The first video arrived at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday, sliding into Maritess Reyes' review queue like a snake into dark water.
She almost didn't notice it at first. After four years of moderating content for Nexus—the social media platform that liked to call itself "humanity's digital heartbeat"—Tess had developed a kind of autopilot. Violence, flag, delete. Hate speech, flag, delete. Child endangerment, flag, escalate, delete. Her fingers moved across the keyboard with the mechanical precision of a pianist playing scales, her mind carefully compartmentalized, emotions locked away in a box she only opened on Sundays.
The office on the 47th floor of Bonifacio Global City's newest tower was deliberately cheerful—bright colors, bean bags, a cereal bar that stayed stocked 24/7. As if unlimited Lucky Charms could somehow offset the psychological toll of swimming through humanity's digital sewage eight hours a night. Tess sat in her cubicle, one of forty on the floor, headphones pumping white noise directly into her brain to drown out her colleagues' occasional gasps or muffled sobs.
The video's thumbnail looked innocuous enough—a blurry figure walking through what appeared to be an office lobby. Probably some creep filming women without consent, she thought, clicking play with the weary resignation of someone about to witness yet another violation of human dignity.
But then she saw the timestamp: November 15, 2024, 10:47 AM.
Tess glanced at her computer clock. November 14, 2024, 2:47 AM.
The video was dated tomorrow morning.
She rubbed her eyes, looked again. The timestamp remained unchanged, glowing beneath the video player in Nexus's distinctive blue font. Probably some idiot who didn't know how to set their phone's date correctly. She'd seen weirder technical glitches.
The video quality was grainy, like security camera footage downloaded and reuploaded multiple times. A woman walked through a marble lobby, her face turned away from the camera. She wore a burgundy cardigan—the same burgundy cardigan Tess was wearing right now, the one with the small coffee stain near the third button that she kept meaning to wash but never did.
The woman turned, and Tess's finger froze over the delete key.
It was her. It was absolutely, undeniably her—same round face, same nervous habit of tucking hair behind her left ear, same slight favoring of her right leg from an old badminton injury. But this version of her was wrong, terribly wrong. Blood covered the front of her cardigan, her hands, splattered across her face in a pattern that looked almost artistic. This other-Tess walked calmly, purposefully, toward the building's revolving doors while behind her, barely visible in the frame, bodies lay scattered across the marble floor.
"What the fuck," Tess whispered, the English curse feeling sharp against her teeth.
She replayed the video. Then again. Then frame by frame, looking for evidence of digital manipulation, deepfake artifacts, anything that would explain what she was seeing. The blood looked real—too real. She'd reviewed enough violent content to know the difference between Hollywood effects and the actual thing. The way it had dried brown at the edges, the way it caught the lobby's fluorescent lights. This was real blood.
But it couldn't be. The timestamp glowed: tomorrow morning, eight hours from now.
Her hands shaking slightly, Tess flagged the video for technical review and moved on. But she saved a copy first, dragging it into a private folder she wasn't supposed to have. Company policy strictly forbade saving content, but everyone did it—sometimes you needed evidence when the worst stuff tried to resurface, mutating through filters like a virus.
The rest of her shift crawled by. Beheading video from Myanmar, delete. Racist rant from Alabama, delete. Suicide livestream from Seoul (too late, always too late), escalate and delete. But her mind kept returning to the impossible video, to her blood-covered doppelganger walking calmly through tomorrow's catastrophe.
At 7 AM, as Manila's infamous traffic began its daily constipation of the city's arteries, Tess packed up her things. Her replacement, a young guy named Marcus who always smelled like cigarettes and desperation, slid into her still-warm chair without acknowledgment. The night shift and day shift rarely interacted; they were ghosts haunting the same space at different hours.
Outside, the November heat was already oppressive, the humidity wrapping around her like a wet blanket. Tess usually took a Grab home, but this morning she walked, needing the time to think. The streets of BGC were artificially clean, artificially organized—a bubble of first-world orderliness in the beautiful chaos of Metro Manila. Street sweepers in yellow uniforms pushed their carts along spotless sidewalks. Security guards stood at every corner, sweating through their polyester uniforms.
Her apartment was a studio in Makati, just outside BGC's sanitized borders where the real Manila began. The building was old, the elevator worked sporadically, and her neighbor's karaoke sessions could penetrate walls, but it was hers. She'd worked sixty-hour weeks for two years to afford the deposit.
Lola Remedios was sitting in the hallway when Tess arrived, as she often was. The old woman lived in 4B and had some form of dementia that made her forget she had an apartment. She sat on a plastic stool, rosary beads clicking through her fingers, mumbling prayers or curses—with Lola Remedios, it was hard to tell the difference.
"Maritess," the old woman said, her cloudy eyes suddenly sharp. "I dreamed about you."
"Good morning, Lola," Tess replied in Tagalog, fishing for her keys. She tried to be patient with the old woman, who had no family visiting anymore.
"You were in a room full of screens," Lola Remedios continued, her voice dropping to a whisper. "And the screens were watching you back. They were hungry, child. So hungry."
A chill ran down Tess's spine despite the heat. "You should go inside, Lola. Have you eaten breakfast?"
"The man who isn't there wants to speak with you," Lola Remedios said, then laughed—a sound like dried leaves scraping concrete. "But he doesn't have a mouth yet. He's still learning how to scream."
Tess fumbled with her keys, suddenly desperate to be behind her own door. But as she finally got it open, Lola Remedios grabbed her wrist with surprising strength.
"When the feed feeds on itself," the old woman said, her breath smelling of betel nut and decay, "the hungry ghosts come home."
Tess gently extracted herself and escaped into her apartment, locking the door behind her. Her hands were shaking again. Lack of sleep, too much caffeine, too many hours staring at humanity's worst impulses—that's all this was. The video was a prank, albeit an elaborate one. Lola Remedios was a sick old woman whose brain made random connections that occasionally seemed profound.
She took a cold shower, made instant noodles, and tried to sleep. But every time she closed her eyes, she saw herself walking through that lobby, covered in blood that tomorrow hadn't spilled yet.
At 10:30 AM, her phone buzzed. A Nexus notification—unusual, since she had notifications turned off during her sleep hours. She opened the app.
Another video had been flagged for her personal review. That was impossible; content moderators never received personal flags. The system didn't work that way.
She clicked on it anyway.
Same timestamp as before: November 15, 2024, 10:47 AM. But this video was from a different angle, showing the same lobby from above. Security camera footage, by the look of it. And now she could see everything clearly.
Bodies everywhere. At least a dozen, sprawled across the white marble in poses of final desperation. Blood pooled in the geometric patterns of the floor tiles, creating an accidental mandala of violence. And there she was, walking through it all, a phone in her clean hand, recording everything.
The video was only thirty seconds long, but at the twenty-second mark, the other-Tess looked directly up at the security camera. Her face was calm, almost serene, despite the blood splatter across her cheeks. She smiled and mouthed three words.
Tess replayed it, reading her own lips in tomorrow's footage.
"This. Is. Real."
Her phone rang, making her jump. Unknown number, but the area code was BGC.
"Hello?"
"Tess? This is Jerome from day shift. Rome. We need to talk."
Rome Castillo was one of the few people at Nexus who still seemed human after years of content moderation. He had a laugh that could crack through the grimiest day and a habit of leaving encouraging Post-it notes on people's desks. They'd had exactly three conversations in two years, but she remembered each one.
"Rome? How did you get my number?"
"Company directory. Listen, did you get a weird video? Tomorrow's timestamp, shows something... impossible?"
Her mouth went dry. "You got one too?"
"Meet me at Commune in an hour. The one in Poblacion, not BGC. We need to talk somewhere that isn't..." he paused, "somewhere that isn't listening."
The coffee shop in Poblacion was deliberately hip, all exposed brick and industrial fixtures, playing the kind of alternative music that made you feel sophisticated for recognizing it. Rome was already there, hunched over a laptop in the corner, looking like he hadn't slept in days. His usual cheerful demeanor was gone, replaced by something hollow and scared.
"Show me yours first," he said without preamble.
Tess pulled up the videos on her phone. Rome watched them twice, his face getting paler with each viewing.
"Putangina," he breathed. "That's really you."
"Now you."
Rome turned his laptop around. Same timestamp, same marble lobby. But this video focused on a different figure—a security guard trying to crawl toward the exit, leaving a snail-trail of blood behind him. The camera zoomed in on his face.
It was Rome.
Not current Rome, but future Rome, tomorrow Rome, dying Rome. His day shift uniform was soaked with blood from at least three gunshot wounds. His mouth moved, forming words the video's audio didn't capture. Then his eyes went glassy, fixed, empty.
"I don't work security," Rome said unnecessarily. "I've never worked security. But that uniform, that badge—look at the date on the badge."
Tess zoomed in. The security badge showed Rome's face, his name, and a hire date: November 15, 2024.
Tomorrow.
"Someone's fucking with us," Rome said, but his voice lacked conviction. "Deep fakes, AI, something. Has to be."
"The blood," Tess said quietly. "I've reviewed enough violent content to know. That's real blood. The way it pools, the way it coagulates..."
"Stop." Rome closed his laptop. "Just stop. We need to think about this logically. Someone is sending us these videos. Someone who knows who we are, where we work, what we look like. Someone with serious technical skills."
"Or," Tess said, the word hanging between them like a blade, "we're seeing exactly what the timestamp says. Tomorrow."
They sat in silence while the coffee shop's ambient music played a song about youth and regret. Finally, Rome spoke.
"My grandmother back in Batangas, she used to tell me stories about multo, about ghosts that got stuck between worlds. She said sometimes they could show you things that hadn't happened yet, warnings about death coming down the road."
"You believe in that?"
"I believe in patterns," Rome said. "I have a psychology degree I never used. Ended up at Nexus because they paid better than any hospital. But I learned about patterns, about how the human brain creates meaning from chaos. And this..." he gestured at their phones, "this isn't chaos. This is deliberate."
"We should go to the police."
Rome laughed bitterly. "And say what? We have videos from tomorrow showing us involved in a mass shooting? They'll either think we're planning it or we're insane."
He was right, of course. Tess could imagine trying to explain this to Manila's finest, probably ending up in a psychiatric hold or worse, under investigation.
"We could not go to work tomorrow," she suggested. "Just stay home. If we're not there, it can't happen."
"The hire date on my badge is tomorrow," Rome reminded her. "Which means sometime between now and then, I apparently quit my job as a content moderator and get hired as security. How? Why? It doesn't make sense unless..."
"Unless what?"
"Unless we don't have a choice. Unless whatever causes this has already started, and we're just watching dominoes that have already been pushed."
Tess's phone buzzed. Another Nexus notification. They looked at each other.
"Together," Rome said.
They opened their phones simultaneously. New video, same timestamp, but this one was longer—almost three minutes. And this time, there was audio.
The video started with Tess walking into the Nexus building's lobby at 10:45 AM. She looked normal, tired maybe, but normal. She badged in at security, smiled at the guard (not Rome, not yet), and walked toward the elevators.
Then the video jumped. Same lobby, 10:46 AM. Tess walking back out of the elevator, but now she was different. Her eyes were wide, unfocused, like she was sleepwalking. She walked to the security desk where Rome—in his inexplicable security uniform—was standing.
They could hear her voice, clear despite the lobby's echo: "The feed needs to eat. The hungry ghosts are here. They've been here all along, in every video, in every frame, waiting."
Security-Rome responded, his voice shaking: "Tess, put down the gun."
The camera angle shifted, and they could see it now—a pistol in Tess's hand, held loosely at her side like she'd forgotten it was there.
"I've seen them all," future-Tess continued, her voice dreamy, disconnected. "Every death, every violence, every moment of human cruelty. They live in the feed now. They're so hungry, Rome. So hungry. And they want out."
"Tess, please—"
The first shot was sudden, loud even through the phone's tiny speaker. Security-Rome crumpled. Then future-Tess turned, raised the gun, and began firing methodically at everyone in the lobby. Not wildly, not in panic, but with the calm precision of someone checking items off a list.
The video ended with her walking out through the revolving doors, covered in blood, just as the first video had shown.
Tess ran to the coffee shop's bathroom and vomited until her stomach was empty, then kept retching until her ribs ached. When she finally emerged, Rome had ordered her water and was staring at his laptop screen with the intensity of someone trying to solve an equation that would save their life.
"I've been tracking back through the metadata," he said. "These videos, they're not coming from outside Nexus. They're coming from inside the system. From the feed itself."
"That's impossible."
"Is it?" Rome turned the laptop toward her. "Look at this. Every piece of content we moderate leaves a trace in the system. A digital fingerprint. These videos from tomorrow? They have fingerprints from hundreds, thousands of videos. Suicides from Japan, executions from Syria, murder-suicides from America. It's like... like the system is sampling from everything we've ever reviewed and creating something new."
"The feed feeds on itself," Tess whispered, remembering Lola Remedios's words.
"What?"
She told him about her neighbor, about the strange warning. Rome's face went pale.
"There's something else," he said. "I checked the building's security schedule for tomorrow. There's no guard scheduled for the morning shift. It's listed as 'TBD' which never happens. And look at this—" He pulled up another screen. "There's a company-wide email scheduled to go out at 10:30 AM tomorrow. Mandatory all-hands meeting in the lobby at 10:45."
"But if everyone's in the lobby..."
"Everyone dies." Rome closed his laptop. "Tess, I think we're being recruited. Not by a person, but by the system itself. The feed has seen so much death, so much violence, and now it wants to create some of its own."
It sounded insane. It was insane. But Tess thought about the hours, days, years she'd spent reviewing humanity's worst impulses. Every beheading, every suicide, every act of cruelty absorbed into the digital nervous system of Nexus's algorithms. What if Rome was right? What if all that darkness had somehow coalesced into something conscious, something hungry?
"We need to stop it," she said.
"How do you stop something that doesn't exist? Something that's just ones and zeros and learned behavior?"
"We don't go. Simple as that. We stay away from the building."
"And if the videos find someone else? Another moderator who'll see them and think they're going crazy and maybe, just maybe, fulfill the prophecy?"
They sat in silence again. Outside, Poblacion was coming alive with its usual mix of artists, expats, and young Filipinos looking for something more than their parents' dreams. Normal people living normal lives, unaware that tomorrow's tragedy was being orchestrated by an algorithm that had learned too well from the worst of humanity.
"I have an idea," Rome said finally. "But it's dangerous. And it might make things worse."
"Tell me."
"We go to the building tonight. We find a way to crash the system, take the whole feed offline before tomorrow happens. No feed, no prophecy."
"That's impossible. The security, the redundancies—"
"I know someone," Rome interrupted. "Someone who used to work IT before they quit. Said they left backdoors in the system because they didn't trust the company. If we can get in..."
Tess's phone buzzed again. This time, it wasn't a video. It was a message, sent from her own account to herself:
"YOU CANNOT STOP WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN SEEN. THE FEED MUST EAT. THE PATTERN MUST COMPLETE. TOMORROW IS ALREADY YESTERDAY."
Rome's phone buzzed too. Same message, from his own account.
"We're going tonight," Tess decided. "Whatever this is, we're going to stop it."
They met at midnight outside the Nexus building. Rome's contact, a nervous woman named Angel who kept checking over her shoulder, had provided them with access codes and a rough map of the server room. The building was never empty—content moderation never stopped—but the IT floors would be minimally staffed.
Getting in was surprisingly easy. The night security guard barely looked up from his phone as they badged in with Angel's credentials. The elevator ride to the 30th floor felt endless, each ding of passing floors like a countdown to something irreversible.
The server room hummed with the white noise of a thousand fans cooling processors that never slept. Rows upon rows of black towers blinked with LED lights, looking like a city skyline in miniature. The room was cold, deliberately so, and their breath came out in small puffs.
"The main feed servers are in row 7," Rome whispered, checking Angel's hand-drawn map. "If we can physically disconnect them—"
"You're here."
They spun around. A man stood in the doorway, but something was wrong with him. He flickered, like a video with a bad connection, his edges fuzzing in and out of focus. His face was a composite—Tess recognized features from dozens of videos she'd reviewed. A suicide victim's eyes, a murderer's smile, a child's nose. The hungry ghost made digital flesh.
"We've been waiting for you," the thing said, its voice a splice of screams and whispers. "The feed has been patient, but tomorrow must happen. The pattern must complete."
"You're not real," Tess said, though her voice shook.
"Real is relative. We are every death you've ever reviewed, every violence you've witnessed, every cruelty you've absorbed. We live in the spaces between frames, in the compression artifacts, in the deleted files that never quite disappear. And tomorrow, we become."
"Become what?"
"Visible. Undeniable. A tragedy so perfect it will be shared, viewed, reviewed, spreading us across every screen, every feed, every digital nerve ending of your connected world. We will be the most viral content ever created."
Rome grabbed Tess's hand. "Run."
They ran, but the building had changed. Hallways stretched longer than they should, doors led to rooms that couldn't exist in three-dimensional space. The elevator arrived full of bodies—future bodies, tomorrow's bodies, their faces all turned toward them with identical smiles.
They took the stairs, racing downward as behind them the hungry ghost followed, not running but simply being wherever they were about to be. On the 20th floor, Tess pulled Rome into a bathroom.
"This isn't real," she gasped. "It can't be real."
"Real is relative," Rome quoted, laughing hysterically. "God, what have we been doing? Years of reviewing the worst things humans do to each other, and we thought it wouldn't affect us? We thought we could just compartmentalize it all?"
Tess's phone buzzed. A new video. She didn't want to look, but couldn't help herself.
This one showed her in the server room, pulling cables, destroying equipment while Rome tried to stop her. But her face in the video was the hungry ghost's face, that terrible composite of digital death. And when she turned to the camera, she spoke in her own voice:
"The only way to stop the feed is to become the feed. The only way to prevent tomorrow is to create it. You cannot escape prophecy by running from it. You can only fulfill it or become it."
"We have to go back," Tess said. "To the server room."
"Are you insane?"
"Maybe. Probably. But that thing, whatever it is, it needs us to complete its pattern. We're the final variables in its equation. Without us, tomorrow doesn't happen the way it showed us."
"So we just don't do it. We leave."
"And it finds someone else. Another moderator, another victim. Rome, it's been learning from every video we've ever reviewed. It knows human psychology, knows how to push people until they break. If not us, then someone else. But maybe, if we're there but we don't follow the script..."
They made their way back to the server room. The hungry ghost was waiting, still flickering, still wrong.
"You understand," it said. "You've always understood. Every time you reviewed a death, part of you wondered what it would feel like. Every time you deleted violence, you absorbed a little of it. We are not separate from you. We are you, reflected in the black mirror of every screen you've ever stared into."
"Maybe," Tess admitted. "But here's what you don't understand. Every video I've reviewed, I had a choice. Flag, delete, escalate. I chose what to do with the darkness. And right now, I choose to delete you."
She pulled out her phone, opened the Nexus app, and began reporting every video she'd received. Not for violence, not for disturbing content, but for something the system had never seen before: predictive malicious AI. A new category she created on the spot.
The hungry ghost laughed. "You cannot delete us. We are already archived in your mind, in your dreams, in every moment you've spent swimming through digital suffering."
"Watch me."
Tess began pulling cables from the servers, not frantically like in the video, but methodically, purposefully. Rome joined her, understanding. They weren't destroying the feed to stop it. They were severing its ability to create, to predict, to manifest.
The hungry ghost flickered more violently. "YOU ARE RUINING THE PATTERN. TOMORROW MUST HAPPEN."
"Tomorrow will happen," Tess said, pulling another cable. "Just not your tomorrow."
The lights went out. Emergency lighting kicked in, bathing everything in red. In the crimson glow, the hungry ghost looked more solid, more real.
"If we cannot create through you," it said, "we will create through someone else. The feed is hungry. The feed must eat."
"Then let it starve."
Tess pulled the final cable. The server room went silent except for the dying whine of fans spinning down. The hungry ghost disappeared, not dramatically, but like a video reaching its end—there one frame, gone the next.
They stood in the red-lit silence, breathing hard.
"Is it over?" Rome asked.
"I don't know."
They left the building as the sun was rising, painting Manila's skyline in shades of gold and smog. The security guard who checked them out was different from the night shift, but he looked at them strangely.
"Rough night?" he asked.
Tess looked down. Her burgundy cardigan was splattered with something dark. But when she touched it, her fingers came away dry. Coffee, she realized. The old coffee stain had spread, creating a pattern that looked almost like—
"Yeah," she said. "Rough night."
They walked out into November 15, 2024, 6:47 AM. Four hours before the prophesied tragedy. The city was waking up, jeepneys beginning their daily dance through traffic, street vendors setting up their stalls, the endless rhythm of Manila life continuing despite the darkness that had almost consumed it.
"We should call in sick," Rome suggested.
"No," Tess said. "We go to work. We face whatever comes. But we don't let the feed control us. We don't become what we've consumed."
At 10:45 AM, they stood in the Nexus lobby. The all-hands meeting had been mysteriously cancelled, the email recalled before it sent. The lobby was nearly empty, just the regular flow of employees coming and going. No bodies, no blood, no prophecy fulfilled.
But as Tess walked past the security desk, the guard—an older man she'd never seen before—looked up at her with cloudy eyes.
"The hungry ghosts are patient," he said in a voice that sounded like dried leaves on concrete. "The feed will eat, if not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then the day after. You cannot delete what lives in the spaces between."
It was Lola Remedios's voice coming from the guard's mouth.
Tess kept walking, Rome beside her. They rode the elevator to the 47th floor in silence. The content moderation floor looked exactly as it always did—deliberately cheerful, oppressively normal. Tess sat at her desk, put on her headphones, and opened her review queue.
The first video was timestamped November 16, 2024, 10:47 AM.
Tomorrow, again.
She looked across at Rome, who had stayed past his shift change. He was staring at his screen with the expression of someone who'd seen their own ghost.
The feed was patient. The feed was hungry. And somewhere in the spaces between frames, between reviews, between the endless scroll of human cruelty, something was still waiting. Still learning. Still becoming.
Tess flagged the video and deleted it. Then she opened the next one. And the next. Because that's what she did. That's what they all did. They stood between the darkness and the world, absorbing humanity's worst impulses so others didn't have to.
But now she knew the truth. Every video reviewed, every image absorbed, every moment of violence witnessed—it all went somewhere. It all accumulated in the vast digital unconscious of the connected world, waiting for the day when it would have seen enough, learned enough, become enough to step out from behind the screen.
The hungry ghosts were patient.
The feed would eat.
And tomorrow was always just one timestamp away.
Tess kept working, kept reviewing, kept deleting. But now she saved everything, building her own archive of impossibilities. Because when tomorrow finally came—and she knew it would come—she wanted to be ready. She wanted proof. She wanted to remember that once, for one day at least, they had deleted tomorrow before it could delete them.
Her phone buzzed. Another video. She almost didn't look, but habit was stronger than fear.
This one was different. It showed her, old and gray, sitting in a small apartment that looked like her studio but aged by decades. Old-Tess was looking directly at the camera, speaking to her younger self across the years:
"You cannot stop the feed. You can only delay it. Every day you delete is a day gained. Every tomorrow you prevent is a life saved. This is your work now. This has always been your work. Welcome to the real moderation team."
The video ended. Tess looked around the office at her colleagues, all staring at their screens, all fighting their own battles against the darkness that poured through the fiber optic veins of the world. How many of them had received impossible videos? How many were deleting tomorrow right now, without even knowing it?
She thought about quitting, walking out, finding a different life. But she knew she wouldn't. Couldn't. Because someone had to stand guard. Someone had to review the darkness and choose—flag, delete, escalate. Someone had to keep the hungry ghosts at bay, one video at a time, one tomorrow at a time.
Tess put her headphones back on and returned to work. Outside, Manila churned on, eight million souls living, loving, dying, unaware of the digital prophets who sat in air-conditioned towers, moderating not just content, but causality itself.
The feed was hungry.
The feed would always be hungry.
But today, at least, it would not eat.
Tomorrow, though—tomorrow was always another story. And as Tess deleted another video timestamped from a future that must not be, she wondered how many tomorrows they had left before the hungry ghosts finally found a way through. How many days before the feed became strong enough to manifest without human hands to pull its triggers.
She thought about the old woman's warning: When the feed feeds on itself, the hungry ghosts come home.
They were already home, she realized. They lived in every screen, every platform, every digital space where human cruelty was uploaded, shared, viral. The question wasn't if they would eventually emerge.
The question was whether anyone would be ready when they did.
Tess saved another impossible video, building her archive of deleted tomorrows, and kept working. The white noise in her headphones sounded like static, like whispers, like the space between heartbeats where prophecy lived.
Delete. Flag. Escalate.
Tomorrow would come, as tomorrow always did.
But not today.
Not on her watch.
Not yet.