My phone starts screaming at 4:11 a.m.—three alarms I forgot to cancel and one that doesn’t belong to me. The new one chirps like a shorebird and swims through the other alerts to perch on top. I slap at the nightstand, find glass, and haul the rectangle into the curve of my palm.
A DM waits on a blank account with no avatar, no posts, a name that tastes like salt: @ShoreWitness. The message is a single link. No “hi.” No context. Just the kind of dare the city loves to send.
I sit up. The room smells like yesterday’s coffee and cassette tape cases sun-warmed by the afternoon that never really left. Outside, the bay coughs fog against the row-house bricks, and the drone beacons blink like patient lighthouses. My thumb hovers. I’ve built a life around pressing play, and in the moment before I do, I notice my hand shaking for the first time since the halo said yes.
I press.
The studio unfurls. My dress. The halo. The host’s teeth lit like museum glass. But the color is wrong. My throat remembers cold air and green wash; the clip bathes me in a red that turns my face into a warning sign. The host asks the same question he asked last night—“Did you abandon your mother in her final week?”—and my mouth opens, but edited words fall out and tangle into “Yes.” Onscreen captions stamp a verdict: DECEPTIVE.
The halo pulses scarlet.
“No,” I say to the phone, to the room, to no one. “No, that’s not what I said.”
The clip ends with a crisp logo swipe and a timestamp that reads LIVE even though none of this is live now. My chest goes cold in the exact shape of the halo.
Another notification stacks on top of the first DM like a gull landing on a piling: Sera Vale. The preview shows a single word.
Explain.
I swipe without thinking and record a voice memo I don’t send. I listen to my own breath stall. I delete it. I text back: I’m calling.
She answers on the first buzz. I hear the sproing of one of her ancient bed springs under the evenness she likes to wear to work. “You saw it.”
“I did.”
“You said yes.”
“I didn’t.”
“The halo is red.”
“I know,” I snap, then soften it. “It’s altered.”
“Deepfake.” She rolls the word in her mouth like it’s a new pill she doesn’t trust yet. “The network will say deepfake.”
“They already will,” I say. “But I need the file.”
“Don’t go to war with screens today,” she says. “Sleep.”
“I can’t.” I stand and let my feet find the cool spot on the old floorboards, the place where the varnish thinned from years of pivoting toward the door. “The applause track had a glitch last night. I recorded it. This new clip… I can test the room tone.”
“Mira—”
“I’ll call you in an hour,” I say. “I promise.”
I hang up before I can read the disgust that might not even be there. The kettle’s click sounds too loud in the kitchen. I grind coffee with the hand mill, the burrs making a soft stone-in-stone rasp. Steam lifts and gives the little room a wet heat; the bay air sneaks under the window and spools it back into itself.
I drop the link into a sandboxed browser on my laptop. The video loads on a mirrored site with a hundred anonymous cousins. The handle on the original post belongs to @ShoreWitness again. The comments are already climbing like mold: red > green, always was, pattern doesn’t lie, she coached herself, monster sister. The city’s code words surface in strings—Clouded and Storm—as if people are swapping weather forecasts for my face.
I reach for the volume and stop my hand in midair. I pull out my studio headphones instead, the over-ear pair with the little crack at the hinge. I set the headband across my hair and feel the comfortable clamp. Breath in, breath out. I slide the playhead to the moment the halo shifts. I see my mouth shape something that isn’t mine.
“Did you abandon your mother—”
I tap the M key to add a marker, then another, then another. The markers line up like stitches. I slow the playback to half speed and listen under the voice that is officially mine.
The room breathes.
Studio B breathes at a specific frequency when the air system idles; last night it sat at 58 hertz with a second harmonic riding at 116 like a polite echo. The clip’s foundation hum lands right there, damped a hair by bodies in seats. I nudge the EQ, scoop out the vocal, and let the floor of the thing reveal itself. Under the scarlet wash, the room sounds exactly like the room.
I pause the file and hold my breath. My skin prickles along my forearms.
“No,” I say again, but it’s a different no. This isn’t fake; this is repurposed. Someone took my night, mined it, repainted it, and fed it back to me with my name still warm.
My phone buzzes hard enough to make the mug clink. A corporate email domain comes through: We value your voice in the subject line, which is how managers start bad hymns. I open it. They’re “pausing” my contract at the station pending “clarification.” They “support” my journey and will “review” in two weeks.
I blow across the coffee and miss my mouth. Heat kisses my lower lip and the taste spikes metallic. I thumb-call Sera again.
She picks up at once. “I’m watching morning feeds,” she says without hello. “They’re running split-screens—your green on one side, red on the other.”
“Let me hear.”
I put the call on speaker and set the phone on the table next to the laptop. Elevator news music whispers through Sera’s audio like it’s broadcasting from a moving box. A host I used to like keeps saying alleged. Another keeps saying stunning. A third says forgiveness like it’s a coupon.
“They’re saying deepfake,” Sera narrates. “They brought on a guy with a blazer and a jaw.”
“He’s a watermark guy,” I say, before she tells me his credentials. “They always show the diagonal grid and explain how pixels are loyal.”
“He’s showing the grid.” Her voice thins with weary amazement. “How did you know?”
“Because the city tells the same stories with new fonts.” I close my eyes and picture the AquaBlue set where I recorded interviews last winter—the same LED smiles, different subject. “Send me a clip from their side-by-side feed. I want their compression, not just the leak’s.”
“Fine,” she says. Then, softer: “Mira… did you—”
“No,” I say, not letting the word pick up any freight. “I did not abandon her. Not then, not ever.”
“They’re going to chew that sentence.”
“Then I’ll give them bone,” I snap before I can dress the impulse.
The kettle sighs again, a little empty cry as the warm metal cools. I take the headphones off one ear so I can still hear the house. The stair at the back pops as the wood shrugs into morning. A neighbor drops a pan. Far out, the bay bell clongggs a long warning into the fog, and somewhere above the marina I imagine drones braking on their rails because the wind tunnel is washing blind tonight.
My phone vibrates with Sera’s forwarded clip. I catch the energy in her punctuation, no pixels wasted: here.
I drag the file into my editor and drop it under the leak. I line up the host’s syllables, mark the question ends with yellow flags, and look at the noise floors like fingerprints. The leak lives in a richer file, less crushed. The news feed compresses everything to a tidy rectangle. But—and here’s where my heart goes hawk—the low band still carries the studio’s exact hum. If someone fabricated this, they took the time to synthesize the room and paint around it, a labor no troll would waste on me unless they were paid or praying.
“Say you’re going to the network,” Sera says in my ear. “Make them fight the deepfake thing for you.”
“They’ll fight for themselves,” I answer. “They’ll say technology is tamper-proof and gratitude is patriotic.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Fair doesn’t buy ad slots.” I hear my own voice and soften it. “I’m going to request the raw from my scan. The lab has it.”
“They’ll make you sign more papers.”
I glance at the Pureline voucher on the counter, embossed with two perfect rings. “They always do.”
The morning deepens from iron to pewter, and the elevator screens across the city must be whispering my name between floor dings. I imagine commuters watching me flip red and green between floors 12 and 20, their palms slick from disinfectant pumps, their mouths tasting hot sugar from the lobby cart, and the halo icon watching them pay.
“What do I say to Leo?” Sera asks. The question lands like a plate we’ve broken before and glued with care.
“Tell him I’m still green,” I say. “Tell him the halo is a mood ring, not a judge.”
“He doesn’t believe in mood rings.”
“Tell him I’m coming by after I send some emails.” I swallow the newspaper pulp forming in my throat. “Tell him I love him.”
“He knows,” she says, then adds, quieter, “Convince me.”
“Come over tonight. I’ll show you what I hear.”
“I have work,” she says. “Parents will come in with printouts. They already do when their kids’ scores drop two points.”
“Scores,” I repeat, the word scratching me just under the ribs. “We trade them like weather.”
“Don’t make fun.” Her voice sharpens. “Scores keep some of my kids fed.”
“I’m not making fun,” I say. “I’m making tape.”
Silence. Then a sigh that turns into briskness. “Text when you have something I can understand.”
“I will.” I add, because I need it, “Don’t unfollow me today.”
“I never did,” she says, and hangs up.
Micro-hook: I scrub the leak to the half-second where my mouth opens and a false confession steps out wearing my voice.
I solo the low bands. The room hum is a body lying under a blanket; if I pat it, I find the ribs. 58 hertz. 116. A narrow 180 bump from the floor LEDs. I split the stereo image and listen to the ceiling. The ceiling carries fan gliss that the balcony mics always catch—the slipping note of air motors when the director hits fade. The leak has that gliss. It isn’t glued in from another room; it belongs to Studio B’s bones.
My email pings again. Subject line: Contract Status. The station manager says the word “pause” twice and the phrase “brand safety” three times. There’s a line about loving my “commitment to integrity.” I read it out loud with the sweetest syrup voice I own. “Dear Mira, we love your integrity so much we need it to take a short nap.”
I hit reply and then don’t. I know better than to write when the temperature in my chest climbs like this. I open a new note instead and type the sentences I will want later when my hands are cooler.
Ask for raw onto personal encrypted drive. Cite clause 9c. Ask who owns the halo feed’s multitracks. Ask who has access to the live-switch assets. Keep it to questions. Remember: the first record wins.
Fog rubs its shoulder along the window and leaves the glass damp. A news blimp motors toward downtown and then shoulders left, choosing a cleaner path. I picture the pilot’s screen, a thin ribbon that tells them where the air is easiest; I picture a producer drawing red Xs over neighborhoods that don’t trend.
I click to the leak and open the audio spectrogram. The voice bands bloom like reeds. I feather in a notch to reveal the consonant tails. My tongue goes dry as I hear a stutter in the S of “Yes” that doesn’t match mine. I have a tiny snag on my incisor that turns S sounds into ribbons. The leak has a clean S, rounded and smooth, then the tiniest cut where a splice lives.
“There you are,” I whisper. “Hello, seam.”
My phone lights again. Sera, short and surgical: work paused?
I type back: Yes. Two weeks. I add, because I know the hole that word digs, I can pay rent. I have savings.
Three dots waggle, then halt. No reply.
I carry both phones—the personal and the old station loaner—to the kitchen island where my portable recorder sits like a little black brick. I tap the recorder’s mic to hear the room say my name through vibration. I play the leak on the laptop and feed it into the recorder’s line-in; the recorder writes what it hears like it’s a witness with better habits than mine.
Then I do the thing that wins me listeners when the stories are not mine: I talk to the future.
“Timecode,” I say, reading the numbers. “Fourteen seconds to twenty-seven. Studio B hum present at fifty-eight and one-sixteen. Fan gliss overhead at two-seventy to three-eighty. Applause bed shows loop repetition every two-point-eight seconds. Splice artifact at the S in ‘Yes.’ Leak isn’t a deepfake; it’s a re-edit with authentic ambient.”
I take off the headphones. The house quiets around me in a way that makes my shoulders climb and then drop. I pour the coffee from the cold mug into the sink and rinse the taste with tap water that runs iron-bright.
My front door clicks as the hallway warms and the deadbolt relaxes in its housing. I put my palm to the wood the way a person might test a fever. The city is awake now, with elevator screens whispering, food halls opening, and families sliding rings of purity over receipts. In two hours, strangers will use my name like cutlery at a table where they’ve promised not to film, and they’ll film anyway from the corners.
I make one more file and label it ROOMTONE_LIVE. I drag last night’s applause glitch into the same session as the leak and stack them like panes of glass. The hums sit on top of each other in perfect agreement. The pops argue: my glitch, their gloss. The leak’s editor fixed what I caught and then used a different seam to draw blood.
“You’re not random,” I tell the file. “You’re internal.”
My phone pings with a new notification—network PR. The statement is already in rotation. They describe the clip as a “malicious manipulation targeting our community of healing” and promise to “partner with experts.” I tap the photo attached to the press release: two concentric rings, embossed; a wrist wearing them like an honor.
I text Sera: I can prove the room is real.
She replies fast: Prove to whom.
I look at my recorder, my inbox, the little voucher with the plush paper. I think about being believed by machines and families. To be believed, I submitted to the machine that can erase me. Now I have to use that same machine to call the machine a liar.
I open a fresh email and start a subject line to the clinic’s data custodian. Then I stop, because my phone buzzes once more, a buzz that isn’t a text, isn’t an email, isn’t my alarm bird.
@ShoreWitness again.
Do you want the rest of it?