5.5 KiB
commute
the burned out shells of ruined cars line the street while you are given a parking ticket for overstay in your own driveway. television screens, mattresses, broken glass cabinets line the street
your electronic vehicle measures its speed in kilometres per hour as whole integers even though it runs on a 64bit platform. it increases its speed from 59km/h to its new set point of 60km/h. there is a heavy clunk as the battery surges, overshooting its target to 62.1779103879933km/h and your meagre savings are obliterated by an automatically enforced speeding ticket unleashed upon you from a medium-altitude long-endurance unmanned aircraft traffic surveillance platform.
you drive on and the drivers you share the road with are completely insane every one of them out of their mind in some way. video games, gambling, drugs, or pornography adorns the dashboard displays of enormous trucks, with heavy duty wheels they crush all in their path.
the troubled youth joyride whatever they can get their hands on. they knock on the ports of the ignition systems with their low energy frequency hopping spread spectrum phreaking boxes. snow encrusted demons on motorcycles, they frequently lose it on the ice and slam into parked cars, erupting into a lithium hellfire.
acid rains from the sky. the air is filled with sulphur and an infernal smell clings to the icy slurry that covers the roads. more about the air
the people cower in their crumbling plasterboard homes, or in a megalithic brutalist block of units, with crisscrossed walkways to its neighbours: a data centre with a backup natural gas generator that is always running, and a slaughterhouse.
we get to the entrance. there's some kind of error getting in. "the organisation has changed something," states the gruff exmilitary watchman from his pillbox guardpost, "they say the last system was too simple." there is a lot of shuffling in and out of the post. a brusque call is made to a service provider. lastly, a blood sample is given. identity confirmed, the heavy steel gate lowers and we pull into a carpark at the base of the building.
snow falls on the courtyard outside the_facility.
one of nine hundred and thirty eight, the name of this firm: growtein garden is milled into the steel face of the building.
its edges are sharpened to cut the ropes of attackers attempting to abseil down from the roof onto to the floor to ceiling glass windows of the board room below it.
on the snow below the board room, the severed wings of bats and birds that have tried to nest in the logo alcove. they are drawn by the warm exhaust being vented from inside, their warm blood melts the snow they rest on.
we enter the building. back in the guard booth our photos and personal details appear on a monitor. in the corporate headquarters they appear among scores of others in the bottom right 16th of a panoramic operations centre, briefly, before being added to a chain of times and locations that stretches all the way back to birth. the corporation amasses gargantuan troves of personal information on everyone that comes into contact with it. everything from medical records and genetic data to crass itemisations of sexual liaisons.
a copy is immediately exfiltrated by an advanced persistent threat's worm festering in the state manager of the neural network powered facial recognition subsystem. they list it on a deep web market in a bundle with 2 million others. the corporation's automated scraper of the market buys a copy and adds it to the training data of the facial recognition subsystem.
i sit down at my desk. the headphones are still tangled from the morning report.
i glance at my todo list. a remarkable tool, one of unquestionable utility. it should be a comfort, a girder upon which to build a productive and satisfying day of labour for the mutual benefit of both the self and the greater whole.
... but it has become corrupted. in times such as these, where productivity is being deleveraged, for every item crossed off, 2.28 will have been appended. this is the economy under the management of the todo list that only gets longer.
it senses my presence. ...
the todo list that only gets longer
taunts you ink like the tar of a lifetime smoking cigarettes oozes out of its mouth as it speaks the universe is playing against you. every time you play this card increase the number of items on it by 2 get another notebook? i can't. that would mean believing that an inanimate notebook has the power of speech. making an economical decision based on the subjective experience of something out of reality.
desk
i can't separate the facility that sucks and the one that rules because they are the same place. the office.
sharp steel signage milled into the building same way that anti ergonomic benches aggrieve ordinary people, skateboarders and the homeless, the sign was designed to prevent people scaling the walls but also cuts the talons off birds that attempt to perch on it, feeding them bloody arms of a different sort
spotify changed its ui again - smart shuffle - stops playing the album to play music video
what to do in the face of so many minor inconveniences
- driving in the morning to the_facility
where the fuck i am
is it competitive dog barking are there really monstrous lovecraftian hounds stalking the countryside
well for one thing it's fucking cold like driving in antarctica. but then it will get warm, which is not very pleasant because the air is full of sulphur and extremely humid so there is a constant icy sludge and a foul smell there is junk all over the place, not just at home