Evil

And there it stands before me; a foul coalesence of turrets and gantries; vanes of rippled steel and orbs of smoke-blackened glass. A building created to terrify and to distort even the empty blue of the sky above. The intricacy and incoherence of the thing leaves the observer in no doubt that there is some devious magnet at its core, a thing wrought in the fires of hell and there given the strength to draw in all the most evil lumps of matter from all the corners of the Earth and bring them together as one single atrocity. The building is more solid than anything around it, yet it seems somehow mutable as well. No mortal will or device could affect it, and yet upon a whim of its fell creator it would surely twist itself into an avatar or a new Tower of Babel immune to divine reproach. There is no sound, only the subsonic tremble of the great engines hidden below ground, those turned by the sweat of the condemned and oiled by the gasping, unrelenting desire for the release of death which is all that now remains of their souls.
“Fuck it,” I say as loudly as I dare, “I’m not going in there.”
“Well you’re not living on my sofa and eating my food a day longer until you start paying me some rent. You can either get in there and sign on or you can fuck off and die in the gutter,” she says, her voice laced with honey-coloured acid.
“Which gutter?”
“Get inside!”

“Welcome to your local Arse4Elbow JobcentreDoublePlusGood,” the monolithic desk-satyr grumbles, “sulphurous lake of true pain and unhallowed tomb of heretics. Damn all who enter here.”
“I beg your pardon?” I croak.
“I said,” a deep sigh, “Welcome to your local Arse4Elbow JobcentreDoublePlusGood, if you wish to make a new claim please carry on through to clerical. Down the hall there.”
“Oh right, thanks very much.”
“Don’t mention it.”

The corridors loom in a way that defies geometry. Vast portraits line the walls, grinning down you to tell you that you too can be as happy and as ethnically representative as we are. You too can be like us, we redeemed, we justified, we saved. Slogans cry out from posters with equally piercing silence:

“Become someone new today!”

“You can succeed!”

And my personal favourite:

“Society has nothing against you personally, it just requires that a certain proportion of the population remains ostracised and impoverished so that everyone else remains suitably afraid and thus suitably compliant. But it’s not unheard of for one of you lot to switch places with one of the valid humans out there, so keep your chin up eh? You could be leaving Greggs behind and eating pasties from the Marks and Spencers café before you know it.”

The forms are simple enough. Bank details, address, reason your parents gave you when they got divorced, reason they actually got divorced, partner’s name, name of person you gave up on when you settled for partner, shoe size…DNA sequence. I don’t actually know my DNA sequence off the top of my head, but thankfully there’s a footnote:

If you do not know your DNA sequence then Arse4Elbow ltd. can retrieve it for you at a cost of £42.10, payable by cash or debit card. By agreeing to the sampling procedure you agree to give Arse4Elbow ltd copyright control over your DNA sequence data for a period of 50 years, regardless of the customer’s survival or otherwise over that period. Arse4Elbow limited waives all responsibility for any cases of hepatitis A, B, C or any as-yet unknown strain contracted as a result of the sampling process. Claims cannot be processed without a valid DNA sequence.

I hand the clerk my completed form, £42.10 almost entirely in change and my left arm. The clerk doesn’t seem to realise that this last item is still attached to me, and he hauls it across the room to some sort of console before shoving it gracelessly into an oddly-shaped apeture wherein it is assaulted by a selection of needles in rapid succession. The whole procedure takes maybe three seconds but leaves me feeling like I suddenly have an awful lot less blood inside me than I had before. I can’t help but wonder whether a DNA sample is actually any use if you neglect to leave any DNA behind to compare it with. I am shown to a waiting area where a handful of simillarly delirious claimants sit on itchy and unyielding sofas. Shortly after I sit down a man with crutches is summoned by a head appearing from behind the door marked ‘disability allowance claims’. The man hauls himself upright and teeters towards the door. A comforting hand beckons him inside and the door closes behind him. The muffled sound of a gunshot is heard moments later, followed by a sound which might be considered simillar to that produced by a pair of crutches falling to the floor. Nobody else seems especially troubled by these two sounds so I take my lead from them and calmly read the jobs page of the local paper seventeen times before I am called in for interview.

“Well, you’re an educated man. We shouldn’t have any trouble finding you something to do. Have you had any experience as a Recruitment Consultant?”
“Can’t say that I have, no”
“Marketing Executive?”
“Afraid not.”
“Right…err…Team Leader, Sales?”
“That’s not even a sentence.”
“Network Taxonomist?”
“Artichoke Elucidate?”
“You must have had some sort of job.”
“Yeah, for twelve years I worked in a steel mill.”
“I’m sorry, a what?”

Eventually I am given my personalised action plan, which involves joining up with some community service people and some prisoners on day release and fishing hypodermics out of the canal for 39.5 hours a week in exchange for my £46.31 per week unemployment benefit which I will almost definitely be paid within eight weeks of my initial claim. If I do not show that I have spent at least 39.5 hours each week actively seeking work my benefit can be stopped and I can be made to repay any benefit payments made prior to the date of this sanction. If I am late for any scheduled appointment it is a simple matter of proceed directly to Siberia, do not pass go and most certainly do not collect £46.31 this week or any other. There are a lot of clocks in this building, all keeping identical time, all mysteriously fast when compared to the time shown on my radio-controlled wristwatch.

A security guard stops me as I am about to leave the building. With no explanation he escorts me to a small, dark room lined with screens. A small, dark man peruses the screens, one of which has my face on it in freeze frame. The image has a time stamp in the corner, indicating that it was taken mere moments before the security guard apprehended me.
“You see this?” the little screen man enquires, tapping my image with the end of his biro.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“According to my software, your face in this image indicates that you are only 21% hopeful of finding full time work within a period of 4-6 weeks.”
“Do you have software that tells me how likely I am to find full time work in that period?”
“Yes I do actually, based on your work history, educational attainment and history of godless cynicism you’re currently reading around 18% likelihood”
“So I’m more hopeful than I should be? Is that a problem, being 3% deluded?”
“Well of course it is. A 3% deulsion coeffecient isn’t nearly high enough. We’ll have no freeloaders here you know, we want to see you determined to succeed. I’ll have to make a note of this incident on your file I’m afraid.”
“Will that affect my claim?”
“Impossible to say.”

Eventually I am allowed to leave. I stagger out of the building weighed down with helpful leaflets and dread. I check to see if I have enough money left for a cup of coffee. I don’t. Had the DNA test been 10p cheaper I’d have been alright. I light a cigarette. Another security guard, bigger and uglier than the last one, grabs me.
“That’s copyright infringement that is,” he growls.
“You what?”
“Mutagenic init? You’re tampering with the intellectual property of Arse4Elbow ltd., Data Supremacy Division.”
“Why do they even care?”
“You’re an asset now sunshine, a resource. Can’t have you dying of cancer can we? You signed the forms. That means we can pay you a quid an hour and you can sit there and like it. Unless,” he laughs at this point, “unless you find full time employment of course.”
“Fuck off, I don’t belong to you.”
“No, but unless you wanna try living on no money you might as well.”
“So you people don’t want me to find a job? You make more money if you can force me to work for next to nothing and keep the difference?”
“Makes no odds either way mate, if you do get a job we get a big cheque from the government for finding you a job. Whatever happens, we win. All that really matters is that you come back to us as soon as possible if you do find work, but we’ve got that sewn up as well. It’s in the small print of our contracts with the big employers that they’re to let people go after they’ve been there six months. It has to be six months or we don’t get the big cheque you see. Rules is rules and you can only bribe so many of them out of the way before you’re out of pocket on the whole thing.”
“You seem to know a lot for a security guard.”
“I’m not a security guard, I’m the chief executive,” he replies with a grin.
“Then why are you hanging around outside the front door?”
“Can’t smoke inoors can I?”
“I feel your pain friend, I feel your pain.”

“What,” I groan, collapsing onto the sofa from the effort of doing so, “a fucking nightmare.”
“Well at least it’s done now,” she says as she callously neglects to make me a cup of tea and give me a hug.
“I have a horrible feeling the fun is only just beginning. You really wouldn’t believe what it’s like in there. I could barely believe it myself. Look, they even made me wear this wristband to make sure that nobody calls me an ambulance if I get hit by a bus. Who would’ve thought we’d come to this? I wonder if anyone would’ve imagined, back at the start of the decade, that everything would be so heinously fucked up by now?”
“Well given that this decade only started six months ago I suppose someone must’ve had an inkling.”
“Fair point.”