Paper Dust in His Cuffs
I keep seeing the night shift.
I was not there. I built the place from reported pieces: the hydraulic cutter Anthropic used on purchased books, the industrial scanners, the bulk orders that booksellers suspect are headed toward AI labs. Then I gave myself steel-toed boots, an orange vest, and eight hours beneath white lights that never flicker because even the bulbs have been told to improve their performance.
A pallet waits beside the belt. The plastic comes off. Books underneath, hundreds of them, packed flat and tight. Some are new enough to shine. Others have cloth covers, cracked leather, library stamps, prices written in pencil by people probably dead now. I pick up the first one and look at the title.
The foreman taps the belt with a pen.
“Titles don’t matter.”
I put the book down. It moves toward a hydraulic blade.
The drop is neat. No bonfire, no cheering crowd, no police holding back the writers. The machine takes off the spine with a heavy sigh and leaves a squared stack of pages. A woman beside the cutter lifts the stack into an industrial scanner. Light passes over every page. The words go into a file. The paper goes toward the bins.
By eleven the floor is furred with dust.
On the clipboard the load is called clean data. The phrase has the smell of a hospital corridor, but all it means here is that the books were printed before the machines began filling the internet with sentences made from other sentences made from other sentences. The companies want human writing uncontaminated by their own exhaust. The dead, it turns out, have excellent quality control.
A middleman now offers AI buyers orders from a thousand books to a million. He used to help libraries, distributors, and shops find books. There is probably a lesson in that career change, but the belt keeps moving and the foreman does not pay me for lessons.
He pays me to separate covers from pages.
At midnight I find a note in one book. CALL FRANK ABOUT THE ROOF, it says. The ink has faded to brown. I hold it for a second, trying to decide whether Frank ever came, whether the roof held, whether the person who wrote the note sat under the leak with this book open on a rainy afternoon.
The foreman taps the belt again.
The note goes into the bin.
Some sellers believe these anonymous bulk orders lead to AI labs. The pattern points that way: random titles, every one with an ISBN, hundreds of books where twenty used to sell. The secrecy keeps certainty out of reach. One service promises buyers discretion because it understands what the trade looks like when described without perfume. Its own words are “the optics problem.” AI company destroys two million books, it says, is not a headline that generates sympathy.
The cutter comes down.
One bookseller has mixed feelings. I believe him. His old inventory moves. Money comes in. Rent does not accept cultural arguments, and nobody should demand that a small shopkeeper become the unpaid night watchman of civilization while richer men hide behind bulk orders. Still, he says uncommon books are being pulped. His stock includes rare and out-of-print volumes. He cannot know exactly where each one ends up. He only knows the orders arrived and the shelves began to empty.
At one in the morning I cut a foreign-language book I cannot read. Maybe five hundred copies remain. Maybe fifty thousand. Maybe another warehouse has a whole pallet of them. Rarity can turn a man into a priest very quickly, and plenty of old books are only old books. Most of what passes beneath the blade tonight is not the last copy on earth. The scan may even keep a text from vanishing. A file can survive a fire, cross an ocean in a second, sit in ten thousand machines without taking shelf space.
The foreman approves of this thought. It speeds my hands.
But in Anthropic’s real operation, the file was not going to the town library. A broke kid could not slip that copy under his coat, and a woman could not lend it to a friend who never returns anything. Nobody would find a grocery list inside or argue with the author in the margin. The scan went behind company doors to help train a machine on the habits of people whose names had fallen off the training record.
I have stolen books. Poorly, and without legal advice. When I was young and broke, I took them because I wanted the words and could not afford the paper holding them. This was a crime. The book remained a book. It moved from one shelf to another. I read it, stained it, lost it, found it, and sometimes passed it on. A thief can have successors.
Anthropic, in the operation that supplied the blade for this scene, was cleaner than I was. It had invoices.
First sale allowed Anthropic to dispose of the lawfully purchased paper copies. In that case, a federal judge separately ruled that converting those books into a digital library and using the lawfully acquired texts for training was fair use. One ruling is not a tablet brought down from the mountain, and it did not bless every book-acquisition trick in the business. It accepted these steps: buy the copy, cut it apart, scan the pages for the machine. Nobody stole that copy. The transaction stayed respectable all the way to the baler.
At two, the woman at the scanner asks if I want coffee. We stand beside the loading dock while the belt carries on without us. She says the blade is better than the old one. The old one jammed on thick bindings. This one goes through anything.
“What are they making?” she asks.
“Something that writes,” I say.
She looks through the little dock window at the pallets still waiting.
“Must write a lot.”
We finish the coffee.
By four my wrists hurt. By five I stop seeing books and begin seeing units, which is how every bad job eventually wins. Pick up. Square the edge. Hands clear. Blade down. Pages left. Cover right. The work becomes almost peaceful once the object loses its name.
At six the shift ends. Outside, the sky is gray and the first bus is breathing at the curb. I brush my shirt once. Paper dust lifts from the orange vest and hangs in the headlight. The bus doors fold open. I climb aboard. The driver never looks up.