It was grainy, shot from a dashcam. A man in a grey hoodie stood at a deserted intersection. He wasn't moving. He just stared into the camera—directly into it, as if he knew Leo was watching. The caption read: “They won’t let me leave. Press REMARK if you can hear me.”
Leo almost yawned. Another paranoid schizophrenic. He moved his cursor to —the standard bin for lonely delusions.
Leo’s cursor hovered over the button. But this time, he wasn't moderating content.
He tried to call his supervisor. Voicemail.
But now, every third video was different. A reflection in a window. A split-second face in a crowd. A license plate that spelled LEO . And the man in the grey hoodie—always there, always watching, always holding a new whiteboard.
Leo’s hands shook as he opened his mod logs. There it was. His own digital fingerprint. He had marked the man as benign. boring. not worth saving.
Leo’s finger hovered. He glanced at the protocol manual taped to his monitor: Do not engage. Do not interpret. Classify and move.