The Evil Queen was spotted watering the cactus on her desk.
My Aquarium-issued key card allows me access only to the third floor, i.e., the indie floor, and the rooftop cafeteria. All other floors are out of bounds. Javabot has an active gig with GITCo and has access to the top two floors; as far as I know, Go Go Girl is the only indie developer with legitimate access to all floors. I say legitimate because Pool Pot has been spotted on all floors too. Floor access, cafeteria etiquette, and a dozen other rules (some sensible, some properly totalitarian) are enforced by a platoon of burly guards and a German camera surveillance system that stores thirty days of footage. Pool Pot claims that it was used by the Stasi.
There is one blind spot, measuring approximately twenty square feet. It lies beneath a ventilation fan in the far corner of the parking basement and is the location of the only fire-safety sand bucket in the building. The Aquarium sternly insists that the premises are strictly “smoke-and-vape free, with no exceptions” and, therefore, all evidence of people breaking this rule is removed from the sand bucket every night.
Yesterday, I found myself wistfully sniffing the air in the lift—there’s a node somewhere in the reptilian part of my brain that loves the smell of tobacco even though I quit many years ago. The smell or, specifically, its intensity was unusual since most of the Aquarium’s smokers tend to use odourless vapes, while the potheads, careful to mask their misdemeanours, leave behind a lingering cloud of mint and strong deodorant on the stairs. Something was inciting stress at the Aquarium… I buzzed myself into the third floor to find that the entire General Population—a.k.a., Coders without Cubicles—was missing. Go Go Girl and Javabot were talking animatedly inside their cube. I knocked on the glass and gestured quizzically towards all the sleeping laptops in the room.
Javabot opened the door. “The Evil Queen was seen watering the cactus on her desk,” he said in an oddly matter-of-fact tone. Then, seeing the puzzled look on my face, he continued, “GITCo’s private beta exploded like a shite grenade in a fan factory. The WAP Demon wants a pitcher of Bloody Piggy to calm his nerves.”
The look on my face remained unchanged. I remembered the incident at the cafeteria. Later that day I leafed through my notebook to fill in the blanks:
The WAP Demon owns half of GITCo.
[Reproduced from Meursault’s Field Notebook ] The median size of startups at the Aquarium is about twelve. Most of them are financed by a combination of unpaid labour, pooled savings, maxed-out cards, ketchup-and-crackers for dinner, and maybe a loan from Mom and Dad. GITCo is a bit further down along the corporate yellow road: it has around one hundred employees and secured Series A funding two years ago.
Half of its stock is held by a raffish Demon who lives somewhere in the Valley. He earned his dosch selling WAP services in the 1990s, and now spends his time golfing, fornicating, and investing in startups, often simultaneously. The CEO, the Evil Queen, and a couple of founder-developers own about a third between them; and the rest of the stock is held by a couple of minor hellions at the golf club. WAP Demon was organizing Series B funding, which is a process for Demon investors to sell their stake in the company, usually at a handsome profit. Unfortunately, GITCo’s existing clients felt that the new Poncy Cloud Suite™ was shite.
“Someone at GITCo is getting sacked today,” Go Go Girl said, helpfully.
“I understood that, but what about the cactus?”
She only waters the cactus when she’s about to fire someone," said Javabot.
“The whole team goes into the conference room, and then she slaughters the chosen, one by one, in front of the others. The CEO and WAP Demon catch the action live on the webcam. Sometimes, she even keeps the blinds open,” added Go Go Girl.
“Why?”
“Because she’s a psycho bitch,” she replied. “Pool Pot runs a betting racket in the smoking area on Cactus Day. You can lay a wager on whom and how many she will fire. Last year he offered 1:2 odds on how many would cry.”
“That’s horrible. But how would anyone know who cried?” I asked.
Javabot smiled and pointed: “This one has a dark side.”
Go Go Girl stuck her tongue out mischievously. “I’ve got a video! Wanna see three guys howling like little babies?”
The Rat Boss fires telephone operators by the dozen, every week.
Firings are not uncommon in the Aquarium. The Rat Bosses on the fourth floor hire and fire telephone operators by the dozen, every month. Imagine you’re a green recruit with a high school diploma moving up from a job at MacDoo. Could you spend the entire day cold-calling unsuspecting saps and peddling the flavour of the week? The Terminator AI App, The Greatest Medical Discovery since Antibiotics, We Will Pay You to Take a Loan From Us, Hello Kitty NFTs, and so forth. A few recruits develop a conscience and quit on the first day; most don’t quit, but expect to be fired at the end of every week; when they are, they simply move on to one of the other telemarketing companies, or into customer support. Only a select few, perhaps one in a hundred, manage to slough off every ounce of decency, grow a tail, and become genuine Rat Bastards.
Startup Capitalism is a spectator sport at the Aquarium. The General Population doesn’t care about the deaths of rookie telemarketers who walk up to the line, shrug their shoulders, and shoot themselves. They want to see skilled developers, greasy managers, Pit Bosses, and Rat Bastards being slaughtered; they want to see weeping VPs. They want to be entertained!
The queue for the watery porridge ladled out on Cactus Day–served with generous lashings of saccharine schadenfreude–reveals the plebeian nature of the Aquarium’s inmates. Why else would anyone assemble like voyeurs in front of GITCo’s office to spy on the grim proceedings?
“I think SAMM’s going to go,” I said.
“Yeah. I have one hundred bucks on him,” said Javabot.
“Nope. He’s been licking boots all month. Besides, he is pretty damn good at selling shite. My money’s on that idiot who leads the UX team, and two of his weasels. If it were up to me, I’d sack the entire UX team. Bunch of morons,” said Go Go Girl, as she plugged in her headphones. Javabot considered this information for a moment, then ran downstairs to hedge his bet. I went back to Cubicle 3. The General Population began trickling in. Apparently, the Evil Queen had kept the blinds closed. This Cactus Day would be a boring affair.
Ex-Man walked into the room wearing the same puzzled expression that I did. At lunchtime, while I was arranging my notes, I saw him chatting with Pool Pot who, I presume, described the events of Cactus Day. A splash of sadness, which continually simmered deep inside his heart, boiled over and stained his face. I thought at once of my own commentary on the subject and wondered whether, at any moment, I had felt any sympathy for those who lost their jobs. I couldn’t say.
Three people from the UX team were sacked that day. Go Go Girl pocketed three hundred; Javabot made a profit of fifty.
Editor’s Notes:
- The principal characters in the Aquarium series were introduced in The Cracked Bell Jar. GITCo, also known as PoncyCo is the “Generic IT Company with a Poncy Name”; YeAT&T is “Yet Another Anonymous Telemarketing And Trading Company.
- All despatches from the series are listed here.