The Destructives by Matthew De Abaitua

She fed the parameters of Mala’s face into the hearth and it searched for matches around the entering and leaving of school. The hearth took samples of first person viewpoint rather than continuous stream, the intermittence a legal workaround. Also, Meggan could opt out of first person at any time with a trigger word. Early iterations had used constant first person streaming and that had upset unquantified people.
    The search criteria were not met: according to the samples held on the hearth, Mala and Meggan had never actually spoken to one another face-to-face. Mala had been glimpsed at the back of class. Or skulking around the playground. Being accompanied from class by a teacher. But there was no data on face-to-face communication.
    Verity took a range of samples of Mala’s voice, and ran a hearth search for that audioprint. No matches came back. So – no catcalling in the playground. Next, she ran an audio search for Mala’s name and that brought up a large cache of conversations and remarks between Verity and her friends. For the rest of the morning, Verity listened to these conversations. Theodore drew up a chair, and did likewise. Mala, it seemed, had a past.
    She had told some girls that she lived in sheltered housing with her mother. That they were in hiding from her father. He was violent. Had threatened to kill them both if he ever found them. Mala can’t even look at men, say the girls. Her father is English but she doesn’t want anyone to know that, so that’s why her accent is so weird. Other girls say that Mala is a liar and that her mother and father split up, and that Mala gets moved from schools not to protect her from her father but because she is a fantasist: the insecure new girl telling stories to get attention.
    Verity summoned up the class photograph on the hearth again. The date on the photograph indicated Mala was in the class at that time, there was crossover with her soshul posts. With both hands, Verity gathered together all the followers of Mala and all the people and bots she followed, then began segmentation, in each instance cross-referencing usernames with other web presences to infer real names, real identities. This segmentation was run through a series of lenses to detect groupings. It took a while for Theodore to figure out what she was looking for. She plotted the followers geographically, and then searched for congregations in the UK. If Mala had left England on the run from her father, would she sever all contact, or would she still follow her old British friends?
    No, nothing significant in the UK. Verity checked the startup date of Mala’s account. It had been set up only a month before she joined Meggan’s class. Odd, most girls had soshul from eight or nine years old onward. She must have purged her old soshul. Would a thirteen year-old girl really be capable of making such a clean break if she wasn’t in danger?
    Verity drew her lips back and tapped thoughtfully at her teeth.
    What was Verity looking for?
    Verity got up, stood in front of the mirror, then she went to the bathroom. He had no idea what decision she had come to, or what she was going to do next. He was stuck in real-time with her. He needed a way of moving through the archive in the same way that Verity controlled the hearth. While she was gone, he put down his pen and paper, and imitated some of the gestures that Verity had made. The hearth did not respond. He tried voice command. He tried writing commands down on the paper. Nothing. The hearth seemed like the natural interface with the archive. But it did not accept his input. It might not be capable of running any searches other than the ones within its history.
    Verity returned from the bathroom and called her husband, Oliver Horbo. A loop of Oliver in happier times trailed his presence, in corduroys and fleece and hiking boots, mock heroic among redwoods; then the live feed connected and he appeared – judging from the unflattering lighting and angle