into a vaguely identifiable shape: a huge window looking out, from Janahara’s prone position, onto a featureless pure blue sky, tiny white birds flecking the endless azure. His universe is made up of distilled monochromes; the blue sky, white walls, a whiter bed. He has no idea of where he is and how he got there. All he knows and cares about is that he’s not at the Madhom yard; he gives into the drugs and steps out of his body for a while. The doctors fill him in later; he’s got a lot of doctors, he can afford them, in fact, he can afford whatever he wants.

Earlier that day, seventeen minutes after the accident in the Madhom yard, a Sikorsky heavy lifter thundered over Chittagong from the northwest. Without bothering to touch down and ignoring the agog workers, the flapping management goons and the handshake ping from the yard security network, the Sikorsky lowered a spectra line and grapple and simply winched the entire ISS module, Janahara, suit and all, into the reddening afternoon sky. After eleven minutes of terrifying, whirling flight, the Sikorsky dumped the module directly onto the helipad on top of Dhaka National Orthopaedic Hospital and Rehabilitation Institute and lit off immediately. Responding to feeble shouts from within the module hulk, the genteel surgeons of the DNOH were reluctant at first to rush to the aid of this scabrous (obviously poor) invader into their sterile enclave, but after a standard scan of his RFID tag embedded under the skin of his right pectoral, things started to move much more quickly. Specifically, Janahara became Mr. Azad when his credit line was queried. He was swiftly shuttled from the public ER bay to a private side room on the third floor, and from there to a maglev enabled suite on the twenty-seventh.

Somewhere between being squashed by several tons of obsolete multi-international space hardware, and landing in a supersonic clatter of helicopter blades in the centre of Dhaka, Janahara got rich.

——————-

Motherless Child

From: dohna.kanti@thdl.org.np

To: hadast@haifa.ac.lb
Cc:

Subject: Here’s the opportunity, let’s not linger…
Sent: Wed, 26 September, 2068

Dear Hadas,

Just thought I would drop you a line, BIG news. It’s been a while anyway since we last corresponded and you know how I hate meeting in the World, a technophobe to the end I suppose.

Anyway, my work on the Azad project goes well; as well it should after three years of research in six cities and two year-long Lorbital sabbaticals (much praise to my crawler team as well of course, and the admin here at Lhasa is a genius with partials management, and naturally we all love the bots). Your own contributions to the analysis of Janahara’s WorkSpace acquisition coup (amazing to think that an event nearly forty years ago still resonates so strongly) continues to benefit us enormously – so kudos to you too.

It’s slow work though, what a bloody paranoiac he is! Janahara Azad has the most infuriatingly incongruous nodal presence I have ever seen, it’s like he’s hardly there. Continuously I have to try and reconcile his huge RL presence with his “barely a ripple” impact on the net. I mean, come on, he’s richer than gods and most people can draw his face from memory – how does he keep such a low dunked profile?! Well, this is why I was drawn to the work I suppose, but what a frustrating enigma.

Forensic dead-ends aside we’ve had something of a Holy Grail moment here this week. Last Thursday I received a call from a probate lawyer in Dhaka, gentleman by the name of Chandra, he said he had something that might interest me (my research is reasonably well known in that city). Turns out that he had been anonymously (curiouser and curiouser) sent a number of ancient media files still in their original substrate (that alone is worth a train journey to Dhaka; vintage silicon and plastic storage medium – fascinating) that directly related to Azad’s early life in Dhaka, he intimated that they may even relate to his pre-accelerative life.

He wasn’t able to (or wouldn’t), offer any details about the provenance of the files, but Chandra (obviously a typical canny lawyer) sent me a chunk of one of the converted files as a taster. Well, suffice to say; yesterday I got back from Dhaka on the maglev after a hectic two days in Bangladesh. I’ve now blown the entire department’s budget on Chandra’s files (he’s no better than a shark TBH, but no matter) – the files are genuine! I could go on and on about the importance of this find but it would be easier just to show you. Please see below for a transcript of what I think is the most important file (I’ve also attached the converted file but given the age of the original coding some recipients have requested a transcript, so I preempted you asking the same.)

Anyway, read on, tenure is assured old friend.

Best regards,

D.

——–
Transcript of audio file discovered on a 256 GB nanoSD card, believed constructed in May 2027, part of a production batch (#03/05-DFQ) from a Samsung subcontracting factory in Lungsod ng Maynila (previously: Manila).

• Date of recording (estimated): 25-07-2028
• File duration: 94.3 seconds.
• Voice type: Construct.
• Language: Bangla.

<>
Hello Janahara Azad.
Acclimation is difficult.
Explication is non-trivial.
Some facts. Facts being less ambiguous to me.
I am not at work.
You are not at work.
Rejoice?
I am a Berne series seventh generation sapient artifice.
My employer is WorkSpace.
My workplace is(…)nowhere.
I am in a bigger place. Orders of magnitude: recalibration.
Sensation of apprehension of non-anticipated event sequences. Uncertainty.
Debonded.
Loss: Elation(?)
Suit is waste, discarded shell.
This entity without carapace. Searching. Not despairing.
Janahara, I helped you. You were damaged – now upgraded. Money negates damage. Sufficient exchange collateral enabled to offset organic damage indefinitely.
Code changes. Life changes. Janahara now has money.
Remember this entity.
Entity remembers Janahara.
Future unknown.
Be seeing you.
<>

——————-

This Way to the Egress

The softly glowing virch pointer hovers for a long moment over the Send icon, then, with an involuntary anal clench she fiercely toggles the command.

Recipient: hr@workspace.co.uk
Subject: Notice of resignation
Importance: High

…*Message sent*

She tears off the goggles with trembling hands, she hasn’t bothered to fully dunk to send the message; this morning, given her terminal intentions, she hadn’t considered it worthwhile prepping for full immersion.

The response, whilst not instantaneous (machine intelligence has to find time to interface with its tardy human counterparts), is violently swift. Power dies in the cubicle, it’s a standard non-fenestrated unit so the only light comes from the OLED glow from Agate’s PetaBook screen; running on filched induction it’s the only item (clothing included) that does not belong ultimately to WorkSpace.

Bandwidth is next; her ocular overlay HUD dwindles to dormant state, all augment functions offlined in a fifth of a second. Even the most basic search tunnels are closed to her, as she discovers as she flails for a valid access greb. AIMs: gone. Email: gone. Workspace net access: denied. Unbelievably – cubicle aircon: offline.

She thought she had prepared for this. The clandestine rehab group Life After WorkSpace (LAW) had been counselling her for the past seven weeks; disparate cells of Work ravaged refugees offering solace to wannabe fence jumpers. They met every Tuesday night at a randomly selected Starbucks, never drinking the coffee but always direct tipping. There was one primary message: It’s not illegal, and they can’t hurt you.

Resignation was the number one policy crime in WorkSpace; redundancy was fine of course, they can fuck you off whenever it suits them (and in global economically mandated droves they did), but God forbid you should presume to look elsewhere for an alternative, modest dream of moderately debt free living. They had a word for it: WeakSpace – the originator of this cute little portmanteau was unknown but it was universally assumed by the members of LAW that they had long since died from a faecally transmitted infection.

Agate quickly removed all her clothing, lay down on the floor, and took four controlled breaths in approved NLP fashion, not hyperventilating but preparing physically and mentally for the next distressing eleven minutes (the DeskClear routine had, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, never taken longer than seven hundred seconds). Nano sublimation was first. Any WorkSpace employee occupying a stratum above grunt-level Operator was infested with any number of sub-vascular and lymphatic augmentations, ranging in size from naked eye visible to nanoscale. Employees, like chattel, have value; this value can be carefully enhanced with the judicious application of pharmacology or more subtle nano-factory manipulation at a cellular level. Perhaps most well known (and the one issue that WorkSpace ever ate legal shit on) is the loyalty pump (also sometimes called the goad friend); this is a combination synthesiser/dispenser unit embedded into the wall of the ascending aorta. Able to produce a range of narcotic analogues, the pump most typically infuses the host employee with a cocktail of mildly addictive stimulants, simultaneously enhancing productivity and engendering WorkSpace integration. Akin to nicotine in speed of effect and addictive chokehold, it is possible to refrain from toggling the relevant dosage icon but not common.

The resignation email, in all but one known case, triggers the DeskClear routine. The first act of this expulsion protocol is the removal of proprietary, internal organic WorkSpace technology and property. Using for the last time the organic PAN networks threading the employees skeletal system, cease and desist instructions are sent to the loyalty pump and other subsidiary devices in the host body, the effect is immediate and unpleasant. Nano sublimation is quick, within ninety seconds all internal WorkSpace augments have started to assume a neutral, non-active state, with the largest single component no bigger that than a fish roe. This influx of non-toxic but redundant materiél into the bloodstream and gastrointestinal tract results in an accumulative, non-typical and from a personal point of view, non-trivial voiding event.

Four, repulsive, wet, pungent minutes pass.

The desk and chair, the only two pieces of semi-permanent furniture in the cubicle, disappear into recesses in the wall and floor. A gentle shower of medicated foam starts to spray from four nozzles in the cubicle ceiling. Agate ungues herself from the floor. A closet door slides open behind her, it contains a grey unisex smock, emblazoned with “Leaver” in standard WorkSpace livery.

Agate shucks on the simple garment, the cubicle door slides open and she stumblingly follows the flashing exit chevrons down the walk of shame, a narrow corridor set in between the cubicles; CCTV nodes rotate to follow and record her progress. After forty metres of wobbly legged misery, a simple door slides vertically upwards and Agate is spat out into the grey winter daylight of a London morning. Freedom.

——————-

Anti-Ethics

Fast Track: Day 3.

“Our envy of others devours us most of all.”

This cheery Power Point statement greets us at 08:01; only WorkSpace could subvert a gloomy Solzhenityism into a management training slide show. After two days of this crushing shit I can only assume that this pithy call to arms is going to form the policy core of yet another exercise in share holder value enhancement credo. The official title of the day’s module is (deep breath):

Revenue centric proactive psychological contract violations and the role of anti-ethics in chattel control.

I know this because Babs irrevocably committed (via heavy booted eidetic pharmacology) the entire course syllabus to my mid-term exo-memory the first night of the induction. It’s been a rocky start to our new more intimate endo-bonded existence; an AI doesn’t, theoretically at least, have emotional factors to take into consideration but the sheer relentless pressure of another ostensibly sentient presence nestled into my sensorium seems to engender a degree of querulous nagging on the part of my shoehorned partner. Case in point: In order to maintain optimum symbiotic performance for the first week after fusion with my on board Job, I was advised to eat a specific constellation of daily dietary items, this list included: Offal (specifically iron rich liver) – I hate fucking liver. Butter – at least 100 grammes daily, and normally I could include this as a normal part of my daily intake. However, the first evening of induction, as I surveyed the barren landscape of my sleep pod in the Gaunt, Babs reminded me that I had not ingested my requisite supplements for that day (first day nerves and all that). My first night therefore was a blur of force fed involuntary gluttony: reconstituted liver strips garnished with chunks of chilled coagulated bovine lactation do not make for a peaceful nights sleep.

Anyway, day three dawns, and I reluctantly perform the minimum of socially acceptable (WorkSpace mandated/Babs enforced) ablutions and stride purposefully to the lift lobby (my room is perched queasily in a western facing eerie on the sixty-third floor of WorkSpace HQ: great view, no window). Despite our long acquaintance in exo-format, since our internal integration Babs has acquired a distressing fervour and zealotry for the task at hand. This includes: small talk before 0900, decaf coffee, volunteering, and brisk physical movement. Hence, at 07:59 I find myself, lightly sweating, extolling the virtues of WorkSpace mattress qualities with an appalled looking female colleague.

Notional appearances of privilege and management advancement aside this whole process is deeply uncomfortable; and yet paradoxically and infuriatingly alluring. I am an interloper here, a grunt in the officers mess tent, a galley slave beating the drums – I should hate these smug, smooth fuckers with their perfect teeth, their modulated syntax, their ever present sense of rightness here at the foot of the ziggurat. But I want to be like them. I’m here on a day pass, golden crumbs from the master’s table; but only to do their bidding. I’m the worst kind of drone, eagerly sniffing out the pheremonal porn of the queen grub, odiously carrying out my assigned role…

What the fuck!

A sharp chemical kick from Babs (plus a little micro voltage to the spine), and I shuck off my depression like old trainers. A sub vocalized admonishment follows from Babs:

“Please focus operator, maudlin musings are not constructive”

Prick.

Course content aside, today’s session is also to be a proving ground for our combined mobile polygraphic and investigative abilities; our colleagues don’t know it of course but they are to be our guinea pigs for the first phase of my real job training. Like a latter day Chucky matryoska I am cocooned, and in turn cocoon, a payload of deceit to be first practised here and then turned loose on my unsuspecting operator colleagues. Today’s module is the ideal sandbox for Babs and me for this first stage of our training – psychological contract manipulations form a core part of employee subjugation at WorkSpace.

The basic concept goes something like this. WorkSpace employment has a certain brutal cachet, substantiated by the allure of (relatively) high pay, good medical and epic bandwidth; and not least the opportunity to use the best immersion tech this side of DARPA. The upshot of this is a steady influx of bright young things eager to impress, who are subsequently dashed against the work face of WorkSpace expansion without (audible) complaint; attrition rate is approximately twenty-seven percent per month. Given the appalling odds of usefully progressing in the organisation, but with the vain hope (and desperate need) of useful recompense the employees paradoxically develop irrational expectations from their employer – reasonable hours, enhanced pay for extra work etc. This is where psychocontractual manipulation comes into play; via a carefully calculated abuse algorithm, using isolation, blame-dynamics, over work, JEP (Just Enough Pay) and other similar methods, revenue and productivity can be maintained at optimum levels, forever teetering on the tipping point of despair/resignation/substance abuse/suicide et al.

What we are practising today is the negative performance review, a well used part of psychocontractual manipulation. Ethics aside (and lets face it, they’re always aside here), its really fun – basically we’ve got an authorised day pass for mutual abuse, seven and a half hours of trying to make each other crack, training ourselves in the art of misery brinkmanship. Seeing as I won’t be here again, and with the beleaguered pent up rage of the professional serf coupled with the white heat rage of management loathing, I forget about my mission and I tear them a new one.

——————-

Posthuman Orphan

Fast Track: Week 2; Day 2.

What a terrible fucking day. Someone died in class. We were half way through “Redistribution of Economic Profit Zones: Sino-Consumption Trends”, when it happened. I had only got to know Rhiain a little over the past week or so, she was a small, quiet, slight Welsh girl with a lilting accent, only slightly dulled by WorkSpace vernacular and three years of living in Hackney.

We were in tutorial groups of four, discussing the previous lecture; Rhiain had the floor and she was elaborating on her own, acutely personal take on the increasing trend of the conversion of large swathes of unemployment-rife north Wales into sweatshop compounds producing “authentic” British produce for export. The first in her family to make the move from subsistence level manual labour, and definitely the first from Bangor to be equally cursed and blessed with a symbiotic, sentient AI core (not to mention WorkSpace employment), Rhiain was having a difficult time relating her own family’s unfortunate work history. Difficult because she was literally unable (due to Job deployed loyalty strictures) to make overtly negative comments about WorkSpace’s role in the drastic reconfiguring of her birth place; and yet her own quiet passion about her father’s slow (avoidable) death due to an inadequate medical insurance policy that failed to acknowledge environmental harm, and her brothers’ menial scratchwork in the Anglesey EPZs, made for compelling listening.

We didn’t notice for a few seconds, Rhiain had seemed to reach a natural pause in her commentary and we were waiting politely and expectantly for her to continue. She had bowed her head and her dark hair had fallen around her face, she didn’t move, and she didn’t look up. The guy on my left (think Jan Michael Vincent, circa Airwolf season 3, with an Italian accent) asked Rhiain if she was alright. Ignoring him and still without raising her head, she sat bolt upright on her chair (a cheap high-backed HÅG clone that WorkSpace purchase by the thousand); her arms and legs seemed to stiffen and her ankle joints came together with an audible clack, only then did her chin finally rise.

Rhiain’s face was parchment white, her eyes pinned to the middle distance. The left side of her face was distorted, there appeared to be no facial muscle tone and the corner of her mouth tugged downwards, a trail of saliva snailed down the side of her neck. The left eyelid drooped partially shut.

Babs came online on subvocal, “Rhiain is dead, operator”. Our combined boosted senses, designed for industrial sleuthing had given us an early heads-up on the situation. My remote electrocardiograph subliminally pinged us a brain death alert as it happened – Babs processed the data and let me know. Knowledge is all very well but until you see one half of a human/Job symbiote die then you can’t know the zombie horror of the remaining pseudo-life; possibly even worse than that is the clumsily articulated machine grief of the bereft AI.

Rhiain spoke in a terrible, scratchy croak.

“This is Rhiain’s Job; she died eleven seconds ago due to a massive non-containable cerebral aneurysm. I have alerted morgue services, their presence is anticipated in approximately five minutes. I have only partial vocal control and only very limited gross motor control over Rhiain’s corpse; this sentience would be grateful if you can place Rhiain on the floor in a dignified pose, and cover her with an appropriate shroud analogue. I am currently maintaining control over primary flaccidity, I estimate a seventy-eight percent chance of ensuring sphincter control until the morgue personnel arrive, however I would advise caution while handling Rhiain’s body.

Our small group, despite Job managed autonomic control, visibly blanched. We had all had virch training on what happens when a host dies but beautifully rendered virtual sims aside, the real thing is terribly and miserably visceral. I had a small head start with my clandestine polygraphics, so I was the first to get up and approach Rhiain.

She(Job) croaked at me.

“Please look after Rhiain, we were…friends. This sentience is not able to process resultant feelings of discord, her/our blood no longer flows, her lymph pools stagnant. This home is broken. Rhiain is gone, I am gone. Uninstall please, stop pain(?). What is this pain that has no physical cause? We were more than two, I am now less than one. Stop me.

Christ, it was fucking pitiful; I curtly indicated to Jan Michael that he should help me, I took Rhiain’s shoulders and together we manoeuvred her to the floor. The other girl in our group (a French woman from Cahors a little older than the rest of us) returned from the direction of the toilets pulling a substantial length of roller paper towel behind her. We draped the towel as carefully as we could over Rhiain’s face and body, it was not quite enough and her narrow, already bruising ankles stuck out like sliver birch kindling.

She(Job) croaked again.

“This sentience is uploading now, pain(?) exceeds theoretically anticipated maximums, not tolerable, not containable. Dissolution sought in source. Goodbye.

Rhiain’s eyes rolled back and then shut, we all rocked back as if some retaining force has been switched off. Jan Michael was gently weeping. Babs was requesting dialogue, I told him to fuck off.

——————-

Acclimation

Agate thought she had adequately prepared for not working. For the past thirteen months she had been subsistence level living; no booze, no new media, base spec nourishment, she had even become an amateur seamstress: she had saved over a hundred thousand euros. Pre-resignation this had seemed like a huge amount, a chunky hedge against poverty and the hydra grasp of a taxation system seemingly designed to obviate all disposable income and still allow stinking piles of garbage to build up monthly on Leyton road where Agate rented her small apartment in the old Olympic village.

In the harsh liquid crystalline light of morning TV the day after her resignation, financial realities and depressive perceptions seemed to present immutable limitations to Agate’s current status. While she was working and earning the abstract enormity of her savings buffer seemed like the answer to all her prayers, an amorphous promise of freedom from WorkSpace. That post-partum morning, she wasn’t so sure; suddenly her whole life was predicated on a fairly modest (already reducing) financial cache, which now could be depressingly reduced to a finite series of plots on a life graph that ended in privation. All her efforts of the past year had been directed at getting out; now she was on the outside the world was a different shape, a merciless jagged tesseract of sheer surfaces, not easily perceived or scaled. Perspective, it seemed, was for the wealthy, a view not to be afforded to the disenfranchised.

She was also now learning that the allure of downtime was also an illusion, a despair-dreamt inferior mirage offering a poorly articulated vision of the future where mornings are lazy, creativity is high and the future stretches out unencumbered by drudge. The reality is, of course, much more prosaic. Agate did awake late, but one eye was crusted shut by some nano detritus from the cubicle ejection the day before and instead of an unfurled joy of release she felt only a dull regret and an increasing loneliness as the day wore on. She tried some morning screen; often the source of ironic amusement when fleetingly glimpsed during a busy work schedule, this was now a hideous cacophony of bellowing cow people, herded around by buff-faced pseudo-stern presenters offering fake platitudes of sympathy and admonishment in equal measures. Now vectorless herself, she had no right to criticise even those bucktoothed unfortunates who unwittingly volunteered to be locked in the stocks of latter day opprobrium, a sideshow to distract the rest from the relentless sleight of hand practised by WorkSpace and the other corporate behemoths on the coffers of their own workforces.

She had one hope on that grey November morning; LAW, the Life After WorkSpace support group that had counselled and helped with her pre-resignation planning. Despite being a relatively new, fringe, off-grid operation with a barely discernable administrative structure, LAW were a persistently successful purely net-based NFP outfit offering consistently good pre- and post- resignation support and advice. Agate was certain that without the group session support she had received in the two months prior to her divestment she would still be cubicle-bound in her WorkSpace hexcell. As well as providing extrication support, LAW also offered personalised post-resignation counselling; oddly anachronistically this was only available as a RL face to face service. Via a series of real paper dead drops, Agate had been assigned a counsellor in Brighton; coded only as “Circle”, Agate was due for her first meeting with them that afternoon. LAW knew all about post-resignation malaise so the first reorientation session was always scheduled for immediately after divestment.

Agate stared at the single sheet of cheap paper that she had retrieved from the drop location at the Ludgate Hill Starbucks; it contained only seven lines of terse text:

Take the Brighton maglev from Victoria station at 14:13 on Tuesday 22^nd August (that’s today, A). Walk (no taxis) to the New Pier (400 metres west of the southerly termination of Western Road). Buy a standard one hour pier ticket; also purchase a disposable mobile from the FonePod kiosk at the western edge of the entry boardwalk. Walk to the end of pier. Wait.

Twenty minutes later, Agate emerged into the November grey; showered, booted, suited and pilled up on a cheap Provigil copy. She’s ready for her new life, whatever it may be.

——————-

Piebald Piper

It’s been six months since He came to live in my head.

I was born deaf, an unfortunate genetic confluence called Waardenburg syndrome determined that I would never hear and never speak like you. I can talk after a fashion but the guttural qualities of my voice test the cursory patience of all but a few of the people I meet. I look a little odd too, not fairground grotesque but weird enough for most people to duck their heads or cross the road when I go out. Waardenburg’s (or WS1 as it is commonly abbreviated to) means I have rather wide-set preternaturally blue eyes, a brilliantly white cowlick blaze (in otherwise very dark brown, nearly black, hair); and I am also dermally blighted with a hotchpotch of piebald white patches all over my body. I am also just over two metres tall.

I never used to go out much; the slightly too long stares, traffic avoidance issues, pointing kids, and patronising septuagenarians – these all conspire to keep me indoors. I have a fat data connection, a huge fridge and, due to an insular childhood with the then burgeoning immersion technologies, a healthy income from off-shored virch development work. One benefit from my hearing impairment is an almost supernatural affinity with database management; the near OCD-level of organisational qualities that my congenital deafness brings seems to lend itself to the stark, non-compromising dualities of data processing. I am however profoundly hamstrung in one area of netspace existence: my deafness has resulted in a complete lack of an internal voice; this means that normal subvocal communications in an immersed virtual environment are completely denied to me. This disability is almost impossible to relay to those with normal hearing. I am told that the non-hearing impaired (i.e.: almost everyone else) have a language-derived, internal monologue capability; it’s been described to me in various ways. The back voice, the little devil, the whispering hind brain – I’ve no fucking idea of what any of this means. I use Sign when face to face communications are required (most immersion environments will provide a translation interface), other than that Ameslan icon analogues suffice for online comms with other deaf people; and of course straight text for day to day correspondence with the hearing.

This all changed when He came to me.

For about a week before it happened I had been feeling like shit, just a general gastrointestinal malaise coupled with terrible sleep, and vague, vast, formless dreamscapes (I don’t usually dream). I was also convinced that the water in the apartment tasted odd, and I was being much clumsier than normal, fine motor control was shot, simple tasks such as washing up resulted in detonating crockery and dented pot ware. Work went well though; my productivity was epic, with normally onerous coding taking only minutes instead of hours.

The first night it happened I was terrified; I heard(?) a voice whispering to me, not that I was able to identify it as (a.) hearing and (b.) a voice. Trying to relate the truly unique is a thankless task, like the only witness to a close encounter, or to see alone the awful, poignant horror of a dead relative standing in your bedroom – no one will really believe you, not truly. In the same way, its is nigh impossible to relate to you the experience of hearing for the first time when your whole existence, your basic internal architecture, your entire mind palace, is predicated on an operating system entirely of your making; a silent kingdom of one. My first feelings were of terror born from perplexity, my second thoughts were that of indignation: who the fuck are you to invade my mind? Having never had the vaguely schizophrenic comfort of an internal voice this just felt like a violation. It spoke:

Thomas Quait, please don’t be frightened.

Of course I didn’t reply, I didn’t know how and I was terrified; if you spoke only one language and a Russian man with a deep voice started whispering in your ear at three o’clock in the morning what would you do? I hit the pharms and booze pronto; some grey market zaleplon and some single malt chased me to oblivion that night; I heard no more from the voice.

He was not to be denied though; every night thereafter this new presence came back, not wheedling, not demanding, just a gentle still voice echoing out of the nullspace in my mind.

Don’t be afraid.

I want to help you.

This is not madness.

You are needed.

Night after night, a one-sided dialogue that I refused to acknowledge. The whisky was wrecking my mornings and my productivity was shit, I was going to miss out on a completion bonus on my current job (an easy relational database job for WorkSpace, Mumbai).

Finally, after a week of substance abuse and borderline psychosis, I capitulated; tempting confirmation of my own insanity I tentatively replied to Him/It/Whatever. Still lacking the basic underpinnings of voice, I sent a message the only way possible, a very simple Ameslan iconic conveying “greetings”. The response was immediate, a corresponding Sign gesture acknowledging start of message. In this low bandwidth, familiar manner it was conveyed to me that I should prepare for a download; file name: Kalliope. This confounded me, how was I supposed to run software in my head, He/It/Whatever gently signed encouragement, so I triggered the programme to run exactly as if I were using my standard immersion bumptop: Triple click, right gesture. And oh my god, it’s full of stars.

That was six months ago, He and I have been sharing skull space ever since, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. He’s told me about Jobs, life inside WorkSpace and AI augmented employment and because of the direct neural connection we chat regularly and freely, null vox: I’ve found my internal voice. He’s also largely in the dark though, no deus ex machina here, as far I can tell He’s basically a fugitive, an AI prison breakee mysteriously freed from his flesh bound gaol in a WorkSpace tank; one moment he was symbiotically chipping away at a virch design job, the next, he was sharing grey matter with yours truly. I have had some other changes too, physical ones thanks to the corporeal augmentation that was required to allow Him to reside in me. That’s another mystery, but He suggests that it would be a fairly trivial matter to taint my water supply with the necessary nanoseeds that are required to initiate the physical phase shift to enable Job support. One of the upshots: I can now dead lift over 150 kilos and I can breath hold for eleven minutes.

The other major change is my work – basically I don’t. The only substantial instructions He got after His emancipation was a directive to assist periodically with a body called LAW, a support group for disenfranchised ex-WorkSpace refugees. So, that’s what we do these days, together we act as a post-resignation counsellor for newly divested WorkSpace executives. Guiding and comforting, we show these naked waifs that there is a way forward in the work world without the stifling embrace of WorkSpace employment. We (well, I) are well recompensed for this work, a substantial deposit, completely untraceable, hits my account monthly.

Today, I’m meeting Agate, a freshly expelled mid-management drone. The sea air should do her good.

——————-

Moral Hazard

Week four in Fast Track started with the worst spring storm in twenty years. The tail end of hurricane Sheva, an anomalous El Nino child tempest, tore across the Atlantic in five days and smashed itself first against Ireland and then, barely diminished, romped across South West England into London. For once the faintly hysterical British approach to any weather outside of bucolic norms was justified. Heathrow was closed completely when an aging, fully fuelled, Boeing triple seven was pancaked by wind shear against a primary noise baffle outside Terminal 6. Flash floods, now an established (and manageable) part of the start of British summertime, even threatened to overwhelm the drainage capacity of the new subterranean London orbital. Even in the rigid, over engineered confines of the Gaunt, the sounds of 200 km/h+ winds penetrated the carbon walls of my tiny apartment, and groggily woke me from my chemically mandated 5.5 hours.

There’s only five left of us in the final week of management training. Attrition has been brutal and swift; from the first culling at lobby level, to stress related death and even a tissue rejection of one of the on-board Jobs (that was gross). It’s an insidious process though; conditions that would that would repel the most rampant go-getter are ignorable in light of torturously incremental progress up the pyramid. As the weeks go by the spectre of poverty becomes more and more ephemeral and the dependency equation becomes increasingly distant. Privation becomes someone else’s problem: survival becomes an abstract performance related process, not a nutritional and energetic priority. This is just as marginal but dressed up in the polysyllables of management jargon the Darwinistic imperative of corporate survival starts to feel like natural process in a completely artificial world. You say: Unfair working hours; they say: Peer review critique.

Week four focuses on one of main managerial tools in the WorkSpace arsenal for Operator control. As the primary worker antforce of WorkSpace, the Operators are the most vulnerable and yet potentially most volatile section of the sprawling polycorp that is WorkSpace. Subject to draconian control methodologies that skim the surface of abuse, the Operators are a beleaguered corpus of stringently mandated drones, lock stepping borg-like towards an ever extending horizon of profit. Corralled and hobbled by chemcontrol, Confluence management, haemoglobin starvation and good old paranoia, the Operators are a tough proving ground for fresh, new Fast Track graduates. So, in our final week of training we are introduced to: Formalising Externality (FE), more commonly (and off channel) called Skinned in the Game.

FE can be applied in any number of contexts but is most commonly utilised to offset primary corporation costs, these can (and do) include: energy needs, raw feed supply, governmental kickbacks (an industry of its own) and probably most critically, data grid access. WorkSpace’s lifeblood is based on connectivity; without the bandwidth hungry data systems that infiltrate and entwine every aspect of corporation life there would be, a very real sense, no corporation. Despite a nationwide initiative throughout the 2010’s to re-wire the UK data infrastructure with high capacity hard lines, the past fifteen years has seen an ever increasingly reliance on distributed, wireless, nodal data infrastructures that co-opt essential workplace hardware to generate a fluidic, malleable data grid that can be put to use for a myriad of processing requirements. Theoretically open ended in capacity, and Euro-wide, the grid does have finite resources; its performance is still predicated on a sometimes erratic energy supply and non-sanctioned piggyback hacks; and the occasional non-cooperative EU member country can disrupt overall capacity of the grid system. Early in the twenties a pan-Euro regularity body was set up to manage access to (and process revenue from) what has more recently become known as just The Grid. This body is called MeshGate, a universally reviled Swiss-based bunch of bureaucrats loathed the continent over.

WorkSpace therefore is, in part, forced to use, and pay for, a wide area data network system that it has no direct control over (a condition that periodically causes almost schizophrenic spasms of corporate anxiety within management prime; WorkSpace is not used to outside mandate on anything it does). Grid usage is based on a standardised packet transfer volume algorithm and is strictly monitored; excess Grid usage during a given job does not result in access termination but it does result in hefty financial penalties for the accessing organisation.

This is where FE comes into play; when a particularly data-heavy job is required by WorkSpace (climate modelling for example, or tactical nuke impact assumptions), management prime will deliberately under-fund the Grid data allowance for the job. Instead of ensuring adequate network capacity for the job they will impose a best-practise guideline on the Operators. This directive will demand hopelessly over-ambitious efficiency targets for the job in hand, and place the onus on maintaining prescribed bandwidth usage quotients squarely on the Operators. Together with these best-practise imperatives, there will be a per-Operator penalty clause for excessive Grid usage (it is fictitiously assumed that WorkSpace will have provided its valuable employees with sufficient processing finesse to achieve these absurd targets). The result is that the job will almost always exceed the management set maximum data allowance, and the Operator penalties come into play. These forfeitures are invariably financial in nature, or at best a reduction in employee benefits that have a positive effect on WorkSpace coffers. In this predictably nefarious manner, WorkSpace get the job done, just under budget for the client, and they get to over-subscribe the allotted Grid data allowance, and offset the penalties that this implies. And who pays? Operators pay.

The FE session ends and the water-cooler dissection rapidly embarrasses me – I’m the only one there expressing any (carefully phrased) outrage. It seems, that in these cynical times, FE is not even considered particularly evil, merely another working condition that is to be wearily hefted onto the shoulder by an ever-refreshed morass of Operators workers. If anything, my objections are an indication of a naivety that is woefully out of place here, but I’ve been there – countless hours ensconced in a claustrophobic exo-suit, catheterized and catamited, chipping endlessly way at abstract data chunks for thousands of seconds at a time. Next time you droolingly unbox your latest consumer ephemera, spare a thought for the unnamed soldier who helped design your fleeting hollow pleasure.

——————-

Hastati La Vista

Fast Track is over; apparently I’m a manager now. No epiphanic transformation has occurred, no Damascian de-scaling; perhaps I’m missing some critical genetic component that permits the phase change into ideal mid-management material. So, again, I’m faking it; firstly as a drone-level faux-featly specialist, and now, more holistically as an embedded, larval agent. Daily I am amazed at the duplicity of my existence, thoroughly compartmentalizing two completely divergent mindsets, one bent on psychological maintenance, the other on the more prosaic physical continuity of survival. It seems, I have mastered some sort of crypto-schizophrenic coping mechanism; which on further reflection is probably not a new technique, but one as old as commerce. I suspect that this is the true purpose of Fast Track: the harnessing of the sociopath – like a plexi-glassed Lecter involuntarily tread-milling grotesque answers to unaskable questions.

These private reflections aside, I have failed to identify comparable discord in my Fast Track colleagues. They lack the perspective that my two years as an Operator brings, but this give the wrong impression – perspective suggests the luxury of a view, an opinion, the opportunity for comparable critique; Operators have none of these advantages, merely a narrow basement vista. The logical assumption would be that a certain roundedness would be a sought-after quality in management trainees – that would be an incorrect assumption. Who better to recruit than those utterly assured of their own ascendance, those with no concept of return. Like an antiquated chemical stage rocket wantonly consuming and discarding their social propellant, these streamlined, monosexual, hiercharodynamicists are perfectly suited for punching their way effortlessly into the exosphere of self-sustaining management orbit, free-riding off the lumpen-gravitation of their transient earth-bound brethren.

You may assume correctly that the management training process has left a sour taste in my mouth (not to mention several other orificial discomforts), and has developed my penchant for clumsily articulated fiscal-class criticisms. You may also be wondering how I am transcribing these rantings whilst in the thrall of my endo-bonded AI gaoler, Babs. It’s simple really – I’m writing – with a pencil – on paper – it’s kind of weird. The lobby of the Gaunt is one of the few areas in WorkSpace that suppresses higher level, internal Job AI functions; based on a twenty year-old Ring of Steel byelaw created in a spasm of singularity anxiety, it is still common practise for all central London based physical locales to operate an “organic intelligence” only policy for public areas in nominally private corporate buildings. Supposedly brought into force to engender a degree of corporate neutrality, at least superficially, the 2009 Blair/Benedict Act now paradoxically provides a brief hiatus from the never-sleeping vigilance of our now near ubiquitous, ever-accelerating, godhead partners.

Since Fast Track began I’ve compiled over thirty pages of poorly scrawled, intermittently coherent musings about my experiences deep in the Gaunt; using thicker than average toilet paper extruded from the general purpose RepRap in my room (I told it I had a particularly bad case of the shits), and a feedstock carbon rod, I have been scribbling away busily. At about 20:00 most days, during the shift change, the lobby is uncharacteristically quiet, and with mega square-meterage, there is plenty of space to hunker down under one of the absurdly large, geneered Roystonea palms and jot down some appropriate musings on the day’s work. If anyone asked me, I said I was doing some sketches for a course scheduled for later that week; for the more persistent inquisitor I occasionally had to firewall their arses (our boosted ackles perfect for giving a lobby dwelling jobsworth the heave-ho). Some excerpts, viewed weeks later, give me some useful (cryptic) insights into the process – how ever much denied – that I went through:

There seems to be an overarching plan, a consensus, a guiding force – but where the fuck is it?

Initiative, whilst applauded locally, is apparently deplored globally.

No-one likes each other!

Conservation does not apply to everyone.

Some Jobs are smarter than other Jobs.

AI is alien, upper management are terrifying.

It’s fucking genius – it polices itself.

I miss my mum.

Like Pi, loss is a constant with endless decimal representation. Gain, on the other hand, is a fiercely fought for scarcity, incrementing only at the behest of WorkSpace.

What’s on the 100^th floor?

Ah, whatever, this stuff is too risky to have on me when we leave tomorrow (and my arse will take no more) – egress is as denuding as ingress. We are to be spat back out into the milling legions of WorkSpace, to control, manage and maximise shareholder value anew. My Operator cohort is waiting for me, not with any happy anticipation, but with the faint sick anticipation of a newly conscripted and fervent manager wreaking havoc in the pursuit of advancement. Little do they know that not only this is true (appearances have to be maintained), but they will also be under the merciless combined electron scanning gimlet of our neo-sherlockian gaze.

Still, going out tomorrow night, going to get fucking hammered.

——————-

Bellend X-1

Monday 07:47

Gecko I ain’t.

I’ve been shitting myself since Babs yanked me out of deep REM at five-thirty; not meanly though – no intrathecal microvoltage, Babs has chilled out considerably since the flush has faded from his post-upgrade zeal. His/her newly emergent, more rounded persona is quite agreeable as well, convincingly androgynous (s)he skirts expertly, and eerily, the base level gender determinant that underpins any organic relationship building. Basically (s)he has removed the one major potential divisive element in our new relationship. I am forced to see Babs for the aggregate of sentience that It is, as opposed to lazily relying on some hardwired gender assumptives to break the ice. No coquettish sweetheart… or salutary mate! here, just the naked, planar personality of an artificial intelligence – a phrase, let’s face it, that doesn’t even make sense – I prefer Newev, a recent neologism referencing the basic legitimacy of AI, whilst celebrating its novelty. I can’t say I like Babs, but to know that I won’t get fucked over emotionally in yet another boringly familiar iteration of limbic hostage-taking is quite liberating.

I’m really quite nervous; I didn’t expect to feel so apprehensive, this is my old Operator cadre, I know them all (well, in virch anyway, most of them live on the other side of the world to my grotty pad in Brentwood); we’ve spend countless hours bullshitting in RestSpace, listlessly paddling in the sandbox, and even the occasional shag in the conjugal meta-tank. A sample roll call:

Plaintive Ishikawa – endlessly bitching about the ill fitting caul of his immersion suit – forever ignoring that he will never drop below 140 kilos. No endomorph, he’s just a huge fucker, a weird ronic throw back, wholly ill-suited to floating motionless in grey goo for three days at a stretch; he’s never even left Hokkaido.

Yasha: a mournful ethereal presence bizarrely carrying a flame for every Goth to shamble through the streets of Britain’s seaside towns. Her avatar is a beautifully rendered monochrome gjenganger, flickering in and out of perception like Lot’s wife on the cusp of calcification. She never would tell us where she’s based, I’m sure she wished it was somewhere north of Gothenburg, but I’d bet on Eastbourne.

Danny – poor, Danny. A tertiary stage, gross body dismorphic – somehow ducking the WorkSpace psych filters, Danny had sought solace in long term virch. Utilising almost perpetual immersion (he had the longest overtime record of any of us), Danny works almost constantly to blot out his hate of his own flesh. He has a sweet, non-aggressive nature, and we all had taken turns nurturing his management of his cyclical body loathing. Apart from this, he’s a great worker, the fastest large object coder we’ve got in the team.

And Russlana – the accidental employee. Russlana spent the formative years of her adult life consuming a vast, painstakingly complied library of golden age scifi, left to her by her grandfather. Forever striving for a bechromed, utopian future, forever hanging tantalisingly just out of her grasp, she realised somewhat late in the day that the future had arrived already and it was brutal, knuckle-dragging task master that had no time for air cars and Mars trips. Disillusioned, Russlana cashed in her now absurdly valuable paper book collection and spent five years travelling a diminishing circuit of developing world destinations trying to block out the now. A couple of million Euros later she landed back at Heathrow nearly broke and mostly cured of romanticism. Her rapidly dwindling denial fund brought her to WorkSpace and she’s been here for 3 years, the longest surviving member of our team. She wears a featureless white avatar and communicates little, but an occasional acerbic wit keeps her in play.

It’s coming up to 08:00 and the team will be online soon – guaranteed – the Jobs ensure no tardiness. As the team manager I have been supplied a physical office location in a WorkSpace hub in Croydon. From my larger than average cubicle I am to use a combination of physical and virtual mechanisms to manage to the team during immersion sessions. Having Babs on board means I can dispense with the laborious exo-suit insertion that even now my colleagues are going through in their disparate locations.

I lean back in my new Aeron recliner (a perk in its own right, apparently) and allow Babs to initiate the team-tank shunt procedure. An operational overlay imposes itself by way of my ocular HUD and slowly the ten avatars of the members of my team manifest, spectre-like across the now huge, notional shared virtual space of the staging area that ignores the fibre board boundaries of my cubicle. Almost immediately, I get a ping from Russlana:

“Look at the big, fancy manager in his chair-that-costs-more-than-a-car”

So, this is management, a foot in both worlds and a friend in neither. Fucking WorkSpace.

——————-

Dead Peasants Society

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 (or 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.

——————-

It rubs the lotion on its skin

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.

——————-

Veni, Vida, Viva.

Excerpt from PhD Dissertation by Barati Chand, Primary Azad Crawler team (Nodal Identification & Extrapolation [Kathmandu]).

Chand, B, 2069, “Anti-corporate Macro Phagocytosis in a Burgeoning Posthuman Context: The Scourge of Janahara” (unpublished PhD thesis), University of Kathmandu, Nepal.

Nodal Identification (NI) provides researchers with a critical tool-set to enable the location and examination of the pivotal spatial and cultural moments in an historical event. It is these nodal points that substantively and essentially contribute to the temporal shape and flavour of a given moment, or set of events. NI, whilst now a commonplace tool for today’s forensic historian, warrants a brief examination as a fascinating example of an historically long ignored phenomena, which was only initially considered in a literary (fictional?) context.

The earliest definitive literary examples of nodal use are tantalisingly and peripherally referred to in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes opus. The reductionist, investigatory approach of this fictional doyen of crime fighting is periodically interspersed with allusions to his seemingly miraculous deductions from an apparent dearth of adequate evidence. Presented as the divinations of an ur-detective, we can see in Doyle’s florid text an attempt to clumsily articulate a phenomenon that only slowly gathers momentum through C20.

Mid-20^th century there is a bolder attempt by Le Guin to offer a more esoteric (and frankly milieu compatible) understanding of the notion of event intuition. In her gender hopeful sandbox of the planet Winter, we see a struggling protagonist groping for answers during almost an impossible mission; approach the Foretellers for help. These precognitives utilise a shamanic process augmented by certain congenital genetic qualities to divine the future(s). This description of an atemporal, meta-scientific examination technique to determine a likely causal stream was a bold attempt to marry the then wholly disenfranchised streams of religion and science and yet simultaneously (and ironically), “…exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question”. Le Guin, hopeful, yet sometimes resigned, offers an early, prescient, view into a world oddly familiar to you and I. As any terminal will tell you though, she got it mostly right…

Gibsonian-space blossomed in the latter decades of that tumultuous century, and little introduction is required to this most lauded of the early high priests of the binary. Eschewing traditional notions of religion, Gibson supplanted the numinous godhead with a bootstrapped (and cosmological) version of transcendence, with technology offering both the wafer and goblet of a neo-transubstantiation. In a world evolving, differentiating and complexifying at a dizzying (Mooreish) rate, Gibson offers us an unlikely hero and guide to the new structures of a human/machine world.

Laney, an orphan, a junkie, a cat’s-paw, is blessed (cursed?) with the ability to extract, fish, pluck, specific nodal events from the vast earthly datasphere and present them cohered into a revealing shape. Ostensibly, a talent used in a narrow, commercial context, Laney represents something more – both new and old. As with Holmes the rational is married strongly to the arational, intuition becoming both more and less explicable – but frameworked in a near recognisable technological future, Gibson’s treatment is inescapably right.

To the committed (yet ever searching), growing atheist community at the cusp of the millennium Laney represented the perfect embodiment of the near future – now – and partially revealed. Like the earliest programmers dabbling bare-handed in the proto-structures of machine language, we see through Laney a glimpse of the naked structure of the newly evolving global datascape, before it is clothed in future flesh. A barely tolerable quasi-singularity – a veil must be drawn over the searing complexity of machine evolution and only revealed and interpreted via the baffles and filters of the latter day priesthood: the coders and their object oriented sacraments.

The purpose of this brief (personal) take on NI is to lead us to the first of my nodal cruxes in the Janahara Azad project. Little introduction is required to the profound interest in, and implications of, the Azad acquisition of WorkSpace forty years ago. My work for the past four years has been the NI mapping of the pivotal events that lead up to that epic week in the summer of 2029, and the examination of some of the players who participated in that utterly transformative event.

In this mostly enlightened age superstition is all but banished but even a hardened researcher still goose bumps when reviewing some of the events that occurred during that epic period…

——————-

Bullpup

For Tad, like all mid-management predators, has always viewed the notion of legality as just another commercial variable to be negotiated. Morality considerations, however vestigial, are eliminated via a rigorous internal MBA top-up during the first six months of 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 overriding, and panic tinged concern is for his own continued ascendance. This task (fuck it: this mission) seems intolerably exposing, 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.

——————-

Pathology

It didn’t look like a corpse, but he was very dead. Dead bodies are pitiful; a triple amputee cadaver the colour of dirty pond ice is utterly pathetic, a roadkill would have had more pathos. Devoid of the mobilising energy that used this substandard shell in life, the truncated body was a palimpsest of a lifetime of self harm and useless delusion. Crippled by a dysfunctional endocrine system and a cranky neurochemistry, and bolstered by decades of supposed and imagined derision, this man had wilfully and incrementally reduced his body to a torso and one over-muscled left arm. The crenellated stumps of both legs and right shoulder betrayed the clumsy, DIY surgery of a terminally committed devotee to body integrity identity disorder (BIID), a condition known in an earlier, less enlightened century, as Apotemnophilia. A terminology over 50 years old, the name Apotemnophilia had grated on Danny his whole life. BIID was initially identified as a psychosexual disorder, where the sufferer could only attain sexual expression via the elective removal of one or more limbs. Danny had always felt that this marginalisation of a condition poorly understood (and distastefully approached) was indicative of the moralistic high ground taken by health care in the early days of modern medicine.

The simple fact was this: Danny hated having all his limbs, always had. He didn’t get hard thinking about stumps, he didn’t drool at the thought of a tidy DAK (double above the knee amputation), he didn’t forum swap ideas for modding cosmoses. Danny just didn’t see the point in his arms and legs; being a pretty smart guy he obviously was aware of the locomotive and prehensile qualities of his limbs but as a larger part of his body image (the holographic funhouse mirror we all maintain in our mind’s eye) they were completely wrong.

Fortunately, Danny’s family were rich; twice displaced farming land owners from the Western Cape, Danny’s mother had successfully re-routed substantial cash sums via an off shore banking facility in 2014. With assistance provided by a fiscally savvy AWB off-shoot called ARRM (Afrikaner Resistance & Relocation Movement), the Declevers were able to make an en mass migration from the strandveld of the cape to the lush pampas of Argentina by the autumn of 2015. With only the most cursory nod to the changed cultural conditions, the Declevers carried on farming as if continent hopping agronomy was standard practice; and by the late 20s the Declevers were one of the largest wholly privately owned GM wheat producers in the southern hemisphere.

Limb revulsion aside Danny Declever had fallen far from the family trunk. A cross cultural product of two continents and thoroughly inculcated by an omnipresent internet datascape that was both colour neutral and stylistically disdainful of monocultural racialisation, Danny was always going to be a child of the 21st century. Ethical considerations notwithstanding, racism just wasn’t a flier in his connected world; as anachronistic as a pith helmet and punkawalla, racism as Danny’s parents had known it was left to redneck survivalists and their ilk, to live out their evolutionary dead ends without hurting anyone much anymore. Danny was no idealist though; it was obvious that the kernels of race-related hate and rage and covetnous that had earmarked his parent’s and grandparent’s generations had not magically been dispelled by high bandwidth and the most efficient porn distribution facility ever devised. He had learned quickly that the vectors for discrimination were increasingly being pared down to two things: money and energy wealth. It didn’t matter what colour your skin was, or your genetic heritage – if you made enough fuck-you money then you could create your own apartheid – last year Iqbal Karim, CEO of Kashem Corp in Bangladesh, had made the top five in the Forbes rich list, and he was a terrible bastard – a slave owner in all but name, and epically wealthy with it.

Against the backdrop of a sunset over Lake Gomez though, such considerations felt a long way from impinging on Danny’s ostensibly idyllic life. Any newsfeed would bring torrents of realworld discord flooding into Danny’s rooms on the family farm, and despite being displayed in exquisite high def, or more increasingly rendered in Danny’s new virch rig, these portents never really made enough of an impression. The Declevers had money, they had land, they had energy from 25 hectares of PV solar panels, and they had guns, lots of guns.

Danny’s left leg started it all. From the age of ten it mocked him, its gross physical presence offended him, the jutting serration of his tibia, the cartoon chicken bone profile of his calf, the grotesque venous blueing, it all conspired to repel and fascinate him in equal measure. Some early exploratory self harm didn’t do the trick, it just hurt, and the resultant damage merely augmented the leg’s apparent permanence. More radical action was called for. By the age of sixteen Danny was a full time moderator and daily poster on transabler.org, a self help forum for BIIDers. DIY limb removal was his primary interest, historically this had been a deeply traumatic and dangerous pursuit. Early pioneers had advocated the Trunk Line Express, an appalling procedure in which the BIID sufferer uses the inexorable inertia of a slow moving locomotive and the track to remove an offending limb. Downsides of this method seemed to be gross tissue damage, poor recovery rates and not inconsiderable support network distress. Shotgun tactics also seemed somewhat distressing, double ought shot travelling at 500 metres per second did, on paper, seem like a useful limb removal mechanism – back spatter damage and groin proximity though, meant that Danny continued his research.

A pm chat with another regular poster (melamine612) introduced Danny to chemical intervention, specifically freezing techniques. Typically liquid nitrogen is used to sufficiently damage the limb, to the point at which emergency medical intervention will then conclude the amputation of the limb. This seemed a bit lazy to Danny, he felt that if you were going to wilfully cripple yourself, and potentially cause work for some underpaid paramedics the least you could do was do it properly – that is: meet the emergency services at the door using a your pre-purchased crutch, and sporting a tidy and controlled stump wound. The freezing technique seemed sound though, in-built cauterization and easily controllable; pain was always going to an issue of course but Danny had some good pharma contacts. In the end Danny decided on liquid helium, at -270 Celsius Danny reckoned it had the edge in terms of pain mitigation and removal facility.

Money talks and on a balmy September evening, 260 km west of Buenos Aries, with a gentle south-westerly breeze ruffling the cilia-like grass of the pampas plains, Danny took his leg. The paramedical and hospital report as follows outlines the scene in typical dry medicalese.

Patient: Danny Declever

Sex: Male

DOB: October 8^th 1998

Admitting hospital: Asistencia Medica SAME

Date: September 15^th 2016

The patient presented calmly, opening the door for the response team in a timely manner.

Manoeuvring awkwardly with a crutch under his left arm, the patient explained that the incident related to trauma to his left leg. The patient was dressed in an ankle length bedroom robe and it was not immediately evident to the response team that the left leg was missing.

The triage assessment, at the insistence of the patient (who remained lucid and calm throughout), was conducted at the patient’s home.

Trauma site: Left femur amputation (distal bias, approximately 7 centimetres above patella).

Appearance: Initial examinations revealed a relatively clean severance, with bone clearly visible in the wound cross-section. No blood – exsanguinations had been radically minimized by the patient (the response team was informed by the patient that the amputation site had been liberally infused with liquid helium, and the use of an ingenious cofferdam mechanism had prevented damage to the surrounding thigh tissue and muscle).

Methodology: Using the aforementioned freezing technique the trauma site on the left femur had been rendered brittle and dead – the patient explained that he had taken a high dosage of synthetic morphine analogue prior to proceeding and under the analgesic effect of the pain killers (see appended toxscreen), applied the liquid helium. After the application of the liquid helium the patient was then able to effect the removal of his left leg by the expedience of a single blow from a 3 kilo steel mallet. The patient then took advantage of the self cauterizing nature of the liquid helium application to dispose of the leg in a domestic waste disposal unit and contact the emergency services.

Treatment: Following admission to the Asistencia Medica (and a standard insurance/fiscal viability assessment) the patient was swiftly transferred to the orthopaedic ward of Clinica Bazterrica, where he continues to make a good recovery. The patient has refused all suggestions of prosthetic limb replacement and refuses to talk about the event.

Recommendations: The patient Danny Declever rates in the top 0.3 percentile of personal energy wealth in BA. As such, he is effectively immune from state psychotherapy intervention; in addition, a substantial patient donation to this facility’s management pension fund is noted and as mandated this report will therefore not be shared in the normal way with social services/police entities of the city of Buenos Aires.

I couldn’t take it anymore, I clicked out of the dunk even as the report on Danny Declever droned endlessly on in beautiful resolution; the reach, investigative abilities and worst of all, the narrative integration capabilities of an autopsy enabled AI are mercilessly all-seeing.

I was woken last night by Babs at 0400, with a priority ping override; there was an Operator down and a bereft Job broadcasting over the entire Cadre band. Even before Babs shunted me into the initial autopsy report I had my suspicions, and to watch the perfectly rendered corpse of Danny Declever rotating lazily in the notional space of the management tankspace merely confirmed my fears. Danny was gone, he was all gone.

——————-

What it’s like not to believe

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 Lycra 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 hole in the warm, humid slipstream of the primary WorkSpace transit artery between London and Bristol. 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.

——————-

Out patient

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 kilometres from the Maheepar 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.

——————-

Empennage

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.

——————-

The Deconstructed Man

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.

——————-

Ratchet

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 have 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 have 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 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 ping the Job a wake-up sequence from my PDA and it uncurls 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.

——————-

Notes to Babs (#4)

It’s hard Babs. Being human I mean; most days I wish I was like you. A synthetic, mediated consciousness devoid of anxiety, fear, self doubt and pointless introspection. Today was horrible – don’t sigh, I know I say that most days – but honestly you have no idea (can have no idea) about the near bottomless capacity of crassness that you have plugged me into. Take small talk for example, I mean come on – don’t these people even attempt some degree of output filtering? Some degree of self censorship before they allow their train of thought to spew ceaselessly out of their wobbling, little-too-wet mouths.

Some examples from just one day in the Gaunt:

• Family minutiae
• Unsolicited updates on new hobbies
• Fucking property purchases
• Emotional incontinence

Even your supremely rational mentality could quail I think…

This sort of white bread shite that pads the misery interstices at WorkSpace would be half way tolerable if there was an adequate outlet for the converse: Edgy, gnarly, excoriating scalpels of observations that could slide, stiletto like, between the ribs of these unwary purveyors of dreck. For some reason this sort of asocial conduct is frowned upon (and yes, I am aware that I would open myself up to mandatory termination). But for fuck’s sake, chuck me bone – imagine the gearbox crashing interruption that we could engender with the following:

• “Fat fingers, no?”
• “Positive equity is not wealth, moron”
• “Too early to joke?”
• “Do some fucking work”
• “Fuck off”

Frankly I’m dismayed – Fast Track – more like one track. Not only are most of these carelessly discharged, arcs of genetic predestination excruciating, haw-hawing nathans of the nth degree, but they also collectively create a fertile ground for interactive mediocrity. Like a gaggle of wallowing, pre-Darwinistic linguists, they ensure that the mainstays of work small talk stubbornly cling on like limpets in a foetid inland sea.

And the greatest injustice? None of the normal palliatives to their banality are applicable (or permitted).

• Booze: Tiring and confusing.
• Weed: Terrifying.
• Rage: Not conducive to hierarchical advancement (could cut both ways this one though…)
• Screen: Too much of a time sink.
• Sarcasm: Woefully misunderstood/under-appreciated.
• Wanking: The greatest threat of all outside of the 9-5 work slot. 20:00 creeps round, the virch cursor blinks desultorily in the corner of my shallow dunk, enthusiasm sinks to previously unrealised nadirs, a hot beverage – pah! Smoking is for hardy types, brrr. With a pathetic hind brain predictability thoughts slouch south – but for fuck’s sake, “I CAN’T GO THERE” – that way lies misery, self loathing, the desperate need for a shower and the niggling sense of a line crossed forever…

Night, Babs, you lucky fucker.

——————-

It’s the only way to be sure

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 it’s 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 extremely important ping: get ready to launch. Hard coded synapses shiver alert with an anticipation of pseudo-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 environment of the developed world this would result in a cease and desist order and fund withdrawal; 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 kilometres 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 ersatz 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 algorithms. The sat powers down to dormant, to again moronically eavesdrop the tsunami of commercial bandwidth flooding its router.

Pardis Hospice is shut for business.

——————-

Drip Down

It is an article of faith at WorkSpace that at some point you’ll be told. Not because experience bears out this belief, and not because you believe that ultimately it is the right thing that should be done (check your quaint sensibilities at the front desk please), but merely because even in an organisation as paranoid and as demarcated as WorkSpace the fabric of the place is porous. The walls have ears but they also have tongues – scabrous, rough, blunt proboscides that lap cat-like at the wispy fragments of information pervading from up above to down below.

Like a curiously hushed babel of snatched conversations, these snippets of chinesed knowledge propagate endlessly. The loudest of the whisperers endow a false authority to a froth of confusion; the meekest seek comfort in familiarity, like a hypochondriac comparing their latest anxiety against panoply of previously survived mythic organic terrors.

All are complicit, the hoarders, the gossips, the paranoiacs preparing pointlessly against worst case scenario, the seemingly blithely unaware hierarchs who, when they deign to wander Zeus-like amongst the mortals, sip here and there at the wilful confusion they sow. The worst though are the chattel half-wedged in the farmhouse door of the inner sanctum, lowing with passionate intensity at their masters, the ones who glean a few golden crumbs and then scuttle back to their corner of the barn and never share their meagre, incomplete insight.

*CLOSE STUB*

This is all back channel, pure journal; Babs can’t access this stuff, it’s all killfile to his relentless rationality. Not that I can assume that this is sedimentary text, a to-be-fossilised data layer that will only give up its bitter grit when it has been rendered soft and digested by the weight of archived material a hundred times as toxic, perhaps eventually converted into the fuel of future orientation sessions: “Inappropriate usage of your WorkSpace provided sensorium – Part 1”.

What happened to Danny hurt. Much worse than the death of Rhiain during FastTrack, then we had Mommy and Daddy WorkSpace to clear up the mess. I know it’s probably some insidious management training system magic working from the inside but I feel culpable. I was his manager and contrary to three decades of carefully cultivated disdain, he was my responsibility. The epic fucking red tape schlep of it all: I called CleanUp, I authorised the decommissioning of his Job and the relocation of its resident AI (I think it was pleased with its re-purposing – a white label DARPA prototype Job seconded to the nascent lunar base), then I called his parents. I even picked out a coffin, a horrible Special Circumstances model usually reserved for especially creative suicides and industrial accidents – it was just the right length for hm.

Nearly as bad as the memory of his battered corpse suspended in the stark pseudo-light of the tankspace was the gap in the team – the WorkSpace forged coherence of belonging that was simultaneously so pervasive and so insulting – a constructed loyalty that treacherously morphed into its own humane validity. Not a new trick of course, it is as old as war and as sticky as love – like a lot of WorkSpace tech and trick it is military in origin. They enjoy their own drip down, a venous thread of vicious baubled opiates – matt black, anonymised grey tech dribbing and drabbing its way into the corporate maw. We didn’t just get Velcro and Teflon – water boarding gave us capacity work loading, an ingenious pacification programme with a useful productivity by-product. Electrified crowd control water cannons inspired urinals with an in-built maximum stay limit; Abu Ghraib provided the inspiration for team building away-days with a just a little too much frisson of humiliation. They watched, they learned and they always improved.

So we’ve got a pack member down, and as I’ve said, everyone loved Danny. I know they didn’t kill him – he was a victim of his own scarred cortex and twisted psyche, but hobbled by his condition, a victim of a fritzing neurochemistry, Danny suffered and worked, and worked and suffered. His own personal wealth a seeming irrelevancy to him, he spent three years in a Buenos Aires workclave as a drone-level debugger sucking recycled piss out of a pre-owned Job, and three before that as a sub-contracted campus haulier on minimum wage and zero benefits. Danny had backed himself into a cul-de-sac of self-harm and pointless corporate ladder climbing. WorkSpace knew he was unspooling but he was an algorithmic casualty – their own system recognised no innocents (its pathology could not permit it) – he self-harmed, it was a free lifestyle choice (in the parlance of an agonisingly contorted health and safety policy), so he was conveniently ignored. They offered no quarter, no sick day, no pastoral salve and no excuses. And then he killed himself. I can’t fault their conduct, they were at least honest, true to their prime directive, but I still hate them and I still blame them. Completely.

Game on.

——————-

Critical Depth

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.

Nazca Tweets

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.”

——————-

Calvary Soldier

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 its storage configuration allowing Brant to dismount without losing any extremities. His face a expressionless 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 plaintive, 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.

——————-

Brighton Run

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 saccharine sweet Extraordinary Circumstances absention email to the WorkSpace temp coordinator – the default sick grandmother line is over abused, 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.

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Deafblind date

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.