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-fuckin-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 excruciating 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 skeptical 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 hi’s, cigarettes were stamped out, ties adjusted, skirts aligned; we headed up the steps.