Nora’s POV
Sophia spreads the files across the kitchen table — our kitchen table, in our apartment, the radiator clanking and the window letting in November light and the fridge notes curling six inches from her elbow. The first preparation I've done in a space that actually belongs to me.
"Walk me through the timeline again," Sophia says. "From the beginning. When did you first discover the surveillance?"
"The rootkit notification. Danny found it — Ghost found it, his avatar, before we knew each other's real names." I wrap my hands around the coffee mug Danny made before he left for the garage.
"The system notification said Phase Two. We didn't know what it meant. We thought it was a game mechanic."
"And when did you understand what it actually was?"
"Gradually. Danny traced the architecture. Raf helped him map the server structure. By the time we understood the full scope — biometric capture, audio recording, intimate session logging — we were already inside it. Already recorded."
Sophia writes something in the margin of her legal pad. Her handwriting is precise, small, the penmanship of a woman who bills by the hour and doesn't waste ink.
"The FTC hearing is set for December ninth. You're the primary witness." She looks up from the pad. "Do you understand what that means?"
"It means I sit in front of a panel and answer questions about the worst things that happened to me."
"It means you sit in front of a panel and the worst things that happened to you become public record." She sets her pen down. "I need to be specific about what that includes, Nora. They'll ask about the Love Room."
The name lands on the kitchen table between us. The Love Room. The place where Danny first touched my avatar's face and my heart rate spiked and a system I didn't know existed recorded every beat.
"What was captured there," Sophia continues, her voice careful in the way that means the next words require care.
"The biometric data, the audio. The intimate sessions that Tristan built his surveillance protocols around." She pauses.
"They'll ask about your father's involvement. The email chain. How Tristan framed it as behavioral monitoring while building something far worse. Arthur's authorization. The word capture."
"I know."
"It will become public record. Not sealed or redacted, but public. Journalists will report on it. Your name will be attached to testimony about what was recorded in a virtual room during intimate moments. The exposure Tristan threatened you with — the thing that drove you back into your father's house — it happens either way. The difference is whether it happens on your terms or his."
I stare at the coffee mug. Danny's handwriting on the fridge behind Sophia's head — pick up milk, your turn to clean the radiator grate, you left your Keats on the bathroom floor again.
The domestic evidence of a life reassembled from wreckage, two weeks old and already accumulating the small paper trail of people who live together and love each other and leave notes because notes are how you say I'm thinking about you when you're not in the room.
"Forty-seven thousand couples," I say.
"Forty-seven thousand documented accounts. The actual number of affected individuals is higher — partners, participants, anyone who interacted with a monitored user."
"And they all have the same recordings. The same biometric captures. The same intimate data sitting on servers that Tristan built and Arthur funded."
"Yes."
"Whether I testify or not, the violation already happened to them. The recordings already exist. The data was already stolen." I look at Sophia.
"The question isn't whether I'm exposed. I've been exposed since the first night in the Love Room. The question is what the exposure does."
Sophia watches me the way she watches evidence — carefully, completely, reading for what's underneath.
"If I stay silent, Tristan's threat wins. The fear of exposure keeps me quiet and keeps forty-seven thousand other people invisible. Their stories don't get told because I was too afraid to tell mine." I set the mug down.
"If I testify, the exposure becomes evidence. The thing Tristan designed to shame me becomes the thing that protects everyone he did it to."
"You've thought about this."
"I've been thinking about it since I read my father's emails in his study at 2 AM with a penlight shaking in my hand." My voice is steady in a way that surprises me — not the performed steadiness of Eleanor, not the controlled register of a woman managing her output for strategic effect.
The steadiness of someone who has already walked through the worst thing and discovered that the other side has a kitchen table and a clanking radiator and coffee made by a man who loves her.
"They already have the recordings. The violation is complete. The only variable left is whether I let it define me in silence or use it to protect everyone else."
"The defense will push back. NeuraLink's attorneys will argue consent was embedded in the terms of service. They'll try to reframe the surveillance as standard data collection."
"Standard data collection doesn't include the word capture in an email about monitoring your own daughter. And a father who says he doesn't need the details is a father who chose not to know what he was authorizing."
Sophia almost smiles. Almost. The corner of her mouth shifts one degree — the maximum emotional display I've seen from a woman who treats feelings like billable hours.
"They'll ask about Tristan specifically. The phone call. The café. The dead man's switch threat. The night he played audio of your—"
"I know what he played." My jaw tightens, the involuntary clench of a woman remembering the sound of her own voice coming out of a stranger's phone in a public place.
"I know exactly what he played and exactly how it felt to hear it and exactly what it did to me. And I'll describe every second of it on the record if that's what it takes to make sure he can never do it to anyone else."
The apartment is quiet. The radiator clanks its one-note rhythm. Danny's fridge notes curl behind Sophia's shoulder and the light through the sticky window falls across the table where a woman is deciding to sit in front of a federal panel and tell the truth about what was done to her in a room made of light.
"I'll testify," I say.
Sophia nods. Picks up her pen. "Then let's prepare."
She opens the first file and we begin — two women at a kitchen table with coffee getting cold and a radiator marking time and the specific, terrified, certain energy of a decision that can't be unmade.
Sophia asks questions and I answer them. Not as Eleanor. Not as Siren. As Nora — the woman who walked into her father's house and walked out carrying the evidence, the woman who sat on a bench at midnight and chose a mechanic over a kingdom, the woman who straightens her spine at a kitchen table not because a mask requires alignment but because she's decided to stand.