With all the pep of a park ranger, someone named Arjun introduced himself and the others, who waved politely enough. Arjun was older than me, with a choppy almost-Mohawk slicked back down the back of his head. There wasn’t a white lab coat in sight, with everyone in jeans and T-shirts. At least I didn’t look completely out of place. Arjun got me settled into my own workspace and explained the rundown of their days here at the Video Mezzanine, though everyone just called it the Footage Farm.

Arjun and his team had thousands of hours to comb through, between the separate files of twenty-four-hour chunks that the Envisioner recorded of the other universe. With additional footage of each time someone asked the machine a question, like a camera from one of the panels was pointed at the questioner’s face. Plus, Arjun thought the tablets that Figueiredo’s staff lugged around were synched to the machine, meaning there was likely tons of video footage from those, too. The individual files weren’t in chronological order, because, as far as they could tell, the transfer from the Envisioner using the ancient laptops scrambled things up. But they were lucky, still, that Kaori’s tech lead had been able to dump all the footage from the Envisioner onto a separate server. From there, Arjun had created a work queue that all the footage techs logged into, watched a few hours at a time, and recorded their observations in a digital report for the whole team.

No one had any idea what the people in the footage were saying, of course, with reports mostly full of educated guesses while they waited for linguists to fly in, hopefully. Sometimes when they needed another opinion one of the footage techs would play a clip on the big screen in front of the panel of windows. Subject A is clearly angry at the results here. No way, see that smile? He’s satisfied. Or gassy? Subject A was Dr. Figueiredo, a helpful shorthand to help distance myself from the footage, plus the other film techs butchered my last name.

I was dying to get into the work queue myself but I had to be on-boarded. Ugh. I hated the business-douche language. I burned the morning reading employee conduct handbooks, signing NDAs, and watching work queue tutorials. I shadowed one of the other Footage Farmers for a while, which meant sitting at their side and watching them watch footage. Thrilling. I wished I’d brought Genesis’s tarot deck from my room me to give me something to do with my hands. After lunch, by the time I was ready to wade out of the kiddie pool, Arjun and the others started packing up their things for the day.

“What gives?” I asked him.

“You didn’t hear? We’re closing up shop early,” he said. “Staff supply run. You coming?”