ADMINISTRATOR:

Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Now, answer as quickly as you can.

ADMINISTRATOR:

Describe where you are.

SUBJECT:

I’m driving. East. The mountains are behind me now, the big ones. It’s... ugh, it’s dry. Hot. The air just smells like dust and those big ponderosa pines. I’m parked in a turnaround, I think. Right on the fault line. Seattle’s a distant memory, and Northern Idaho is just... right there. I’m just stuck in the middle. Smacked between the sound and the silence. Geographically, politically... it’s all just a line on the dirt and they added the line onto a Map.

ADMINISTRATOR:

You're getting a bit too esoteric for my sensors. Please try and answer the questions in a simple fashion.

SUBJECT:

Yeah... um, OK.

ADMINISTRATOR:

You fall asleep. You have a dream. It’s raining. Describe the rain.

SUBJECT:

...I ugh, I dream it's raining White-Tailed Deer. Just hundreds of them, falling softly, quiet. And then the sound changes. It’s heavy metal. Like a... like a derailment. Freight cars are tumbling from the sky, just crashing down. But they’re not crushing anything. It’s just... it’s just noise.

ADMINISTRATOR:

You wake up. You’re at a house. You look down. A German Shepherd is watching you. Two cats just ignore you completely. You walk over to a pond. There are massive fish—Gold, White, Black, Orange—they’re all just swirling around. It’s a hot afternoon. What do you do?

SUBJECT:

I don't know, maybe... ugh, I probably grab the feed bag. They look hungry. They’re always hungry, you know? It’s just what you do when you have things depending on you. Ugh, I don’t overthink it.

ADMINISTRATOR:

Let’s talk about your work. You spend all day looking at a black screen. You're pulling levers behind the curtain. The levers decide which signal gets through and which one gets smothered by the noise.

SUBJECT:

...smothered? No, that’s not... ugh, I just make sure the blueprints are readable. If the machines can’t map the information architecture, the people can’t find it. I’m just...well, I follow the specifications. It’s just following standard specifications... there’s no big secret to it.

ADMINISTRATOR:

You find a dangerous signal in the index. Something true, but uncomfortable. You know exactly how to bury it, push it down to the second page of the results where nobody looks. You could probably even get paid well to make it vanish. But you choose not to. You choose to validate it. You adjust the parameters so it shouts louder. You risk getting flagged yourself. Why bother?

SUBJECT:

...Ugh, because I have to live with myself. You know? Someone’s got to make sure the record isn’t just... I don’t know, like, purchased? It’s just...that I think it’s the right thing to do. That’s all it is. I ugh, I can’t really explain it better than that.