She was up the next morning before her Tamagotchi monster – the tiny screen of the phone was black with a Z rising stiltedly in grey. Her proper phone, the one she used for real, was lighting up. There’d been a data breach. Not at any of the companies she worked with directly – no one actually worked for any of the companies directly – but at one of the big social media companies which she might be working for in some of her covert jobs but was definitely working for in the moderation job. It sat in the background humming away most days. An all-staff email came from the senior management team of the contractors she supervised the moderation for. It was a firebreak. You may have read, it said. We can assure you.

She read the email with one eye shut. She went to the news site that had broken the story and read the article. Then there were messages from the moderators she supposedly supervised, asking what the email meant. There was one from the supervisor on the ground too. Everyone thought she would know something.

She put her phone down, got out of bed, kneeled beside it and prayed. It seemed to keep her away from a drink. She knew something was watching now – something was playing with all of them. It was vengeful, probably – human, maybe, or post-human. She didn’t know exactly how it worked, but she didn’t want to set any alarm bells off or draw attention to herself. She was biding her time, watching, trying to be unwatched. So, she kept doing what she’d done on the first day she was sober, and the second – she kept going. She picked up the battered notebook from her bedside table and turned to sit on the floor, her back resting on the bed. She had to write in small printing and some pages were written over and over, illegible, but it felt best to keep it this way – analogue. She was using a spreadsheet for the messages, but the messages weren’t anything anyone couldn’t find by looking at the phone. She was the one noticing the things that turned up and disappeared and she wasn’t ready to put that information anywhere it could be found. She started every day writing in the notebook. It got her head right. Some days she wrote Nothing, but these days were fewer and further apart. She was already worried about how much work she had to do today. Worried that somehow she would be implicated in the data breach. She had a rule that she never took on a job that she didn’t honestly think was ‘right’. There was a sliding scale of what was right. Depending on how close rent was. She was reading the article now but still thinking about the day ahead. Data breach, she wrote in her tiniest writing in the notebook.