Ambiguously Productive: A Novel

In the age of extreme productivity, where an employee’s every move is tracked, measured, and optimized, the Timekeepers of Frenell & Co. struggle to survive the increasingly absurd corporate life.

Nolan Haut, a recovering alcoholic and career assassin, finds himself blackmailed into sabotaging the firm’s most powerful rainmaker. Desperate for a way out, Nolan attempts to become the rainmaker’s protégé by building a drug-dealing side hustle and sharing his revenue with the firm.

Ryuka Murong, your typical perpetually inadequate overachiever, has hit the glass ceiling and strives to create her own luck. An opportunity has knocked on her door. All she has to do is manipulate a witness and stop a regulatory ban on an addictive prescription drug.

After her sexual harassment complaint is dismissed, Saidah Sulaimaniyah ends up in the firm’s in-house “hospitality” services. Disenchanted with her “elite” career and shaken by the insurmountable wealth inequality in a crippled economy, she decides to weaponize her beauty and escape the rat race by marrying rich.

As the story unfolds, the paths of the three friends converge and evolve around a drug crisis ravaging the city, pushing them in directions once unimaginable. Set in a professional services firm in the near future, Ambiguously Productive is a fast-paced, satirical prosecution of corporate exploitation that brings out the worst in humanity, and a plea for a different reality at the dawn of the next industrial revolution.