by Sam Byers
‘OK, what’s the problem with saying that then?’
‘It’s anti-Islamic,’ said Childs. ‘Everything’s anti-Islamic now.’
‘No it isn’t,’ said Hugo. ‘It’s got nothing to do with bloody Islam. All we’re saying is, if you can’t see what colour people are—’
‘I’m wondering if maybe we should kind of not keep saying it?’ said Teddy. ‘So as not to get too in the habit of saying it? Because that’s how things slip out.’
‘I don’t understand what’s controversial about this.’
‘Well, what’s controversial about it is that it kind of suggests that terrorism is something that’s defined by the race of the person doing it rather than the thing they’re doing.’
‘But it is,’ said Hugo.
‘Not really, no. Because if you put a bomb in a school, you’re a terrorist. Doesn’t matter what colour you are.’
‘I think that’s a very semantic point.’
‘Politics basically is semantics, Hugo.’
‘That’s an even more semantic point. Well done, Teddy.’
‘I don’t know what semantics is,’ said Childs.
‘You don’t need to, Ronnie. Your life involves no semantics whatsoever.’
‘You could tell by their hands anyway,’ said Childs.
‘That’s true,’ said Hugo. ‘What if I didn’t say faces? What if I said hands?’
Teddy looked at him a long time. ‘Let’s say nothing for the time being, OK?’
‘Faces. Hands. It’s a semantic point, isn’t it?’ said Childs.
Hugo looked at Childs for what he hoped was a long time but not long enough to make Childs angry.
‘What’s that thing they say?’ said Hugo. ‘We are your face. What does that mean?’
‘We don’t know what that means,’ said Teddy.
‘Could be racial,’ said Childs.
‘Could be very racial,’ said Hugo, who found himself agreeing with Childs slightly more often than he would have liked. ‘Have we looked into that, Teddy?’
‘No,’ said Teddy, ‘because like I was saying before …’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’re T minus seven minutes on the bowel situation, Hugo. Ronnie: we need to drop you off here.’
‘But we haven’t—’
‘We’ve heard,’ said Hugo seriously. ‘You understand what I’m saying, Ronnie? We’ve heard.’
‘We’ve heard very clearly,’ said Teddy, across whose face a thin film of sweat had developed. ‘And now we’re going to plan. And once we’ve planned, we’re going to act.’
‘What you need to do right now, Ronnie,’ said Hugo, ‘is pause. Strategically. You know what we’re saying?’
‘I can only hold back the lads for so long,’ said Childs.
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ said Teddy. ‘Boy, can I relate to that. But there’s a time and a place. That’s all we’re saying.’
‘Right,’ said Childs.
‘We’re going to drop you here,’ said Teddy.
‘Maybe if one of you gets out,’ said Childs, wriggling from side to side.
‘No can do,’ said Teddy.
‘One of us might be seen,’ said Hugo.
‘Alright, yeah, good point. I’ll just …’ He clambered over Teddy and pushed open the door, then stumbled out onto the pavement. Looking briefly rage-filled, he then gathered his composure and opened his newspaper.
‘He’s reading his newspaper on the pavement again,’ said Hugo, looking back.
‘Driver,’ said Teddy, tapping urgently on the glass partition. ‘We’re going to need to travel slightly faster than this.’
*
‘He’s gone dark, is what you’re basically saying.’
‘Not totally dark, no. Like, he’s still there. He’s still pulling traffic. But nothing’s really coming back and I can’t see what he’s doing.’
Trina nestled the phone into the crook of her neck and reached down to her mouse to click around some more. In front of her, the traffic-light colour codes of the Microtaskers that made up the bulk of Green’s workforce reordered themselves, but left her none the wiser as to what the one on whom her attention had fallen might be up to.
‘And he’s usually productive?’
‘Usually super-productive,’ Trina said. ‘He logs in all hours, shifts tasks like a machine. He was a day or two away from going next level.’
‘And then …’
‘Then this.’
‘Maybe it’s personal issues?’
‘I thought that, but then … His traffic is just too weird. He hasn’t dropped off the grid, which would suggest a sudden crisis, and there hasn’t been the slow decline in productivity you’d associate with, you know, mounting domestic issues. It’s like he’s half-vanished, but he’s still there.’
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
‘Have you flagged him?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You’re going to have to flag him.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘Who’s your team leader?’
‘Norbiton.’
Another pause.
‘I can see why you’d be reluctant.’
‘Right.’
‘But I don’t think there’s any other way.’
She sighed.
‘Fine. OK. I’m flagging him. Wish me luck.’
She put the phone down, navigated her way through the profiles in front of her, right-clicked, and added a flag. Seconds later, the system acknowledged her action with a little pop-up. Through the grinding monotony of her day, this was about as close as she would get to an event.
She sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, onto which were imprinted the scrolling colour-codes of Beatrice, her task-management system. She waited until the after-image faded before allowing herself to return to immediate time and space: the blank cube of her No-Go room, just big enough for a desk and a terminal; soundproofed, swipe-carded. To some, it would have been depressing. To Trina, this anonymous, isolated cell was what achievement looked like. She’d battled for this, and so never resented it.
Work at The Arbor was rarely, if ever, a process of collaboration. Thanks to the neurotically enforced Need To Know policy, nothing of significance was achieved in the open. Instead, projects were managed by designated individuals in flat-packed, portable cells programmed with a single set of entry credentials. The system’s aim was to prevent data breach. Even if someone went rogue and started leaking, went the wisdom, they would only be able to reveal what limited information was known to them. A side effect of secrecy, though, was status. Your presence on the open floor, toiling away with all the other non-project workers, signified only the unimportance of your work. To be noticed, to be in the mix when increased responsibility was discussed, you had to be nowhere to be seen, working away on something only you could define.
She returned her attention to Beatrice, the neatly ordered interface that comprised the entirety of her working environment. In the top right-hand corner of her screen, a real-time figure advised her that productivity was exactly where she wanted it. Nonetheless, she played with the parameters, nudging sliders and dials and watching as the productivity rate updated itself accordingly. Below it, the icons and worker handles, each of which represented an anonymous worker coding away in their bedroom or lounge in various corners of Edmundsbury and, in some cases, the country, shifted colour. Green for the highly productive, amber for the average, a stern red for those not currently pulling their weight. At the bottom of the list, Tayz, the once-reliable worker she’d just been forced to report, remained stubbornly scarlet.
Thought and action were ruthlessly segregated in The Arbor. Ideas were generated by those whose position in the hierarchy allowed them to think. Once approved, those ideas were broken down, fragmented into a series of actionable tasks. Each task was a package, a container for a series of tiny, non-hierarchically arranged jobs that needed to be done, each of which was, by this stage in the process, so sm
all, so insignificant, so utterly disconnected from the big-picture project of which they were part, that literally anyone could complete them. Even better, they could complete them from anywhere they had access to a networked computer. If you believed Green, which all Green employees unquestioningly did, it was an arrangement that suited everyone. Bulky, expensive offices had become redundant. Dull, inflexible office hours were a thing of the past. Microtaskers worked wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Because they were given a single micropayment for each microtask they completed, they worked as much or as little as they liked. The work–life balance, Green proudly claimed, had never been more flexible.
The reality, as Trina knew, was a lot less utopian. She’d MT’d herself. She knew how many micropayments it took to approximate a full wage. She knew how many hours, daylight and dark, it took to complete enough tasks to pay the bills. Unlike so many of the faceless workers she currently controlled, however, she also knew exactly what it took to graduate from remote, piecemeal labour to the next level up.
Like any gamified and incentivised system of working, the aim of Microtasking was to win. The problem was that no-one knew what winning looked like, or how it might be achieved. This was, of course, no accident. With no clear sense of what constituted achievement, the only option was to achieve as much as physically and emotionally possible in the hope it might suffice. Shaped around distinctly primal impulses, the Microtasking ecosystem was custom-built to leverage morale. Because the work required of MTs offered no context, no sense of completion, and no fixed endpoint, a sense of achievement had to be synthetically added. Levels could be unlocked, payment could be incrementally increased, status could be offered and withdrawn according to productivity. MTs weren’t just working, they were competing. At the end of the game, was the implication, lay the ultimate reward: an end to Microtasking, a position Inside The Building.
Rumours abounded as to what was required. MTs formed chat-rooms and forums to swap speculation. Some said productivity was key. Others felt quality was what counted. Trina knew the truth: it was neither. Green had productivity on tap. Since the Microtasking system automatically weeded out anyone who botched more than a couple of tasks, quality was a given. Instead, what caught Green’s attention were the very factors around which they based their own ethos: innovation and disruption.
The sliders and dials of Beatrice’s interface, to which Trina, in her hard-earned No-Go room, now turned her attention, were her own design. During her time working and studying, she’d become interested in certain parameters. Beatrice, she’d realised, was automated, and as a result, it was predictable. Although its exact structures of punishment and reward could never quite be ascertained by the people it remotely managed, its rhythms and patterns could be unconsciously absorbed. Productivity would be highly stable, but would never exceed projections. Her solution, emailed to The Arbor via an admin address, was simple: a user interface designed for human play. Now, Beatrice’s parameters incorporated the plasticity of human whim. In response, the workforce of Microtaskers was destabilised. In scrabbling to rebalance, they overworked. Productivity spiked. Trina was Inside The Building.
Her sense of achievement, though, was muted. All the time she’d been Microtasking, through every speed-fuelled working jag and Valium-cushioned comedown, The Arbor had been her goal. Breaking in had kept her going. Now she was in, now that she’d unlocked the level she’d craved, all she found was that a whole new set of goals had unfolded in front of her. Life in The Arbor, it turned out, was only marginally different to life outside it. The hours were more manageable, the pay more satisfying, but the conditions were painfully familiar. Even here, it transpired, no-one was on anything even approaching a traditional contract. Workers could be sunsetted without warning. She’d seen it happen. A little pop-up on your screen thanked you for your contribution. You clicked to acknowledge, your screen locked, and you were out. Workers were encouraged to keep an empty box under their desk so they could vacate without delay.
As if on cue, an alert box appeared on Trina’s screen, causing her to experience, as always when these little windows sprang up out of nowhere, a momentary jolt of fear, followed by relief when she read the contents. User: NORBITON requests your immediate presence at: An emergency huddle. Location: The Dialogue Den.
She sent her computer to sleep and exited her No-Go room using her swipe card. Outside, the open floor hummed gently with muted activity: the insectile patter of keyboards, the chirr of quickly dismissed alerts.
Bream and Holt, who prided themselves on allowing not a single second of non-productivity to burst the fragile bubble of their efficiency, were already present, reclining awkwardly on the beanbags Green provided for meetings in the misguided belief that they countered formality, tablets propped on their knees, styluses windmilling through their fingers while they fretted over the wasted moments lost to Trina’s not quite instantaneous appearance. Perched on a slightly larger beanbag, repeatedly adjusting himself as the malleable floor-furniture rejected his portly form and deposited him onto the carpet, was Norbiton.
‘Trina,’ said Norbiton. ‘Glad you could make it.’
‘The alert implied it was compulsory,’ said Trina.
‘It is. I was using a standard idiom by way of a greeting.’
‘Consider me greeted,’ said Trina, lowering herself to the others’ level.
‘Right,’ said Norbiton. ‘All present. Let’s begin.’
He turned a page on his defiantly retro legal pad and tapped the paper with a chewed biro. Bream and Holt exchanged glances.
‘As all of you no doubt know,’ Norbiton began, ‘on Friday night, Edmundsbury experienced what for want of a better word we are currently describing as an incident. A group of people calling themselves The Griefers assembled—’
‘We all know what happened,’ said Bream.
‘Great,’ said Norbiton. ‘Excellent. I was just making sure.’
‘Let’s move on,’ said Holt.
‘Well maybe if we start by—’
‘We’re all short of Meeting Minutes, is the point,’ said Bream. ‘So this has to be a very targeted meeting.’
‘Fine,’ said Norbiton. ‘I’ll get to the point.’
‘Got to point out here that saying you’ll get to the point only further reduces the speed at which you’re able to actually get to the point,’ said Holt.
‘Noted,’ said Norbiton. ‘Anyway—’
‘We’re, what, two minutes in?’ said Bream. ‘And I’m hearing literally nothing.’
‘Green are, as you can imagine—’
‘Concerned?’ said Holt. ‘Because if you’re about to say they’re concerned, I think we can all safely say that we’d gathered that much.’
‘Let’s skip the concern,’ said Bream. ‘Drill down to the relevant detail.’
Norbiton, Trina noticed, was starting to sweat slightly.
‘I heard you were a tough team,’ he said.
‘Kind of a tangent, no?’ said Bream.
‘My timer says three minutes,’ said Holt.
‘Wow,’ said Norbiton. ‘OK. So the thinking is that we need to cauterise this situation basically ASAP because otherwise—’
‘Otherwise the town is going to flip out,’ said Bream.
‘What with the infrastructure and security concerns, etcetera,’ said Holt.
‘Right,’ said Norbiton, running a hand across his brow and heaving himself back to an upright position on his beanbag, from which he had once again slid. ‘Exactly so. What I’m trying to establish is—’
‘You want traffic reports,’ said Bream. ‘You want access registers. You want a breach analysis.’
‘That’s exactly it,’ said Norbiton. ‘This is … This is great. I mean, I’m barely having to do anything here, so, you know, that’s really great. Because that’s my whole leadership philosophy, to be honest with you. Get out of the way, let the people do their thing. It’s not even leadership, if we’re being really fine-gra
in about this. It’s more—’
‘This seems, like, totally extraneous,’ said Holt. ‘Does anyone else think this is extraneous?’
‘I think it’s extraneous,’ said Bream.
‘Whew, this is quite a pace you’re setting here, chaps. And Trina: when I say chaps I want you to know that obviously your gender is noted. No-one’s being exclusionary here.’
Trina said nothing. Much as Norbiton might have been hitting the ground, she thought, he was not doing so running.
‘Anyway,’ said Norbiton, who was starting to sound breathless despite being semi-prone on a beanbag. ‘Bream, what are the—’
‘Can’t tell you,’ said Bream.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I assume you were about to ask about my traffic reports. But I can’t tell you. You’re not NTK.’
‘Also,’ said Holt, ‘I am not NTK on Bream’s traffic reports, so even if you were NTK, Norbiton, Bream wouldn’t be able to say anything with me here.’
‘Also not NTK,’ said Trina, raising her hand. ‘Although while we’re on the subject, I would like to be NTK on more—’
‘You’re not NTK on it because you’re not working on it,’ said Bream.
‘It’s not, like, some sort of civil-rights issue,’ said Holt.
Trina eyeballed Holt but swallowed her response. Whenever Bream or Holt made her angry, they tended to lay the whole angry black woman thing on her, which of course only made her more angry.
‘Good,’ said Norbiton. ‘Great knowledge of the Need To Know policy there. That is totally noted and admired, OK, guys? But—’
‘This meeting will be many seconds shorter if everyone uses the agreed acronyms,’ said Holt.
‘Trina,’ said Norbiton, attempting to press on, ‘maybe you could—’
‘Uh uh,’ said Bream. ‘We’re not NTK on what Trina does.’
‘Yay equality, right?’ said Holt, shooting Trina a smarmy, deadeyed smile.
‘So basically no-one can …’ said Norbiton, floundering.
‘Tell you anything?’ said Bream. ‘Not right now in this setting vis-à-vis the subjects that have thus far arisen, no.’
