The result is both familiar in its petty irritations and clandestine attractions (“In the line in the canteen I suddenly realize I feel a kind of tenderness for Cadet 14”) and unsparingly strange confessions (“I dream that there are hundreds of black seeds in my skin, and when I scratch at them they get caught up under my nails like fish eggs.I feel this has something to do with the objects in the rooms”) that bode ill for the increasingly fractious crew. To address this problem, a committee of impartial mediators has spent the last 18 months interviewing crew members and compiling the resulting recordings into the document of this book. In concordance with, or perhaps as the result of, the growing sense that the objects exist “in communion” with the employees, a rift between the human, and therefore mortal, and the humanoid, and therefore capable of being endlessly “reuploaded,” workers is having deleterious-even dangerous-effects on workplace productivity. The objects are impacting their human and humanoid caretakers in different ways eliciting erotic responses in some, paranoia in others, an uneasy sense of maternal responsibility or a near catatonic state of existential quandary in still others of the crew. It soon becomes apparent, however, that something is disrupting the workflow on the Six Thousand Ship.

The ship itself is tightly run, with employees in place for every conceivable need-be it laundry, reeducation, or cremation-and the labor does not seem to be difficult.

Their mission is to curate and tend the mysterious, alluring, and perhaps even sentient objects brought up from the surface of New Discovery, the Earth-like planet whose exploration is the Six Thousand Ship’s mission. A workplace drama set in the 22nd century on a spaceship orbiting a distant planet.Īboard the interstellar spacecraft the Six Thousand Ship, Earth-born humans and their bioengineered humanoid counterparts work together according to well-established company protocols.

The employees by olga ravn