Four-seventeen AM. The laptop screen has burned a rectangle into my vision that I'll probably see for days. My coffee went cold two hours ago.
I drank it anyway, because caffeine is caffeine and desperation doesn't care about temperature.
I am not a hacker. I need to be clear about that. I can't crack encryption or write exploits or do any of the things that Raf's weird forum friends brag about in threads with skull emojis in the headers.
But I understand systems. I understand how things connect, how data flows, how machines talk to each other when they think nobody's listening.
Echo Link is talking. A lot.
The network monitor shows outbound data packets transmitting every thirty-eight seconds. Consistent and rhythmic, like a pulse. Each packet is encrypted — I can see the size but not the contents — and they're routed through a server address I've never encountered.
Not Echo's known game servers. Not NeuraLink's public infrastructure. Something else. Something that doesn't show up on any registry I can find.
The packets are massive. A standard companion app syncing gameplay stats might send a few kilobytes per session. Echo Link is pushing megabytes. Continuously—even when the game isn't running.
Even when the headsets are off and the phones are sitting dark on the floor and we're asleep and nobody is generating any data worth transmitting.
Except we are. We're breathing. Talking in our sleep. Existing in a room with two phones that have microphone access and never turn off.
I screenshot the traffic logs and save them to a folder on my desktop. Then I delete the folder, create a new one with a different name, and move the screenshots there.
Then I realize that if the app has access to my phone, it might have access to my laptop through the shared network. I delete the folder entirely and sit there staring at the empty screen.
Analog. I need analog.
The notebook is in the kitchen drawer — a cheap spiral-bound thing I used for engine diagnostics before I switched to my phone. I flip to a blank page and start writing by hand.
I start a manual log because pen on paper is both untraceable and unhackable, providing the kind of hard-copy security that no encrypted server can touch.
Anomaly one: outbound data packets every thirty-eight seconds to an unregistered server. Anomaly two: packet size consistent with audio transmission, not gameplay telemetry. Anomaly three: transmission continues when app is backgrounded and game is not active.
My hand moves across the page in the dim light. Nora sleeps six feet away, her breathing slow and even, one arm thrown across the empty space where I should be.
I want to crawl back in beside her. I want to close the laptop and pretend the traffic logs are normal and the server is legitimate and the game that brought us together isn't doing something I can't yet name.
I pick up her phone instead.
The screen lights up with her lock code — the one she gave me last week because she said "people in relationships share passwords, Danny, it's not a government secret." Battery at thirty-one percent. She charged it to full before bed. That was five hours ago.
I check my phone. Twenty-eight percent. Same charge cycle. Same impossible drain.
A phone sitting idle overnight should lose maybe five percent. Ours are hemorrhaging power like they're running a small server farm in the background. Which, based on the traffic logs, they essentially are.
I add it to the notebook. Anomaly four: accelerated battery drain consistent with continuous background processing and data transmission on both devices.
The apartment is silent except for the radiator's mechanical breathing and the scratch of my pen.
I work through the anomalies one by one, testing each observation twice before committing it to paper.
The engineering discipline I learned from motorcycle repair — diagnose before you disassemble, verify before you condemn.
Anomaly five: the Echo Link app requests a system wake-lock that prevents the phone from entering deep sleep. Ever. The processor runs at elevated capacity twenty-four hours a day.
Anomaly six: background location pings every four minutes. Not the rough approximation that weather apps use. High-precision GPS coordinates accurate to three meters.
Seven through nine I find by accident. I'm scrolling through my phone's system permissions when I notice the camera indicator light — the tiny green dot that means the lens is active — flicker on for half a second.
I set a timer and watch until, three minutes later, the green dot flickers again—same duration, same pattern—confirming that the camera is activating in intervals brief enough to dismiss, but consistent enough to be intentional.
I angle Nora's phone toward the ceiling and watch it for five minutes. Same flicker. Same timing. Both phones, synchronized, the cameras waking and sleeping in a rhythm that matches the data packet transmission almost exactly.
My hands are steady while I write it down. My handwriting is not. The letters get smaller and tighter as the list grows, as if my pen is trying to contain something that keeps expanding.
Anomaly ten: Echo Link's cache files are encrypted with a protocol I don't recognize. Not standard AES. Something proprietary. Whatever the app is storing locally, it doesn't want anyone — including the phone's owner — reading it.
Eleven: the app registered itself as a system-level process during installation. It can't be force-stopped through normal settings. I tried three times. It restarts within seconds, like killing a process that's been hardcoded to resurrect.
Twelve: I pull up the app's network certificate and find it issued by a company I've never heard of — Meridian Digital Solutions. Not NeuraLink. Not Echo's parent company. A completely separate entity with no public website, no listed employees, and a registration address that traces to a P.O. box in Delaware.
I stare at the name for a long time. Meridian Digital Solutions. It means nothing to me. Which means everything, because legitimate companies don't hide behind empty shell addresses.
The pen hovers over the page. Twelve anomalies. Twelve data points that add up to a picture I don't want to see — an app that listens constantly, watches periodically, tracks precisely, transmits continuously, and answers to a company that doesn't appear to exist.
Dawn bleeds through the curtainless windows. The light hits Nora's face, and she shifts in her sleep, murmuring something that sounds like my name.
My chest tightens. She looks peaceful and unguarded. The version of herself she only became after she stopped performing for everyone else.
I should wake her and show her the notebook. Tell her that the game we love and the app we invited into our home is doing something that twelve data points say is very, very wrong.
But twelve isn't proof. Twelve is suspicion and suspicion, delivered without certainty, is just paranoia wearing a lab coat. She'll ask questions I can't answer yet.
She'll want to know who and why and how bad, and all I have is a list of irregularities in a spiral-bound notebook and a company name that leads to a mailbox.
I need more. I need Raf.
I close the notebook, slide it into the kitchen drawer behind the takeout menus, and sit on the edge of the mattress. Nora's hand finds my thigh in her sleep, her fingers curling against the fabric of my jeans.
Automatic and trusting. The gesture of someone who believes the person beside her is keeping watch.
My phone glows on the floor, its green dot flickering once in a rhythm that tells me I won't be sleeping tonight.