Another contractor working for the political consulting firm wrote a week later pitching her the same job in different words. She didn’t have much going on – she had a lot going on but it was all boring her. It had got her attention the first time and now, with the contractor’s new way of explaining the job, she felt like she could justify it – to other people probably, and to herself absolutely – because the rent was due and she had been thinking about it for a week and she’d almost worked out an elegant and canny way of executing it.

She stayed on the floor and read a couple more articles. It was definitely the programme she’d written. The silly game with the spiders that ran all over you and your friends, grabbing copies of everything and bringing them home, leaving you with a definitive answer to the question, which Hogwarts house do I belong to? Or, which cocktail am I? Or, what is the date of my death? The whistle-blower was a guy she’d heard of. None of them had met one another – they all worked on their separate parts, separately, all of them contracted by different companies. He had positioned himself. Had some photos taken to go with the article. She spread her fingers to zoom in – he’d had his hair done. She could understand it, how he was trying to emphasise the sacrifice he was making, but no one ever did anything unless it benefited them. Her included.

The job was wrong. She shouldn’t have taken the job. She knew it the minute she read the first message. She knew it even more surely when she read the second message. She hadn’t needed money to pay the rent – she already had money. What she wanted was the challenge of it, was what she told herself, but she realised as soon as she accepted it that what she liked was the destructive capability of it. That it had the potential to corrupt everything in a way that might undermine the game. That it might contaminate the experiment she felt like she was living in. It was like the people in the rollercoaster park, but it was real people who could be made to line up and ride. It was a way of taking control of the players. The world was on fire with this sort of thing, and she’d been in its path for years. She’d said no for years without any fanfare and as a way of not drawing attention to herself, then she’d said yes to this, and by saying it she was shouting at the fire, from inside the fire, making more fire: ‘Here I am.’ And she rested the notebook on her thigh and wrote, as the media storm raged and the messages kept arriving, I’m seen, and immediately wished she was invisible again.