Elena froze. Then the figure reached out and tapped the glass of her window. Twice.
She scrolled back. In that earlier clip, the fire escape was empty. But the camera had panned left on its own—something the manual explicitly said the VMB3000 could not do. No pan, no tilt. Fixed lens. And yet, the view shifted, slowly, until it was aimed not at the alley, but directly at her bedroom window.
“It followed me.”
She took the base station and a single camera back to her apartment. That night, she followed the manual step by step. Step 1: Connect the base station to your router. She plugged in the Ethernet cable, watching the small LED blink from amber to green. Step 2: Sync the camera. She pressed the sync button on the base, then the camera’s. A tiny blue light winked.
At 2:17 a.m., her phone buzzed. She sat up, heart thudding. She opened the app. The video was black and white, ghost-lit. A figure stood on her fire escape—hood pulled low, face invisible. The figure wasn't moving. Just standing. Staring directly into the lens.
She whispered into the empty room, “Dad, what did you see out there?”
She never knew what he was so afraid of. Or maybe he was just lonely.
For the first time in months, she felt like she was doing something he would have been proud of.
She mounted the camera on her fire escape, pointing it toward the alley. The Arlo app loaded a grainy, night-vision world of dumpsters and stray cats. She set motion alerts and went to sleep.
She looked at the manual still open on her nightstand. Troubleshooting, page 24: If the camera moves unexpectedly, check for magnetic interference or… The sentence trailed off into a smudge, as if someone had rubbed the page with a thumb. Below it, in her father’s handwriting, was a single word she had never seen before: