Chapter 6
6
I woke ahead of my alarm, full of anticipation for the momentous day I was about to embark on. Eight hours of moderation, coffee with a pilot, and then my real date for the night—my flight with N108DQ—would commence. I washed my hair and blew it dry, put on my gold dress, and applied makeup. I tucked one of the perfume samples into my backpack to use later, so the scent wouldn’t curdle by the time I met Simon. I packed my toothbrush and a sample-sized tube of toothpaste for my overnight at the airport. I double-checked my wallet for my driver’s license and the front pocket of my backpack for my chunk of 737.
Though I’d woken earlier than usual, my grooming ritual had taken over an hour, and for the first time, I arrived a few minutes late to Acuity. The interior row dwellers leered at me as I passed to my terminal. I now understood a fraction of what Karina experienced each day. I felt they were taking something from me that I hadn’t offered. I’d dressed up on behalf of my date with a pilot, not to be gawked at by my coworkers. The planes didn’t care what I wore.
Karina was already settled at her terminal. She’d placed her Louis Vuitton tote on my chair to save my spot, though it seemed unlikely anyone would try to take it. She humored me with a cartoonish double take. “You look hot,” she mouthed.
At six o’clock I stood in line at the Millbrae Peet’s. I scanned the board behind the counter, though I’d reviewed the menu while I was on BART and already knew what I would order. I’d been excited about a date with a pilot in the abstract, but now that it was happening, I felt anxious and almost hoped Simon would stand me up.
A human form sidled up to me.
“Hey. Are you Linda?” he said.
Simon was a few inches shorter than me, wearing a black suede jacket and distressed jeans that bunched at the knees, presumably stretched out from sitting. I nodded, and he pointed at himself, saying, “Simon,” though this wasn’t really necessary. I wondered if we should shake hands, or hug, but neither of us was deft enough to initiate contact. We stood together awkwardly. I thought back to his profile pictures. This man’s abdominal muscles could not possibly resemble corn.
“You been here before?” Simon said.
“To Peet’s? Sure.”
“To this Peet’s?” he pressed, as if the distinction mattered.
“I think so.”
Simon seemed cowed by this, as though I’d won an argument. The man in line ahead of us—mid-forties, his gelled hair threaded with silver—glanced at us with a bemused expression. It must have been obvious we were on a first date. I was telegraphing to the world that I’d posted photos of myself on the internet for the purpose of finding someone to have sex with, or, worse, to build a life with. I wanted to assure the smirking silver fox that I only wanted to marry a pilot to maximize my access to planes before commercial flight became financially prohibitive due to the collapse of fossil capitalism. But that would be cruel to Simon, who was standing right next to me.
“Parking’s such a bitch around here,” Simon said. He seemed annoyed that I’d suggested we meet here, though he hadn’t offered any alternatives.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “I took BART.”
“You don’t drive?”
“I don’t have a car.”
“That sucks,” Simon said.
I watched him study the menu board, as I’d pretended to do a few minutes earlier. My skepticism deepened. His profile had said he was twenty-three, but he looked less mature than he had in his photos. In fact, I now suspected the photos featured Simon’s face grafted onto another man’s body. He was a wormlike fellow, dubiously capable of operating a commercial aircraft. Karina had been right to point to Simon’s youth as a red flag, as it took years to accumulate flight hours and climb the ranks of an airline. Becoming a pilot was an arduous journey, with erratic schedules, long hours, and paltry compensation at the outset. Only a true believer would commit to such a vocation, someone possessed of self-discipline bordering on masochism, perhaps resulting from a love-starved childhood or a family that fetishized the military. It was a pursuit requiring an immense capacity for suffering combined with a romantic predilection for viewing the earth from the sky.
Could Simon be such an exalted fool? As I observed him rocking back and forth on his Asics Gels, tongue pressed into cheek as he squinted at the menu, I knew the truth in my heart: this man was no pilot.
“What are you getting?” I asked him.
“Huh? Oh, I dunno. Just a coffee.”
Karina had told me Simon should pay for my beverage. “If he doesn’t pay, the date is over, symbolically if not literally,” she’d said. But the moment came upon us quickly. I was first at the counter. The barista was a young, freckled woman, her hair dyed magenta. I ordered a medium iced green tea, proud to have studied the menu prior to my arrival, so that I knew the establishment offered three types of iced tea in three sizes. She pressed some buttons on her screen, then turned to Simon.
“Together?” she said, and I froze, knowing this was the moment when Simon should step forward and offer to pay for both our orders. He said nothing, and I said, “Sure, together,” and handed over my debit card, eager to get the ordeal over with. Simon ordered a chai latte with almond milk, a five-dollar item.
We sat outside, as the interior was crowded with people working on laptops. Wind whipped around our metal table. I buttoned my jean jacket over my thin dress, though the denim provided little warmth. Across the street sat an Italian deli and a Taiwanese dessert café. Down the block was a tutoring center where high schoolers worked at raising their SAT scores so that they might be admitted to an elite university, gain lucrative employment, and earn enough to one day send their own progeny to a similar tutoring center, a cycle that would perpetuate until the earth became too hot to sustain human life.
I dared to inspect Simon more closely. He had buzzed hair and a nose on the large side, but otherwise seemed featureless, like a stick figure. He did not resemble any plane I’d seen.
“So,” he said. “Here we are.”
I sipped my iced tea through a paper straw that had already gone gummy. “Here we are,” I echoed.
“I guess we should get this out of the way,” Simon said. “I’m not a pilot.”
I was disappointed, but grateful to know the truth. “Why did you lie?”
“What’s so great about a pilot, anyway? Would you want to date a bus driver? Because that’s all a pilot is. A bus driver in the sky.”
I stiffened with outrage at this ignorant statement. “There’s more to it than that,” I said.
“You women all want the same thing.”
“What’s that?”
“A rich guy who can pay your bills.”
“Most pilots aren’t rich.”
But Simon was on a roll now. “You want a real macho, type-A kind of guy, and that’s not me, so excuse me for taking liberties just so I can get a second glance. You would never have talked to me if I hadn’t pretended to be a pilot.”
“That’s true,” I said.
His expression softened, as though he, too, were grateful to have his suspicions confirmed. “Your dress is pretty,” he said.
I sipped my tea, feeling more comfortable now that he’d paid me a compliment. “So what do you do? If you’re not a pilot.”
Simon groaned. “God, I fucking hate the Bay Area. The first question is always ‘What do you do?’ Which really means ‘How much money do you make?’ Which means ‘How much should I respect you?’ It’s so fucking transparent. No offense.” He sipped his chai, which must have reminded him that I’d paid for his expensive beverage, as he proceeded to answer my question. He lived with his older brother, who was a software engineer and earned a salary of two hundred thousand dollars, a fact Simon seemed both resentful of and awed by. Simon worked as a driver for a food delivery app and did odd jobs through a platform that allowed people to purchase each other’s labor, though he wasn’t often hired, as he possessed few skills. He wanted to drive for Uber but was waiting to be approved to lease one of their cars, as his own car was “a beater.”
Simon’s accounting of his life aroused my sympathy. I saw we were both misfits, struggling to find our place in the world. I, too, had lived with my more successful older brother for a time. “It must be nice not to have to clock in at the same place every day,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s pretty sweet,” he said sarcastically. “So what do you do, Linda?”
I told him I was a content moderator, and he made a face.
“I’ve heard about those places,” he said. “Sounds awful.”
“It’s not so bad,” I said. “Our role is simply to make decisions according to the parent company’s terms of service. Ideally, our judgment will align with the software they’re developing. When our verdicts conflict, it’s typically the software whose decision is rendered final.”
“Then what’s the point of having you do it at all?”
“As I understand it, our input helps to strengthen the AI. And occasionally, the software misses something, so it’s important to have a human review its work.”
“But soon the software will be so good it won’t need you.”
“Yes, that’s what they say. Everything in life is temporary, after all.” My feelings toward Simon had reverted to their original disdain. I’d tried to be nice to him, in spite of his having catfished me, and he’d responded with rude comments about my job.
“Do you see a lot of fucked-up shit?” Simon asked.
“I don’t deal with videos, only text,” I said. “I’m in the Hate the mysterious night-shift workers; our duplicitous managers; the fleece-clad bosses at the parent company, who issued dictates from an anonymous remove. Once I started, it was difficult to stop. I rarely had an opportunity to describe my life to someone I’d likely never see again, and who could thus be confided in freely.
Simon listened raptly, and at the end of my monologue, he asked if Acuity was hiring. “I think I’d be great at it,” he said. “I’ve done some trolling in my day. I could bring an insider’s perspective. Like a covert operative.”
“You can say I recommended you,” I said in a spasm of magnanimity, though he didn’t need my endorsement. Acuity was always searching for unspoiled human consciousnesses to plug into their machine.
Simon thanked me. “I’m sorry for lying about being a pilot,” he said.
“It’s okay.”
“You look different from your photos, too. Did you use filters?”
I hadn’t, but it seemed undignified to debate him on this point. “Did you photoshop your face onto another man’s body?”
“Yeah, I might have,” he said, grinning. “My bad.”
I checked the time on my phone and told Simon I had a flight to catch. He perked up, as though my scarcity increased his interest. “Where are you going?”
“Phoenix.”
“What’s in Phoenix?”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Then why are you going there?”
“I like to fly.” It was exhilarating to tell someone the unvarnished truth after my careful hedging at the VBB.
“So your profile wasn’t a joke.”
“Not at all. If I had the option, I’d never leave the airport.”
“Wow. You’re a freak,” Simon said with admiration.
I stood, and Simon did, too, and shook my hand.
“We could hang out again sometime,” he said. “I mean, if you want.”