For training, they make you sit in this grey room with a bunch of computers on a grey table. Your boss tells you she’s thrilled to have you on board but she doesn’t exactly sound thrilled. She sounds a little high strung, which is understandable, what with all the security checkpoints and facial recognition scanners and armed guards stomping up and down the corridors, back and forth, back and forth. You’d be stressed too!
“This is just a little orientation presentation,” Pam tells you. “This explains all the, um, great things we do here!”
A dome camera blinks in the ceiling’s corner.
You watch all these videos about how digital information is stored and how digital information storage benefits the economy and how the American people are actually grateful to have every last byte of their digital information captured, bought, sold, analyzed, categorized and stored in perpetuity on behalf of a wildly remunerative private company which is financed almost in its entirety by the United States Government.
The benefits are clear! you are assured by the 56th slide of a 137-slide module. The technological services facilitated by the company enable good, decent, hardworking Americans (think construction workers, teachers, and the callous-handed farmer) to:
- Increase efficiency
- Enhance productivity
- Substantially decrease unnecessary financial capital losses due to the employment of an outdated, ineffectual, and frankly contemptible human workforce
- Streamline online shopping
Wow, you think. Technology is amazing.
Slide 57 lists healthcare options (not applicable for this position). Slide 58 outlines the overtime policy (not applicable for this position). Slide 59 indicates who to report to if you suspect your co-workers of international espionage, cyberterrorism, seditious activities, and so on and so forth, yadda yadda yadda. You know how these things go.
After the module portion of training, you are given the workplace tour portion of the training, where Pam leads you around your assigned quadrant of your assigned sector of your assigned wing of the massive, ten-million-square-foot data center located on what used to be a rare butterfly sanctuary in the Santa Fe National Park.
“This sector alone can process the data of thirty million Americans” says Pam, as two stone-faced men with machine guns glide silently past you without even the briefest acknowledgement. “It barely takes just a little over twice the amount of electricity used to power Los Angeles to do it.”
You are briefly amazed by the incredible potential of technology, then a little depressed as you recall the former existence of butterflies, but then it’s right back to being amazed at Computer!
You walk down the long hallway filled with monolithic servers that produce and radiate invisible waves of psychic menace, paranoia, apocalyptic foreboding, and a funny buzzing sound. Along the way, Pam shows you where to clock in, where to find the liquid spill coagulant powder, the forms you fill out if you happen to be electrocuted by any number of high-voltage pylons, and the break room with the Keurig coffee maker.
“Because sometimes, even people need to be rebooted!” says Pam.
“Ha!” you say. “Totally.”
On the breakroom television, the news plays a segment about how detonating a chemical bomb in the middle of Sacramento may have actually benefited the Grand National Party in the midterms.
“Ha” allows Pam. “Okay let’s get to work.”
***
Now, this ain’t your first rodeo. Ohhh no. You’ve worked maintenance a while now—in libraries, public schools, post offices, small family doctor’s offices—but those places don’t really exist anymore, so now that you’ve landed this position at Ussen Cloud Data Management Solutions, a company who now accounts for 37% of the state’s economy, boy are you ever grateful for the opportunity. Mostly because you’ve got a looooooot of student loan debt for a degree that has very little to do with the maintenance work you’ve been doing for the past six years. And, as far as jobs go, this isn’t too bad. It isn’t too good either, but also not too bad. What am I trying to say? I guess I mean that It is no less and no more difficult/tenuous/anxiety-inducing/frequently disgusting/unsafe/underappreciated/underpaid/unprotected as any other job you’ve had in the last few years, of which there have been many, all of them just about as bad and/or good as this one? I guess I mean that this job is fine. I mean it’s awful, yeah, but it’s good! I mean it’s not good, of course, but thank God you have it! And maybe you don’t exactly “love” it every single day, but you just puuuuuush those thoughts riiiiiight out of that brain of yours! Because do you want to be homeless? You want to be one of those people gathered outside the gates? One of those non-people? Who you often see sprawled out in gutters around the city? On who knows what kind of drugs? Is that what you want?
No.
So all day long, tasks are assigned to you through an app on your phone that blips and chirps at you constantly in a little voice that is cute and bubbly and permanently lodged in your subconscious after only a few short weeks. Mostly the computer voice has you dusting server racks, mopping up boot scuffs, restocking the coffee machines, readjusting motion sensors in the central server room, cleaning up spent tear gas canisters from beyond the double barbed wire perimeter of the data center’s fortified walls, unclogging toilets, replacing the trash bags etc, etc, etc. The hardest part is memorizing the code system.
For instance:
If you hear “code 411, B16 upper” that means there is a spill in the hallway by the work area.
If you hear “code 227, perimeter” that means “potential terrorist activity” and you’re supposed to shelter in the nearest safe room while the security team neutralizes any and all threats to data security.
If you hear “code 612, B2 lower” then the AC is out.
And if you hear furtive whispering emanating from the closed-for-maintenance employee bathroom, and you open the door to find two engineers huddled over a toilet seat looking over what appears to be floor plans for a data center, and you ask Is everything alright in here? and one of the employees whispers in a panicked hiss for you to close the fucking door before they see you while the second employee hastily stuffs the blueprint into an unassuming-looking messenger bag, and you say What’s going on? and the guy, a large bald man, yanks you into the stall, and you say Let go of my arm, you’re scaring me and then you notice that the second employee, a short dark-haired woman, is holding what appears to be a gun, and you say Is that a gun? Why do you have a gun? and the bald guy says Never mind about the gun but you’ve already started to panic, sucking in these big wheezing breaths until the small woman with the gun grabs your face and covers your mouth and says He’s seen too much and then she looks at you and says I’m sorry but you’re a part of this now and then, with a look of deep sorrow, adds You don’t have a choice and when she uncovers your mouth you say Who are you people? What do you want? and the man, cracking the door open a sliver of an inch to check the hallway, says We’re people. Human beings. We’re people and we intend to stay that way and then he points to a spot on the floor plan about half a mile from the bathroom where you’re standing now and says Call in a code 227 right here and he says Marie, are you sure? and Marie says This is providence, John and then she turns to you and says Do it so with shaking hands you lift your phone and report a 277 in C wing, and fifteen seconds later you hear a hustle of tactical boots clomp-clomp-clomping down the hallway, and the next thing you know you are pushed out the bathroom door with a gun jammed into the small of your back, and the woman with the gun says I’m sorry it has to be this way, but you’re involved now, you just are, and we can’t let you leave, but it will all be over soon so just do what we say, okay? and adds Okay? but you don’t even hear her over the pounding of blood in your head, and the rising swell of the alarm system screaming in the hallway, and you approach the door to the main server room which is now temporarily unguarded, but for how long you don’t know, and the man extracts the small blinking package from his messenger bag and affixes it to the server in the center of the room and says I love you, Marie and then, wiping a tear from her eye, the woman says Oh, John… and then one of the guards comes out of the breakroom and you scream HEY before you can think, and you scream HELP ME and TERRORISTS! and GUN! and SUSPICIOUS! and then John says Shit! and the security guy says Drop the weapon! On your knees! and Marie says Fuck you, fascist fuck! and raises her weapon and then it’s BANG BA-BANG BANG BANG BA-BANG BA-BANG BA-BANG BANG BANG BA-BAN-
***
A nice thing about recovering from a gunshot wound you received at work is you get to watch a ton of TV in the hospital.
A baking show. A dating game. A contest for puppies. A segment about the kidney melting supervirus careening through Venezuela. An update on the celebrities who have been kidnapped by pirates. An ad spot for a new show about a small town software engineer who gets run out of town by evil farmers. A heavy metal jingle for an energy drink that blasts microplastics right out of your bloodstream—BLAM! A commercial for a medicine that supposedly makes you stop mysteriously crying all the time for no good reason. A story about how those butterflies were actually ugly and poisonous un-American anyway. A report that ANTIFA has infiltrated the nation’s kindergarten classes. A story about an AI bracelet that knows your life story. A commercial announcing the return of the McRib! A brief, BREAKING NEWS interruption that the index finger of one of the kidnapped celebrities has been recovered (and then a quick facial scan registering your reaction to the thing about the McRibs from a minute ago) followed by a report that the arsenic in the water supply for the greater Seattle area may actually be a political win for the Grand National Party!
It’s just nice having time to unwind.
***
When you get back to work (which, you’ve gotta say, is an alarmingly short amount of time), you’re practically a hero! There is a gift card to Chili’s taped to your locker. Management awards you an extra ten-minute break on any day you choose. Someone left brownies in the breakroom (which have mostly been eaten) and HR has sent you a “THANK YOU” email in which they named you “TEAM PLAYER OF THE WEEK” and it almost makes you forget the dark clot of pain where the wound is still closing. It can be hard to ignore, but you have a life to live, right? Of course you do!
It’s actually kind of nice to be back at work, to be honest. Things were getting boring at home. You like having things to do. You like having tasks to complete. It makes you feel real. Like a real person with a role to play. It makes you feel real in a way that sitting alone in your miserable studio apartment, dressing and undressing a debilitating injury, could never really do for some reason.
So thankfully, your days return to the familiar, pre-shot-in-the-ribs pattern of taking directions from a bubbly robot who chirps on your phone, sweeping long monochrome corridors, taking screws in and out of AC units, unclogging toilets in the security breakrooms, replacing the perpetually empty Keurig coffee cups in the staffroom, and watching the gargantuin pile of Donut Shop Blend and Green Mountain Coffee and Decaf Luminosa grow and grow and grow in the trashcan until it finally reaches a tipping point and just spills the fuck over.
Oops!
And you just leave it there, bleeding brown bean-water onto the grey, monochrome carpeting.
“Oh! Um… that’s okay!” Pam says when she walks in on you staring wordlessly at the filth on the carpet. “Let me get that for you. You’re probably still recovering from that little mishap and all. Ha. Ha ha.”
“Ha” you parrot. “Ha ha ha.”
Because it feels pretty good to be recognized, you guess, even if you are being recognized for getting accidentally shot and almost killed by an armed employee of your workplace, who has not once even stopped by to say sorry, even though you work with the guy, and even though you were technically a hostage, and even though you thought you made that pretty clear when you were screaming for help. And the security guard who shot you apparently received a medal from the governor for detaining (killing) two “Radical Islamo-Socialist Somalian Narco-Cyber-Terrorists”, which doesn’t sound right to you, but it’s what the news is calling them. But hey, who are you to question the report of a frightening and heavily tattooed security guard? Or your supervisor, Pam? Or the Santa Fe Chief of Police? Or the governor of New Mexico? Or the CIA? Or the NSA? Or the Cybernetic Anti-Terrorist Strike Team Investigative Force? Or the Ussen Cloud Data Management Solutions Private Militia Intelligence Division? Or the president’s tweets? Or what everyone is saying, like it’s just a known fact, that these people were evil, Muslim, drug dealing, Somalian cyber-terrorists? Even though, to you, in your opinion, they seemed more like two regular people driven insane by their understanding of the evil things they believed were happening in this evil, evil place, and felt compelled by a force greater than fear to do something, anything, to stop it? And is “insane” even the word?
This gets to you a little. It kinda makes it hard to concentrate on your job mopping servers or dusting toilets or whatever. It makes it hard to focus on the supplementary training modules that tell you that actually your chances of cancer correspond to your levels of patriotism and has very little to do at all with what Ussen does or doesn’t dump into the water. Mostly, it makes it hard to sleep. It makes it harder to sleep than the actual bullet wound, which already ensures that you barely sleep at all.
And hey, here’s something interesting. Here is a new and interesting development. Instead of dozing off like you usually do to clips of The Adjustor (an NBC show about a heroic insurance executive taking on scheming sick people) or The Empty Grave w/ Rachel Maddow (a news program about all the good things happening today) or even Dancin’ with Congress! (self-explanatory), you stay up late into the night reading all about various former butterfly species and (get this) weeping into a pillow!
Crazy!
But it’s okay. It’s aaaall gonna be okay. Because when Pam finds you crying in a supply closet during your extra ten-minute break, she takes pity on you and allots you one of her administrative healthcare tokens that you can use on a single hour-long consultation with the company psychiatrist.
“What seems to be the problem?” she asks from a grey seat in a grey room while gazing straight through you with grey eyes.
“It just all seems so wrong” you blubber through snot.
So she gives you some pills. Little grey pills. And they help you dislodge the words “EVIL” and “TERROR” and “SIN” and “MISTAKE” from your mind. And instead of being sad and frightened and angry all the time, you can go back to being grateful—grateful for your job at Ussen Cloud Data Management Solutions, which Congress has just awarded the status of sentience. And although you can hear the gathering crowd of human rage already building at the barb-wired, drone-guarded, blood-soaked walls of the company’s sovereign lands, you are sure that this decision will undoubtedly, unremittingly, unaccountably, some-fucking-how, prove to strengthen the already undeniable drive of this country’s Grand National Party.