It is an article of faith at WorkSpace that at some point you’ll be told. Not because experience bears out this belief, and not because you believe that ultimately it is the right thing that should be done (check your quaint sensibilities at the front desk please), but merely because even in an organisation as paranoid and as demarcated as WorkSpace, the fabric of the place is porous. The walls have ears but they also have tongues—scabrous, rough, blunt proboscides that lap cat-like at the wispy fragments of information pervading from up above to down below.
Like a curiously hushed babel of snatched conversations, these snippets of chinesed knowledge propagate endlessly. The loudest of the whisperers endow a false authority to a froth of confusion; the meekest seek comfort in familiarity, like a hypochondriac comparing their latest anxiety against a panoply of previously survived mythic organic terrors.
All are complicit, the hoarders, the gossips, the paranoiacs preparing pointlessly against worst case scenario, the seemingly blithely unaware hierarchs who, when they deign to wander Zeus-like amongst the mortals, sip here and there at the wilful confusion they sow. The worst though are the chattel half-wedged in the farmhouse door of the inner sanctum, lowing with passionate intensity at their masters, the ones who glean a few golden crumbs and then scuttle back to their corner of the barn and never share their meagre, incomplete insight.
** CLOSE STUB **
This is all back channel, pure journal; Babs can’t access this stuff, it’s all killfile to his relentless rationality. Not that I can assume that this is sedimentary text, a to-be-fossilised data layer that will only give up its bitter grit when it has been rendered soft and digested by the weight of archived material a hundred times as toxic, perhaps eventually converted into the fuel of future orientation sessions:
“Inappropriate usage of your WorkSpace provided sensorium – Part 1”.
What happened to Danny hurt. Much worse than the death of Rhiain during FastTrack, then we had Mommy and Daddy WorkSpace to clear up the mess. I know it’s probably some insidious management training system magic working from the inside but I feel culpable. I was his manager, and contrary to three decades of carefully cultivated disdain, he was my responsibility.
The epic fucking red tape schlep of it all: I called CleanUp, I authorised the decommissioning of his Job and the relocation of its resident AI (I think it was pleased with its re-purposing—a white label DARPA prototype Job seconded to the nascent lunar base), then I called his parents. I even picked out a coffin, a horrible Special Circumstances model usually reserved for especially creative suicides and industrial accidents—it was just the right length for him.
Nearly as bad as the memory of his battered corpse suspended in the stark pseudo-light of the tankspace was the gap in the team—the WorkSpace-forged coherence of belonging that was simultaneously so pervasive and so insulting, a constructed loyalty that treacherously morphed into its own humane validity. Not a new trick of course, it is as old as war and as sticky as love—like a lot of WorkSpace tech and trick, it is military in origin. They enjoy their own drip down, a venous thread of vicious baubled opiates—matt black, anonymised grey tech dribbing and drabbing its way into the corporate maw. We didn’t just get Velcro and Teflon: water boarding gave us capacity work loading, an ingenious pacification programme with a useful productivity by-product; electrified crowd control water cannons inspired urinals with an in-built maximum stay limit; Abu Ghraib provided the inspiration for team building away-days with just a little too much frisson of humiliation. They watched, they learned, and they always improved.
So we’ve got a pack member down, and as I’ve said, everyone loved Danny. I know they didn’t kill him—he was a victim of his own scarred cortex and twisted psyche, but hobbled by his condition, a victim of a fritzing neurochemistry, Danny suffered and worked, and worked and suffered. His own personal wealth a seeming irrelevancy to him, he spent three years in a Buenos Aires workclave as a drone-level debugger sucking recycled piss out of a pre-owned Job, and three before that as a sub-contracted campus haulier on minimum wage and zero benefits.
Danny had backed himself into a cul-de-sac of self-harm and pointless corporate ladder climbing. WorkSpace knew he was unspooling but he was an algorithmic casualty; their own system recognised no innocents (its pathology could not permit it). He self-harmed, it was a free lifestyle choice (in the parlance of an agonisingly contorted health and safety policy), so he was conveniently ignored. They offered no quarter, no sick day, no pastoral salve, and no excuses. And then he killed himself.
I can’t fault their conduct, they were at least honest, true to their prime directive, but I still hate them and I still blame them. Completely.
Game on.