The dragon badge
If I don’t get my score above 800 in the next 20 minutes I’ll lose the bonus points I’ve been saving all week. I lose those and my pay won’t be enough for the week. There hasn’t been a ticket assigned to me in ten minutes and I’m certain they’re withholding on purpose. I’ve asked about this on #general a few times but those threads stay very quiet: @admin down-votes any comments, replies, and discussions on how we get work and the scoring system. Lest those threads leads to talk of organising.
I’ve been a contractor here at Borges for a little over five months now: part of an influx of work during what we innocently used to call the wet season. The job is mostly patching holes in the map for cars and trucks and things that go, anything that doesn’t need direct human input to drive. Humans have to be involved somewhere along the chain, just not at the wheel. There’s not much to the job: mostly approving merges to the mesh and shepherding the AI when it’s confidence levels aren’t in the green. Tickets usually stream down the side of my screen assigning points and modifiers depending on how fast I accept and complete them. Each ticket doesn’t pay much. The trick is stringing them together for a higher score. The notifications tab being suspiciously quiet in opposition to the timer counting down the 16 minutes left before I break my chain.
To maintain an acceptably low number of car crashes, the array of sensors and lenses surrounding the car need to detect, predict, and evade any and all moving objects. Those need to be compared against The Map: an ever updating and ever growing 3D model of the drivable world. Borges owns and maintains the map that almost every self-driving vehicle thinks it’s driving on. Those eyes are how they built the map in the first place: scraping all the footage from early self-driving datasets and training it to build a low poly 3D model of all the roads, then manually up-rezzing it over the years while adding secondary surfaces like footpaths. A sublime number of points and splines floating in a 3D space that are forming a model of the drivable world. But it’s obsolete all the damn time. Every time it is, when a vehicle spots a conflict with the mesh that isn’t a moving object - pedestrians, cyclists, human drivers - we get a ticket. Even for a temporary change to the map like roadworks. Or a new bike lane. Or a road collapsing from a mudslide. Or the asphalt warping from heat. The map needs to match the territory, and the damned territory keeps changing.
The second month was the worst; when I realised the job is babysitting a model that doesn’t realise it’s watching our brittle infrastructure crumble. Each notification, each new ticket, reminding me of what it’s like out there. What it’s like everywhere. The map doesn’t care though: the roads might in tattered ruins, just make sure they get folded into the map.
The mandatory chats on #therapy with the off the shelf bot didn’t help, what helped was the bonus points you get after your three month preliminary period. That and realising that if the weather stops, so does the work. All the bad news just washes over me now. I know it’s getting worse. I know the map is forever drifting away from the real world. I don’t care. I just care about grinding to the next level, getting my bonus points, and turning that into my pay. I’m fast too. I used to screenshot some of my best days and post it, but @admin doesn’t really like it when we’re not practising what we learnt from our sensitivity training. Eight minutes.
My notification centre lights up to match the vibrating hum, the way it does when there’s overlapping emergencies. Slowly at first, then all at once. There’s at least 13 tickets obnoxiously jittering down my screen; switching to map view shows that they’re all coming from one place. Jackpot. This’ll easily get me over the line. Weather overlay says that they’ve had centimetres of rain since the sun went down. I accept three tickets all clustered together, knowing that’ll 3X whatever score I would one by one. Road’s flooded. I’m guessing most of the other tickets are dealing with something similar.
The fidelity and detail of the map is incredible. Breathtaking. Same as the ability for these things to drive without a human. Rain though, rain is still somehow a problem. Too much water on the road and the car’s confidence levels drop sharply. It’s like it doesn’t have a model of a reflection, and somehow thinks there’s a whole world in there. The point cloud keeps getting washed away by the rain clouds.
I tag the aberration as a water reflection and help nudge the updated model into place from a mix of eight usable video feeds from three cars. I need to grab the timeline and pull it back a and forth a few times to map the potential spread of the water over time, generating a few different scenarios to how traffic flow might be affected over the next few days. Due to the ongoing rain I place a Dragon over the area, effectively blocking the area off to traffic. Someone else, somewhere else, is watching the reverberations of that map update unfold across their network of trucks that will now need to swarm on a different route.
Feeling charitable after my win, I unlock manual override on all three cars so they can get out of there if they want to drive themselves. They should be fine. My ticket combo, coupled with the extra points for speed, gives me the bonus multiplier I needed. The graph wiggles forward by a few pixels. Inappropriate fireworks light up my notification tab as I get a ‘Here Be Dragons’ badge for safely blocking the area on the map further which easily pushes my score into the new tier. 873 points. Two minutes to spare.
It’s either floods or droughts with this job.