Who you work for is no longer a meaningful question. The web of bribes and blackmail is so dense and computationally complex that there's hardly an action you could take that it's not something you might be rewarded or killed for. Some secretive organ in your mind is constantly trying to solve the ambiguous system of constraints and equations that separates the deterministically fatal from the merely possibly so.

You work for the web. In its inconsistencies and opacities — its human moles and terse instructions and surveillance systems and algorithmic controls — it's not the worst handler you've ever had even if you now know that none of them ever controlled the web around you but were strands instead. Like you are for others. This realization added to your unspoken stash of nightmares — unspoken yet not secret, for surely some sensor or another has fed the right data for some system somewhere to have inferred them somehow — a dread of spiders. Web weavers, web users, uncaring web gods. Certainly no more than a few. Surely at least two.

Your worst nightmare was that this number was one.

The nightmares didn't make you lose a step in your non-Euclidean game of twister. You kept finding solutions to the web's puzzles and getting lucky when that wasn't enough. With constant fear and abstract pride you kept surviving not entirely on your own account and rising up in the paper-thin hierarchies of the world not entirely for your own purposes.

High enough that you met those at the top and saw the top wasn't a center. They were arrogant and cruel but behind their eyes you could see the familiar trace of thin webs of blackmail and bribes. The kompromat took unfamiliar forms, for they feared different things, and the bribes were denominated in currencies you'd never be wealthy enough to have any use for.

Your nightmares changed. You keep surviving.

One day you won't.

If you prayed you'd pray for the web to go no further. But there's only one thing in the world that listens to prayers.