Anthropomorphic Worldbuilding: Work, Vocation, and Why There Are Grizzly Bears in Cubicles

Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series

Picture a break room in an IT security firm on a Tuesday afternoon.

A Lupenite walks in — tailored grey dress shirt, yellow tie centered with mathematical precision, not a hair out of place. He is, by every outward signal, the kind of person who has decided that how you dress for work is itself a form of argument. He pours himself a black coffee into a Lupenite-sized mug and leans against the counter.

And then the door opens again.

A twelve-foot Grizzly Ursinian fills the frame — white T-shirt stretched across the trademark Ursinian build, light brown shorts, the easy, unhurried energy of a species that does not experience urgency the way others do. He reaches past the Lupenite (who steps aside without thinking about it), selects a Grizzly-sized mug from the cabinet, and pours himself a coffee. He adds sugar. He adds cream. He is not the sort of person who can stand it black.

They talk about coffee. They talk about vodka. They complain, with genuine feeling, about the moral crime of over-roasted beans. The Lupenite thinks the break room needs thicker cubicle walls. The Grizzly thinks he should try the good Russian stuff sometime.

This is a normal Tuesday at Red Hat Solutions, an IT security firm in New York City, where a twelve-foot Grizzly Ursinian named Jerry has his cubicle next to the break room because that’s where the coffee is and Jerry, whatever else he may be, has his priorities in order.

Nobody finds this remarkable.

That’s the point.

The Built World

Before we get to Jerry and why he matters, it’s worth understanding the physical reality of a multi-species workplace — because it is one of those things that sounds complicated until you actually think it through, and then turns out to be simpler than expected.

Public buildings in my world are designed from the ground up to accommodate everyone. Not retrofitted. Not patched over. Designed, from the architectural floor plan outward, with the full range of species in mind from the beginning.

This means the infrastructure — the bones of the building — works for all of them. Doorways are sized to allow a Giant Grade II species through without incident. Elevators have the load capacity for an Ursinian family. Stairwells are proportioned to serve both a two-foot Vulpen and a nine-foot Leonite without either of them having to contort themselves. The building is, in the most literal sense, for everyone — and that is expressed in its structure before a single person walks in.

Where the individualization happens is at the personal scale.

Every September, at the start of the school year, the teachers and staff at every school in this world do something simple and practical: they take a headcount. They note who is enrolled, what species they are, what size grade they occupy — and they arrange the classroom accordingly. Different-sized desks for different people. The child who is Small Grade I gets a desk sized for them. The child who is Giant Grade II gets a desk sized for them. Nobody sits hunched over a surface that comes to their knees. Nobody tries to wedge into a seat designed for someone twice or half their size. The classroom, reset each fall to fit the specific people who will actually spend the year in it, says something before the teacher says a word: you belong here, at a desk that fits you.

The same principle governs the office. Cubicles of various sizes are the norm, not the exception. Mugs in break room cabinets come in the range of sizes the building’s occupants actually need. Personal workspace is personal — it fits the person who occupies it. The infrastructure of the professional world, like the infrastructure of the school, was built with the understanding that the people using it are not all the same size, and that this is neither a problem to solve nor an inconvenience to manage around. It is simply the reality, and the world was built to meet it honestly.

The Volorsky Family

There is probably no better illustration of how work actually functions in my world than the professional history of one Lupenite family from Brooklyn.

Boris Volorsky is a Large Grade II Lupenite who now holds the biology chair at Brooklyn College, where he is known for demanding exactitude from his students and for a personal standard of professional dress that has remained completely unchanged since approximately 1987. He is, in his current form, exactly the kind of person you would design if you needed a biology professor: precise, meticulous, genuinely enthusiastic about the material in a way that tends to be contagious, and constitutionally incapable of doing anything at less than full capacity. The suits he wears to work every day are tailored, and they have to be — Boris has kept the same rigorous training regimen he has maintained since he was twelve years old, and the suits are not covering an ordinary frame.

He was not always a biology professor. He was not always a personal trainer, either. Before either of those, he was something else entirely.

Boris’s father — known to everyone who knew him as Gus, a shortening of Gustav that stuck early and never left — was a personal trainer and a carpenter. Boris grew up in the gym alongside him, working out while Gus was with his clients, absorbing the discipline of serious physical training the way other children absorb a language: by immersion, before it was ever a conscious choice. By the time Boris was twelve, training was simply part of what he did. By the time he was eighteen, he was Mr. Russia of the Lupenite Division — a title he held from 1988 until 1994, when he completed his Biology PhD and the competitive chapter of that career gave way to the academic one.

The bodybuilding and the biology are not as separate as they might appear. Both require the same fundamental disposition: the willingness to be rigorous over a long period of time, to trust a process that does not produce visible results every day, to care deeply about precision. Boris brought the same qualities to the competition stage that he brings to the lecture hall. The suits simply replaced the competition gear, and the students replaced the judges, and the exactitude remained exactly what it had always been.

When Boris and Larissa first came to New York from Russia, he drove a cab — Lupenites tend to learn the geography of a place quickly, and Boris had the steady, attentive energy that makes for a reliable driver. Then came the personal training work, drawing on his own physiology and on the real pleasure he took in helping people build something in themselves. That career lasted until the biology position at Brooklyn College opened up, and Boris recognized, with the certainty he brings to most things, that this was the job he had been moving toward.

His father’s path — personal trainer, carpenter, the man who built the gym Boris grew up in — was not the path Boris followed. The biology professorship was not inherited. It was earned, through a series of jobs that each made sense at the time, in a trajectory that only looks inevitable from the back end.

Larissa models. Part-time, on her own schedule, work that fits around the household and the family and the particular reality of being the mother of a very large Lupenite family. She is good at it — she has the presence and the physicality for it — and she finds it satisfying in ways that have nothing to do with the size grade or the species and everything to do with being a person who happens to be good at a particular kind of work.

Their oldest sons, Dimitri and Vladimir, are fraternal twins who arrived at their careers by routes that could not be more different from each other.

Vladimir wanted to be a policeman. From childhood through his teenage years, that was the plan — not a vague aspiration but a genuine intention, the kind of career a younger Lupenite builds a picture of himself inside and carries around with some pride. Boris talked him out of it. The argument Boris made was simple and not wrong: police work is dangerous, and Boris had no interest in asking Larissa — or himself — to carry the daily weight of wondering whether Vladimir was going to come home. The love behind the dissuasion was obvious. Vladimir understood it. He chose Electrical Engineering instead, guided primarily by the fact that it was the major that looked the most manageable at the time, and has found, in the years since, that the work suits him better than he might have predicted.

Dimitri, his twin, works in IT security — which is how a formal, precise, perfectly-groomed Lupenite ends up spending his days in a cubicle doing cybersecurity work, pouring black coffee, and maintaining friendships with twelve-foot grizzly bears who take theirs with cream and sugar.

Three more of Boris and Larissa’s sons — Euigeni, Arseny, and Ilariy — are carpenters. Sergei, still young, worked at the family restaurant as a teenager alongside all his older siblings before him; what he becomes will be his own story to tell. All of them, at one point or another, worked the Volorsky family restaurant, the Russian-cuisine establishment that served as the training ground for the entire generation — the first job, the early discipline, the place where the older ones learned that work is work regardless of what it is, and that doing it well matters.

What you have, in the end, is one Lupenite family producing a biology professor, a cab driver turned personal trainer, a model, an electrical engineer, carpenters, an IT security analyst, and a generation of teenagers who spent their formative years learning to run a restaurant. No species track. No predetermined vocational destiny. Just people — people who happen to be Lupenites, yes, with a Lupenite’s particular energies and strengths and inclinations — going after what they were drawn to, building the careers that fit them as individuals rather than as representatives of their species.

The Vocation Principle

Here is the thing about my world that matters most when it comes to work: it operates exactly the way ours does.

People do what they are drawn to. They follow what God has equipped them for. They take the opportunities that open in front of them, sometimes deliberately and sometimes because the right door appeared at the right moment and they walked through it. They work the family restaurant at sixteen because that is the job that exists and it teaches them something they did not know they needed to learn. They plan to be policemen and become electricians and find, somewhere down the road, that the electrician’s work suits them better than they expected. They drive cabs until the professorship comes through, and then they spend the rest of their careers as the kind of professor other people remember.

The species shapes things. Of course it does. Physicality matters — certain work is easier for certain bodies, and that reality doesn’t disappear because we’d prefer a neater story. The Lupenite’s endurance, the Ursinian’s strength, the Vulpen’s quick mind in tight professional spaces — these are real, and they inflect the experience of working, the ease of certain tasks, the comfort of certain environments. Personality shapes things too — the Pardinian’s observational patience, the Leonite’s commanding presence, the Ursinian’s steadiness under pressure. These are not nothing.

But they are also not destiny.

They are the coat. And the coat does not determine the calling.

The calling is individual. It belongs to the person, not the species — to the specific soul that God made with its particular gifts and inclinations and blind spots and late-developing passions and accidental discoveries. Boris’s father was a carpenter and a personal trainer. Boris is a biologist. His sons include an engineer and carpenters and a cybersecurity analyst. The coat is the same across all of them. The callings are their own.

This is, if you are paying attention, one of the most human things about my world: that the question of what you do with your life is genuinely, irreducibly yours. The species gives you a starting point. It gives you a body and a temperament and a set of natural tendencies that will make certain things easier and certain things harder. But it does not give you your vocation. That is between you and God and the particular path your life actually takes, with all the detours and redirections and unexpected arrivals that any real life contains.

The Proof of Concept

And then there is Jerry.

Jerry is a Grizzly Ursinian, which means he is approximately twelve feet tall, built like a geological formation, and designed by millions of years of evolutionary pressure to sleep through winter and eat enormous quantities of food during the rest of it. He is warm. He is easy-going. He is the kind of presence that makes a break room feel more comfortable simply by being in it.

He works in IT security.

His cubicle is next to the break room — not because the floor plan required it, but because Jerry has arranged his professional life with the quiet practicality of a species that knows what it needs and plans accordingly. What Jerry needs, apparently, is ready access to the coffee pot. He cannot stand it black. He adds cream and sugar. He has strong opinions about over-roasted beans.

He is not what you would expect if you built your expectations around his species and stopped there. A twelve-foot Grizzly Ursinian in a cubicle, doing IT security work, is not the assignment anyone would have predicted for him based on his biology alone. It is charming precisely because it is unexpected. It is also, once you sit with it, exactly right — because Jerry is not his species. He is a person who happens to be a Grizzly Ursinian, with a Grizzly's warmth and ease and love of comfort, and also with a mind that found its way to cybersecurity and a personality that makes him the kind of coworker people stop to talk to in the break room on a Tuesday afternoon.

He is the proof of concept.

Not because he is unusual — he is not, in this world, unusual. But because he illustrates, without any fanfare, the thing that is most true about how work functions in my world: the species gives you the coat. Everything else is up to you.

When you build a world that takes the Imago Dei seriously — that insists these are people, made in the image of God, with all the dignity and freedom and individual mystery that implies — the careers follow the same logic as everything else. They are chosen. They are shaped by talent and opportunity and failure and redirection and the particular thing that turns out to light up a given soul, regardless of what any reasonable person would have predicted based on the biology.

The Lupenite professor. The Ursinian IT analyst. The Leonite who turns out to be a poet. The Vulpen who becomes a carpenter and loves it.

The world, built with doorways wide enough for all of them and desks sized to fit whoever shows up, is ready for every version of the story.

It just waits to see which one each of them tells.

— Eric Flegal

Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series

What is the most unexpected career you've given a character in your own anthropomorphic world — the job nobody would have predicted from the species? Tell me in the comments.