legends · 6 min read ·
Flagged
A content moderator flags a clip that shows her own bedroom, and the footsteps in the corridor outside match hers.
My job is deciding whether strangers get to keep their videos. I sit in a windowless room on the fourth floor of a building that used to be a bank. The vault door is still bolted open at the end of the corridor. For eight hours a day I watch clips that other people have reported. The queue gives me a thumbnail, a length, a category, and a line from whoever flagged it. Most lines say *gore* or *spam* or *this is my ex*. Some just say *please*.
I have one rule. I watch every clip to the end, because the worst thing is usually in the last few seconds. People think violence is loud. In my experience it is mostly quiet and happens while the camera is pointed somewhere else.
On a Tuesday in October the queue gave me a category I had never seen: *Unauthorized Location*. The flag note was empty.
The thumbnail was a bedroom. Gray carpet, a white dresser, a desk lamp with a paper shade. A window on the far wall, the blind halfway down.
It is my room.
I want to be exact about that. The dresser has a chip on its top left corner, shaped like a bird, which I covered with a sticker in my second week because it embarrassed me. The sticker was in the clip. Under the sticker, the bird. The lamp shade had torn in the same place mine had torn.
The clip was four minutes and eleven seconds. Camera at the height of someone sitting on the bed. For thirty seconds nothing moved. Then the blind lifted a few inches, and a bar of morning light lay across the carpet, and in the light the dust was turning very slowly, the way it does in a room that has been shut for days.
At two minutes and six seconds, a woman in a gray cardigan walked into the frame from the left. Her back was to the camera. She stood at the window and looked out, the way I do before work, to see whether the street is wet. She had her arms folded. I know that posture. I know the set of her shoulders when she's deciding not to go back to bed.
I stopped the clip and checked the metadata. Upload time: forty minutes ago. Source: no account. Device: none. Location: a single word the system uses when a clip cannot be geotagged.
*Interior.*
I should have sent it to my supervisor. That's the procedure. I didn't. I hit play.
At three minutes and forty seconds, the woman turned around. I saw her face. It was my face at seven in the morning before coffee, with the faint crease on the left cheek from the pillow.
She didn't smile. She lifted one hand and placed her palm against the lens, and the image went warm and close and then the clip cut to black.
Before the queue asked me for an action, I heard it. A sound from the corridor outside the review room: a door at the far end, the old vault door, moving on its hinges. Then footsteps. Slow, and very even, coming up the corridor toward my door, and each one landed a fraction after I'd heard a matching step inside my own head.
I did not get up. I tapped *Escalate* and sat with my hands flat on the desk.
The footsteps stopped outside. The handle of the review-room door turned down, then up, and held there, the way a person holds a handle when they are waiting for you to be ready to be seen.
I did not open the door. I looked at the monitor. The clip had reloaded itself. The woman in the gray cardigan was at the window again, but the blind was up all the way now, and the light outside was not morning light. It was the dull orange of a sodium streetlamp at four in the morning. It was the light in my street. She was looking out at it. Her arms were folded.
The handle went up and down again. Then the footsteps walked away, slower, down the corridor and back toward the vault.
· · ·
**Case note (filed by M. Okonedo, Moderation, 09:14)**
Flag reason: blank. Category: Unauthorized Location. Source: none. Recommended action: remove.
Reviewer note: the subject of the clip appears to be the reviewer. Reviewer advised to leave the queue. Reviewer declined and asked to continue.
**Case note (filed by supervisor, 09:40)**
Reviewer cannot explain how the clip was recorded. Reviewer states the room is her own, unchanged, and that the sticker on the dresser is intact.
Recommend: reviewer does not go home this evening. Reviewer says she will.
· · ·
I took the stairs down from the fourth floor because the lift was out, and I counted them without meaning to, the way you do when you're tired. Forty-eight steps to the street. Forty-eight is right.
On the ninth step from the bottom the stairwell light went out. The next lamp down, on the third floor, came on at once, and when I looked up, the stairs I had just come down were in the dark, and I could hear someone on them, counting my steps back to me a beat behind.
I did not stop. I walked out into the street with the sodium light on the wet pavement and the smell of the river, and I went home by the usual route, past the chip shop, past the bus shelter with the broken map, and I didn't look at the windows of the flats above the shops, because I knew which one would show me my own profile looking down.
My flat was where I left it. The dresser was there. The lamp, with its torn shade. The blind was down.
I sat on the bed with the lamp on and waited. Nothing happened for a long time. I looked at the sticker on the dresser, which had started to lift at one corner.
I peeled it back. The bird was there, chipped and small, the same as always.
Under the bird, in the clean grain of the wood, someone had written in soft pencil, pressing hard, the same word over and over, neat and small, filling the space down to the bottom of the drawer.
*Keep.*
I put the sticker back over it. I have not gone back to the review room. My supervisor says I'm on leave, and a new reviewer has the queue. The clips keep arriving. Last night's flag said only *please*, and the thumbnail was a window, and in the window someone was standing with their arms folded, watching the blind.