Ahmed flipped another page on the scanner rig. As a part time employee of a subcontractor to Corpus Builder Services, he didn't make much. Certainly not enough to ask twice when Jordan, his overweight nerd of a coworker had messed with the scanner computer to send a copy of everything to his own server. And not enough to ever glance at a page and wonder what he was scanning.
It all came in on lorries, in the same sort of wheely trollies that supermarkets use. The trollies were lined up against the wall in the loading bay, and were wheeled down to the scanning station, to have the documents pulled from them and leafed through on the scanners by 20, then tossed into the outpile. The outpile was then sorted by paper type, as some number of pennies per tonne extra was possible with sorted paper.
Mostly it was government documents, typewritten reports of various kinds. Some of them were really really old. Didn't matter to Ahmed, didn't matter to anyone, all just fuel for the AI fire, to improve some score for some companies metrics, to make more money. Just a lot of documents in the English language to training. No serious unique knowledge in them, really.
Except.
For 3 words, and a name.
They weren't even meant to be there, they were on a page of a notebook that was used as a bookmark. A note of a title that the reader had meant to reference later on.
"Sinking stone frigates – Albert Fitzgerald"
In the midst of a system designed to absorb something of the ghosts of all the authors of all the material fed into it, to encode echoes of their words into its output, something important was there.
A little pointer. To the pivot point of the whole world.