Turn 8 of 11

Search your own tag history to see if someone has been editing you too

You stop on the pavement outside Tamsin's building. The cold hits you first — March evening, the kind that sits on your collarbones — and then the thought that's been circling since the stairwell lands: you have never checked your own tags. You have spent three weeks reading everyone else's like a detective with a magnifying glass, and you have never once turned the glass on yourself.

You don't know if you can. The power works within arm's reach, and you are always within arm's reach of yourself, so the logic says yes, but the logic of this thing has been unreliable from the start. You close your eyes. You reach — not outward, the way you do for Tamsin or the woman at the bus stop or the barista who once had a tag that read grieving-quietly, but inward, the way you'd try to see your own face without a mirror.

For a moment, nothing. The street noise fills the gap — a bus pulling away, someone's phone playing a tinny pop song, a dog walker passing with two leads tangled. Then the panel opens, and your breath catches, because your tags are not what you expected.

observant. guilt-prone. lonely-even-in-company. private-about-everything. And below those, three more you don't recognise: prone-to-isolating, testing-trust-issues, and — your stomach drops — believes-she-is-the-only-one-who-can-see-this.

The last one sits there like a signature. Like someone leaned back, reviewed the full picture, and wrote a tag that describes not what you are but what you think you are. It's the same surgical style — lowercase, hyphenated, precise — and the timestamp reads edited 4 days ago. Four days ago you were in Edinburgh, eating a bad conference lunch and wondering why your sister's tags had changed from across the city.

You pull the history log open and the cascade unfolds, and this time you are ready for it — or you think you are. Your own edits are there, the few times you've tried to adjust yourself: you changed anxious to observant in week one, you swapped self-pitying for guilt-prone because it felt more honest. But below those, the unknown entries begin, and they are not sparse this time. They are frequent. Deliberate. A pattern of small, careful adjustments that reads like someone tuning an instrument — adding prone-to-isolating, removing it, adding it again with a slight variation, testing-trust-issues appearing and disappearing twice before sticking. Each edit is timestamped. Each one carries the same six-character identifier fragment in the far-right column.

The fragments are clearer here than they were on Tamsin's log. You grab for them, trying to fix them in your mind before they dissolve — and this time you catch more. Not H, 7, K. The characters are different, sharper, as though your own panel is more willing to show you than Tamsin's was: a lowercase k, the number 4, an uppercase R, something that might be a 9, an a, and a character that flickers between an x and something else you can't hold.

You are standing on a public street with your eyes closed and your hand raised slightly in front of your face like a person trying to remember a dream, and a man walking a greyhound gives you a look that you can't see because your panel is full of evidence that someone has been editing you for weeks.

The full history goes back further than you expected. The earliest unknown edit is dated three weeks and one day ago — the morning after you first changed Tamsin's self-conscious to sharp. The morning after your first edit. Someone saw what you did, and they started work the next day.