At two in the morning the floor held thirty-eight women and one temperature, which was fourteen degrees, because the client specified fourteen degrees for the equipment and nobody had ever asked what the client specified for the women. The building had kept fish for thirty years before it kept terminals. The cold felt native to it, and under the instant coffee and the hand lotion there was still, some nights, when the wind came off the port the right way through the vents, a ghost of ammonia, thin and easy to miss, and the older women said you got used to it and the younger women said used to what.
Pui sat in the third row, seat 14, in two cardigans. July, and she wore two cardigans. Last cool season she had worn one. She did not make anything of this. On the inside of her left elbow there was a yellow-green shadow, fading unevenly at the edges, where the line had been in June, and she kept the sleeve down over it the way she kept the other sleeve down over the older mark on the wrist, out of the same tidiness, nothing more.
The work arrived as a queue. A number in the corner of the screen said how many clips stood behind the one you were on, and the number never reached zero, because upstream of the floor there was the world, and the world did not stop generating footage of people saying things. Each ticket opened with the same instruction line, English on top, Thai beneath, the English worded the way engineers word things when they think they are being simple:
MARK THE FRAME WHERE THE PERSON STOPS MEANING WHAT THEY SAY.
Play. Watch. Scrub back. Set the flag. Rate your confidence, one to five. Submit. Next. A clip ran twenty to forty seconds. The shift ran ten at night to six in the morning, five hundred and eighty baht, overtime after six at seventy-two baht the hour, and the floor's median was seventy clips a night, and the wrist went before the eyes did. Half the women wore braces. Daeng, seat 13, wore hers over arthritis that predated Cognita by a decade — twenty-two years at a sewing machine in Phra Pradaeng had spent that wrist long before anyone paid it to move a cursor — and she still cleared her queue, because Daeng's queue was anger, and Daeng could find the frame where politeness died in a man's face faster than the model could, faster than the man himself knew it had.
"They give me the easy one," she said, when Sombat praised her numbers once. "Anger is a door slamming. You want hard, sit where she sits." She had tipped her chin at Pui and gone back to her screen before the sentence finished, so that the compliment never had to be witnessed landing.
What Pui's queue held, mostly, was the other thing. People saying they were fine. Interview footage, testimonial footage, customer-service footage, faces above collars saying no really, it's no trouble, I'm happy to, we're happy, I'm fine. Somewhere a machine was being taught what fine looks like when it is still true, and what it looks like the second after, and the second after was Pui's trade. She found it in one pass, almost always. The smile that goes on past the point where it is being made rather than happening — she could see the changeover the way you see the exact moment a person carrying something heavy adjusts their grip. Eleven years of looking down into open mouths, into faces that could not talk back, reading everything from the eyes and the hands and the small economies of breath: it turned out to have been training. Nobody had known it was training at the time. That was the joke she did not make on the floor.
Her count the previous month was two hundred and seventeen a night against the median of seventy. QA sampled her flags against the senior reviewers in Singapore and the senior reviewers in Singapore lost.
Mai, seat 16, ran the desire queue and called the model the baby. She was twenty-four and did camera work from her room after shift some mornings, and made no secret of it on the floor, because the floor was thirty-eight women at two in the morning and secrets there had the lifespan of ice. "The baby drinks and drinks," she said, stretching her arms up until her spine cracked. "Mine, hers, auntie's. All of us in one milk. We're all wet-nurses here." She said it cheerfully. Her camera money some nights was three shifts in an hour, and she put her sister through her second year of nursing college on it, and the women who disapproved kept the disapproval in the same drawer where they kept their own arithmetic.
Daeng's arithmetic was tuition too — seventeen thousand three hundred a term, vocational college, air-conditioning systems, the daughter good with her hands like her mother and please God better paid. Pui's arithmetic went into an envelope. On the tenth of every month a polite man on a Wave came to the mouth of her soi in Bang Sue and accepted nine thousand baht against a figure that did not get smaller in any way she could detect, and wrote in a small book, and wai'd her, and rode off. What she thought about the figure she did not say on the floor, and did not need to. The women had read the whole marriage off her in the first week: the phone she stepped away to answer with her voice already level, the pay envelope subdivided before it cooled. They asked nothing. Daeng brought her food.
There was also, that year, a second subdivision, which no one saw. A thousand baht, some shifts five hundred, folded once and moved to the inner pocket she had sewn into the older cardigan herself, a hygienist's stitching, small and short and clean. It did not go into the passbook. It did not go anywhere a polite man with a small book could follow. It went where it went, and it was hers, and that is all that needs saying about it here.
In the fourth week of July, Sombat called her to his desk by the old loading door, where the new aluminum frame did not quite fill the old opening and the port air came in around it, unhurried, holding its old claim on the building. Sombat was forty-one, drank 3-in-1 coffee against doctor's advice he quoted while ignoring, and printed out the client's emails to read them with a pencil, moving the pencil under the English. The women knew his salary to within five hundred baht and knew that he was afraid of the client and not of them, and ranked him, on the whole scale of men available for comparison, as adequate.
"Singapore ran your numbers," he said. "Not just speed. Agreement." He turned the printout so she could see a table she was not given time to read. "They want a reference corpus. Answer key. New annotators get scored against it, the model gets tuned against it. They're calling it —" the pencil found the phrase — "the golden set."
"Whose labels," Pui said, though the pencil was already resting on the answer.
"Yours. Header carries the annotator ID." He showed her: P.SRISUWAN. "It's an allowance. Forty baht a shift, reference duty." He said the number apologetically, being adequate. "Your marks stop being marks. They become the standard. When the baby is wrong, it's wrong against you."
She signed where the flag said sign. Walking back to seat 14 she thought about the word standard, and about her name riding in the header of a file to Singapore and wherever files went after Singapore, outliving the shift, outliving the queue, her taste in turning-points dissolved into machinery like salt into soup, unattributable and everywhere. Six hundred and twenty baht a night now. She logged back in.
Past three the queue turned domestic. It did that some nights — the tickets came batched by source, and a batch would arrive tagged in English she had stopped reading, and the kitchens would start. This one was twenty-eight seconds. A kitchen in this country: the gas bottle, the dish rack, the calendar from a shop. A woman at the sink with her back one-quarter turned to the camera, washing. A man's voice off-frame, low, asking something with numbers in it. The woman's hands kept moving.
Pui set the flag at nine seconds and rated it five.
The tool, as it always did, showed afterward its own faint tick on the timeline, the current model's guess, the thing you were training against. The tick sat at twenty seconds, where the voice off-frame got louder. Eleven seconds late. At nine seconds nothing had happened that a machine could bill: the hands had gone on moving in the water, that was all — gone on moving exactly as before, except that they were no longer washing anything. She did not scrub back to check. She knew what was at nine seconds.
Daeng was resting her eyes, which is what she called watching the row. She looked at Pui's timeline, the flag and the tick and the eleven seconds between them, and then at Pui, one glance, the whole audit.
"You label that one from memory," Daeng said.
Nothing more was said. Daeng turned back to her anger, and Pui submitted the ticket, and the queue produced the next clip, which was a man on a sofa telling an interviewer that the layoffs had honestly been the best thing that ever happened to him, and she flagged the frame where honestly arrived, and rated it five, and went on. On the floor you went on. That was the whole procedure, and the procedure was the mercy.
The songthaew came at six. It idled at the fence with its lights on in the blue dark while the day shift filtered in past the guard's radio, luk thung at dawn, and the night women climbed up under the rail in their cardigans and were carried off toward the market and the piers. Daeng went. Mai went, to her other work. Pui told Sombat she would close out her queue, which was a sentence with no meaning — the queue did not close — and he nodded without hearing it and went home to sleep the sleep of the adequate.
The floor empty was colder. She sat at 14 with her badge lying on the desk, P. SRISUWAN — NIGHT, the photograph on it wearing the face she wore for photographs, and she opened a calibration ticket with no client code, the kind the tool allowed and nobody assigned, and into it she dropped a file from the shared drive: the staff video from New Year, six minutes, HR's phone on a tripod, the sections lining up by turn under the banner to wave and say the year's wish. She scrubbed to the night section. Nine women and the guard, squinting in daylight they were not built for. Herself third from the left, two cardigans even then, saying the sentence everyone said.
She cropped herself out of the line, set the ticket running, and sat back.
The tool did not hesitate anywhere else in the six minutes. On her segment it hesitated — the progress bar stalling the way it stalled on the hard ones, on the fives — and she watched it stall, hands in her lap, and it was fourteen degrees, and the vents brought the port in faintly, and then the tick dropped.
00:02:47.
She scrubbed to it. On the screen the woman third from the left was mid-sentence, mid-word, wishing everyone happiness, the mouth open on the vowel of it, the face doing everything a face should. She looked at the frame for a while. The machine that looked with her taste had been asked her own trade question and had answered in one pass, confidence unrecorded, no reviewer above it now to say otherwise, because the answer key was her.
She did not rate it. There was no one to submit it to.
From her bag she took a school notebook, the horse on the cover, the multiplication tables printed on the back the way they had been printed on the backs of notebooks since she was a girl in Nakhon Pathom, and slid off the rubber band. The page she opened held a short column already: dates on the left, numbers on the right, her handwriting going down it small and level. At the bottom she wrote the date, and then, in the right-hand column, 02:47.
She looked at what she had written, and closed the notebook, and worked the rubber band back on. Then she logged out of the ticket, and out of the tool, and out of the terminal, and put her badge around her neck, and went out through the aluminum door into the seven-o'clock heat, where the day had already started without requiring anything from her, and stood a moment at the fence adjusting to the temperature of the world.