Page 71 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

It’s really breathtaking.

All social media platforms employ content moderators.

We’re the grunts in the front lines of battle, like the grad students somebody told me about, with sledgehammers at the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago with orders to go into the radioactive pile and break it apart before a reaction melted the Second City.

Their plight may be apocryphal. Ours isn’t.

Some platforms stash their content mods in boiler rooms, which might be located anywhere in the world. Many of these sites are in Manila and India. Those mods used to work in call centers throughout South Asia but grew tired of irate customers and insults about accents and they flocked to the moderating profession, hoping it would be a springboard to a good job in tech.

This never happens for the vast majority. Content modding is not a springboard to anything … except—for most—depression. After all, we don’t spend ten hours a day watching vids on how to make a sponge cake or snowboarding. We root out the bad stuff. I mean, thereallybad stuff—videos that can never be unseen and that sit, festering, in our heads forever.

I know of four mods who’ve committed suicide, another two dozen who’ve tried. Marriages have ended and livers grown distended from cirrhosis. ViewNow has a counseling department. Nobody uses it because there’s no time, not when a billion hours of video remain to be viewed.

Otherwise gentle people have turned violent after a few months at CM work.

As for me?

Of course, I have no problem whatsoever with the job.

I’m a born content moderator and always have been. Real life or a high-def monitor. Not a bit of difference to me.

I’ve never liked the verb “peeping,” much less using the word in the silly-sounding combination with “Tom.” According to the myth, or factual history (no one knows), Tom was a tailor who was the only person in Coventry to catch a glimpse of the naked Godiva riding through the city (to get her husband to lower rents on his tenants, a strange form of protest and one that sounds pretty far-fetched, to say the least). The scenario was somewhat skewed sinceshewas the one outside and Tom was peeping, if you can call it that, from the privacy of his tailor shop.

Tom was struck blind by God or fate or whoever, though there was no particular statute he’d broken, it seemed. As for today, the offense of peeping falls somewhere within the laws of trespass and invasion of privacy and if there’s a participle it’s usually “peeking,” not “peeping.” The laws have now been expanded to include spying by drone and hacking into webcams, as well as revenge porn and posting without permission.

I knew as a boy that what I did was wrong and creepy and embarrassing and, if I was on someone else’s property, a crime (you can stare and leer at someone, drooling and grinning madly to your heart’s content, if you do it from the sidewalk). But nothing would stop me. I had to get closer. I snuck up to houses in the pleasant suburban village where we lived and peered through windows. Hundreds of times. The problem with the offense is that if you’re close enough to see, you’re also close enough to be seen. The more my outrageous dangling from trees or hovering on trash cans became, the riskier were the ventures, and the police might be summoned.

Overburdened, as always, officers recognized I was weird but nota physical threat and tended to treat me as a nuisance. They left the matter of discipline and reeducation up to my father.

The self-described captain of industry was not a moral man so he was not concerned about the wrong of what his son did; it was the embarrassment and the bruising of his reputation that stung. Had his boy been a shoplifter, a pot dealer, a teen drunk, he might have been fine with those younger-days misbehaviors. But the creep factor, coupled with the fact that there was no significant police involvement and punishment meted out pushed him over the edge. He took the law into his own hands and jailed me himself. If he found out that I’d transgressed, it was solitary confinement in our house.

Not just house arrest, free to roam from room to room. Oh, no, I was locked into bedrooms, then pantries, then bathrooms, then closets—one in particular so reeking of naphtha and cedar, I’d get high. He’d leave a bucket for the personal functions.

It was on the second or third detention that I learned I could pick the locks and escape. They were mostly Home Depot hardware that could be opened with a knife blade or a straightened coat hanger. My bedroom had a rim lock—the sort with the traditional keyhole-shaped opening, the design dating back hundreds of years. This was more challenging but, well, I managed.

The first time took me an hour. The next five minutes.

I didn’t necessarily want to go anywhere but I needed to know I could.

Then the tipping point.

I had been caught at the house of a prominent lawyer. His sobbing daughter believed she had seen me gazing at her naked from outside the bathroom window. Her father sped to our house and, once inside, confronted me and my father. Denials streamed and I was tearfully upset—that I gotcaught, of course.

The lawyer paid little attention to me, as if I, being a merethirteen-year-old, were a virus unable to make choices about where to float and whom to infect.

The man’s fury was focused on my father.

“Your son’s a pervert,” the lawyer muttered, which was patently untrue. My obsession isn’t and never was about sex; I want to get inside people in a different way. In fact, it was the daughter Heather who pranced into the bathroom and disrobed, while I was observing a fight between the parents in an adjoining bedroom. I blamed her. But that was not an argument to raise in the moment.

The man then said he represented powerful unions. His clients had “associates,” a benign word sculpted ominously. Did my father get the drift? If I weren’t punished, his business would be “disrupted.” The tone of his voice suggested violence was a possibility.

My father turned to me, sitting beneath the two powerful men, though he spoke to the lawyer. “Don’t worry, there’ll be consequences.”

And, yes, there were.

38

Rhyme looked up at the man accompanying Sachs into the parlor.

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