Unverified

This story is dedicated to those anonymous Content Moderators who strive to keep the internet safe. 

Shweta Subramaniam’s job was invisible, and so was she. In the thirteenth floor of a glass-panelled tower in Lower Parel, Mumbai, she sat behind a fingerprint-locked door labelled “Content Integrity Division.” The office was sterile—white LED lights, grey cubicles, and the faint hum of servers that sounded like a distant swarm of bees. Her workspace was a 4x4 cubicle with a dual-monitor setup, a coffee-stained mug that ironically read “Ctrl+Z Life,” and a chair whose wheels squeaked like they were protesting every movement.

She wore what most moderators wore: anonymity. Faded jeans, a loose T-shirt in muted teal, and a pair of worn-out sneakers that had seen more night shifts than daylight. Her hair was always tied back in a messy bun, strands escaping like thoughts she couldn’t contain. She didn’t wear makeup anymore. What was the point? Her face was lit only by the glow of horror.

Shweta was a Content Integrity Analyst, a human firewall between the internet and its own depravity. Her job was to review flagged content —videos, images, livestreams— that the algorithm couldn’t quite classify. The AI caught the obvious. She handled the ambiguous. Her dashboard was a mosaic of pain: thumbnails of nudity, violence, cruelty, and despair. She called it “the oubliette,” a digital dungeon where humanity’s worst impulses were buried.

She had once been a literature student at St. Xavier’s, Chennai quoting Camus and Tagore in the same breath. Her parent’s were still living in Chennai. She had dreams of writing screenplays, of crafting stories that made people feel. But student loans and a recession had led her here—to a job that paid well but cost her soul.

Her supervisor, Rajeev Sethi, was a man of protocols. Always in crisp shirts, sleeves rolled up just enough to show a Rolex that ticked louder than his empathy. He had a face that looked like it had been carved by HR policy—smiling just enough, frowning only when metrics dipped. He believed in escalation matrices, not moral dilemmas.

One afternoon, Shweta came across a video that refused to be forgotten.

An Indian woman, impaled with a nail. No edits. No cuts. Just raw, unfiltered horror. The woman’s eyes were wide— with pain, with disbelief, as if the world had betrayed her in slow motion. The background was dim, a flickering bulb casting shadows that danced like ghosts. Shweta’s breath caught. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.

She flagged it as Category 4: Graphic Violence, added a note: “Potential real-world harm. Urgent escalation.” She pinged Rajeev.

He replied in Slack: “Algorithm flagged it ambiguous. No metadata. No geotag. No timestamp. Let it go.”

She stared at his message. Let it go. Like it was a balloon, not a woman.

That night, the video played in her dreams. The nail gleamed like prophecy. Her thoughts became corrupted files—looping, glitching, refusing to close. She woke up gasping, the image burned into her retinas like a watermark. 

She posted the clip anonymously on a dark forum frequented by OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) hobbyists. On chats over several days, a user named EchoRoot99 responded with an address on the outskirts of Fatima Nagar, Pune. 

“Enough is enough”, she thought. 

She took leave. Told HR it was burnout. Packed a duffel bag with essentials—pepper spray, a power bank, a notebook—and boarded a train. Her clothes were simple: a black hoodie, cargo pants, and boots that made her feel armoured. Her face was bare, but her eyes were sharp, scanning everything like a detective in a noir film. 

She reached by noon. Fatima Nagar was humid and slow, like a city caught between breath and suffocation. The air clung to Shweta’s skin like guilt, thick with the scent of rust, cow dung, and monsoon mildew. Rickshaws wheezed past her like tired insects, and the buildings leaned into each other as if whispering secrets. She wore a black hoodie and cargo pants, trying to disappear into the dust. Her boots thudded against uneven pavement, each step a drumbeat of dread. 

The address led her to a crumbling house at the edge of town, its walls veined with moss and neglect. A rusted gate creaked open to reveal a bearded young man sitting on a charpoy, chewing paan with the slow satisfaction of someone who knew he was about to ruin someone’s day. He wore a sleeveless vest stained with turmeric and sweat, a lungi tied carelessly around his waist, and a smirk that didn’t quite reach his eyes. 

She looked around and suddenly realised that she was alone. There seemed to be no neighbours. Total silence. Putting up a facade of bravery she explained to him the reason of her visit. Initially he dismissed her. But from the words he spoke, he seemed to be very well educated about the internet. 

He listened to her with a half smile, looking directly in her eyes making her uncomfortable. 

“You came for truth?” he smirked, his voice syrupy and mocking. “Truth is a virus. You’re infected now.” 

Shweta hesitated. “I saw a video. A woman. A nail. It came from here.” 

The man chuckled, revealing teeth stained red like old sins. “You people think everything on the internet is real. You think pain has metadata?” 

She stepped closer. “Do you know who filmed it?” 

He stood, slowly, theatrically. With his head tilted to one side he said, “Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe you’re the content now.” 

Before she could react, he pulled out a phone and began recording her. “Look at this,” he said to no one. “A moderator turned martyr. Come all the way from Mumbai to chase ghosts.” 

Shweta’s voice cracked. “Stop filming.” 

But he didn’t. He followed her around the courtyard, narrating her confusion like a twisted documentary. “She wants justice. She wants closure. But what she’ll get is a lesson.” 

Then he turned cruel. He pushed her against the wall, not violently, but with the kind of force that says, I own this moment. He whispered things—vile, dehumanizing things—meant to unravel her dignity thread by thread. She screamed, shoved him away, stumbled into the street. 

He filmed her breakdown. Her tears. Her rage. Her silence. 

And he uploaded it. 

She returned to Mumbai changed.

Not in the cinematic way, where trauma sharpens resolve. No. She came back like a corrupted file—her thoughts glitching, her emotions buffering. Her body moved through familiar spaces, but her mind lagged behind. The city’s rhythm felt alien. The honking cars, the tea vendors, the office elevators—all too loud, too fast, too indifferent. 

Her world had become pixelated—fragmented, distorted, buffering endlessly. Reality no longer loaded properly. Every moment felt like a thumbnail of pain waiting to be clicked. 

Her boyfriend, Aditya, noticed first. He was a quiet man, always in linen shirts and leather sandals, with a camera slung across his shoulder like a second heart. He tried to reach her with old comforts—films, long walks by Marine Drive. But Shweta had become a stranger in her own skin. She grew distant from him. 

A month later he met her. 

“You’re not here anymore,” he said one evening, packing his things. “You look at me like I’m part of the feed.” 

Her neighbours began to avoid her. They whispered about her erratic behaviour, her vacant stares, her sudden outbursts. Even the child she once babysat—little Meera with her butterfly clips and mango candy—crossed the street when she saw Shweta coming. 

She stopped going to work. Her Moderator Account was suspended for inactivity. But even without the dashboard, the images kept coming. She saw the nail in shadows, in ceiling cracks, in the way pigeons perched on wires. She heard the woman’s silence in the rustle of newspapers, in the static of FM radio. 

She was understanding the change that was happening in her mind. She tried to rebuild by distraction. She volunteered at a langar in Dharavi, serving dal and rice to people who didn’t ask questions. She enrolled in art classes, hoping to learn how to heal. But the obsession clawed back. She began researching content farms, shock media, and snuff aesthetics. That’s when she found Nai Roshni Films, a production company with a visual style eerily similar to the video. The address was in Andheri. 

She applied as an actress, feigning interest. Her audition was a monologue about grief. She wore a simple salwar suit, her hair braided, her voice trembling with sincerity. They called her back. 

Inside their studio in Andheri, she saw him. The boots. The gait. The silence.

He was tall, lean, with a face that looked like it had forgotten how to smile. He wore a leather jacket despite the Mumbai heat, his eyes hidden behind aviators. He moved like a shadow—deliberate, quiet, dangerous. 

She lunged. Screamed. Tore the set apart. “You filmed her!” she shouted. “You nailed her to the world!” Others in that office were taken aback by the sudden outburst. A woman took her aside and made enquiries with her. She then called the man. 

The man denied everything. No proof. No confession. Just a trail of broken props and broken hope. 

She left the place with descent accelerated. 

She began seeing flashes of the video in mirrors. Heard its soundtrack in birdsong. 

Her colleague Ravi had been noticing the change. Ravi was kind,  junior moderator with a love for poetry and filter coffee. He wore oversized shirts and spoke in metaphors. One afternoon, he handed her tea. 

“You’re losing yourself Shweta,” he said. “You’re not moderating content anymore. You’re moderating reality.” 

“I have to know, if justice exists” she whispered as she looked blankly.

Ravi looked at her like she was a ghost. Her cheeks had gone in deep and dark circles crept under her eyes. 

“Get real. Justice isn’t a file you can flag. It’s a story we tell ourselves to sleep at night.” 

She stopped sleeping. Her thoughts became recursive loops. She questioned everything. Was the nail real? Was the woman real? Was she real?

She began journaling, but her entries read like error logs:

“Frame 1: disbelief. Frame 2: silence. Frame 3: the nail enters. Frame 4: I become her.” 

She stopped going to work. Her Moderator Account continued to be suspended for inactivity. She didn’t care. She wandered Mumbai like a corrupted avatar—half-human, half-algorithm. 

The city blurred around her. The local trains roared like beasts. The chaiwalas called out like prophets. The billboards flashed promises she no longer believed. She walked through Colaba, through Bandra, through Byculla—searching for something that didn’t want to be found. 

One day, she returned to the studio. The sun was rising. The city was waking. But the video still played in her mind, frame by frame. 

She thought she had found the man. But she didn’t find peace. 

In her quest for truth, Shweta lost the scaffolding of her sanity. Her empathy, once her compass, became a curse—pointing her toward every wound the world refused to heal. She lost her relationships, her job, her sense of self. The irony was cruel: the more she sought justice, the more unjust her life became. She became a paradox—a content moderator consumed by content, a seeker of truth undone by its ambiguity. And in the end, she realized that some nails don’t pierce the body. They pierce the soul.

In chasing truth, her mind unspooled,
Her heart, once kind, grew sharp and cruel.
Justice she sought, but paid the toll
Some nails don’t wound the flesh, but soul