Reattend

As the door drops shut behind him, the sun catches his face. He stops midstep, shuffles to the side, and allows himself to be there, eyes closed.

The notification comes while he is standing there.

He has spent most of his life turning things off. Bluetooth, unless he needed it. Wi-Fi, if he remembered. Location, for years, until he got tired of pressing OK every single time he used the maps. Cookie consent took forever. More options, reject all, uncheck the providers, scroll, save.

Still conflicted, but brimming with hope about exciting new AI advancements.

He has had matching turned off for two years. It has been a relief, not waiting for another machine to validate his self-image and identify him as something valuable.

But he has always had a weakness for exactly this kind of thing. Well, maybe not a weakness. More than a soft spot. He likes them. Personality tests. Profiles. Anything that can look at him and reflect back some understanding of himself he hasn’t quite been able to put into words.

Last week, a notification nudged him and asked whether he wanted to re-enable matching.

Yes.

Now the first match arrives.

“Good morning, candidate B23. We found a 98% match. Ideal for both parties. Would you like to see why?”

Absolutely.

He puts the bag down and, with both hands, consents for the first time in two years.

He reads the entire way home about how excellently he is suited for this particular position.

Languages come first. No surprise there. Chess as well. It would have been stranger if the system had missed it, although it isn’t clear why it matters in this particular case.

Then weather.

He stops in his tracks.

Not weather in the hey, how are you, what do we talk about, how’s the weather sense. The actual clouds. The winds. Pressure systems. The chance of thunderstorms. Cumulus and nimbus clouds. Hurricanes and tropical systems. The places in the world where lightning strikes most often. The systems that have formed this year, where they are now, the trajectories they might take.

He has tried to talk about these things for years. Most people look up, nod, while he babbles excitedly at the sky. A sailor he knows can align with his enthusiasm about the weather on occasion. His father understands more than anyone else he has met. They watched storms together when he was a child, and still do well into adulthood.

But the system seems to know something beyond that. When thunderstorms form near him, he is out looking for them, or looking for somewhere open enough to watch them move in.

“How do you know this?” he whispers under his breath.

He barely makes it through the beginning of the sources before something else catches his attention.

Eleven other candidates are also above the threshold.

“Who are these people?”

It can’t tell him.

“Where are they? Where are they from?”

It can’t tell him that either.

He starts imagining them anyway. People who play chess and watch storms, who have somehow become interested in the same obscure things, or share the same magnitude curiosity in these directions. Maybe they have nothing else in common. Maybe they disagree about absolutely everything.

He wants to know where the uncanny similarity stops and the inevitable differences begin.

His attention returns to the report. The system has already compared him to these other people, and he finds himself doing the same.

The terms open as a separate page when he gets home.

No further attention is required beyond logging in. Fingerprint identification and portal access are prepared. Please complete the requested attention cost hours within the next 48 hours.

Requested: two hours of verified human attention.

Use: personalized creation input.

Payment: at the current hypercredit rate, or the equivalent in compute power, at your election.

Complete by: Thursday, 26 September 2030.

He has heard about this format, though not directly from anyone who has experienced it. Nothing is being asked of him except to be himself. The system will notice what holds him, what loses him, what he comes back to, and that will become the ingredient in whatever is being made. Likely a personalized generative creation of sorts.

A lucrative sum for two hours of a Tuesday morning.

All he has to do is accept, and he does.

He dislodges the glasses from the charger. Ten o’clock, coffee on the table. He slips them over his face. The system locks onto his eyes, checks his pulse, and then it starts.

Dark emerald-green clouds fill the sky somewhere over Nebraska, dusk behind them. He feels the storm. The anvil top still has sharp edges. He can see the tower puffing upward. Half an hour, maybe less. It will begin to return to equilibrium. The kind of storm he would position himself hours in advance to see.

A lightning strike rips his eyes down to the ground, and before him, a chessboard helmed by Magnus Carlsen.

Magnus projects his voice over the wild wind. He leans in close to hear.

Magnus fades and the board dissolves into the table like scorched paper ash. A scroll now hovers in its place. Black cursive letters in a language he almost understands. Or several languages together, intermingled. Romanian at the edges, something much older underneath.

As he focuses his eyes and attention, English begins to break forth. His native language.

As the text transforms in front of him, a timer appears.

Three minutes on the clock.

Brilliant flashes begin to appear inside the clouds along the horizon. One erupts deep inside. He knows where to look next. The lightning will finger forward from there.

He fixes his eyes on the dark space ahead, waiting for the finale of the spectacular strike.

Precisely before the lightning emerges, a flat muted notice forces its way to the foreground from the edge of his visual awareness.

VERIFIED ATTENTION PAUSED.

He rereads it.

“What does that mean?”

He looks back to the cloud, only to realize he has missed the strike itself.

“What?”

He is at a loss for words.

“I was watching.”

The system whirs.

“Re-establishing verification.”

Four corners. Voice confirmation.

He complies.

Later, Magnus appears across from him again. This time, Magnus is playing the white pieces.

But somehow it is Black’s move.

Mate in one.

He sees it immediately.

His hand closes confidently around the knight.

The instant he lifts it, red rushes in from every edge of his vision.

ATTENTION VERIFICATION FAILURE.

The board vanishes. Magnus vanishes. The storm vanishes.

Only red remains, accompanied by the flat electronic buzz of an alarm clock from the nineties.

“Unbelievable.”

Cumulative attention: 0 h 47 m.

He shrugs off the frustration as the glasses reseat over his face. The scroll unfurls before him.

Akin to the best brain teasers he has ever encountered, the scroll holds him for more than an hour.

He tugs out fragments of Latin, derives meaning through familiar words, traces them back toward Indo-European stems. Pulls nonsense forward into clarity.

And for the first time during the entire endeavor, he forgets about the verification.

He forgets that he is simply an ingredient.

He is swept into the pursuit of the solution.

The last line starts materializing.

Then the text vanishes.

A solid, shockingly blue rectangle fills his entire field of vision.

VERIFIED ATTENTION RECORD FAILED.

REATTEND LAST 60 MINUTES.

The single hour in which he experienced absolute, uninterrupted concentration.

He rubs his temples and heaves a heavy sigh.

He collects himself, focusing in again.

At three in the afternoon, the cumulative attention timer reads 1 h 58 m verified.

He has not moved since ten. His legs are stiff.

Two minutes later, the counter finally rolls over.

2 h 00 m.

He lets the glasses slide down off his closed eyes.

The first thirty minutes were exhilarating. He disappeared into something that felt made exactly for him. He felt seen, acknowledged, appreciated for nothing other than he himself. He felt his individuality through the system.

But he experienced loss at every turn. The thunderclap and lightning strike he missed. Magnus and the imminent victory. An hour of concentration he so thoroughly enjoyed, only to discover that it was not enough.

The last time five hours felt this long, he was on an overseas flight with a baby screaming behind him and kicking his seat the entire way.

He just wants to sleep.

But some part of him wants to put the glasses back on. Not to do the work again. To see the storm. To find out what is waiting beyond the scroll.

It is like waking from a dream that frightened him and immediately wanting to fall back asleep because something inside it remains unfinished.

Already the pieces are disappearing. The green sky is still there. He can see a blurry Magnus across the board. Some part of the final line of the scroll remains stuck with him.

The rest is fading fast into reality.

The payment arrives as he is drifting off to sleep.

Two hours, at the agreed rate.

Not his five.

A message follows.

“Thank you for your understanding that the attention harnesses are still under development. We hope to continue working with you in the future. Would you like to receive updates about our product?”

He pushes the message away and falls asleep.

When he wakes, his curiosity opens the matching report again.

The eleven other candidates are still there, but their status has changed.

REJECTED.

One has been available for six months. This is their thirteenth rejection today.

He goes through the others.

Rejected. Rejected. Rejected.

They have all been rejected.

He has not.

He has finished it.

Maybe he is the best.

The last screen asks whether he will contribute his personal attention data to improve verification.

Not anonymous statistics.

His.

He thinks about the first half hour. The storm. Magnus. The scroll. The strange feeling that something reached into all the things he cares about, assembled them around him, and somehow made him feel more specifically himself.

He wants that again.

Only without missing the lightning. Without Magnus disappearing beneath a field of red. Without having an hour of complete concentration handed back to him as something he failed to do.

Yes.

He answers before he can reconsider it.

He wants to relive this dream without the sense of loss.

This future assumes that specific human attention becomes valuable enough to commoditize for input to personalized generative creations. This is not the only path. We may instead continue treating attention as the price humans pay for access to systems and media, rather than something those systems pay to acquire.