‘A bit much exactly like working at the call centre,’ Donna had said, and everyone laughed. Greta and Peggy laughed, too. Being separated during the day was probably the worst thing about their pretty good life. They were hoping that, if they got good enough, or if the script worked out, they could start some kind of small business and just work from home. There were more and more jobs they could do online. Moderating was just the start. That’s what they thought. It was completely anonymous. The companies didn’t want to know who they were or how many of them were working under one username. They just wanted to make sure the job was done. They were being paid straight into a PayPal account. They could use PayPal on eBay and get most of the things they needed shipped to an address in America that would ship them to their doorstep. Everyone used Trade Me, but they couldn’t use PayPal on Trade Me. It was complicated, but the point was no one needed to know about the money they earned online. They were writing code as well. That paid much better but was harder to come by and when you came across it you couldn’t ask too many questions. There were white-hat hacking jobs. Niall talked about it a lot. So, Greta and Peggy were teaching themselves how to break in to things, too. Nothing large, because that was the quickest way to get caught, just small things, popping in, having a look, putting things back the way they found them. The problem – and Niall said this was the problem too – was that as they got better and better the idea of doing computer security seemed less and less appealing. It seemed like inserting a middleman between them and the wide-open door into the place where the money was.

They didn’t want to work for anyone else. That was what they hoped for. They wanted to work together and not have to be apart. Being apart was like an irritation.