The Cracked Bell Jar

I rent a cubicle on the third floor in a seven-storey glass-fronted building—a ‘co-working’ space—that I like to call the Aquarium. A large backlit sign at the entrance displays the motto of the company that runs the building: Inspiring Ideas and Innovation . I promised myself that I would cancel my lease when the sign ceased to annoy me. Every morning I force myself to pause and read that smug sign before walking into the Aquarium–appropriately irked, and ready for work.

The third floor in the Aquarium is where indie developers are corralled. Almost the entire floor is a sea of sofas, beanbags, minimalist tables, and ergonomic chairs. These are occupied by the General Population–the jobless and penniless optimists among us who hire, quite literally, a place to sit and work. Inmates who have some coin to spare may lease a desk in one of the glass cubicles built along the walls. Mine–Cubicle 3–is the smallest size available, and is what they call a “twin seater”. Three developers share Cubicle 4 next to mine, there are four in Cubicle 5, four more next to that, and so on. I don’t know the names of my neighbours but one needs identifiers, so: there’s Go Go Girl, the only Go developer, and reigning Go champion at the Aquarium, there’s pony-tailed Pool Pot, who has permanently dilated pupils, and plays pool all day, and Javabot, an old-school dev who would plug himself into an IV drip if he could lay his hands on pharmaceutical-grade caffeine, but makes do with hourly shots of espresso. Cubicle 2, on the other side, is currently occupied by a sad dwarfish chap, about my age. He is a middle-level manager who has recently lost his job but doesn’t want his family to know. I call him Ex-Man. He spends most of the day on a Rust certification course for beginners. When he completes it, I’ll change his name to Crusty.

The top two floors of the Aquarium are leased by Generic IT Company With a Poncy Name which everyone calls GITCo; below them is Yet Another Anonymous Telemarketing & Trading Company or YeahT&T, which has, shall we say, a hide-and-seek relationship with the FCC, the FTC, (specifically, the National Do Not Call Registry), and the SEC. The rest of the companies at the Aquarium are packed four or more on each floor. They all make an app of some nature. There’s a laundry app, an online gaming app, a mobile game app, a vaguely fishy blockchain app, an AI Chatbot service, and a medical app of some kind that connects via Bluetooth to a rectal thermometer, or is it a… I digress.

The Aquarium’s walls are papered over with photographs and quotes from everyone’s favourite Steve, The Musk, and Other Corporate Geniuses. The only way to do great work is to love what you do, says The Steve, grinning creepily at everyone from above the lavatory door. Wasn’t it The Other Steve (Wozisname?) who did the work that The Steve loved? Stay hungry, stay foolish sits smugly right above my desk as well as the coffee dispenser. For the past few days, I have printed an A4-sized black rectangle and cello-taped it over one letter of The Steve’s wisdom: a silent protest against the Aquarium’s policy of not allowing unused print quotas to be carried over to the next day.

There is enough work to go around. Quite a few of the companies at the Aquarium offer contract gigs to the indie coders on the third floor. Javabot operates a swarm of virtual machines on the cloud. He pimps a vast menu of bot services such as website scrapers, contact-harvesters, API battering rams, POSTers, like-bots, chat-bots, Captcha solvers, etc., to anyone with money. He’s just landed a temp gig with GITCo. Go Go Girl has long-term contracts with the blockchain people on the first floor and the ChatBot people on the second floor, as well as recurring temp gigs with GITCo. Rumour has it that Pool Pot lives in the Aquarium and that he grows vandal-strength weed in a “service and maintenance” room somewhere in one of the sub-basements.

Ex-Man, like me, takes a leisurely lunch. We never sit at the same table, and I suspect that he knows that I know his secret. Yesterday, we shared a moment of disgust and fascination as we observed Pool Pot hungrily devour a whole slab of chocolate dripping with mayonnaise and tomato ketchup, and washed down with orange juice. Ex-man and I glanced at each other, and at that moment, we recognised each other as fellow stowaways on the recently shipwrecked cruise ship of corporate life. The Aquarium was where we had both floated ashore.

Go Go Girl’s lunch break, on the other hand, lasts about 40 seconds, because all she eats is a small cup of flavoured yogurt. Yesterday, she ordered the vegetarian lunch, which is a sizeable meal of rice, a Chinese or Thai vegetable curry, a bowl of vegan imitation chicken stew, and a serving of tofu dessert; she ate the dessert and then emptied the rest of the tray, untouched, into the trash.

“Was it too salty? Too spicy? Too rich?” asked the cafeteria manager, nervously.

“Too much” she replied with a smile. She used to sit in my cubicle under The Steve’s wisdom before I moved in. She must be the hungriest person in the Aquarium.

It’s the end of my day. The Floor Manager sighs when she looks at my daily printout. She cocks her head as if straining to hear the loose screws rattling around in my skull. I tap my head in reply: Not loose. Lost. She nods sympathetically. The quote above my desk is partially corrected with five black pages: “■■■■ hungry, s■ay foolish.” Three more to go. Next week I’ll begin fixing the one above the coffee machine.

Editor’s notes:

• Last year I received a letter from Meursault in which he described his life at the Aquarium; it arrived soon after he moved his life to a new city. A couple of weeks later, he wrote another letter about the Aquarium, and then another, and another… When he began referring to these as despatches, communiques, and specimen-notes, I realised that Meursault had developed an almost anthropological interest in the inhabitants of the Aquarium. When I suggested that these letters (suitably redacted and edited) might find a place among the pages of The Outsider, he agreed. More from the Aquarium.
• The motto of the company that runs the Aquarium has been changed, for obvious reasons, but the placeholder is similarly smug in style and tone.