Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. There's a certain kind of light
you learned to fear after and enough years an id.
It's not the dark blue glow over crisis screen or
the dozy pulse of a corporate dashboard at noon, but
something thinner, perpetual flicker that hovers on the periphery, whispering
that something in the machine well has slipped out of
place while you weren't looking. It was pushing close to
one fifty a m. The city outside my window dissolved
in sodium vapor and the wine of a distant sireen.
When the new security monitor I'd ritten popped up its
latest anomally badge, I'd already muted the group chat the
other contractors had signed off years ago. Both coasts quiet now,
except for the odd slack emoji floating beside on resolved tickets,
the endless journ of ride logs, driver routes, support, bought communications,
normally just background radiation now felt like a low sided
compressing and from every tap tonight the badge was red
instead of its usual yellow. I scrolled from instinctively drumming
the edge of my desk. The anomaly was tagged no
transit idea, nested under an oftened ride detail marked with
a midnight time stamp. When I cracked open the ride
in staging, the details found out in a panel in
their familiar dull gray origin, destination invisible, trip flagged for deletion,
customer and driver entes wipe. I paused at the chat transcript,
just one line short enough to fit easily in the
preview bubble. Is anyone there? He never left the car.
The message was time stamped two forty three a m.
On after the support chat traffic usually flat lined him
well after my own teens on call window. The center
field was only half filled a hash matching no current
driver account history blanked except for the account creation and
deletion dates, and even those conflicted as if a clip
A script had snip time lines out at random, as
I have it. Over the bubble, A fine wine rattled
my laptop speakers, raise it thin. The fan spun up
to you a sudden grind, like gravel in a pipe.
I'd had the suppression but non reflex, but all it
did was collapse the lock. After a moment, I expanded
the audit trail around the ride, fingers grazed by the
warmth of the screen, the usual artifacts custered near it,
health check fail, deleting rope and error ride not found
on driver ledger. Then a second unrelated entry time stump
two forty six a m reading only goes rye clean
up complete. It should have been another scap for the trotspinaud,
but nowhere near as bad as fishing attempts or accidental
data leaks. But the message itself, the slightly desperate question
hanging there, wouldn't let go. I checked the system camera,
just my own reflection in the dim glow, unremarkable except
for a twitchiness at the jaw. I typed a fresh query,
mind taking for anything like an explanation, but nothing else
surfaced in that log window. All the while, that thread
thin digital rain seemed to hiss in my headphones. The
small home office that most evenings felt like my safe
half cocoon now pressed in with a new, uneasy hush.
Somewhere out there, deep in the lats work of the
company's system, someone or something was trying to be seen,
or maybe the thing with a voice was only just
learning how to listen. I thought for a second, I
saw something move in the glass of the window beside
my monitor, but it was just the city distant headlights
drifting pass nothing more. There was a little point in
staying up longer. I flagged the ride for a secondary scan,
locked my laptop and sat there for several minutes, hands
flat on the cooling surface, letting nerves out in the
charge silence. There's comfort in the rules of beckend work
input process perge, but the line between digital house cleaning
and hiding evidences in practice always thinner than the manual's claim,
and some things clinging, odd things refused to be raised.
I powered everything down and watched the faint pulse of
the ratter in the corner. It blinked at me, steady
as a slow harpy. No more life, if you could
call it. That started late with the electric kettles thrown
rattling over the stale hush of the apartment. Miyone is
a streamlined existence by design. Never mugne its hook, every
cable wound, every trace of old day to wipe nightly
from devices I don't trust. Since taking this contract a
year and a half ago, I'd stopped caring much about
the scraps of personality most people leave scattered in their rooms,
pulses culled at the edges, a dying house, blunt in
the kitchen, all silent and imposing. The real world taxi
is passing down the block. Shouts muffled by glass felt
like a foreign signal, occasionally flickering through. Most of my
day passed between a rays of sanitized dashboard words and
status checks. The company a rideshair conglomerate with servers everywhere,
and people now were preferred onboarding contractors for their most
thenkas bacan tasks. Contractors didn't ask too many questions, didn't
require a seat at the table, our standing video calls
rarely lingered on names. I was and cheebas in the directory.
Allowed to work in sweatshirts and slippers provided productivity metrics
were met. From my window, A glimpsed a slice of city,
a bare alley slash with graffiti, still by the glassy
quiet of late morning. Sunlight when it arrived, came thin
and mechanical through the clouds, always filtered, always too brief.
The only reminders of humanity and this job came through
slack jokes about raised conditions. Copy pasted memes. The companies
which I bought bring us to celebrate a team win
of the week. I like the clean separation order. Encode
is its own comfort. Every morning I checked my own
scheduled scripts to use logs, corrupt, old chat transcripts, archived
permissions maintained. The chaos below the dash were to the
snarls of users at variables. Legacy IPI, lashed together by
duct tape, offered problems only if you look too closely.
Everything measured in arrow rates, everything disposable. That's what I
told myself for months. Anyway, Occasionally, though, there were ticket
I couldn't quite resolve. A ride that failed to clear
from a ledger, a chat from a deleted user trash.
The leads called these companied tritus not with overtime. But
I'd learned, over several contracts and two failed start ups,
that all platforms collect ghosts, often data, soombie users, rides
scheduled after the system's own clock insists no one was
on line. Slack channels filled with quite paranois. Sometimes did
you see another ghost trip last night? Some one might ask.
Usually it got laughed off. I'd poked around the form
some months ago. Found an old inten no wiki entry
redacted but not the leaded, musing about phantom rids that
popped up to spite or customer facing logs saying otherwise
every dev cycle, some one tried to close the ticket
on those. Nobody succeeded. Most of my social life, such
as it existed, was mediated through cables and screens. My
mother's emails blinked in cheerful as check out receipts. Friends
from college popped up once or WHI was a month,
or rather the avatars did. Still it suited me. The
digital world is predictable, banded, or it should be. What
the company didn't encourage was curiosity. We were tesked to patch,
to elete and move on, not to trace anomalies to
their roots. Their privacy compliance training had a quiet emphasis
on the dangers of privileged misuse. Dig deeper and you rest,
triggering audits warnings, and the silent, unblinking scrutiny of security.
Still the ride from last night, no transit ida chat transcript.
The odd phrasing brickled at my mind through lunch. Most
bogues have patterns, most ghosts of someone's fingerprints on them.
By late afternoon with the sun already giving up, I
found myself queuing up another search window coffee gone stair
beside me, trash or not, the ride wasn't gone yet,
and this system, for all its self scrubbing veins, never
really forgets. It started with a simple query for riodes
flagged with a no transit idea, normally from the last
ninety days. Ordinarily these would be edge cases, trips canceled
before pick up accounts to lead of midry, all discarded
within twenty four Eyes by auto made it sweeps, but
the results didn't fit the usual decay pattern. Dozens of
rites some weeks apart, all processed round midnight with the
nagative payment delta, no fare, no tip, no origin or
destination address, only a pair of unhelpful hashes in the logs.
Oddis of all, the customer and driver accounts were both
deleted immediately after the ride supposedly completed. Still a kend
reference idea survived in cold storage and linked to anything public.
I pulled up the data for three of the oldest
New York City Chicago Thollless, each time stamped between twelve
zero and twelve twenty a m. The metadata sparse as
it was repeat it, no payment, no route mapping, the
same airstream ghost right Cleano complete registered afterwards, no ratings,
enters populated. Even though the cobe was supposed to prompt
both parties after every ride, the database obviously still held
these logs, even if the logic was meant to suppress them.
As I dug, more anomalies surface. Four rides from different cities,
each with their own invisible markers, clustered around holidays or
moments of heavy traffic. None ever appear aired in customer
receipts or driver dashboards. The logs stuck around like digital barnacles.
What a nerved me Most were the chat transcripts, while
most support chats are long exchanges but tips lost sunglasses,
phone chowgers. A few of these phantom rides had messages
one line rarely two from the driver handle. Each carried
a time stump long after normal support ires, and each
account was marked deleted, often within minutes afterscending one can
you see my route? She didn't get up? Another nothing
here but falk am madan one simply read is any
one there? He never left the car. The repetition wasn't accidental.
It felt like someone was improvising a distressed signal and
code space, looping it through right logic, hoping it would
slip through whatever digital erases swept the platform. Nightly, I
skimmed through the tripp distance fields. Each was anomalously lawn
or short summer zero point one miles. Others are two
hundred eight point seven faalties that couldn't possibly be correct.
Each ride showed no passenger review and no known payment method.
I ran a quick check in the driver I d
all wiped and I found in current pyrol and yet
their chat locks had been posted IROs, even days after
their own accounts were officially terminated. A cold ripple went
up my spine. I scrolled father back, quietly and suddenly tingling.
In my time at the company, I had swept up
plenty of strange locks, but these these felt less like
bugs than intentions. Iurs after midnight accounts there should have
been dead poking messages into voided channels, transcripts truncated, as
if some one listening on the other end had snipped
the feed. I copied the logs into a text file,
locking it twice with encryption. For the first time in years,
I felt the old ember of curiosity tinged not with excitement,
but with a twist of bread from my speakers. Static
kelt thinly through so faint I almost dismissed it. The
system clock ticked on, digital rain running down. Step, of course,
would not come easily. The next day I set myself
to solving the puzzle in ernest, not for the company's sake,
not even for personal pride, but for something more elemental,
an urge to reclaim order from this rolling hid and chaos. First,
I wrote a script to Crawford Ride's with the no
transit idea nominally, but also to correlate with deleted driver
and customer accounts. The result was growing table peppered with
rides and dozens of cities Miami, Seattle, Atlanta to run to,
always around midnight, always with payment indicators set TOANNEL, deep
diving into the transaction lolks. I cross checked ride creation
events with customer service pings. Most reel rights generated at
least one support for billing event, but the ghost rides
had nothing, no account creation IP, no devised fingerprint, not
even the expected customer support stub. Some now, these were
skirting the very frameworks built to keep arant rides from
polluting production. I ran a geolocation cluster analysis, mapping pins
for every ghost ride found. To my surprise, patterns bloomed
certain cities enter sore clusters every few months, rides lining
up like faint after images near major intersections, busy bus terminals, airports,
and almotas, whose names ranging bell like with the distant ache.
I highlighted three clusters that talented almost perfectly with publicized
cases from local news headlines, missing persons, open investigations, cold
case forms. Some clusters matched dates. When the company rolled
new infrastructure requests for older cloud archive data hit walls
privacy compliance, the response bart replied, even though I was
well inside the company's internal permission schema. I put in
the request again, marked as urgent, and waited. Tensions rose.
A fagged findings on a private's birdsheet hidden under a
benign file name. Small details glimmered in the data. When
the anomaly spiked, support locks showed redacted entries or ticket
closed with the terse reassigned, sometimes with no explanation at all.
Every time I checked, the interfish shivered like something resisting
being seen. I tried messaging and engineering leads, and oli
Rajan the only one I'd seen handle lager clean up jobs.
She replied minutes later with a clipped direct message, don't
waste time on zombie tickets. Stick to the scope. No
one wants audits. I wondered if she was brushed off genuinely,
or if it was a performance. Every one knows the
cost of prying too far. Thirty minutes after that, a
private message pinged into my inbox. The sender's handle was unfamiliar,
a string of numbers and admined at the end, one
I vaguely remembered from last year's ORDI now long transferred
or deleted. The message was only four words, stop following me.
I checked the handle last act three hundred seventy two
days ago. Had someone broken retention protocols or was this
an automated warning. If so, it was crafted to be
too human, too precise, No foniness in the spacing, no
outo corrections. The next day, my cloud storage ticket was
closed for cause, date and validation, no further explanation given.
I sat back, feeling as if the room was smaller.
The air gone heavy outside, cause crawled by head less,
like fish sliding beneath thick glass. There was a point
in all this whereto would have seemed melodramatic, a young
contractor haunted by digital shadows, evidence only half formed. But
in a quiet, hummy office, I felt watched in a
new way, as if my queers themselves pinged back to
some silent observer, immine to oudits and code reviews. The
pragmatic solution would have been to close out the logs,
wipe the spreadsheet, and let the ghosts recede. But the compulsion,
now urgent and compulsive, kept driving me deeper in the
dimness before I found a way to access a backpack
I've not yet loved. Behind the privacy fil it folders
bopped with right event packets, thousands of them, time stamped
in twenty four IRO rolls, some no longer reference by
any live dashboard, among them dark and archives. The Darken
files were brief ten seconds, some as short as for
the first video, taggert to a ghost ride and Philly
opened on a jitter of pixels, the camera lens smeared
by condensation neon lights running into rain outside a rear window.
The driver's fum glowed on the dash half way through
a passenger's that line appeared as slow at shoulders hunched
under a hoe face. A blue gray blow with a
lens never managed to focus. The figure stepped into the car,
a shadow among city shadows. The video ended abruptly with
the sound of the driver's seat creaking, nothing else. The
next two files from Rygiers Apart in Heuson and Minneapolis,
repeated the same effect. The passenger, identical frame, identical dark clothing,
same blurb, asage slipped into the back seat, torso shifting
out of focus. Then the feed cut dead, sometimes with
the static burst, sometimes with a dull, subsonic pop. There's
no way a single person could appeared in every city
across years, crossing impossible distances, but the outline never changed.
I ran facial detection, but the scanner crashed up with
a processing error. The forefile hung for several seconds before
halting on a frozen frame. At first, the image dissolved
into artifacted bands, the sound a thickening whisper, unintelligible, but
Rythick I suspected audio corruption, but as I looped the clip,
it resolved almost forming words are you there? It was loud,
barely a distortion, more suggestion and statement, but the cadence
fit the lines from the chat logs, the same hunger
at the same sense of someone knocking in a place
without doors. I stopped, a heart beating high in my throat.
The glow from the monitor painted the office is far
walpale gray shadows pulling in the corners. This was no
longer just a back end bug. No meridmins grew up,
but something stranger. Threads woven into dated by someone or
something using the infrastructure not to hide mistakes, but to
lay a mask over whatever was actually transpiring. If a person,
what use was all that effort, ficking rise, petted logs overwriting,
driver and passenger accounts were scrambling time d stamps and
identities dozens at a time. If not, what was his
face's passenger doing haunting the system through glitch, video and
echoing chat lines. The glow of the laptop delled as
I took my hands off the keyboard. I sat for
long minute, letting the last frame burone into my mind.
For the first time since starting remote work, I felt
truly watched a sense of some other presents, digital cold intent.
The Workham's green a led flickered for a split second,
then when dark, as if blinking, I pulled the power cord.
Let my eyes are just to the dark, far below
the city's hum stuttered something in the code or above
It was surveiling, maybe for years. When the chill faded,
I realized this wasn't but one ride or even a
rogue admin. It felt bigger, orchestrated, pride loose from the
skeleton of the company by invisible hands. And if the
company's own systems could be subverted so easily, then every ride,
every message, every EGOS event was a potential signal, one
side calling out, hoping to the acknowledge, or maybe warning
me to turn away. I lay awake for eyres, unable
to silence the imagined hums and shifting shadows leaking from
the edges of the glass. The next week, I chased
every ardity to ground time stamps, ride geo locasions, and
fragments of deleted chat locked mapped are on too spreadsheets
pasted into sprawling diagrams sprawling over my walls. I filtered
for the anonymised passenger's signature of the low statu key
blow captured in each figure. Musket strained at the edges
of the company's axis controls sometimes slow in or crashing,
always producing one or two more ghost rides than logic
search should be possible. Technical connections began to call less.
Certain ghost events unnoticed, always followed or preceded by administrative
overright locks. Users with high ranking admin privileges forcing rides
into production bypassing the ordinary locking protocols. Their ACXIS track
didn't survive, disappearing beneath at it exponge complete lines. Minutes afterwards,
certain locks de faced or shredded. Tracing these, I found
that at least three admins were listed as active subsequent
to official leaves or terminations. Proxy accounts perhaps or ghosts
within the ledger raced after each operation in support locks,
redacted names appeared alongside rides that lined up with missing
persons clusters. The more I searched, the more deliberate it seemed,
a web of operation, not accident, making sure everything rootless
vanished into code space, no matter how many safety checks
were built on top. It was only as I tried
exporting one last round of logs that things began abruptly
to disappear. My own nod AT traces began flickering out.
First at Field converted to null, then a support request
removed without ventcode, then entirely unsaved edits. The clipboard froze,
then the screen lot for a half second, only to reload,
missing half my work Slock notifications began pinging insistently dropped
this for priority tickets. I received private messages from HR,
escalated by a system alert escalation pot warning that continued
access attempts to deprecate the logs may result in disciplinary action.
I didn't reply. Instead, I set up a screen chair
so all my work would save locally. One evening, as
midnight drew close, I returned to my desktop to find
my work comes led flickering out of time, on off,
on twice per second for a minute, then off again.
The audio feed hissed softly, even with all inputs muted,
as if oldwires were decaying through my motherboard. The failing
of being watched wasn't paranoida so much as certainty. Not
surveillance by the company exactly, but by some process inside
the machine, a gaze that flickered wherever the data trailed
out of sight, waiting to catch anyone who noticed. I
knew there'd be a point of no return, but by
then it felt inevitable. The obsession took on a physical toll.
Every night that week, I slept lesser work more packet
logs were freshed in the background, timing scripts running on
a separate devices. If one instance crash, the other might survive.
I started preparing to watch in real time to see
if the ghost rides spun up on schedule. Friday night,
the system clock dragged past eleven thirty five p m.
A mug of black coffee steamed at my elbow, the
only warmth in the room. I checked my local machine,
made sure the video capture script was aggregating right events
director backup drive disconnected from Wi Fi except for a
single ethnet feed. I watched the right creation logs roll
in minute by minute. By eleven fifty eight p m.
The sweat on my wrist turn cold. No obvious anomalies,
just routine glitches, support tickets drifting quietly to resolved. At
exactly midnight, the feet hickepped. A red notification swelling in
the corner of my monitor. New ride event, no transit
ID flagged from an LA address, a passenger field null.
The driver d three ACE in minutes one nine. Without waiting,
I forced the video feed live scraping daff can data
until the transfer nearly locked up. My arim Simultaneously, my
phone buzzed with a coal blocked no number. A froze.
I let the call go to vorsemail, but the phone
buzst again, insistent. The line opened besil it, white noise streaded,
the line laced with the distant flutter of highway wind
and small waped syllables repeating beneath it. In one brief surge,
A caught is anyone there? On the monitor, the dash
and feet popped up for the first time. The video stabilized.
A passenger entered the car, face pixelated, but beneath the
shuttering video distortion the features shop and just for an
instant they looked exactly like me, not similar, in near
perfect match, the same bent of browt the mouth tents
and wary a jacket I owned, a gesture I remembered
from Choudhood. Face flickered, glitched, warped, then snapped back. The
video began dissolving. The voice no odder, do you remember
who you're driving? The mouse locked, pointer frozen mid air,
A screen clays gray, then black. An automatical log at
dialog appeared. Company access revoked a single frozen framessured my
own face watching me from inside the spectral car. And now,
as the monitors called, I could see my own reflection, warrant,
pale and yet not quite alone, peering back at me
from the dim screen. The hum of the apartment felt
suddenly immense, like the breathing of some huge, invisible presence
just at the edge of perception. I sat shivering, the
taste of metal in my mouth, the city's lights below
flickering like insistent warning beacons lost in rain. Whatever I'd
found it had seen me too. And now as the
silence wrapped itself around the room, the line wherever it ended,
whoever was really waiting, was still open. And now, as
the silence wrapped itself around the room, the line wherever
it ended, whoever was really waiting, was still open. I
sat motionless for a long time, uncertain on or how
to move. Details of the office pressed themselves into unlikely shortness.
A faint scuff on the far wall, the two warm
plastic beneath my palm, the sigh or haze of old
coffee in the air. Screen after screen behind me shimmered
in the sleep modes, a shifting constellation of blinking indicator lights.
The tremor in my hands finally stared, but my heartbeat
hammered at the base of my throat, a stubborn, stuttering
echo of what had just happened. It took me a
moment to close the laptop, needing to feel the solid
click beneath my fingers, anything to mark at the session
they encounter. Whatever that truly was, had physically completely under
I sat back listening. The old fridge clicked and conked
in the kitchen, but the interior hush of the office deepened,
almost a dull roar. I couldn't shake the thought that
the hum in the air, a pressure building behind it,
was not just the ordinary residue of lost sleep or strain.
It was as though someone invited frequency long buried in
the white noise of my nights at, tuned to my presence,
and was now waiting for a new signal. When my
phone vibrated again, one brief met a tremor, I nearly jumped,
But this time there was no call, no repeated a
only a background system notification of mist event. I picked
it up, thumb hesittin on the screen, checking the locks,
I saw a small gap in a coal register. Just
a blank time stamp with a right up should have
annotated what happened. No audio left in the mail books.
The interface itself had recorded nothing but an empty, cold duration,
as though the entire exchange was meant to leave no trace.
The room grew smaller the longer I sat. I gathered
up the few things that brought me comfort by having
the mark, the familiar weight of my own keyring, a
worn hoodie draped over the back of the chair. I
slid the locks on my door into place, almost mechanically,
feeling the tension linger between surface common the sense that
some one somewhere within the infrastructure had finished waiting and
found me at last. When I tried to sleep, the
city's ambient sound trick offered no help. I lay on
my side, back to the window, the blue after image
of my own face from the ruined video still burned
into my vision. I listened to every stray sound, plumbing
shifting through the walls, a neighbor's dog barking twice and
then falling silent, the distance, soft clatter of an elevator
long after midnight. I counted the seconds between no sounds,
as if curating absences could restore the clean lines of
my old routine, but I knew better. I mourning, some
sense of self preservation began to assert itself. I walked
to the usual barrage of corporate emails, bulk reminders about
new VPN protocols and automate in metrics report pinging congratulations
and bold at the header, but nothing specific about my
revoked access. It struck me as deliberate that omission. If
I checked my status in the directory, I was still active,
with no recorded issues, and yet every attempt to access
even the basic internal dashboard resulted in a bland authentication error.
Call support. That pop up said, if you feel this
is an error. There was no way I would do that.
What would I say? My screen showed my own face
in a ride that shouldn't exist, that a shadow in
the data was both me and not me, and a
system I'd supposedly mastered had in some unknown way turned
around to study me instead. Instead, I tried to gather
some sense of the outside world to pull myself back
into context. My mother's daily email arrived, as usual, a
fojo of her grinning next to a recipe card offering
good energy for my busy work, I replied, as if
nothing had changed, refusing to see even a hint of
worry into her morning on Slack, the background conversations flowed on,
others discussing remote work allowances, snippet jokes, plans for the weekend.
For a while, I let myself drift on that stream,
pretending nothing had split. I tried to contact Sonali, the
engineering lead, through her alternate chat handle. No response. I
checked again hours later, her profile had gone dame status
marked us out of office. A nake, stubborn and bitter
settled behind my eyes. It was as if I dreamed
one level too deep and everyone else had moved on,
leaving me cast a fault line no one else could sense.
Walking outside helped, but only a little. The city poured
by in its ordinary rush, by couriers, sioux clad office workers,
passing cargo trucks, rattling the sidewalk. I tried to read
meaning into the patterns of traffic, wondering if any of
the unmarked carse iidling at red lights belonged to ride
their drivers drawn by the same glitches. I chased to
the end of their curd But nothing out of the ordinary,
stared back at me. Nobody seemed to hold their phone
the way drivers dead famming its greens for quick support
tickets or ride details. The sense of being watch shifted
as the day wore on. Instead of the unmitirectional awareness
that had haunted the office, man's eye is sharpened into
more targeted focus. Every time I checked a phone notification,
I half expected another mist event, a blank time SAMP,
or a messag that wasn't really a message at all.
I deleted and reinstalled the ride app check or permissions
white pash data repeatedly. Still nothing new surfaced. Maybe I
thought the system had pulled back. Maybe I had become
just another oddity in the nightly packet sweeps seemed to
be ignored in erase by design. By early afternoon, my
body ache from tension, I returned to my old routine,
small chores in the kitchen, windows opened for a sliver
of ress air, the white noise of podcasts filling the silence.
Whenever my mind wandered too close to the edge of panic.
I were cataloged my save files and encrypted the most
sensitive ones, keeping back ups off line. But part of
me knew the essential evidence the real encounter had already
slipped into a realm out side proof. For a while,
I addled on message bars and open bug trackos, tracing
almost absent mindedly the subtle patterns that sometimes polls through
the gig economy's technical subculture. There in fragments were hence
I had missed before a thread from six months back
about zero payment ghost rides in Toronto. Astray complained about
admin exi scrat slipping endlessly in the back end of
a now acquired small ride app. Quiet unanswered question in
a forum for support reps. Has anyone else ever had
a deleted driver ping for help after midnight? The posts
didn't connect a freight, but their rhythms matched my own
list of unease, covert heart beat inside the architecture. In
an impulse that felt like crossing a forbidden threshold, I
messaged an older into Gracie wants a backhand developer for
a rival platform, now freelancing on short term AP projects.
I kept the message cautiously vague, phrasing it as a
technical conderary ever seen ride logs with orphan chat lions,
ghosted writer ID, zero payment, come up late, linger then
get expunged without a trace. I weeded, she replied with
a single emojia raised my brow. Then a question, is
this about those weird spikes around two minutes three? And
we used to call them phantom packets at RYDZ. If
that much was both soothing and deeply troubling, the pattern
was unique to my company. It was perhaps more widespread
than any one team, any one app My sense of
isolation cracked open another inch, but so did the realization
if it was systemic, my options were narrowing by the
eyre the hard drive hum beneath my desk, a low
and patient room. In a moment of impulse, I ran
my old network monitor, a little piece of kit I
had cobbled together years ago, designed to catch an omalus
at bound connections from personal devices. I ran it twice,
then a third time for certainty. Every sweep checked out clean.
No signal eavn my network that I couldn't account for,
no odd pangs from the router. Yet I knew, with
a kind of animal certainty, that the signal i'd let
her no longer needed my outbound port to track me.
It had my keys already. That was the shape of
my new normal, perpetual low level vigilance the neater book
catalog and quarantined the strange and amounting awareness that the
most dangerous lines in my world were not physical but
digital cuts in the coat through which a present might slip,
appearing as both glitch and ghost. Late in the evening,
after dinner, I sat by the window for a while,
pohone cradled in my lap, watching the city's lights dim
and shift from time to time. The faint green light
of the router blinked steady, but never quite in rhythm
with its usual pulse. I watched for so long it
almost seemed to sink with the cadence of my breath, steady,
then a hithmic, then steady again. At some point I
found myself staring not at the blinking light, but at
my own reflection in the window. The room behind me,
a blurred geometry of bookshelves, screen edges, and the faint
outline of a chair, reminded me uneasily of the dash conpidire,
the me who watched and the mea who was watched,
separated only by glass. A night, the spell broke with
the sound of a corrod door someway below, the heavy
thunk echoing up the side of the building and then fading.
I almost laughed at the jump in my nose. Just
a neighbor, surely, or one of the endless gap drivers
pulled up for a fair no one would mark or remember.
Yet I could not quite dismiss the notion that if
I stood upright then and looked down, I might see someone, know,
some echo of myself sitting inside a waiting car, caught
between a rival and departure, waiting for a signal from
a line that never truly closed. I closed the blinds
and returned to the soft, insistent light of my phone,
the last barrier against the strangling silence of the room.
That night, Even the city's distant murmurs couldn't quite mass
the sense of the line still quietly open, waiting for
its next message, waiting perhaps for me to reply. Morning
brought no relief. The first thing I saw after opening
my eyes after the hot, gut gnawing tumble of too
little sleep, was the soft, consistent glow of my phone.
Even before I reached for it. No skittered under my skin,
the remembered ghost image on last night's dast come already
rising through my thoughts. I checked for notifications. Nothing but
the bland impersonal churn of bulk emails, a new round
of password rotation reminders, and a single unread message from
a delivery service left unopened. Company acts as still dead.
My dashboard ide struck out, but without any flag or note.
I tried logging into a secondary portal in a last
gasp of habit, and got nothing but the same flat
authentication failure, effective exile. It was raining, real heavy rain
to day, not the digital drizzle from the hiss in
my headphones. It patted against the mush window by my desk,
tracking down the glass in wavering sheets. I sat for
a long while, hands wrap around the kettle mug, willing
the warmth to chase away the after image of my
own feast from the video of the one that shouldn't
logically exist. Each tick of the radiod brought my focus
back to the room, remote and small, as if I
were already half way into the skeleton of a kope
is no longer being serviced. The city outside, shecharned, is
always the traffic, the distant roll of bus wheels over
wet pavement, the kinning of impatient horns. They all pressed in,
mundane and safe. The only parts of the day I
could trust. I scared my inbox, found nothing but automated noise,
and checked personal messages. An old friend had sent me
my years before, deliberately silly or reach across the silence.
It didn't help My reply, a half hearted thumbs uplanded
like gravel in my palm. Restlessness was a posture. My
body remembered well. My foot bounced under the desk as
I re read the chat lines I captured. He never
left the car. Can you see my route? Am I
den The phrasing was too specific, the pattern too careful
to dismiss as a practical jerk by some underpaid junior
death with access to prad. My own presence doubled, now
immortalized in the feinnt outline burned on a dash comb screen,
hovered at the edge of every task. Some time before noon,
the door buzzer startled me, A froze breath caught until
the second bus came longer urgent. The livery the confirmation
text once I checked my phone offered no comfort to
just parcel at your building, contactless drop off. I opened
the door anyway, peering down the narrow carpeted hallway, half
expecting to see someone waiting. There was only a small
cardboard package, bubble wrapped and sealed with brown tape. I
hesitated before picking it up, fingers light in the edges,
the memory of the overnight warnings running quick and cold
in my head. Still, I brought it in, set it
on the kitchen counter, eying the corners for any avis
hampering or identify from the company. Not then just my
name spelled Wright, no return label. I let the package
in touch for an hour, circling my kitchen, pretending to
make breakfast. A low grade anxiety pulsed under everything, like
the hush of silver fans just before sudden shut down.
My mind drifted through possibilities, a legal letter, a second warning,
some of the little joke meant to tip a nervous
contractor into panic. It was only after the aged went
rubbery in the pan that I toiled the tape free
inside a burner. Fahn already powered on screen active with
the unmistakable Ride Company app opened and waiting. The display posed.
A ride request flag is appending the timer counting down
from nineteen forty three hours until midnight. It was an
explicit invitation, no note, no context, only the device warm
in my hand, almost as if it had recently been
pressed by some one else's palm. With the phone came
a passport sized envelope, empty before a torn scrap of
paper printed in block texts You're next in line. I
dropped the envelope, wiped my hands on my jeans, then
checked my own phone from messages for friends or family,
some proof that this was still the world. I knew
nothing unusual. Yet when I put my original phone beside
the burner, it buzzed once, showing a glitch notification and
readable text, half symbols vanishing. The second had tried to
screene on it. There was no doubt now, not even
a shout of plausible deniability. The company, some part of it,
or whatever move beneath wasn't done with me. Whether this
was intimidation, call to action, or a test, I couldn't say,
but the stakes had shifted out of the digital and
into the reel. I looked down at my hands and
found them trembling just slightly, the nails dull against the
marrow line. A wave of Nasser rose. This was the
evidence I'd needed. The proof of the story wasn't only
in my head yet. It was proof that threatened me
with silence, not resolution. A slow, thin dread spread through
my body, as if every point of contact, every axis badge,
every system login, every ride home I had ever taken
could be a weak scene pressed to open, revealing something
at watch, but never truly left. Long after, when the
rain eased and moonlight creased through the clouds, I let
myself feel something like resolve. My isolation was now my
best offense. Nobody to threaten accept me, no one else
in the chain of custody. But it also made escape, deniability,
even forgetfulness impossible. I started I disconnecting every smart device
in the apartment, speakers, back parutters, the unused office phone,
even the smart bulb in the bathium went dark under
at them. Only the laptop and the two phones remained,
each isolated in different rooms, the bernofhones battery taking downward
and tiny and hurried increments. It was like waiting for
a question I knew had already been decided for me
after I was lost, pacing, waiting for a warning, a knock,
a new message that failed to arrive. By brooded in
the kitchen, staring at chipped groat lines and letting no
weight of potential choices constrict in my chest. If the
bernophone's ride request was a threat, it was also a
trace some one else had set and prepared it. The system,
whatever else it claimed, acknowledged my place in line, but
it implied there was something beyond a latice work of events, accounts, sights,
and actions moving on their own schedule. I picked up
the phone and dialed out, first to my old friend
Grace's number, then to a journalist whose work on day
to disappearances i'd respected from of OAR. No answer on
either front, just for smell prompts and blank echoing silences
at the ends of the rings. I left, careful in
direct messages who want to talk create digital anomalies, rideshair
app not urgent but important, and knowing any one listening
would find them harmless. Knowing too that the chances of
actual help within evening came and the cities rhythmed into
a harder, faster pulse. I closed my laptop, moved it
to a drawer, and carried the Berner phone from room
to room like a totem. I checked windows blinds. The
people on the front door, shadows below had always looked
the same, Now I couldn't help but count the number
of cause idling within sight, the slow drift and rollbuck
of the brick lights, as if some untold number of
drivers were waiting for signals not meant for me. The
paranoia was not just in the wires now, it was
in the air itself. My hands remained cold, my breath
came shorter than I wished. When I pressed my fingers
against the wall, I felt, or imagined I felt the
shuddering hum of all pipes rising, and barely perceptible vibration
at ghost resonance I going through dry wall and code.
I thought for a moment of calling the police, reporting
the delivery as harassment. But what would I say that
the support upon an ad traceable phone told me I
was an ex that a message in a blank chat
line had worn me off on behalf of some one invisible.
Any official would shrug, and the real line, or whatever
it was, wherever it extended, would remain safe and attached. Instead,
I did what I had long done best. I turned
back to the data. If I couldn't turn into the system,
I turned to the shadows on its edges. By eight
p m. I had written a small croller on my
old offine machine, a safe box never connected to my work,
a contingency from contracts passed in half Together Pathen I
threw together a scraping tool for public endpount data and
ride receipts posted on open social barb trackers and support forums.
The code sifted through hashtag's BOLOGG posts, tip rumbles, easer
complaints collated from every platform I knew. Patching together ghost
ride effidence wherever it bled into the public Internet, patterns
emerged the raw shapes only half hidden by corporate obsercation.
Ride data posted from Kansas City with the same knull
driver zero payments stamp as I had seen before above
report from Seattle about repeated completed a ride between one
two a m with no mapestry. A message on an
obscure rye gia forum varied and took support language about
dead driver id ping lifelong after those accounts went dark.
It was everywhere. Once I stopped thinking of it as
a unique event, I cross referencing locations, ride types, and frequencies.
I confirmed at least six major U S city sole
clusters of similar ghost roads on the same dates, circling
the same pattern I had mapped in private. The platform
specific details didn't always match, some marked as a test environment,
others as admin over either, but the events signatures carried
a familiar stink. Events built to vanish from customer and
driver views, yet marked by backend anomalies. Only the unlucky
or persistent noticed. I posted to a forum under a
throwaway handle, any one tracking midnight rides with invisible ID,
missing people, no transaction logs. The reply was at first
only silence, but as the clock drifted toward nine thirty,
a message which blink into my private channel you aren't
alone file sent look for the ZP. The message was
from someone using a press avatar, Julie f whose bylines
I'd followed for a year. She suggested a video call,
citing safety concerns. Never meet in person, virtual only you
of something, show me what you have, but cover your camera.
Lots of noise right now. I accepted, turning off my camera,
encrypting everything. Before the call, Julia's voice was brisk, almost
soothing in its directness. We've tracked three similar clusters New Jersey,
ausin oakund If you found a ride lock, don't trust
the dashboards. Admins disappear with the blows go dark. You're
right to stay offline. There was a pause, then she
spoke more quietly. Rides always bike around, vanished names, never
the same operators, but the same logic. Something's co ordinated,
as if you see warning stops, or at least find
a safe way to save your evidence. The conversation lasted
seven minutes, most of it filled with terse questions, hardware
used log's ark out what I'd seen in the video.
She confirmed several clusters matched disputed city zones, edges of transit, hobs,
outskirts of airports, places where bodies in vehicles came and
went with little record kept. Our last source vanished after
posting about a midnight ride near the bus station. She said,
no trace after that except a single deleted chatlock. We
ended the call with little resolved, but the shared a
tension gave me a perverse reassurance. There were others who
had touched the edges of the story, their voices thin
but not yet raised. It was close to midnight. I
sketched the vectors on a notepad. Ride clusters, chat anomalies, dates, locations.
I drew lines and then more cross referencing with missing
persons data a new hunch to crute, urgent and bright.
In my mind, the anomalies weren't only a smoke screen.
They were a communication, yes, but also a mask of
veil that allowed something large and network of oversight and
disappearance to move and scene. My phone buzzed, a flinched
an not a blank notification, content already deleted. My hands
achedrol from gripping the pencil, the tight circles of what
carving tension through muscle and tendon nowhere to go, nothing
to do except keep rowing the lines. When I finally
asked myself what to do next, the answer came bluntly.
I had to find proof, linking the admins to something real,
to living, breathing people who might still be out there,
or to whoever or whatever orchestrated a disappearance. The burner
phone waited, screen dimmed. I placed it face down on
the table, willing away the compulsion to check the ride
request timer. But the numbers still crept into my thoughts.
Thirteen IROs, twelve IROs, ten hours until it would vanish
into the same nowhere as all the others. In the
thick hush of late night, after the rain had faded
and the radiator. It was taken down. I returned to
the problem in the way familiar to any backend analyst,
traced the hands that set the system in motion by
following the permissions that shouldn't have existed. I compiled a
short list of no nadmin of rides from leapd dog
charts and old employee records, scraping, LinkedIn and glassed or
for names that matched the patterns in my clusters. The
handful of profiles I found shared a peculiar trait. All
had been terminated or retired within a week or two
of a disappearance surge, Each marked as left the company
for personal reasons, or a line that stood up seeking
opportunities outside the transport sector. Emails to official addresses bounced predictably,
but one attached to a Southwest city cluster returned not
a system era but a sudden silent paying a single
message my spam folder on red friars until I spotted it.
The subject line re midnight this is all I have.
Attachment identified as logs corrupted seven hundred twenty one zip
fourteen m B, sent from a mass server. Opening it
was a calculated risk. I ran it. It gaped extracting
only the text files, scanning for identifiable information before opening anything,
even assembling executable code inside thousands of lines, most of
them garbled head a clutter, but buried within were fragments
of chat locks. Some showed the same soccado distress pick up,
failed cancel, ride, passenger not found. Others were more concrete,
linked with forced ride cancelations. As the IP code clusters
that matched recent missing persons reports I had already compiled.
The rhythm was clear. A spiking ghost rice an abmin
override event than a user count obliterated and removed from
payroll message out of existence, each trace excised except for
the bare hidden log residual after at each cluster, the
admin accounts were erased two not simply disabled, but shredded,
wiped from back, sometimes even flagged as never existed by
HR systems, as if handlers expunged themselves from the ledger
after a prodained number of operations. The horror of it
was not only the scale, but the cold efficiency. Whatever
moved through the system did so deliberately, one step ahead
of audits, patching over the trail with automation, covering every
track with plausible deniability the messages themselves reinforced the truth.
No fare received tonight, I am ready to close out.
The handler says job done, new lobbed Morrow, the leaving
behind passenger I descrambled. They sounded almost ritualistic. The tolling
bellfer process bound out last any one identity or name.
I pieced together anew, darker hypothesis that the network itself
was cyclical, living inside the machine, shifting riders and drivers
and masks as needed, and when a handler's work in
a city was done, they walked for a vanish leaving
nothing but syndetic gerror's chat echoes and the faintest ghost
of a presence on some one else's screen, though almost
still eyes away and outside the window. The city's tempo
had dropped to a slow wheeling coal hadlets wandering the
streets with animal patients. In my mind, calculations ran and
checked how much was automation, how much human intent, and which,
if either, was more rightening to confront. My next move
felt inevitable. I dressed in the dull comfort of jeans
and a black hoodie, set the beronophone into my pocket,
and descended the stairs to tree level for the first time.
The day, the rye closters, this mat lay thickest nearer
the old transit hobs. Places where pickets lingered long after
the last bus departed, Where drivers waited with empty cows,
staring blank and solitary at arrival gates. It was easier
and practiced to blend in and adfered. I walked the
unnamed block, circling the station, sipping coal coffee from a
disposable cup, scanning faces for any flicker of recognition or intent.
Several Rideia cars circled without purpose, windows rolled up, drivers
scanning their own glowing screens, the vacant chemistry of anticipation
and boredom in their postures. Some moved on, picking up
a light passenger or pausing at a yellow crab, but
a few remained long after any rational fairs should have arrived.
One car parked under a faulty lamp showed the same
rhythm I'd seen in the dash can files. Lights on
car and park, no passenger entering or leaving the driver.
A medium built man in a faded jacket sat silent,
his hands drumming time on the wheel and small anxious ticks.
His phone glowed bright, unreadable from the opposite sidewalk, but
from his expression at tired vacancy, as if awaiting instructions
from elsewhere, there could sense both wariness and resignition. I
watched him for nearly an ire at tolved a m
A flicker ran through his dash camp For a moment,
I thought I saw a shadow shift in the back seat,
but there was no one visibly there. A low hum,
almost anaudible, rolled from his open window, snatch of staticky audio,
pulsing and then fading. After four more minutes, he pulled away,
turning not toward the highway, not toward local streets, but
down a service alley and into darkness. I tried to pursue,
but by the time I reached the corner, the car
had vanished. A hollow e settled in my bones. I
circled the block, looking for any sign of security cameras,
but most of Sticker's warning of footage recycled every twenty
four a for your privacy, and the last two I
passed their lenses broken or taped. I caught my own
face reflected briefly in a nearby store front, not just
fatigua lastitude of the soul, as if the city's night
had snuck in through my eyes and found a deep
place to hide. I shook it off, walked back toward
the bus terminal, but the street was emptying fast. Every
taxi and rye check gun elsewhere by the time I
turned back toward home. In the iro that followed, I
double checked my phone in the burner, then my phone again.
Each time interference seemed to pulse up, audio popping softly
in my apiece go His statical in cost a net
were creed out, battery indicators dipping by small, impossible increments,
as if their life spans were being quietly measured up
and siphoned away. Back in the apartment, after shutting and
chaining the door, I waited, expecting another shooter drop nothing.
For a moment, the tat sparal of vigilance held, and
then with no warning, nightmares tumbled in abandoned reds lupinianously
in dark city spaces, my own hands on a stirring wheel.
I'd never touched, an invisible passenger whispering can you see
my route? He never left the car. When I woke,
adrenaline still hot under my skin. The sun had hardly
climbed above the sky line. A delivery alert flushed on
both fawns, though I'd ordered nothing. I opened the door
to the landing, but nothing waited there, only the faint
scent of ozum, the hush of the rising wheat day floor,
A city ready to remake itself in you, unaware of
the digital web spun tight across its lights. I power
up my machine, running security checks on every file, every
scrap of coppered lock. No immediate breach, but the atmosphere
was thick with through it. I cracked open the burner
only to find the ride request timer done to a
few minutes, the right still appending, still in my name,
the addresses out of block north of my own. I
considered again calling for help, family, police, anyone, But even
if I could make them believe me, nothing about what
had happened was illegal in any technical sense. There was
nothing tangible to show them. The burner buzzed, screened, flickering
as a new message spoiled out. Were waiting. Don't let
the line fall dead. I hurriedly changed every password I possessed,
raise personal histories, toggle two factor authentication on every surviving account.
It felt like building a sand barricadegainst an incommuntide as
evening thicken, a wave of exhaustion set in. I lay
on my back, skin prickling, and mapped the theory in
my mind, tracing consequence from belief to proof and back again.
It sounded at one's uprageous and irrefutable ghost fright, as
camouflage for organized deduction, knock of her disappearance, orchestrated or
enabled by high level adminment population. Each cycle clans by
systematic local rasure and the erasure of the erases. No
wallet entries, no driver permanence, no human witnesses except me, perhaps,
and only if I survived the night. The network, I realized,
was a hydra. Each had growing anyw as another was cut.
Every ride, creation and override was a moving part. Each
hand THEO tasked to erase them cells to prevent detection,
cycling digital phantoms through expired ID and vanished points. Now
even my own audit locks were gone. Years of digital
presents and authority swept up by a system less concerned
with just as them, of a cursive clanting. If I
was lucky, I'd stay below the line, a bug not
worth patching out. If I was unlucky, the call or
the ride would arrive from me, and my place in
line would come do. It was nearly midnight when I
decided I'd flip the script, force the confrontation, and record everything,
even if it came to nothing. With the bernarfone pulsing,
the ride request time is snapped to zero, a silent
push notification your riders here. I closed my laptop, making
sure recording scripts, funnel databases and video to encrypted cloud
storage with a secondary backup. I pocketed both pawns, stepped
into the night and walked up the block, breth shallow,
the cold slipping beneath my shirt. At the curb outside
an abandoned pawn shop, a right chair car waited with
engine running, windows dark. The make and model which generic
enough to belong to anyone's Silver Compact, nothing to note,
and yet it was unmistakable. The carmeas signed ride ID
Tracey times dump for midnight with a D three Swamness
one one as a driver account. I paused at the
edge of the curb, half stuttering. Nobody sat visibly behind
the wheel, but the interior glow of dash man to
phone eliminated the empty cabin. The ride app I come
pulsing like a warning, summoning the remains of my nerve,
I stepped forward, thumbed the handle, and slipped into the
back seat, closing the door behind. Inside, the out was colder,
still heavy, with the scent of vinyl and some faint
earthy cologne. The dashboard was a perfect recreation of company issue,
the foreign clip to the vent displaying the system I
knew too well, their ghost ride events, erre payment, no
passenger identifier. A moment later, the dashboard came alive, flickering
with banded lines. The radio whined softly, then stuttered. From
the distorted speakers, came a glitching fore worries fragmented, but
with the cadence I've recognized from the chat logs. YE
shouldn't be here. Too late to exit? I steadied my
breathing started, my phone camera concealed behind my thigh, red
record light barely visible in the darkness. Where are we going?
I asked voice? Even the replies spilled from the speaker
crackled and doubled. An echo line open to lead or
join the screen flash a white box blimming with the
same blurred silhouette I'd seen in the dat come at
one stringer yet familiar, shifting restlessly at the edge of vision.
The cars shifted into gear, apparently on atopilots, pulling away
from the coat, randing one corner then another, weaving a
route through sleeping city blocks that made no geographic sense.
Lights passed by outside, but streets looked empty, blank, expanse,
with no sign of human life. Traffic signals held green
as we drifted slowly through, as if time had bent sideways.
The ride app demanded input. A button flashed, Eggsit now
or acknowledge? I pressed neither, committing to pure observation. Hands
pressed to my knees, ever, muscle quaking in the blankness
of the mirrors, A face solidified, not the driver, not
visible except as reflection a familiar outline, the city coggestion
of my own feature sculpted and flickering overlay, watching me
from within and beyond. The radio voice pulsed, do you
remember who you were driving? When I reached for the door,
a soft mechanical snickel locked it in place, the dashboard
into his flask one last time dullies were join. I
didn't answer. I whirled myself outwardly, calm, every sense thrumming
with alarm. At last, the ride Drusloe crept to the
curb where I'd started and stopped. The car powered down, light, flickering,
dashboard going dark. The screen on my phone, which I'd
used to record, went blank, the video arc I've dissolving
to static. The burner phone now showed only an empty
home screen. All ride history gone. I staggered out, hot
clawing at my rib and stood back under the city's
pale sodium glare as I watched the car idle for
a full minute before sliding away, vanishing at the corner.
No trace in the street, nothing but my own breath
fogged in the air, the echo of the ghostly radio
voice still whispering in the back of my skull. All
evidence of the rider raced itself under my eyes. I
checked my phone once twice, three times. No art of fact,
no trace, only the blank, defaut wallpaper, as if I
had simply stepped up for air and missed any connection
to the line. As I walked back up the stairs,
leg shaking, I held tightly on to the fading thumbal
print out from the chet lock, the only persistent physical
artifact left in my pockets. The world around me returned buzzers, flickers,
a single car passing on the avenue, but the boundary
between digital and reel had blurred beyond repair. Back in
the apartment, I sat at the old wooden table, looking
down at my two fonds and white lap up. The
city below yawned open, indifferent to my terror, the hum
of its machinery echoing what I had learned but could
never quite prove. In that moment, I understood I had
seen one layer of the net, only the outer most skin.
The network was deeper, self repairing, erasing vets the moment
they touched anything vital. My own sorry was now only
another art fact, half visible from the back end, a
red badge denominally no one would choose to open. And
yet my hands still moved, stubborn and deliberate, as I
annotated everything I knew and pushed it out encrypted, shuffled
to every secure drop I'd memorized from me as a
digital life, I sent my report to where it might matter,
journalists advocates, the handful of friends who would recognize a
warning when they saw it. Then I shut everything off,
powered down, pulled the curtains tight. A final one line
text rolled in just as I was about to slide
my phone away. Is any one there? He never left
the car. The words pulsed softly on the screen, the
audio line humming with faint, familiar static. I saw reflected
in the glass of when now darkened, that upper blurred,
half formed figure hovering behind my left shoulder, the same
soil which shaded and dash and blue. I looked up.
The fine hair is on my arms rising, and understood
then that the line no longer needed a call to
keep itself open. On the other end, something was always listening.
On the other end, something was always listening. For several
long moments, my reflection wouldn't release me. My own outline
laid with half seen figure details warping and fading each
time I blinked. I set the phone face down, but
its screen glowed through the table's grain and electronic candle.
Guttering against sleep. I breathed with careful deliberation, pulse strumming
in my ears, waiting for the silence to fray, with
the line to drop dead. At last, it didn't. The
city outside my window began to stir and sure in
the distant bark of a CAB's horn. When shivering lose
a stray branch against bricks. But my world had collapsed
to the four feet between me and the backs of
my devices, a place where evidence evaporate, calls and spoiled
into static, and the boundary between being the watcher and
the watch had burned away. I forced myself upright, rolling
my shoulders against the egg of adrenaline, and spent terror
everything from the day before in the night's encounter in
a car wredoors click shirt and ryse sal for RaSE
to plead back and footmented sensory loops, the vinyl's chill,
the digitized voices shredded logic, the impossible familiarity of the
passenger blowed in mirrored glass. It was all gone, save
the final anonymous text and a print house much limp.
I sweat. If I became a missing entry nex. If
the network targeted me, no proof du't last the ire
I felt both singled out and indistinguishable, and note on
some hidden graph relevant only so long as I kept
the thrid in motion. There was, by necessity work left
to do. Survival instinct hollowed a path through dread, and
I seized it. Stood, poured a glass of tap water,
set it carefully on the table, I reviewed the chain
of messages, logs, corrupt a chat edits. I mapped connections
with lyone zadmin departures, right spikes, unreachable drivers, linking my
closest points of certainty. I locked every file with new passwords,
triple checked my cloud drawbendpoints, and ran a final virus check.
Though I suspected no code would catch the thing settling
over my system. Now, when the sun edged a little higher,
I finally composed an encrypted packet with everything I knew.
The clusters, the override logs, the dash conframes that had
nearly worn my face, the hypothesis of a raised hand,
those cycling through new shells as easily as rolls in
a script, each point nested behind layers of keys, routed
through anonymous uploader, as sewn in books. As I hoped Julia,
Gracie or some one else would reach my still monitor
With a thumb and numb from tension, I distributed it.
Every minute that passed without blowbacks did a different note
of panic. If my signal was meant to vanish, it
now existed in a dozen ghost places, hard to trace,
hard or still touries completely. I comfort if a frail one.
The act of sending was both anti climax and necessity.
I found the old and accountable exhaustion crashing around my shoulders,
and after burn of two Manday nights spent monitor in
quiet lines and assembling tenuous conspiracies. The apartment fell back
to quiet, above the stretching for folds of a neighbor
beside faint music filtering from someone's streaming playlist. I leaned
against the kitchen counter and monitored the notifications. No new messages.
I checked slack out of refects, discovering that my company
Loggin now registered as an act of contact it my
contract or email wants a scrape of reassuring normalcy had
been suspended, so had graces. A handful of names in
my network flickered off linked in over the course of
an hour, profiles going private or evaporating, as though their
runs had split at the fire door, not bothering to
turn off the lights on my phone, ryde chhair alert ceased.
Not a single pin for incoming rides, no safety reminders,
not even a survey request for apuse satisfaction. My presence,
I realized, was being blotted out systematically, almost gently, as
if the network were smoothing over wrinkles rather than issuing thrips.
That evening, I walked outside through her heavy with sprain,
the sety movement, concerned, oblivious, a parade of ignition, sparks
and tail lights, a few block part as pulsing the
shallow correctable joy. Yet every sliding car, every rycher decal
glowing in then and night struck me now as both
participant and confederate in the machinery. At glimpsed, I unplugged
everything not essential. I taped over the camera lens again,
even though the green nelide had not blinked since my
system blacked out. In a final ride, I unplugged the
smart speaker. When I made tea. The squeal of the
kettamask den certain discouring in my head. With nothing left
to monitor, I existed in the prison tense for a while,
phone on airplane mode, lopped up, stuffed in a drawer.
Only the physical acts of day to day endurance left
within reach. For days, nothing happened. The story didn't boil
up in headlines, no expressey, no law enforcements sweep Surely
as use, an end disappeared from every contact sheet I'd
known the one anonymous in which should share a bounced
with an undeliverable court exceeded error. I watched a ride
sharing apps in public app stores for changes to go
for user reviews, for signs of new errors crawling uproard,
but there were none of just the same complaints but
weight times and fair spikes. It was as though the
system recognizing a breach had replaced the surface layer without
effort rasure and adaptation at once, but absence two revealed patterns.
My location ID usually pulled for ride discounts signaled to
deactivator pending review. My payment card was declined on mine
approchases fled for suspicious routing. I called the card issue.
They confirmed a fraud warning from an I be assigned
out of nowhere, fired at midnother week before my online
accounts trained of social oxygen support. Tickets posted under my
name were rerouted or vanished. The only persistent artifact was
that raw printed chat lug. The lion is anyone there?
He never left the car. Paranoia swelled again, not a spectacle,
but a texture that sensed that I was always at
the terminal edge, that any contact might be another handler's mask.
I spoke to no one in person. I let calls
from family go unturned, fearing the line had become infested,
or that my voice contained too much of the story.
Yet in the real world, the wheels continued to turn.
I bought groceries, smiled at the exhausted cashier, felt the
subcutaneous twinge of recognition. In dim glasses. I passed a
ride heer Piccopson. After dark, cars came and went, some
circling in slow looping orbits, all of them ready to
slide behind another layer of digital mask of proe too closely.
Several weeks slid by. On a morning, handed by drizzle,
I noticed that the ap echosystem abruptly updated a new
cheerful color for the branding, a handful of privacy assurances,
the option to opt out of personalized ride suggestions. The
developers had scrubed the data layer, but the true structure,
passing permissions of ride and locks remained invisible. To casualize
hiding the machinery that had lain beneath. It was only
then that a pattern emerged Suttler more insulating. Reports of
ghost rides vanished altogether from public forums for about a month.
Then a summer thickened, scattered new posts described thinly simhophenomena,
but always in other cities, foreign platform variants, port crewers,
and different idioms, a new cycle, new erasures, same hidden, shaped,
different masks. I learned to become both less and more vigilant,
Less in my public documentation, more in the cold habitual
sweep of my living space, a daily routine of scanning
for Mike's, checking window latches, watching the exterior corridor for
cause idling toulon. I passed each reflection wearily, glancing for
the silhouette that had flickered, for screens in glass and
rear view mirrors. Even in privacy, I felt surrounded by lines,
both visible and codeep, each capable of snapin, shut or
opening in you. It struck me often in the hour
before sleep, that the only reason I persisted was the
had been cataloged now as observer, not there. If the
network chose to spin up another handler, another round of
mass rides, my rolle would again be to bear witness
to seed uncertainty, tacked as the static between channels. I
had seen one pattern close itself off cleanly and completely,
but the underlying structure a cursive adaptable on NI persent
was unchanged. Perhaps the point was not to finish, but
only to survive, to outlast the silence between pings. On
a night too hot for comfort. Four months after my ride,
I received the last message I would ever acknowledge, a
muted buzz, a sharp drain in battery and notification. Refusing dismissal,
I flipped the phone. As always, there was only a message,
Is any one there? Ye never left the car, The
text shown for an instant, the speakers hissed, and as
though the air itself thickened, that old was but threaded.
The shadowed silence rising just behind my shoulder, cool and
insistent in the glass over my reflection, the faintest suggestion
of a second, blurred figure stared from behind, a silhouette
built from every ride and every echo, fused into the
shape that meant nothing and everything at once. I closed
my eyes. When I opened them, the message was gone,
but the line, in all its unwinding, a cursive mystery,
stayed open, as always, waiting somewhere out there for its
next reply. And that is the end. Thank you for listening,
and I will see you in the next one.