Everyone has bad days (weeks, years) at work. Mostly, those bad times are caused by other humans behaving badly. In The Expansion Project, the debut novel from Ben Pester, it is the workplace itself that becomes monstrous and engulfs its staff. “Wires emerge from windows in some buildings, clustered like tentacles.” People blur at the edges, disappear, find mist where there should be real places. The “expansion project” of the title is relentless, mysterious — and never explained.
Humans started this inhuman project, but the bosses are unseen. Early on, we hear of a CEO announcing the expansion, and there are references to the HQ of the company being in Texas. An archive note reads: “This HQ is also referenced in several hundred archive clippings of expansion meetings — for example ‘When, tell me when did we lose contact with the Texas office? How long has it been since they dialled into these meetings?’”
Our guide, of sorts, is the nameless, all-seeing future archivist at the Capmeadow business park. Everyone inside the ever-expanding campus is watched over, surveilled and heard from, faintly, in archive footage and audio testimony. Employees end up living on site, first in hotels, then in chalets. As an “inbound architecture-growth services” worker says: “There is something, I suppose, creeping about the way the land map expands underfoot. The slime on the tiles, and so on.”
