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 a rejection of the increasingly conjectural bulwark 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 (and scarified) new world, the corporate doyens of WorkSpace hunkered down and let a decade of climatic and economic privations break against the hybrid barriers 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.