Detective Amelia started the car and spun it one eighty, went right past the food truck without glancing at it. Everybody did this. Unless of course they were hungry.
“And I get five K for it?” Arnie asked.
“Five K.”
The man appeared uncertain. “What you told me, it sounds risky.”
“Life’s risky. Maybe I’ll get salmonella from that sandwich. I’m not negotiating.”
A sigh. Arnie said, “Okay.”
“And I need a complete loss of memory when this’s over with.”
“I sometimes forget my mother’s birthday.”
“I’m not joking.” Five Gs buys you the right to crack the whip occasionally.
“I got it, I got it. Everything’ll go away after. When and where?”
“I don’t know yet. It’ll have to be deserted and we can’t have witnesses.”
“She didn’t look like a cop.”
“No, she doesn’t. Here’s a down payment.” He handed the man an envelope. “A thousand. And another thousand for a beat-up van. And score some other plates for it. Don’t put ’em on now. You do that just before the job.”
“I’ve done this before. How big?”
Douglass supposed it didn’t matter, and he said this. Then: “You clear the deck for the next two days. You don’t take any other jobs.”
“What if—”
“You don’t take any other jobs.”
“I don’t take any other jobs.” Arnie nodded quickly.
“I gotta talk to my associate here.”
Arnie looked around.
“The driver,” Douglass snapped. “The food truck.”
“Oh. Yeah, okay. You know, I had an idea. I’ll get a white van. That’s the most common color. What do you think?”
“It’s a fine idea. Now leave.”
After Arnie left, Douglass told the food truck driver that he’d done a good job with the sandwich and asked for a Cuban coffee.
Douglass sipped the coffee and thanked the driver, who also handed over an envelope — the results of some espionage work. Money changed hands. Smells wafted from the truck. As much as he loved food, he was a terrible cook and was, at the moment, between wives (he was good at getting married but not so great at staying that way).
“What’s the bestseller today?”
“Creole-grilled tofu, I’d say.”
“Make me one and wrap it up. I’ll have it for dinner.”
37
Back in the womb of my workshop.
A change of clothes, some peanut butter cheese crackers, some decaf coffee.
I’m looking over the knives I’ve acquired — Annabelle’s and Carrie’s. They’re of a functional design, nothing fancy. Carrie’s is the sharpest. I have their panties too. One pair blue, one pair pink. But I’m less interested in them than the blades.
The knives and the garments are sitting on a table beside my workbench. There are also two copies of the Daily Herald; they both still have page 3 intact.
That is one very troubled newspaper.
I feel the weight of my own knife, the beautiful construction of brass, in my pocket.
I content mod for a bit. I peruse a video of a woman who’s lip-synching a top 40 song. She’s good. The autobot has sent it to me not for any violent or sexual issue, but because she’s violating the copyright law. She doesn’t have a blanket ASCAP or BMI license, which would give her the rights to “sing” the tune. However, I will leave it up for a few days. I have spotted a mole on her neck that I believe is cancerous. I don’t want to go to too much trouble, so I simply log on like any other person and leave a comment that she ought to have it checked out.
My mother died of that disease.
I watch some more vids and play God for a bit.
Delete...
Sign in...
Let stand...
We content moderators spend hours upon hours looking for vids that violate either the law or that famous “community standard,” which is quite the odd phrase, since there must be a billion distinct communities in cyberspace, ranging from ethereally noble to disgustingly depraved. The company sends us guidelines, but basically community standards are what I decide they are.
I say I play God, and I do. Often posters, desperate for likes and shares, fling up buckets of content that I have to loose my lightning bolt of judgment upon.
I’ve seen hundreds of executions, suicide attempts, rapes, child beatings and molestations, people shooting up and OD’ing, survivalists giving step-by-step instructions about bomb making, animals hurt, racial invective, calls to revolution, facts cited by politicians and pundits and bumpkins that even I — smart but hardly an expert — know are blatantly false.
Hours upon hours.
There is no end in sight.
My company, ViewNow, is smaller than YouTube and not owned by one of the mega-tech outfits, but it’s not insignificant. Over two hundred hours of videos are uploaded every minute, and each day millions of people watch four billion videos. If you watched every video that was available on ViewNow today, it would take thousands of years of nonstop viewing to see everything.
It’s really breathtaking.
All social media platforms employ content moderators.
We’re the grunts in the front lines of battle, like the grad students somebody told me about, with sledgehammers at the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago with orders to go into the radioactive pile and break it apart before a reaction melted the Second City.
Their plight may be apocryphal. Ours isn’t.
Some platforms stash their content mods in boiler rooms, which might be located anywhere in the world. Many of these sites are in Manila and India. Those mods used to work in call centers throughout South Asia but grew tired of irate customers and insults about accents and they flocked to the moderating profession, hoping it would be a springboard to a good job in tech.
This never happens for the vast majority. Content modding is not a springboard to anything... except — for most — depression. After all, we don’t spend ten hours a day watching vids on how to make a sponge cake or snowboarding. We root out the bad stuff. I mean, the really bad stuff — videos that can never be unseen and that sit, festering, in our heads forever.
I know of four mods who’ve committed suicide, another two dozen who’ve tried. Marriages have ended and livers grown distended from cirrhosis. ViewNow has a counseling department. Nobody uses it because there’s no time, not when a billion hours of video remain to be viewed.
Otherwise gentle people have turned violent after a few months at CM work.
As for me?
Of course, I have no problem whatsoever with the job.
I’m a born content moderator and always have been. Real life or a high-def monitor. Not a bit of difference to me.
I’ve never liked the verb “peeping,” much less using the word in the silly-sounding combination with “Tom.” According to the myth, or factual history (no one knows), Tom was a tailor who was the only person in Coventry to catch a glimpse of the naked Godiva riding through the city (to get her husband to lower rents on his tenants, a strange form of protest and one that sounds pretty far-fetched, to say the least). The scenario was somewhat skewed since she was the one outside and Tom was peeping, if you can call it that, from the privacy of his tailor shop.
Tom was struck blind by God or fate or whoever, though there was no particular statute he’d broken, it seemed. As for today, the offense of peeping falls somewhere within the laws of trespass and invasion of privacy and if there’s a participle it’s usually “peeking,” not “peeping.” The laws have now been expanded to include spying by drone and hacking into webcams, as well as revenge porn and posting without permission.