Rising Floor, Runaway Ceiling · juanloco.dev

The Good News

They tell you the good news first thing, before you have sat down, before the coffee, and they tell it excitedly, the way people tell you a thing they are certain you want to hear. The tools have set you free. The old wall is coming down. You no longer need the ones who could speak to the machines in the machines' own tongue, because now the machine speaks yours, and it waits in your pocket, patient and tireless and strangely kind, ready to write and reason and build on your behalf. Everyone is a builder now, they say. And you, who have spent years learning to keep the customers of a company from walking out the door of it, you who have never in your life made a thing that runs on electricity, feel something ease open in your chest, because the wall you had long ago stopped noticing has apparently just come down, and you are standing, they promise you, on the free side of it.

You believe it. Why would you not.

By nine that morning there are twenty letters waiting for you, each one a small weather system of somebody's displeasure, and you hand them to the machine and ask what they say, and in a few seconds it tells you, neatly, and it is right. So you ask the machine to write responses back, and it does, and the responses are good, and your customers are satisfied. The work that used to keep you until noon is behind you before the coffee has cooled. All around the floor the others are doing the same, every one of them lighter this morning than the last, the whole room lifted at once by the same quiet hand. And you take this new height for something you have done.

The Better Pen

So you use it, and you are good with it. You feed it numbers and it shows you the account slipping quietly a full three weeks before you would have gotten the call. You write more warmly than you used to, and faster, and to more people, and when the rankings come out you are above the line and glad of it, and you buy steaks of a cut you do not usually buy, and a bottle of wine from a shelf you do not usually reach for.

Some days now you leave your desk before five. You stand at the stove with your phone propped against the salt jar, stirring with one hand and approving the machine's suggestions with the thumb of the other, and your daughter looks up from her homework and says you don't look like you're working, and she is right, and it pleases you more than the rankings did.

By every measure anyone is keeping, you are better at your work than you were a year ago.

What you do not do, what does not once cross your mind to do, is build the thing that would do all of this tomorrow without you standing over it. You use the machine the way a person uses a very fine pen. You write more letters with it, and more reports, and better ones. It never occurs to you to build the press, because you have never in your life stood in a room where presses were built, and a person cannot miss a room they have never known was there.

The Grey Cloth

There is a person in your group who came to it late, from another floor of the same building, from a job they left without much of a story. They are not louder than you, nor quicker in a meeting, and if anything the customers warm to you more, because you have been at this longer and you carry the ease that only the years give. They eat the same lunch at the same hour every day, and they wipe their keyboard, which they carried down from the other floor, with a grey cloth kept in a drawer. For a while the two of you look like the same sort of worker doing the same sort of work.

When the same twenty letters arrive each morning, your neighbor does not hand them to the machine and ask what they say. They spend a week, and then a second, building a thing that reads the letters every morning, and sorts them, and answers the plain ones, and sets the hard ones aside for their own eye. The first attempt is clumsy and gets things wrong, and there is one bad morning, early on, when it answers a letter it should have set aside, and answers it poorly, and your neighbor spends the whole of that day walking it back by hand, apologizing for a thing a made thing did, but they go home and make the made thing better. You notice the one who moved over is quiet in those weeks, and you assume, kindly, that they have fallen behind.

The Household

By the third week the thing they built has stopped breaking. By next quarter it is not one thing but a small household of things, each set to watch a different door, and household is the right word, because what they have raised is a house, in its way, a made thing with rooms in it, and doors, and weight, and weather it is expected to stand against. Your neighbor no longer writes letters. They have built the thing that writes them, and above that the thing that decides which ones are worth writing at all, and because they learned long ago how a made thing is kept from falling down, what they built stays up. It stays up...