Name: Humans, humanoids and objects
Item: The Employees
Author: anaca

The Employees →

by Olga Ravn

Humans, humanoids and objects

anaca

Dec 23, 2025

This short novel is all vibe, and the vibe is a pervasive smell, eroding and threatening the identity and the relationships of the whole crew. Poetry is light, and everything is brought up tangentially.

Humanoids behave like humans, humans are troubled by the long gone Earth, and the strange and fascinating objects brought back from a foreign planet communicate their unease through smell.

(a note : Lea Gulditte Hestelund's work is credited, probably for inspiring the objects).

Hard to understand who is employee, employed or employing whom. The order of things is troubled: are humans in charge? What does it mean to be human without Earth? Are the objects the most valuable passengers? Or rather the very productive and expensive humanoids ?

A silent HR department is interviewing everyone, and statements offer snippets but no clear view of what’s happening. A pilot laments that flying without the sky above is no flying. A humanoid laments that he can’t smell as well the objects since the update. The objects, well, no one knows exactly what they want, but everyone around them has sudden strange desires.

The smell that subtly changes everyone every day, and HR, hidden in plain view, that updates and gives order with no discernible point are the two forces twisting the characters. The characters, more or less humans, try and obey two incomprehensible and conflicting gods while drifting so far away from Earth that none of it makes sense anymore. Only market forces and a more and more alien Mother nature remain (so not that different from a 21st-century workplace).