#defekt

Sollbruchstellen industrieller Saugroboter

Ich sitze auf der Matte in der Boulderhalle und gucke mir die Wand an. Vormittags ist hier wenig los, das gefällt mir gut, weil ich die Wand dann nicht teilen muss und nicht warten muss, bis ich dran bin. Aber gerade weil vormittags wenig los ist, finden auch viele Instandhaltungsarbeiten zu dieser Zeit statt. Heute ist es besonders laut, weil die Wand in einem Bereich der Halle ganz neu mit Klettergriffen beschraubt wird (die lauten Geräusche kommen von den Akkuschraubern, die äußerst dicke Schrauben durch die Klettergriffe und in die Wand schrauben).

Und es wird Staub gesaugt. In Kletterhallen fliegt immer kiloweise Kreidestaub herum, der den Händen beim Klettern besseren Halt verleihen soll. Früher tollte hier in den Randzeiten immer ein eifriger Saugroboter umher, aber heute ist es ein eifriger Saugmensch. "Hattet ihr nicht mal so einen Roboter?", frage ich. "Die gehen jedes Jahr kaputt", antwortet der Kletterhallenmann. "Dann kostet ein neuer tausend Euro. Und man muss die richtig gut pflegen immer, sonst gehen die noch schneller kaputt."

Er scheint gute Laune zu haben, der Staubsaugmann. Sein Staubsauger ist monströs groß und monströs laut und hat ein besonders langes Kabel. Ob der auch ständig gepflegt werden muss? Und der Saugmann? Der muss doch auch gepflegt bezahlt werden? Ich würde gerne noch mehr fragen, aber es ist zu laut, um sich entspannt über die Sollbruchstellen industrieller Saugroboter zu unterhalten.

Four Brotans

Translation from Russian to English:

POV: Me, in any group work

Am Anfang geht es noch.

This is the second book of Cipri’s I’ve read, and I enjoyed it significantly more than Finna. Which still isn’t falling in love with it, if I’m being honest, but I’m not at all annoyed I read this one. The overall impression is kind of like watching the kind of rough pilot to an indescribably cheesy by fun adventure serial? Up to you how harsh a discretion that seems.

The story shares a setting with Finna – as in, it’s set literally in the same story, less than a week after. It follows Derek, a special exempt employee of the suspiciously Ikea-like retail megacorp who started a few weeks before, lives in a shipping crate behind the store’s loading dock, and has no memory of ever leaving store property. After he calls in and takes his very first sick day (a coworker saw him basically collapse while assembling furniture and browbeat him into it), his extremely disappointed manager has him come in late to help the outside team with a ‘special inventory’. The outside turns out to be, well, alternate universe versions of him – variations on the same mould, all mass produced in some of the controlled alternate realities the company’s insourced its production and logistics hubs too. The ‘special inventory’ likewise turns out to be a bug hunt, hunting down and killing all the products that have mutated or come alive due to glitches in their production before they have a chance to escape or damage company property.

The plot goes more or less how you’d expect – the alternate Derek’s are a queer and quirky band of likeable misfits (one might even say a found family!), except for their leader who is a monster convinced that if he’s enough of an abusive hardass to the others corporate will see ow valuable he is. The Defekta turn out to be basically benevolent, and Derek turns out to be defective himself, with literal magic empathy and enhanced senses and an involuntary sort of broadcast telekinesis when he’s dealing with strong emotions (which sounds like literal actual hell to me, for the record).In the end the shitty direct supervisor is trapped in an alternate reality, and everyone else unionizes and holds the store hostage until the company caves to their desired reforms Happy ending for everyone!

I’m not sure if it’s intentional or just an artifact of how Cirpri came up with the idea, but the whole ‘taking place literal days after the last book’ thing very much does make it seem like either this one Midwestern store in particular or possibly the company as a whole is like 90% of the way there to spiralling into a complete metaphysical collapse and possible destroying the world. The one scene with Jules at the start of the book also honestly made me like her more than the entire previous book where she was literally the second most important character and on like every other page.

I do think the kind of absurdist corporate horror setting worked better in this book than the prequel, if only because it was a bit more restrained and picked the one aesthetic/setting to actually develop a bit. Having a little bit more edge helped too. Reagan as the polished-until-she’s-glass always upbeat and friendly corporate upper management definitely worked as a more sinister and threatening figure than absolutely anyone in Finna, at least. I do still think the corporate jargon was like 20% too over the top and obvious to really work as satire or horror and just, well, not really funny enough to work as comedy. But that’s probably just a matter of taste

Speaking of funny – I’m not sure whether the megacorp in this is transparently specifically Ikea instead of something more generic (or, like, Wallmart) – Cipri spent some shitty years working at one, maybe. But given literally everything else about the book’s politics, it is kind of surprising how many times the books go back to the ‘look, this thing’s name is a funny-looking foreign word!’ well for humour. Or, well, ‘humour’.

Derek’s whole character arc from enthusiastically brainwashed retail drone to radicalized monster-whisperer was perhaps a bit abrupt, but it worked for me overall. The rest of the inventory team were all pretty much just archtypes with character designs attached, all basically being exactly what you would expect – the only real ‘reveal’ is that Dirk the supervisor isn’t the longsuffering professional leader trying to wrangle the rest of them and get the job done, he’s just an abusive piece of shit the rest of them actively fantasize about murdering – but none of them are, like, offensive.

The themes are, look, they’re really on the nose. There’s no way around it. Derek is so repressed and out of touch with/incapable of expressing his real emotions that his throat splits open and grows a second mouth that starts psychically broadcasting them. There are multiple conversations where people just explain their characters. There’s an interstitial bit of corporate propaganda between chapters about the risks of employees being radicalized by alternate universes into union organizers shortly before the main characters force the company to give them better treatment by sitting down and threatening to hold the store hostage the night before a big product release. And so on.

- feels like an alien and tries his best to mimic others and appear normal

- everyone KNOWS that he’s weird no matter how hard he tries

- overwhelmingly lonely

- likes rules, structures, expectations