“As you likely know,” she says, speaking with zero inflection, “Ilium has been scanning the world’s surface with ever-advancing fidelity for years, assembling the most comprehensive map ever constructed, forty petabytes of data and counting.”

The supervisor plugs in the terminals and the Ilium logo spins on the screens as the terminals boot.

“You have been selected for a pilot program to review potentially undesirable items inside the raw image sets. Our algorithms flag hundreds of thousands of images per day and we don’t have the manpower to scan them all. Your task will be to verify whether or not these images are objectionable, and in the process enhance the machine learning. Either keep the flag up or take it down and move on.”

“Basically,” the assistant warden says, “a fancy steakhouse doesn’t want you to jump on Ilium Earth and find a homeless guy peeing in their doorway. If you see something on there that you wouldn’t want Grandma to see, leave the flag up, draw a circle around it, and the software will eliminate it. Got it?”

“These are skills,” says the supervisor. “This is a job.”

Seymour nods. On the screen in front of him, the Earth spins. The view sinks through digital clouds over a swath of South America—Brazil maybe—and touches down on a rural highway as straight as a ruler. Red dirt runs down both sides; what might be sugarcane grows beyond that. He nudges the trackball forward: the flag ahead gradually enlarges as he draws closer.

Beneath it, a little blue sedan has struck a cow head-on, and the car is crumpled, and there is blood on the road, and a man in jeans is standing beside the cow with his hands behind his head, either watching it die or trying to figure out if it is going to die.

Seymour confirms the flag, circles the image, and in an instant the cow, car, and man are concealed with a section of computer-generated roadway. Before he has time to process any of it, the software whisks him to the next flag.

A faceless little boy in front of a roadside churrascaria shows the camera his middle finger. Someone has painted a penis on the sign of a little Honda dealership. He checks forty flags around Sorriso, Brazil; the computer launches him back into the troposphere, the planet spins, and he drops into northern Michigan.