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.