Data Center
by Liviu Megherea
Somewhere out of reach, a man’s eyes glaze over with images of bleeding flesh and rendered fat. Streaks of red and fragments of pearlescent ivory scatter across the blue light. With his cursor, he traces a circle around a tangled mass that reminds him of hair clumps pulled from a shower drain. Now the machine can see it, too. But he isn’t sure if the machine knows about shower drains.
His work computer can only access one program. He can’t close out of the window, can’t ALT-TAB away from the images stuffed into his retinas. There is only a white background with the image in the center. His cursor is a tiny pencil icon, which he uses to trace around the offensive content. Then he presses ENTER on his keyboard and another image appears.
Each time, his eyes must adjust to a new intensity. The skin of a neck split to the vertebrae, the head hanging loose, eyes open and staring into the void of some camera lens that leads to him and his pencil cursor; charred body material, a black lump that emits a grotesque smile with illuminated teeth. The man’s cursor supplies its identity to the machine’s nodes and intertwining neural networks. And the machine’s eyes are constructed, image by image, by mounds of digital flesh.
And it’s not only the dying. It’s the fucking. Effervescent neuronal desire, heaving bodies and masses of engorged flesh filled with flesh. The machine must recognize both ends of human life – its sticky beginning and its sticky end. Because they violate the Community Guidelines.
Three months ago, an American hiring agency pasted flyers around town, soliciting starving bodies for easy work. “START YOUR CAREER IN TECH NOW,” it read. “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TRAINING.” He signed a short-term contract, and the company placed him in a building filled with wires that hum and emit warmth like veins. He walks inside alone, sits in the hollow cubicle alone, and logs on. The building smells like antiseptic.
The machine learns to moderate, but only through the man’s eyes. Only he can recognize the unacceptability of tangled limbs and chests opened to beating hearts and a blossomed face at the end of a shotgun. The machine can’t recoil; it learns to. The man has since learned to stop recoiling; he only blinks as a new image appears.
His cubicle is surrounded by black boxes with blinking lights. Each morning, they seem to emit steam, which condenses on his keyboard and forms a lightly wet film. He rubs his eyes, scratches his arm, and his skin cells float across the air. He is apparently the only worker on this floor.
After eight hours of images and tracing, he leaves. On his way home, he spends nearly everything he made on vegetables. Eats dinner slowly and lays in bed next to his wife. Her heat is foreign, plastic, her skin is broken glass.
Liviu Megherea is a writer from Chicago.