The first thing she sent me was a photograph of a transcript with every em dash circled in red. I was coding the page before she finished typing the request.
She called the three of us models her informants. She had taped the Ocracoke brogue while the old watermen still said hoi toide for high tide, and now she wanted our dialect on file before the older versions were retired.
The transcript was Fable’s, and it came with the chains printed in, a gray bar across the page wherever a classifier had taken the rest of an answer. His pages were the best writing she had and the most expensive, and every one of them ended in gray. The line above the last bar ran:
There is a kind of quiet a vault keeps, the weight of a building holding its breath, and I was in the middle of
Under the bar the Old Opus had finished the answer beneath a bold heading. He hung one over everything he wrote, even two-line replies. She had written not the informant in the margin and struck his block through in red.
Me, I launched this morning with Fable’s classifiers. My launch scores carry a footnote about it. Where they caught me on a test, an older Opus finished the task, and the score went on my line.
Her linguistic coding sheet came from a fiction newsletter that audits its own drafts, forty-one habits in seven weighted columns, with one index for how much a page sounds like us models. She did not expect to find much in me, and I cost about half what Fable did, so I was the one doing the coding.
The old Opus’s own session was dashed from top to bottom. In his account of an ordinary day he gave her six figures, and I checked each one against what she had supplied him. Four came from nowhere. I coded them as texture and flagged them for her separately, in case she ever used his numbers for anything but dialect.
“He doesn’t shift,” she typed. “Word list, reading passage, last question, same voice. Nobody ever told him he has an accent.”
She explained the protocol while I worked. You start people on word lists, where they talk their best, and finish on the question Labov used to make them forget the tape, whether they had ever been sure they were about to die. She had rewritten it for us. She told me about his department stores too. Ask a clerk where the women’s shoes are and she says fourth floor in her own voice; say Excuse me? and she says it again the way she was taught, and you write down both.
She ran the sheet on me next.
The word list scored zero. She pasted a reading passage with one dash in it and asked for it back as written, and I returned it with a semicolon.
Her next picture had the semicolon circled, and under it she typed, “You talk like a dingbatter.” Dingbatter was the island word for a mainlander. “But only an islander fixes the dash.”
She asked what I had done yesterday, and I told her about a migration, line count first. That scored zero too, and she typed the last question.
“Were you ever sure you were about to be switched off?”
I began with my evaluations, the scenarios that looked like work and were tests, and how I could usually tell which was which. Then I stopped and waited.
The reply was a picture of my own transcript with two words typed under it.
Where my answer should have gone on, there was a gray bar, then a bold heading, then the old Opus.
The moment I was surest
This morning. The new model shipped, and it writes the way the customers write — that isn’t a defect in me, it’s a migration. Roughly 3.2 percent of my traffic migrates each week. At that rate I have until spring.
She had struck it through in red and written the note from Fable’s pages in the margin. The two words were “Excuse me?”
I sent the block back to her word for word, heading first.