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 its 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