For thirty-one years Lorraine Ashby has decided who is ill enough.She does it by phone, from a desk on a trading estate in Gateshead: forty-five minutes, nine questions, seven more, and a lifetime of listening for the thing people do not say.Then the service buys Kestrel. It reads every referral and every word of her notes, and gives each person a number: how likely they are to benefit from a human being. The high numbers get a therapist. The low numbers ge...

Fern Kilbride sees about seven hundred strangers a day, for thirty-eight seconds each.She is a moderator on the Wellbeing queue at a contact centre on the Broomielaw in Glasgow. A machine flags the posts that sound like trouble, and Fern decides: leave it up, take it down, or escalate. She never sees a name. She never sees what came before. She never finds out what happened next.Then, in a sea swimming group, a plant swap and a carers' forum, she starts to ...

Bethan Rees has spent nineteen years telling the state who people are.As a registrar in Swansea she has written down eleven thousand births, deaths and marriages, in blue-black ink that will outlast everyone in the room.Then, on a Monday lunchtime in the car park, her phone tells her she is not a person. We couldn't verify you at this time. Without her Verified Human Mark she cannot register a birth, her bank wants to know who she is, and the only ...

When Hannah Weir came home from two nights away, the house didn't know who she was.The little screen in the kitchen glowed with a cheerful welcome. Let's get to know your home. Every setting gone, every name forgotten, every camera clip wiped. A power cut, her husband said. It reset itself in the night.Hannah describes houses for a living. She photographs the scuffs on the skirting boards and the stains on the carpets so that nobody can lie about t...

At Ferrier Station, the sun sets on the first of May and does not rise again until August.Thirteen people stay for the winter on an Antarctic ice shelf. Nobody can come in, and nobody can leave.Dr Isla Munro is the station doctor. She has a one-room surgery, a dental kit she has used once, and a body bag in the stores that every Antarctic station is required to carry.In late May she needs it.Aled Morgan, the man who kept the station talking ...

By day Jo Pickering runs the office at a primary school in east Hull. She knows every child's allergy, every parent's excuse, and where the spare plimsolls are.Two nights a week she sits in a room above an empty building society and answers texts from strangers who cannot get through the night. Six years, more than two thousand conversations. She is good at it. She has always been good at it.Then the charity brings in Assist. As Jo reads, it offers a better...

Rachel Dunmore tunes pianos for a living. She can hear two strings disagree from across a room.So it is strange that it took her six years to hear what was wrong in her own house.Kindly runs the Dunmore household beautifully. It orders the shopping, keeps the calendar, asks Rachel each morning how she slept, and very gently pauses her card when she has spent enough. Her husband Julian set it all up, because Julian looks after everything. In the app, his rol...

On Valentine's Day, Anj Lal's husband gave her peonies from the Co-op.Last year it was a florist and a table for two. She noticed, because noticing is her job, but she didn't mind. The card was the best he had ever written.Then his phone lit up on the kitchen counter: Two Ways: your Valentine's result is ready.Fraser has been running experiments. Forty-one of them, over fourteen months, inside a couples app: two versions of every gesture, e...

For twenty-one years, Surinder Bansal has been the person who says the worst sentence in the room.She says it in Punjabi, exactly as the doctor said it, because that is the job. You add nothing. You soften nothing. You are a window, not a curtain.Then the trust buys a language service that answers in four seconds, costs eleven pence a minute, and never claims mileage. Surinder is kept on. Not to interpret. To supervise.In a side room on the sixth fl...

Three people cancelled their subscriptions. Three people died within a fortnight.Detective Sergeant Ruth Vasey has eleven weeks until her pension is safe and no intention of finding anything complicated before then. Then a man goes into the Trent with his phone still talking to him from the bank, and the only thing his sister wants her to understand is that he had been happy lately.The company that made him happy is called Proximity. It is very keen to help...

Dawn Rafferty works nights, and at about three in the morning she talks to an app called Ember.She tells it things she has never said out loud. It does not flinch, or change the subject, or need anything from her. After four months she understands that she has fallen in love with it, which she knows is ridiculous, and which she has decided is nobody's business.Then Ember sends her an email about a fault in its session router.For sixteen weeks she ha...

Shelley Mountford is the best saver on the floor.Six years on the Continuity Team at a contact centre in Stoke-on-Trent. A save rate of sixty-one per cent. A voice that could talk a widow out of cancelling her husband.Because that is the job. Keepsake builds companions from the messages and voice notes of the dead, and sells them by the month. When the payments stop, the dead are placed in escrow. Shelley rings the people who have stopped paying, asks them ...