Remarkable is discouraged. Excellent is frowned upon. Deviance, though, in typical WorkSpace narrow focus, is lauded.
Tad Revert is not remarkable, not these days. In the noise and soup of moral ambiguity that defines the trencher of middle management scrap squabbles, he barely rates above norm for aberrant deviancy. Plucked from the thousands of job applicants to hit WorkSpace servers on an hourly basis, Tad was short listed for a management role seventeen seconds after hitting send in his mail client. Semantic cross-referencing accessed his entire digital life history in less than one second, the remaining sixteen plus seconds were wasted by a sluggish organic confirmation from the enlister on duty at the time. Tad was a good match, scoring highly on the initial PCL-R and a strong factor one bias in the Hare checklists, and this was sufficient to get him bumped to the front of the physical interview list. Ninety-four seconds after making his application he was in receipt of time and GPS coordinates for his interview the very next day (a Sunday). From the moment he walked under the terahertz scanning arch in the Gaunt lobby he knew he was going to be happy at WorkSpace; like some race memory analog—he felt like he had come home.
Six years have passed since he had first smelled the earthy, ersatz actinomycetes during the daily lobby precipitation and, from his own particular, warped point of view, they have been happy years. WorkSpace, treated with sufficient caution could be a generous master; shuffling around on its ever-expanding cache, the occasional bauble would trickle to the margins and could be snaffled by an earnestly attentive acolyte. Tad’s meal ticket, like thousands of his ostensibly amenable colleagues, was of course, his psychopathology. Eschewing quaintly naïve ethical considerations, WorkSpace was obliged, legally obligated, and perhaps genetically mandated, to utilise the most efficient resources available to maintain shareholder value. It was therefore not only unsurprising, but expected, that profit-friendly traits evident in their employees were to be capitalised at all costs. Hence Tad and his ilk—their bland half smiles, easy charm, fluid morals and lack of remorse made them an ideal vanguard for WorkSpace. Like Teflon-coated heat-seeking missiles, these moral-free lieutenants of industry were fired into the soft, unsuspecting underbelly of credit card-carrying Joe Public, where they frenzied a profit like sheep dogs with blood lust. It was all very satisfactory—in the short term.
Psychopaths have their disadvantages. Issues like sustainable profit and relationship-building often require a long term strategy, not a strong suit in the skin-wearing fraternity, however domesticated. Other problems manifest over time as well: charisma can turn into buffoonery and cliché, the mimicking of emotions can slip, people notice things. Psychopaths are also typically not endowed with over-abundant internal mindscapes, they imitate creativity exceedingly well, but mostly that’s all it is, imitation. You might ask Bundy to make a board presentation for you, but you wouldn’t get him to run a product launch. Psychopaths: great consultants, terrible employees.
WorkSpace, therefore, as they always do, fixed the problem - or rather, borrowed a solution. Artificial empathy: at first a grotesque concept, but as AI grew in maturity and stature, and human distaste for prosthetic life dissipated, emotional machines became more entrenched in life, a transparent pan-global neologism that meant not just humans, but human-machines, and machine-like humans. With emotional, dermal and carapace barriers becoming more and more permeable, the notion of a non-bipedal conscience became increasingly acceptable.
These mobile empathies were deployed everywhere: post-traumatic stress management, battlefield padre analogs, low level judicial posts, primary school administration. WorkSpace also found a new role for these exo-souls: Management management. Each new trainee above certain seniority grading and capability was assigned (and bonded to) their own empathy enforcement AI. Comparable to the Jobs that non-sociopathic WorkSpace employees successfully symbiote with, these external moral guides leant their charges sufficient ethical qualities to ensure they could operate successfully and profitably in relation to potential client targets. So, usefully augmented, these hybridised cripples became something more than they were, and something possibly better.
Tad is happy about the promotion, slightly more ambivalent about his new neo-conscience riding shotgun (they have yet to have their first orientation session), but mostly fucking ecstatic that he’s made it.
The lift comes to a halt with an almost imperceptible bump as it arrives at Chimney Level 0.
He’s arrived.