January 27 2026, 22:30

The Expansion Project

Author: Ben Pester

First published: 2025

Tom Crowley, first person, then others, ~60,000 words.

There are pleasures in work, but also drudgery, especially in larger organisations where there’s a tremendous amount of bullshit to navigate. Tom Crowley is a workaholic who struggles to connect with his children and feels overwhelmed by guilt at his inadequacy in all areas of his life. He takes his young daughter, Hen, to work (for Take Your Daughter to Work Day) and discovers that nobody else saw that email, so there are no other children for her to play with. Then she goes missing.

Tom works at Capmeadow Business Park as a copywriter. At the start of the story, Capmeadow seems concrete enough, expanding with new buildings and projects, but there is a mysterious mist, and people who work at Capmeadow are often confused and anxious about things they can’t quite put their finger on. Their minds play tricks on them, and the longer they work there, and as Capmeadow grows, the expansion becomes more abstract, surreal and upsetting.

An archivist interjects the narrative with notes about the text, which are recorded as part of interviews with the characters over a long period of time. Capmeadow seems to be an organic, living thing, perhaps alien, or a virtual reality, or something else, and anyone who’s worked there seems to be pulled into its growing madness.

Tom Crowley is the closest to a main character we have, continually showing up in the archivist’s records searching for his lost daughter. For him, work is so entwined in his daily life, he succumbs easily to Capmeadow’s spell and work becomes his life. He wanders Capmeadow’s maze of rooms, corridors, gardens, Kanban boards, online calls and chatrooms as if they were all as real as each other.

It’s a tale of how work identity can become our only identity, working on meaningless tasks for empty projects, until we dissolve into a now-sentient capitalist organism. Disturbing more than amusing, it's an impressive surreal dystopia that feels like a warning shot across my bow.

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