The Office of Invisible Beasts
I wake to the shrill hum of a notification, a metallic sound with no source. In the mirror, my face is no longer mine, it is a warped collage of domesticated features. My eyes blink in rhythm with the keyboard lights.
The world of virtual work is not made of flesh, it is made of screens. Behind the screens, the animals have returned.
The sloth, for example, reigns supreme in video calls: it smiles slowly, responds with a delayed gesture, carrying the wisdom of one who knows that time, in this digital zoo, is nothing but a calendar in disguise.
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The elephant signs documents with a firm trunk, its memory a fossilized archive of meetings that should never have happened. It hauls spreadsheets as if they were the bones of an extinct civilization, the civilization of those who once stepped outside.
Everyone pretends to be human. But there is a scent in the air, not the scent of beasts, but of webcams left on without purpose, a smell of virtual sweat, of tension in JPEG, of movement trapped in GIF.
I, who once was a man, am now a wolf only while logged in. By night, I become an octopus, answering emails with anxious tentacles. Sometimes I am an ant, dragging tasks too big for my body. Sometimes I am just a glitch, a genetic error in the interface.
In this Kafkaesque kingdom, no one knows for sure whether they are the boss or the rat. We huddle in digital burrows, digging for meaning in PDFs, PPTs, and XLS files, sniffing for crumbs of recognition hidden in corporate emojis and hollow LinkedIn posts.
And there is always a door, a door with no handle. On the other side, maybe there is the real world, or maybe just another Zoom, another Teams, just with sharper filters and quieter AIs.
No one roars anymore, we only share screens and let the copilots write the minutes.
