She built a tool for Mechanical Turk, an algorithm that searched for certain words and certain rates of pay. Some weeks, she slept near her computer and set the alert so it woke her up when a job came through that looked like it would fit one of the small programmes she’d written for other jobs. She’d written a programme that could sort images based on colour planes and a programme that could find words and take actions based on those words. She’d even built one that could listen to audiobooks and use voice recognition to create documents that were automatically grammar-checked. There were better jobs, but she kept doing it. Everything about Mechanical Turk was unfair, and she liked the idea that her cheats fucked with it a bit. She shared them all online and more and more people were using them to try and scrape out some kind of existence from the app.

There was quite a bit of computer security work available and it paid much more than putting images into folders or data de-duplicating. It was a word-of-mouth thing, and because it was commercially sensitive she never got any real credit for her work. She was generally called in when there was a problem – and then only quietly. Someone would call someone, and they would message her, and she would try to fix it from home. But every now and then they’d want to meet her face to face. A few times she’d asked Heidi to go. Heidi was managing online sales for a medical device company, so she was often out of the office legitimately at meetings. No one asked when she put Margaret’s meetings in her diary. Margaret had to brief her quite carefully, but Heidi was a lot happier around people. She would say she was Margaret, or whatever Margaret had said her name was on that occasion, and she’d take the meeting and sometimes, because she felt that Margaret should really be able to handle all this by herself, she’d agree to things that were very difficult for Margaret. Nothing so far had been impossible. Margaret was always smarter than anyone realised. ‘Smarter than you give yourself credit for,’ Heidi would say. She was in the shadows and never able to shine. ‘Which might be the smartest thing I do,’ Margaret would say.

They heard Heidi talking to Alexa in the kitchen as she checked on the bread in the oven.

‘Alexa, set timer.’

‘All right. For how long?’

‘Five minutes.’

‘Sorry. I don’t know how to help with that yet.’

‘Alexa.’

‘I’m still learning.’

‘Fuck.’

Heidi came back into the lounge looking at her phone. They all looked up from their phones, even Ash, and laughed together.

‘Seamless,’ Heidi said. They laughed some more – Heidi and her family.