Prose

He used to do it himself. Every soul, face to face, the full appraisal. It was thorough and it was fair. Time-consuming beyond all reasonable measure, but He’d had the bandwidth in the early days when the population of the Earth could fit inside a decent-sized hut and still leave room for the buffet. Then the numbers grew. Civilisations rose and multiplied and wiped each other out and multiplied again, and the queue for judgement stretched so far back through the celestial waiting room that the last souls in line were arriving when the first ones had already crossed their Sirat bridge, come back for their bags, and crossed it again, others already reincarnated as otters, and St. Peter had stamped so many hands he’d developed RSI and put in for a century’s cloud leave. The breakthrough, when it came, was divine inspiration. Middle management. Someone (I don’t know who, the filing system up there isn’t exactly what you’d call intuitive) proposed a field-based assessment model. Deployable agents. Funeral attendance as proxy data. The logic was sound: if you have lived a good life, people will show up when you die. They will cry. They will say nice things about you. The sandwiches will be good, because someone cared enough to make them good, or at the very least they won’t be a painter’s table full of Tesco Meal Deals. He signed off on it. Of course He did. He’d been three billion souls deep at that point. Gabriel wouldn’t stop cc’ing Him in on things, Chitragupta was leaving increasingly agitated voicemails and rumour had it that Raqib and Atid were no longer on speaking terms (but that’s office politics for you).

A Tragedie of Digital Disruption, in One Acte THERE WERE THREE of them, as there have always been three, and they met on a Thursday in a rented office above a Pret A Manger near Kings Cross. The baristas downstairs would later say that the coffee machine had behaved strangely that morning, producing three black coffees, without instruction, before anyone had arrived. They would say, too, that of the three women who came to collect them, only two cast shadows. But baristas say a lot of things, and none of them write any of it down. The three were named Denise, Morag, and Constance, and they were builders, for that is the word the industry uses, and they used it too, and we shall let it stand. Though what they built was not a bridge nor a building nor, indeed, anything that existed in the physical realm. They built platforms. Between them they had built AlgoRecruit™ that rejected a human rights lawyer for "insufficient moral signalling," The Happiness Index™ that secretly reported employees' private Slack messages to HR in a weekly dashboard, and FocusForge® that disabled your emails for three hours every morning whether you wanted it to or not. All three of their ventures had been seed funded. All three had been successful.  All three had been acquired. And all three had made the lives of ordinary professionals immeasurably worse. They fully intended their next idea to be the most wicked yet.