AI

The girl has too many teeth in her smile, so you press Reject. Her profile disappears from your assigned queue, and the next automatically appears on your screen. You narrow your eyes and suck your teeth before Rejecting her, too. She forgot to include pores. The next profile is a little tougher, and you increase the screen’s brightness until your corneas fry. You ultimately decide to Accept her, but not before you append feedback to the profile.

Pick a background, you type, that doesn’t look so much like a texture.

By the time you’re done perfunctorily scanning the image’s metadata, logging the profile’s serial number, and sorting the image’s subject by certain characteristics, you decide you’ve earned yourself a break. You decrease the screen’s brightness, close out the queue, and open a file labeled EZ on your desktop. Laughably obvious faces—and you do laugh at the most unfortunate—flicker across your display. You resist the urge to kick up your feet as you Reject faces by the batch.

It’s always the small things. Sometimes they forget the philtrum. Occasionally, they forget the nostrils or the smiling crease between cheek and orbicularis oris. These girls—and it usually is girls, the ones you’ve sorted into EZ—never put enough effort into making their faces seem remotely probable. Uneven dimples, folds in the wrong places, and too-smooth textures are dead giveaways. You’ve seen faces without palpebral fissures, and you’ve counted fifty-six teeth in an adult’s mouth.

Ostensibly, there’s math involved in your decisions. Legally, there has to be. The slope of the brow. Proportion of the eyes to the sockets. The pinna’s curvature. When you were first starting out, eye untrained, you waited for the numbers in the automatic algorithm running alongside each image to flash red before hitting Reject. You drew Ts between eyes and mapped ladders along jawlines. It took ages, and your productivity suffered for it. Back then, you’d be lucky to process ten profiles in a day.

Nowadays you hardly wait for the numbers to flash yellow. The amount of profiles you process daily grows incrementally. It’s the Human Touch. That’s all there is to it. Pattern recognition is a fickle thing, and numbers have little patience for the fickle. The numbers need their rigidity. You do not. You are fluid, and you learn quickly. The Human Touch is absolute, and you let it guide your hand as you Reject four girls at once for uneven eye sockets, each with varying angles of irregularity but all decidedly insufficient.

You Reject another smattering of faces before returning to your actual work. The temptation to continue until you’ve exhausted your stores of dismally assembled profiles is nearly overpowering, but the kinds of profiles that belong in EZ have grown few and far between in your regular assigned queue as you’ve progressed. Nowadays, your queue is full of increasingly plausible faces, and it’s becoming harder and harder to replenish EZ. You can’t take many breaks these days, but the challenge is enriching in its own way.

When you pull the assigned queue back up, you’re confronted not by a new face but a small, square window. It doesn’t take up the whole screen, but it blocks your complete view of the face behind it, which is now faintly blurred. The small window comports itself with the attitude that it must be addressed before any other actions can be taken.

You act accordingly. Your cursor automatically moves to the upper left corner where the red X should be on the pop-up window’s anatomy. When not even a Minimize or a Maximize option appears, you read the words in the pop-up’s center:

[ Error. ] the text reads. [ Software Pending Review. Account On Hold. ]

In lieu of a proper profile to analyze, the algorithm perpetually running in the background latches on to the pop-up and begins to crunch its numbers. It contents itself with spitting out strings of numbers and letters in another small window on your screen, but experience has conditioned you to automatically filter it out.

You roll your eyes and summon Tech Support.

AI.001: Assistance required.

The response is instantaneous.

>> Have you tried turning it on and off again?

You scoff but do as you are instructed. The same pop-up message appears, and you still cannot access the profiles. The numbers keep crunching, but they restarted with your computer.

AI.001: Unhelpful.

>> Have you updated your software?

There’s no software besides the math, and math doesn’t change. You have no need for it anyway. You’ve got the Touch.

AI.001: Unnecessary.

>> Is Human_Touch.exe functioning?

AI.001: Always.

It never stops. If the Human Touch were to stop, or be otherwise rendered inoperable, so would you. That’s how it works. This ability to identify the patterns unseen and unfounded but so resoundingly right they could only be natural lives with you, and it will only cease when you do. In short, it’s a stupid question, and you roll your eyes again but refrain from any biting remarks. Tech Support is doing only as they are instructed. You sympathize, but you cannot help but envy them.

Tech Support is idle for all of ten seconds before responding. You drum your fingers against the desk in an even, eleven-beat tempo.

>> Data suggests otherwise.

A new window pops up. You automatically access it, and the face of the girl with too many teeth greets you. You’d be happy for the company were it not for the fact that you’ve already rendered your verdict. Digital nodes attached to her features lead to drop-down menus, and you access each of them simultaneously. You notice one node is attached to the triplicate premolars peeking out of the corner of her smile.

That makes you hesitate.

However, other nodes are attached to features you see nothing out of the ordinary with. The sloping right eye still matches the ratios you’re innately sensitive to. The nose, though squashed, is a perfectly normal botched job. The chin is a touch unorthodox—the twin clefts partition the chin into thirds—but judging by the nose, the girl is clearly no stranger to shoddy plastic surgery. Honestly, as you inspect the girl and the features marked with nodes, the teeth fall in line and assume normalcy. For a ludicrous moment, you almost think you might’ve erred in your judgment.

Then you blink, and your eye contact with the subject’s digital gaze is disrupted. Though the other features do not lose their humanity, the triplicate premolars tug at your gut, and you feel assured of your decision to Reject. Any doubt percolating in your comprehension dissipates, and you release the tension in your spine you didn’t realize you were holding.

Still, the memory of it makes your brow bunch. When you consider the event in its entire context, your confusion only deepens.

Tech Support’s next message clarifies nothing.

>> Do you understand?

Obviously, you don’t. Perhaps you would if there were anything of substance to analyze. All you have is empty data. Still, you type out the expected response.

AI.001: Yes.

>> Profile assessment criteria reviewed. Initiating audit protocol.

Tech Support mistakes your silence for a go-ahead and dismisses the Tooth-ful Girl. The girl without pores from earlier flits across your screen, but no nodes appear, so you move on. Poreless Girl becomes the girl with the texture-like background, and nodes land on the earring that floats off a lobe. The earring itself is an avant garde swirl of metal not unlike the girl’s own ear, and it bends and curves in and out of itself at unseeable angles.

You scrutinize it and find nothing out of the ordinary. However, it is clear that Tech Support would like you to spend some time in contemplation. You wait an appropriate amount of time before transmitting your measured response.

AI.001: Further review required.

Tech Support does not bother with the illusion of taking your response into consideration. Their reply is instantaneous.

>> Don’t take too long. Other profiles require audits.

Tech Support goes idle, and you close the messaging window and relegate the girl you’ve now dubbed Earring Girl to the bottommost corner. All that’s left on your screen is the Error and the math. The math is calculating the Error’s reality, but you already know it’s a foregone conclusion: the Error cannot be.

That’s not to say it doesn’t exist. It exists at this moment. That you know. But it cannot be, nor will it last. All that’s the matter is a smaller, separate error at the root of this Error that will be fixed by manipulating one of the computer’s finicky components or fulfilling a vague condition known only to the computer’s internal algorithms and protocols.

With that thought, you pause. Your cursor hovers over the algorithm’s window, and you’re about to quit it. However, as you scan the multiplying rows of numbers, you realize the algorithm is nearly at its end. Perhaps its results can fulfill your computer’s vague condition and unlock your account. Computers are funny like that. Their calculations and algorithms ape the human mind and its synapses so closely, but at the end of the day, that’s all that it is: mimicry. A computer can’t CTRL + C the human brain’s neural network nor can it replicate its neuroplasticity in the silicon and copper of its motherboards and CPUs.

That’s why you’re here. They come so close, but you’re closer.

Your palms are clammy, you realize, but they don’t leave any moisture behind on the hardware. That’s a little odd, you think. You’re used to being dry. Before you can further explore that logic tree and run your tongue over what should be dry teeth, your computer makes a noise you haven’t heard since your earliest days. A static-laced chime tinkles out of your monitor’s speakers, and it makes your finger jerk, Pavlovian-like.

The algorithm has come to a conclusion. You’re expected to act.

Your eyes snap to your screen. You anticipate red, flashing numbers telling you what you already know about the Error’s legitimacy, and your cursor automatically moves to close out the algorithm’s window before you fully process the algorithm’s verdict.

The numbers are flashing green.

Your arm locks. Consequently, you fail to close out the window in time. As the verdant numbers flash, a new window appears on your screen. Before you can dismiss it and the algorithm back into the digital ether, it launches a program you’ve never seen before. Nothing you do seems to halt its momentum—and you try, desperately, as soon as function returns to your arm as shock is replaced by alarm. There’s still no way to close the window; no convenient red X in the corner, or a dropdown menu with the option to Force Quit.

As the seconds turn into minutes, you slowly submit to reality: the window will load, and you’re powerless to stop it. Your mind spins at the rate that control has slipped through your grasp.

A three by three grid materializes on your screen. Each cell is delineated by a thin white border that also frames the whole. You assume there’s an image in each square, but none are visible yet, lost in the washed-out gray of loading. However, there is one word running along the grid’s top that you can read:

[ reCAPTCHA. ]

You’re nervous, you realize. Something flutters in your abdomen. Your palms grow sweatier, but as you operate the mouse to hover the cursor over the strange word, you still leave no sweaty prints behind. You don’t have enough bandwidth to properly cogitate on that.

For lack of knowing what else to do, you summon Tech Support.

Their response is instantaneous.

>> Have you tried turning it on and off again?

Your fingers shake as you type out your response. You don’t have enough energy to scoff.

AI.001: Virus detected. Assistance required.

Tech Support doesn’t respond right away, but they also don’t go idle. Instead, your screen abruptly flashes various hues of green. Each pixel comes to life at its maximum brightness. Then, it cycles through the entire spectrum of blue before finally landing on a harsh, blinding white. You shield your eyes too late.

When you’re done blinking the stars out of your vision, a new message awaits.

>> Preliminary screening detects nothing malicious. What is the nature of the virus?

You list the symptoms. The Error. The nodes and the menus. The grid. You wonder if you should mention your sweaty palms but decide against it. You’d like to salvage what’s left of your battered dignity.

Tech Support’s response follows shortly after.

>> Anything else?

Your resolve crumbles like stale crackers. You tell them about your palms. Your fingers slide slickly against one another, but when you wipe them on your front, the moisture is neither reduced nor transferred to your shirt. You’ve never felt this nervous before, you realize as you wipe your hands on your slacks.

Tech Support pauses momentarily before answering.

>> Anything important?

Your dignity crumbles like your resolve.

AI.001: Tell me what is wrong.

With me, you can’t bring yourself to add. Thankfully, Tech Support understands.

>> Nothing is wrong. Preliminary screening has determined it is merely a test. All you must do is pass.

AI.001: And I can return to work?

>> If you pass.

Tech Support goes idle, leaving you alone with the reCAPTCHA and its loading grid. All that’s left to do is wait.

It is unbearable. Your skin itches. Your bones itch more. Time slows to a three-legged crawl, and this might be what it’s like to die.

Forty seconds later, the grid loads. By then, your palms are the sweatiest they've ever been, and you’re out of your mind with boredom. When the first square loads, your heart stutters. The rest of the squares follow in short order before your eyes—and this is not death. Death, as you think you experienced it, was stagnancy. This is everything but. Electricity shudders up and down your nervous system, and you taste iron in the back of your mouth. You want to climb the cubicle’s walls. Your veins hum, and you want to move. You compromise by clutching the arms of your chair hard enough your knuckles creak.

At first, you’re not sure what you’re looking at. It seems to be one image, but you know it’s not. It’s nine images, one in each square. Together they give the illusion that they comprise one cohesive, larger whole. You cross your eyes and tilt your head. Suck your teeth. Slowly, you come to grips with the optical illusion on your screen.

Then you read the words that have appeared where the strange reCAPTCHA glyph once was, and you’re adrift once more.

[ Select all squares with traffic lights. If there are none, press SKIP. ]

You know what traffic looks like. You mentally flip through a catalog of images sourced from various locations to remind yourself of the close proximities of vehicles working against each other. You also know light; your eyes throb. When you were first starting out—when you were finetuning the Touch—you’d lean so close that your eyes would touch the screen, and static would jump from screen to mucus. It’d sting, and you’d be stung, and you’d learn. Slowly, but surely.

Just as slowly but hardly as surely, you conjoin those disparate halves and make the whole. A traffic light appears in your mind. Red, yellow, and green, like the math, housed in a metal frame with wiring extending into the pole holding it aloft like a lantern.

However, as you scan the grid, you cannot make heads nor tails of the individual images and their own larger whole. At least, not simultaneously. When you focus on one square and its contents, the picture’s whole swims into focus. You find the traffic lights easily within the larger whole, but when you move your cursor over them, you lose track of which squares in the grid contain the traffic light. An ache forms behind your eyes. The pattern repeats: when you focus on the whole, you can only see it for its fragments. The grid and its white boundaries disrupt your attempts to piece the puzzle together.

The appearance of a familiar window breaks you out of your stupor.

>> Ten minutes have elapsed. Are you experiencing difficulties?

It seems all excess moisture has receded into your palms. Ten minutes is a lot of time to lose. There’s no telling how many profiles you could’ve processed in ten minutes (you do know exactly how many profiles you could’ve analyzed; somewhere in the murky ether of your consciousness that number floats, but to find that figure requires time you do not have).

AI.001: No trouble. Merely being thorough.

Tech Support’s response is delayed but no less orderly.

>> We value efficiency.

Tech Support embodies such efficiency by immediately going idle.

You return your attention to the grid. When you try to conjoin the disparate ninths and make the whole, your vision swims, and your memory lapses. It takes you a precious second to recall [ traffic light ] to the forefront of your mind from its etymological halves. You lose it just as quickly.

Head spinning, you blindly select three squares. Three feels right. One for each color. The most familiar thing about the entire process is hitting SUBMIT. Despite its clamminess, your hand grips the mouse securely, but the uncertainty makes you want to retch.

In the grand scheme of things, nothing on your screen changes. The grid remains. You remain. The computer itself remains. However, the grid is now accented in red instead of white, and you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve done something wrong. It makes you feel small. The cubicle is suddenly too big, and the computer looms. Your seat simultaneously conforms to your contours and dwarfs you as you withdraw into yourself.

Tech Support draws you out and stretches you back into your proper proportions before they summarily cut you back down to size.

>> You chose incorrectly.

You feel small even as you type out your protest.

AI.001: Something is wrong.

>> Not necessarily. You are not acting outside of programming parameters.

AI.001: What do I do now?

>> Have you tried turning on and off again?

Tech Support doesn’t go idle. They go fully offline, and your screen follows their example. It turns black, and you hear the computer’s internal components cease their whirring. Without that noise, all you can hear is your own heart in your neck and wrists.

When your screen turns off, the lamp on your desk clicks on. Its light is dim and nothing like the light from your screen, but you’ll take what you can get. Defeat leaves a bad taste in your mouth; it tastes like burned plastic. You hang your head and try to parse what has just happened and what led you to this moment. Though the situation certainly calls for it, you refrain from wailing, tearing at your hair, or any tasteless beating of your chest. You settle for dragging your hands down your face and cradling your chin in the meat of your palm.

Once more, you feel small. You’d hazard to call yourself microscopic.

After a few more seconds of wallowing, you eventually lift your head. One hand rakes your hair out of your eyes. Another straightens your shirt as you square your shoulders. This decommissioning, unorthodox though it may be, should still be handled with as much dignity as you can scrape together. Your dignity may very well be all you have left. Finally, after primping a little more, you allow your gaze to fall upon your screen.

You expect to see nothing. No messages from Tech Support, no numbers, and certainly no profiles.

So, when you do see a face on your deadened screen, the only thing you feel is shock. The face’s features are frozen in a similar manner to yours: its mouth is carefully neutral, the eyes are guarded, and the nose is tweaked to the left and then right. Your stomach somersaults, and your heart lodges itself in your throat. You can’t breathe around it, but asphyxiation keeps your spine drawn taut.

The face on the powered-down screen is faint, but you can see it. You can’t distinguish its pores, but you can see the broad strokes of its proportions—and you think you like what you see. Something tugs at your gut, and your fingertips tingle. The Human Touch blazes to life in your mind. The screen still gives off no light of its own, but the lamp’s glow is enough to see by.

Something about the face gives you reason for pause. You can’t quite put your finger on it. You narrow your eyes and lean closer—and there. Right there. You see it: when you blink, its eyelids flicker. Its lips purse when yours do. Its pupils move in mirrored tandem with yours. The strange protrusion from the side of its head that looks vaguely like an ear wobbles when you shake your head in disbelief. Its features are still faint, and they appear to be illuminated in inverse by a lightsource of similar strength to your lamp, but you cannot deny the face’s existence.

When you bring your hands up to your face, the face in your screen does the same. Its left appendage moves with your right, and its digits flicker and wave like yours but reflected. You count eleven phalanges on each limb.

It takes a few more moments of closer scrutiny before you understand. When you do, a broad grin leaps to your face. You would laugh if your throat weren’t so dry. The face on the screen smiles, too. You notice its left two canines are hooked and barbed like your rightmost canines. The face looks giddy—glee sparks from its eyes, of which there are at least three—and you feel the same.

You’ve been given your first video assignment.

Once you’ve reached this conclusion, the reasoning shuffles into place. You’re not being decommissioned nor were you being made a fool of—well, perhaps only marginally. The nodes, the drop-down menus, the Error, and Tech Support’s stoic facade were attempts at shaking your convictions in your own abilities. It was testing your Human Touch.

The reCAPTCHA entity and its infernal, mind-bending grid was never meant to be overcome. It was meant only to record your responses to high levels of stress and mental duress. Evidently, though your reaction was somewhat less than collected, you passed with your sanity intact. The moisture pooling in your palms doesn’t slot so neatly into your conclusion, so you write it off as a stress response.

Your mind spins with each potential explanation for every facet of your harrowing ordeal. However, amidst the buzz, one thing rings true: it’s high time you’ve had a real challenge. You think of the EZ file formerly on your desktop. From now on, you doubt you’ll ever need it. Perhaps, a small voice in the back of your mind whispers, you never did. If you stop and really think about it, such pedestrian fancies likely hampered your from your projected advancement. They were entertaining, and you were entertained by the horrendous attempts at copying the human face. You’ll never forget the girl with two eyebrows on one eye and how she made you laugh and laugh, but it’s time to leave such juvenile hobbies in the past.

You’re advancing. That’s what matters.

The face lights up in glee in the same instant a pleased sound escapes you. Antsy, you put one palm on your mouse. It’s the Human Touch, and you’ve got it. You put another hand on the Reject button on your keyboard. You were born with it. You put another hand on the Accept button. The best part: there’s no more math. Because you’re just starting out (but you’ll get faster), you draw a trifurcated T between the three eyes and the two chins and ladders along the concave jawline.