Rule I keep, even now doing freelance subs at home: once you've typed a caption, you don't read it back. You check the timestamp, check the audio's roughly lined up, and you move on. I don't explain it to anyone who asks. I just say it's a habit from a bad contract, and mostly people let it go.
THREE WEEKS AGO
The file was called BRG_ARCHIVE_0447.mp4, forty minutes of some regional current-affairs thing from the eighties, badly telecined, audio drifting out of sync by the second reel. My job was just to clean the auto-generated captions so they'd match. Boring work, paid by the minute. I do twelve or fifteen files most weeks, more if Priya's overloaded and passes me the overflow.
Correction: Priya wasn't the one who sent this one. It was a name I didn't recognise, someone covering for her, R. Voss, no reply-to on the email. I only remember that because I tried to ask about line 4,412 and the address bounced.
Line 4,412 wasn't dialogue. The auto-transcription had picked up something in a shot of a noticeboard, background text the software tried to render as subtitle because it thought it was speech. Six lines of a symbol repeated, not letters, more like a shape that folded into itself, the kind of thing you'd get if you asked someone to draw a knot from memory. I fixed the timestamp around it and left the shape alone, because touching OCR garbage isn't my job. I typed it in without reading it properly. That's the rule. I've had it a long time and I didn't break it that day. I don't think I did.
That night I dreamed about a corridor with a door at the end that had my flat number on it, except the number was wrong by one digit, and I stood there working out which digit for what felt like hours.
NOW
The agency's asked me to redo the file. Apparently the client rejected the delivery, said the captions cut out at 31:02 and never resume, even though I remember finishing all forty minutes. I open the project and there's line 4,412 again, same shape, sitting in the timeline where I left it.
Except this time the cursor's already blinking inside it. I didn't click there.
I go to delete the line and stop myself, because deleting means selecting it, and selecting it means my eyes go over every character while I check I've got the whole string. My hand stays on the mouse without moving. The radiator ticks. Somewhere below, a bus stops and doesn't take on anyone. I remember thinking, absurdly, about my sister's dog, who used to sit exactly like that at the top of the stairs when something in the house had changed and she couldn't say what.
I copy the line instead, paste it into a blank document without looking at the preview pane, and rename the file so I won't recognise it later. Small win. I close the project and tell the agency the source video's corrupted, which isn't a lie, exactly.
R. Voss never answered my second email either. I looked up the noticeboard from the shot. An actual council building in a town I'd never been to, torn down in '91, or '92, I've seen both dates and never bothered to check which. I don't know why that detail's the one that got to me more than the shape did.
I still have the blank document. I haven't opened it since. It's sitting in a folder called OLD, three keystrokes from the desktop, and some nights I get as far as double-clicking OLD before I stop. My finger just rests there on the trackpad.
The cursor in line 4,412 was still blinking when I closed the project. I checked, once, through the gap between my fingers, the way you'd check a stove was off.
It was.