The Future of Work

You haven't slept in six months. Staying awake isn't your job: the computing fabric lining your skull is in charge of that.

Your job is to have signed for it as a job. Human experimentation is as illegal as torture, with similar footnotes, but neurotech early beta-testing in no less a legitimate activity for prison inmates than light manufacturing or agricultural fieldwork.     

Profitable, too. Easier to speed-run the technology if you have a large talent pool open to brain surgery, and with funds impatient for the Next Revolution, the supply of testers creates its own demand.

You work as close to remotely as the situation allows for. No longer tied up for your safety in a bed in an in-house testing lab, you're tied up in your own cell. In the bunk bed above your cellmate looks at the ceiling with a brain no longer capable of registering boredom as pain. 

None of the other cells are noisy either; that sort of product testing is done elsewhere. The loudest noise you hear, and it wouldn't keep you from sleeping if you were allowed to sleep, comes from the makeshift buildings being erected to house new coworkers as the company expands.