“As you likely know,” she says, speaking with zero inflection, “Ilium has been scanning the world’s surface with ever-advancing fidelity for years, assembling the most comprehensive map ever constructed, forty petabytes of data and counting.”
The supervisor plugs in the terminals and the Ilium logo spins on the screens as the terminals boot.
“You have been selected for a pilot program to review potentially undesirable items inside the raw image sets. Our algorithms flag hundreds of thousands of images per day and we don’t have the manpower to scan them all. Your task will be to verify whether or not these images are objectionable, and in the process enhance the machine learning. Either keep the flag up or take it down and move on.”
“Basically,” the assistant warden says, “a fancy steakhouse doesn’t want you to jump on Ilium Earth and find a homeless guy peeing in their doorway. If you see something on there that you wouldn’t want Grandma to see, leave the flag up, draw a circle around it, and the software will eliminate it. Got it?”
“These are skills,” says the supervisor. “This is a job.”
Seymour nods. On the screen in front of him, the Earth spins. The view sinks through digital clouds over a swath of South America—Brazil maybe—and touches down on a rural highway as straight as a ruler. Red dirt runs down both sides; what might be sugarcane grows beyond that. He nudges the trackball forward: the flag ahead gradually enlarges as he draws closer.
Beneath it, a little blue sedan has struck a cow head-on, and the car is crumpled, and there is blood on the road, and a man in jeans is standing beside the cow with his hands behind his head, either watching it die or trying to figure out if it is going to die.
Seymour confirms the flag, circles the image, and in an instant the cow, car, and man are concealed with a section of computer-generated roadway. Before he has time to process any of it, the software whisks him to the next flag.
A faceless little boy in front of a roadside churrascaria shows the camera his middle finger. Someone has painted a penis on the sign of a little Honda dealership. He checks forty flags around Sorriso, Brazil; the computer launches him back into the troposphere, the planet spins, and he drops into northern Michigan.
Sometimes he has to poke around a bit to understand why a flag has been placed. A woman who might be a prostitute leans into a car window. Beneath a church marquee that says GOD LISTENS, someone has spray-painted TO SLAYER. Sometimes the software misinterprets a pattern of ivy for something obscene, or flags a kid walking to school for reasons Seymour cannot guess. He rejects or verifies the flag, draws an outline around the offending image with his cursor, and it’s gone, hidden behind a high-resolution bush or erased by a smear of counterfeit sidewalk.
The movement chime sounds; the other two men trundle off to lunch; Seymour stays put. By roll call, he has not moved for nine hours; the supervisor is gone; an old man sweeps beneath the teaching terminals; the windows are dark.
* * *
They pay him sixty-one cents an hour, which is eight more cents than the guys make in the furniture shop. He’s good at it. Pixel by pixel, boulevard by boulevard, city by city, he helps Ilium sanitize the planet. He effaces military sites, homeless encampments, queues outside medical clinics, labor strikes, demonstrators and dissidents, picketers and pickpockets. Sometimes he comes upon scenes that engulf him with emotion: a mother and son, bundled in parkas, holding hands beside an ambulance in Lithuania. A woman in a surgical mask kneeling on a Tokyo expressway in the middle of traffic. In Houston several hundred protesters hold banners in front of an oil refinery; he half expects to recognize Janet among them, twenty new frog patches sewn on her jean jacket. But all the faces are blurred, and he confirms the flag, and the software replaces the protesters with thirty digital sweetgum saplings.
Seymour Stuhlman’s stamina, the Ilium supervisors report, is remarkable. Most days he triples his quotas. By the time he is twenty-four, he is a legend in the Ilium Earth offices, the most efficient cleaner in the entire prison program. They send him an upgraded terminal, give him his own corner of the computer room, and raise his pay to seventy cents an hour. For a while, he manages to convince himself that he’s doing something good, removing toxicity and ugliness from the world, rinsing the earth of human iniquity and replacing it with vegetation.
But as the months tick past, especially after dark, in the isolation of his cell, he sees the old man in the dark of the library, wobbling in his penguin tie, holding the green backpack to his chest, and doubts worm their way in.