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 avie 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). 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 23rd 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 millenium 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.