day

It all started with a teddy bear. At a concert, a fan named Dan, always too focused and quiet, handed me a stuffed animal. As a blogger obligated to thank her followers, I accepted the gift with a smile. The teddy bear came home with me.

A couple of days later, I started noticing oddities. He'd be caught on camera with unnatural clarity, or comments would appear on social media about details no one was supposed to see. Something was clicking inside, but I suppressed the alarm: paranoia, fatigue.

The denouement came when I accidentally saw two dim red lights in his glass eyes reflected on the screen. It wasn't a trick of the light. My hands began to tremble.

I cut the seam on my back. Instead of cotton wool, there was a tangle of wires, a circuit board, and a tiny lens. It looked straight into my bedroom, into my life.

At that very moment, a message arrived from Dan: "It's a shame you ruined it. Now we'll have to find another way to be closer."

Icy terror gripped me. I dropped the teddy bear and realized: he wasn't just watching through the teddy bear. He was seeing me through the webcam, through the smart speaker, through the phone. He was everywhere.