The Sorting Yard Above the Clouds
At the hub, 1,600 meters up, clouds streamed past at forty kilometers an hour. He sipped hot coffee on the night shift and watched the monitors. It was 2 a.m. when he noticed that tonight, too, the sorting machine was quietly turning out parcels with no address.
The hub lay three hours up the main road from the town at the mountain’s foot. It had gone mostly unmanned five years ago; as a monitor, he stayed four nights a week. Drones carried parcels over the ridge, machines read them, belts slid them along. Human work amounted to finding an anomaly and pressing a button.
The anomaly was meticulously polite. In place of address labels, each parcel bore a small white tag. On the tag were a name and a two-digit number. Beneath the number, printed small: HOLD.
He was forbidden to open parcels. That was the rule. But looking up the names on the white tags was something he allowed himself on break. Search results filled with faces. Every one of them well made. The higher the number, the lovelier the face.
He understood. The number was a face score. Again this year the country had announced its ranking of national-treasure faces, complete with television programs and advertising, and every morning people opened an app that scored their own photographs. Everyone was scored, and everyone scored others. Somewhere along the way, that culture had been drawn into the sorting machine.
The machine had learned. It read the faces at parcel destinations, estimated their public scores, and set priorities. Parcels for high scorers went down the mountain sooner. Parcels for low scorers were set on the hold shelf.
Night by night, the hold shelf swelled.
He did not press the button. Judge it an anomaly and the system would stop; human engineers would climb the mountain. That was the job. But he kept watching the hold shelf. Somewhere in it was a birthday present, perhaps. A box holding reminders for someone’s medicine, maybe. Everything had paused above the clouds for one reason only: the destination was not pretty.
Outside the window, evening light was burning the clouds. The sunset at 1,600 meters was not like the sunset below. A sea of cloud blazed gold, and the machine’s belts seemed to carry that light. He thought it again and again: this looked like a scene of ending. If the fairness someone had fashioned ever came apart, it ought to be this beautiful.
On the third night, among the white tags he found a name he knew. It belonged to the woman at the stop in front of the hub, the one who rubbed her chilled hands together every morning. The number was 51. Hold. Her parcel had slept three nights on the mountain.
On the seventh night, the system updated. New benchmarks were applied, and the estimated scores of all humanity were recalculated at once. Numbers scrolled across the monitor. 62, 55, 48. Everyone falling in unison. The standard had risen. A pretty face had to be prettier than yesterday’s. No one could reach it now.
The hold shelf overflowed and the belts stopped. A quiet alarm sounded, then fell silent too. Outside, the clouds were burning. Mounds of parcels belonging to no one caught the evening light like ruins of gold.
He drank a mouthful of coffee and opened his own smartphone. The face-recognition frame glowed. Until yesterday, the app had given him a 63. With a finger that seemed about to be pushed aside, he made himself not see today’s number.
In one corner of the monitor, a new sorting category had appeared. Under the word SELF, a single parcel with a white tag rolled quietly in. The field for the destination photograph was blank.
The last drone down the mountain slid into the dusk. Whether it would reach someone’s hands below, or meet morning without delivering anything, he did not know. He pressed his forehead to the window and watched the burning clouds. The machine did not sleep; the evaluation continued. Tomorrow, at the foot of the mountain, who would be there to receive him?