You clock in at 7:58 AM. Two minutes early, like always. You find your station—desk 14, third row, positioned so your screen faces the wall. Company policy. So coworkers can’t accidentally see what you’re seeing.

The queue loads. Two hundred and forty-seven items. You’ll finish maybe one-eighty before lunch if you’re fast. Speed matters. The quota matters. Four seconds per item, decision rendered, next. Keep the internet clean. Keep the platform safe. Keep moving.

You adjust your headphones—the foam is disintegrating, cheap company-issue equipment—and open the first ticket.

Standard nudity. Delete. Four seconds.

Hate speech, slurs, easy call. Delete. Four seconds.

The third one takes longer. A video. You watch a man’s hand reach for something off-screen and your finger hovers over the mouse, waiting for context. The hand comes back holding a knife. You watch for three more seconds to be sure, to make the right call according to the guidelines in your training manual that’s three hundred pages long and tells you exactly what constitutes imminent harm versus artistic expression versus dark humor versus—

Delete. Eight seconds. You’re already behind.

The fourth one is a child.

You don’t let yourself think about it. Eyes, assess, decision. Your hand is steady. This is why you’re still here after eleven months when most people quit after three. You’ve learned the trick: don’t let it reach you. Don’t let it become real. It’s pixels. It’s data. It’s a thing to be categorized and removed and then it stops existing because you made it stop existing.

Delete. Escalate to law enforcement. Six seconds.

Your mouth tastes like like you forgot to brush your teeth.

By 9:30 you’ve cleared ninety-three items. You’re in the zone now, that flow state where your conscious mind disconnects and your hands do the work and time stops meaning anything. This is when you’re most productive. This is when you stop being a person and become a filter, a human algorithm, a necessary barrier between the sickness and everyone else’s feeds.

Delete. Delete. Escalate. Delete. Review. Delete.

Someone’s eating lunch at their desk two rows over. The smell of microwaved fish reaches you and your stomach lurches. You swallow it down and keep going.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

The images are coming faster now, or maybe you’re just processing them faster, hard to tell. A body in a bathtub. A dog, muzzle dark. Two people in a living room doing something that would be normal except for the age of one of them. A beheading video from a conflict zone you can’t quite place. Someone’s suicide note, typed out with perfect grammar, attached to three photos you have to verify before you can—



Lunch is forty-five minutes and you spend it in your car with the windows up even though it’s eighty degrees outside. You need the separation. You need the quiet. You eat a protein bar without tasting it and try not to think about anything at all.

Your phone buzzes. Your girlfriend asking if you’re okay, you’ve been distant lately, is everything all right?

You don’t know how to explain that everything is fine and also you can’t close your eyes without seeing things that didn’t happen to you but happened to someone, somewhere, and someone filmed it and uploaded it and now it lives in your head. Forever.

You text back: “Just tired. Love you.”

She sends a heart emoji. The sight of it makes something twist in your chest. Innocuous little heart. She has no idea what you spend your days deleting so she never has to see it. None of them do. The internet is clean because you make it clean. You’re a hero, technically. The company said so during onboarding.

You check the time. Thirty-two minutes left.

You close your eyes and see the child from ticket four. Eyes open. Eyes open is better. Eyes open you only see the interior of your car, the steering wheel, your hands on your lap.



The afternoon queue is worse. They always put the worst stuff in the afternoon queue because by then you’re numb enough to handle it. Management knows this. They optimize everything.

You open ticket one-ninety-four and it’s someone’s home video, a birthday party, a cake, and then the camera pans and you see what’s happening in the corner of the frame and your hand moves before your brain fully processes and you’ve already deleted it but it’s too late because you saw it and now you’ll always have seen it.

Four seconds.

Your coworker three desks over stands up abruptly and walks to the bathroom. You hear retching through the thin walls. They’ll be back in ten minutes. They always come back. The alternative is quitting and you need this job and so do they and the internet needs to be moderated so this is what you do. This is what someone has to do.

You keep going.

Delete. Delete. Delete. Escalate. Delete.

Ticket two-twelve is a livestream that someone flagged mid-broadcast. You have to watch enough to determine if it’s real or staged. The algorithm can’t tell the difference yet. You can. Usually. You think you can. You’re trained for this.

You watch a man plead into the camera. Behind him, someone is crying. You watch for fifteen seconds. Twenty. The guideline says you can take up to sixty seconds for complex cases.

You watch for thirty seconds and make the call.

Escalate. Delete. Take down the account. Flag the IP.

Your heart is hammering. You realize you’ve been biting your lip.

By 4:47 PM you’ve cleared two hundred and thirty-one items. Sixteen to go. You can finish. You always finish.

Your eyes hurt. There’s a pressure behind them like they’re being pushed forward from inside your skull. You blink and for just a moment you see an afterimage of something from earlier, can’t remember which ticket, doesn’t matter, it’s gone now.

You blink again and it’s still there.

Just an afterimage. Just your brain playing tricks. Your therapist—the company-provided therapist, forty-five minutes every other week, mandatory—says this is normal. Intrusive images are a normal response to the work. Your brain is trying to process what it’s seen. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean you’re broken.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

Ticket two-forty-three is a still image. A room. You examine it carefully, looking for policy violations. The room looks familiar. It takes you a moment to realize why.

It’s your car. Your steering wheel. Your dashboard.

That’s not possible.

You refresh the ticket. Same image. The timestamp says it was uploaded forty-five minutes ago. The metadata says it was taken from inside a vehicle. Your vehicle. You can see the parking sticker on your windshield.

You can see yourself in the driver’s seat, eyes closed, hands in your lap.

Someone took a photo of you during lunch and uploaded it and now it’s in your queue and you have to decide if it violates any policies and you have to make this decision in four seconds like every other decision and—

You delete it.

You mark it Spam.

You clear the Ticket.

You're ok.

At 5:02 PM you clock out. You walk to your car. The parking lot looks exactly like it did at lunch. You get in. You check your mirrors.

You sit with your hands on the steering wheel and try to remember if you closed your eyes during lunch or if you kept them open. You try to remember if the photo was real or if you imagined it. You try to remember which tickets were real and which ones were—

You start the car.

You drive home.

At a red light, you glance at the car next to yours. A woman is driving. She’s looking at her phone. In the back seat, you can see something small and—

No. Just a car seat. Empty car seat. Normal car seat.

You look away.

The light turns green.

You keep driving.

Your girlfriend is home when you arrive. She smiles and asks about your day and you say it was      , and she kisses you and you realize she smells your breathe.

She asks if you want dinner.

You say yes.

She turns toward the kitchen and for just a moment, just a flicker, you see something else. Someone else. Something from a ticket, you can’t remember which one, it doesn’t matter, it’s not real, it’s just your brain misfiring, it’s just the afterimages, it’s just—

She turns back and she’s herself again and she’s asking if pasta is okay and you say yes.

You say yes to everything.