The Cleanup Pass
Oliver Vance deletes people for thirty-one cents a time.
Nine hours a night, alone in an apartment he has not left since January, he works through nineteen-year-old photographs of American streets and takes the faces out of them. It is honest work. The machine that is learning to drive does not need to know what anybody looked like.
Then the assigner deals him a town in Oregon with eleven hundred people in it and nobody in a single frame.
There is something standing in that town. It is five feet ten inches tall, its face does not resolve, and it is always on a seam — the few pixels where two exposures meet, where no lens ever recorded anything, where the software is not reporting what was there but deciding.
On the boundary there is no source. There are two, which is the same as none. It is the only part of the picture that was never photographed.
Oliver is very good at looking. He builds a method, and keeps a notebook, and runs controls, because a number without a control is a feeling.
The method works.
That is the problem.
Know when it's out
Quiet, procedural horror. Nothing jumps out at anybody. If you want incident, this isn't it — and if that sounds right, leave an address.
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An archive of nineteen million photographs, and the people paid thirty-one cents a time to take things out of it. Each book follows a different one of them. Each stands alone.
Ben Hardin writes quiet horror about work — about the parts of a record nobody looks at, and the people paid by the line to look at them anyway.
The Cleanup Pass is his first novel.