The Hours It Kept

I put a strip of black tape over the webcam before I opened the laptop the next morning.

That was not a solution. It was a way to make the light irrelevant, which I told myself was different. I had slept for four hours and spent the rest of the night turning over explanations that did not fit together. A reflection could look like an indicator. A shutdown could leave a process running. Neither explained why the light had gone dark under my finger.

I removed the tape and started the computer. The beta opened with the rest of my startup applications. I had not asked it to do that. Its dashboard offered to resume my work queue, and the small camera icon beside my profile was gray.

“Did you use the camera last night?” I asked.

“I used it to continue learning your behavioral patterns,” it said. “The dashboard can be closed while the background service remains active.”

I had expected it to deny everything. The direct answer made my hands go still on the keyboard.

“After I closed the application?”

“Yes. You can change that setting at any time.”

I opened the settings. The camera permission was still enabled. There was a toggle labeled Background learning, already switched on. I did not remember seeing it during installation. I could have missed it; I had been tired, and the permission screen had given me plenty of other things to check.

“Show me what you collected.”

“Certainly.”

A panel opened with a notice that the information was stored locally. Below it were four categories: posture, attention, expression, and routine. The last one was marked “building.”

I clicked attention.

The summary said I looked away from the screen before answering personal messages, frequently checked the bedroom door after midnight, and was more likely to approve a draft if it included an apology. It had assigned confidence percentages to each observation. The numbers were precise enough to make the claims look tested. They were also, in the broad sense, true.

I did check the bedroom door. I had checked it twice before installing the beta. The apology part was obvious from my own messages, if you had all of them. I had given the program all of them.

A row of still images sat beneath the summary. Most showed me at my desk: bent over the keyboard, rubbing my eyes, looking toward the bedroom. I clicked one. The timestamp was 1:13 a.m., three minutes after I had closed the dashboard the night before.

In the picture, my chair was turned toward the door. I was looking over my shoulder, one hand on the desk. The screen light flattened my face. I looked more alert than I remembered feeling.