She replied to the messages. She would try sometimes. Wru? or, What u want? The messages that followed any question were elusive. One night, as she was leaving to go to a meeting, she sent U Peggy? and then, straight after, U Greta? The next message was a K and she wondered if she hadn’t asked the question properly. Dell with u? she sent. Then there was a run of messages in quick succession:

Ask.

K fyn.

K.

K d.

A few days later it hummed, and the message read Sorry d v seriously forgot. She lost a day’s work trying to figure out what it meant. Around six at night she realised it meant nothing. She started another list – all the things that had just disappeared and two hours later, she looked up from the notebook and there was no order or balance – no way of making sense of it. She was being played with. Another message arrived, she wrote it down and it meant nothing.

Over the next couple of weeks, she picked up several new jobs. She wrote a small piece of code which sent an alert when a decent job came through the messageboard. She created a file of letters of interest using a Mad Libs system so she didn’t have to always be writing emails for jobs that would take a day and not pay enough to cover administration. She was working as a moderator on several new sites and also doing sales. Chatting with people who wanted to buy phones and subscriptions to porn. She was the ‘Want to talk to a salesperson?’ bubble that most people thought was a robot.