Moderation

Girlie, a 30-something Filipinx-American, works a day job at a social-media moderation centre, flagging and removing the very worst that makes it on to the internet. She’s good at it, too – dispassionate, unflinching, maybe because she learned by necessity to cauterise all her emotions when she was still a kid – so it’s no surprise to anyone when the social-media company for which she works offers her a big pay rise and an office to start moderating its new venture: virtual-reality theme parks, stunning simulations of civilizations long-since dead. Girlie takes the job, and it almost seems too good to be true. Almost. But she notices two deeply troubling things: that there might be something much darker built into the very code of the company, and that William, technically her new boss, a man whose barriers are as mighty as her own, might just be that long-forgotten thing – Girlie’s type.