DATAFACTORY

The Office for Statistical Management and Moderation has an awesome reputation for data manip and that’s why Crabdale was proud to join them after the last lot had pulled the wires from his chickenbone frame.

You can find it in one of the cratered back streets, a slightly scabby but not unattractive turn of the 20th Century building, with a courtyard open to the sky and enormous double doors like sentries. You can see by its magnificent pillars that it had originally been some elegant urban apartments, but you wouldn’t guess it has also been a base for the Purification of Youth movement; an interrogation centre in the dark years; and then a sound recording studio during the years of hope, where, tutored by long-suffering orchestrators of genius, a stream of untidy musicians converted their half-baked ideas into ephemeral jingles, used occasionally to promote gadgets but usually as soundtracks to poisonous adolescent vision quests.

This was all before it was purchased by DataFactory and thus entered its loftiest, though tattiest, period, in the service of Hibernia. Which is the greater good, arching above us all, in case you were wondering. (Don’t. There are more dark years ahead, more detention centres, and none of it must be hastened into existence by your unruly thoughts.)

DataFactory is a private consortium whose owners, whoever they are, do very well; not a credit from the public purse is intentionally lavished if it’s in any way possible to claw it back. The moderators all use reconstructed keyboards, grey with finger-grime and the data storage devices crash daily because of the amount of meaningless junk stuffed into their limited capacities. There are still typewriters on the go, the whirring and crashing of which can now be read by data-sticks as text. Ranks of drones are jammed into their individual stalls, often walled in, either racking their brains or dreaming uncontrollably, which occasionally results in an excited shudder. (It’s all right. No one is looking.)

They conduct interviews using beaten-up tape recorders held together by sellotape, and afterwards everyone strains so hard to separate the dialogue from the hiss that you would think there was something worth hearing. And, for relief, most drones go once or twice a day to the other stalls, which are tiny and stink like a farm.

The line manager is Lentil, a man in whose soul there isn't enough light material for any spark of humour to catch. He has protruding eyes and a wispy beard. He is thin and stalks round the office like a heron. No one knows exactly what he does. Crabdale, by contrast, scurries round trying to deal with the piles of paper on his desk and weights on his mind, both accumulating. He takes pills for today's hectic lifestyles and hopes they'll prevent the spreading of the dry patches on his palms.

Nothing is ever mended or brought to completion here. It is a continual striving for an improved state of affairs no fool would dare spell out in any detail. For he would be howled down, and after the howling was over, everyone would sit awake in the early hours and grip their sheets.