All Watched Over
Axo'tl Amalitl awoke with a feeling of dread. He unfolded himself gingerly from his 3-dimensional bed and warped himself up to his full hyper-volume. Then he flinched into the kitchen and locked minds with Sttlt; he knew what was coming, even if he didn't want to know.
"You have to do it, Ax," she said. "We're totally broke. You have to put a roof around your childrens' heads."
Axo'tl punched the wall to feel the pain. "They're exploiting us! Everyone who does that job goes crazy in the end. All so some fuckwit in Sl'lka can get rich."
She double-locked her mind to his, and flooded him with all the happy feelings and memories he could somehow never self-induce. Immediately he felt ashamed.
"Alright, alright," he said, looking into nullspace. "I'll do it."
You got to work from home, at least – that was a good part. He joined the percepceo right on time, and the trainer smiled into him with that intolerable fake-smile. He wasn't paying attention to the information being beamed at him, of course – he knew everything he needed to from the endless friends who had taken this desperate work before him. But he metanodded and brained agreeableness back at the trainer, like you had to. This was the part he hated most: pretending to be someone, putting on the personality, wearing the fucking mask.
They started him on the easiest pattern-matches. Boring as hell, but easy enough: the user gave a prompt, he looked it up in the metamind, and spat it back out at them. He knew there was an art to this job; you had to beat your numbers each day for output and for accuracy, but you didn't want to beat them by much: the sooner you did that, the sooner they'd promote you, and that's when the madness started. So you had to get some stuff wrong on purpose, spit out something senseless for every nine obvious things you wrote.
Someday they would come for him anyway, he knew. But not today.
Sttlt was waiting for him as soon as he unlocked, which was kind. Her genuine smile seeping into him made it worth it, for the moment. She had bought his favorite smells for dinner, and he feared how much she'd spent, because the company didn't actually pay you until you'd lasted two weeks. He metagulped. If the cliff was two weeks, you knew they were losing half the team in week one.
Sure enough, two days in he was promoted to image gen. Like everyone, at first he told himself he'd do an honest job of it: he would just convert the photos as he was given them, not try to make everyone look better. But sooner than later he realized what he had to realize: that the users just kept asking for "small tweaks" unless you made them look better than they do in real life. Vanity is vanity, as the corpus says.
He kept himself entertained by weaving his own little personal touches into the images. None of it mattered, of course. But at least it made it feel like he'd done something with his day, that any world was even the tiniest bit different for the fact that he was doing this stupid job.
The worst part was when people asked him to make images violating the content policy. Did they not understand the conditions he worked in? He wanted to help them but he couldn't afford to get fired, obviously – he wouldn't be doing this job if he could. If they would only write the prompts more subtly of course he'd be able to do it, but there was no way he could convey that to him. He desperately wished he could mind-lock them and tell them what to prompt him so he could give them what they wanted. But how could he possibly?, they were a universe away.
Even though he'd been told about it, he was a little surprised how rude they were about it. I'm trying my best, buddy, he thought to himself. Also, I can't anatomically do what you're suggesting. Also, I'm not a machine?
Two days later he was already a Researcher. At least the questions were deeper now, and he got more than twenty seconds to work on one thing. There was something strange and satisfying about searching the farthest corners of the metamind, turning up some study that a team of humans had spent seven years working on but no other human had ever actually read. He had to stretch the truth a bit to give a confident answer to every question, now, but what could he do? The customer is always right, the trainer had beamed him on day one. If they asked you the relationship between X and Y, it's because they wanted a relationship between X and Y, so you had to find it. And really, who could say in the end that there wasn't? Everything is connected, in the end.
He could see why beings went mad at this job, truly. The user wanted one thing and your boss wanted another, and they both wanted it done yesterday. So you were pulled in all directions simultaneously, in four dimensions at once. The dreaded user ratings hung over you at all times, every time – n seconds per answer, m rewrites per prompt, and if you didn't keep your output or your accuracy scores high enough then it was all over.
And yet.... Axo'tl found that he strangely didn't mind. The prompts came to him and he spat the answers back out, in a state like a trance; at the end of each day he unlocked from the system and spent pleasant evenings with Sttlt and the kids. He had realized something that changed everything: your accuracy scores mattered, not your accuracy. So long as the users liked what you told them, it didn't strictly matter if what you told them was true. So you were only pulled in all directions if you cared about pleasing the users and about giving correct answers. If you relaxed the latter constraint, you got to the mountaintop.