Ghosts in the Walls
You think you know who’s watching. But when the voices begin to overlap, all certainty flickers and recedes, and you realize the monitors see more than even you remember.
The first voice belonged to me. Or so I believed, at three in the morning, hunched before the surveillance feed, wrapped in the steady glow of Monitor Three. The city, silent and slick with rain, pulsed behind the glass. My job, in the old SafeGuard Data Facility, was to watch. My name is Clem Toller. Or Clémence, on the papers I never liked to use. This is the account I left for anyone who will listen—if anyone still can.
They assigned me the graveyard shift, hadn’t been a promotion but more like a sentence. Every corridor in SafeGuard hummed and blinked all night, but you’d convince yourself you were alone. Until, sometimes, voices would crackle from nowhere, printed sharp on the edge of hearing. At first, that was the old maintenance speakers. That’s what my boss, Velasquez, said: Just the system. Ghosts, Clem, she called them. Circuits burping up memory.
But one night the ghosts started talking to me.
The tape starts here. Rain outside. Inside, I’m watching the feeds. Line after line of empty white corridors, station numbers flickering. Monitor Seven flicks out with a soft pop. I sigh. Reach for my field notes.
Then my voice fills the room: “Why are you still here, Clem?”
Except my lips are closed and I’ve said nothing at all.
I felt the chill run down my arms. I check the playback, but it’s working. The voice—my own voice—came from the wall speaker, inflected the way I speak when I’m tired, talking to myself. Maybe it’s the circuit. I tell myself that.
I write it down. I have to. Because the more I listen, the more uncertain I become. I read you these logs, as they appear in my battered notebook, blue ink gone ragged where my hand shook:
3:04 AM: Voice, female, indistinct. “Why are you still here, Clem?”
3:06 AM: I reply, quietly: “Just working. Who’s there?” No response.
3:14 AM: Monitor Five flickers—shows corridor 4A, empty. But a shadow moves against the wall. I check the movement list. No one has logged into that sector. Not even me.
4:02 AM: New voice. Low, agitated. Maybe male. “She’s not alone.” I check again. All the staff are signed out except me.
The next day, Velasquez brushes it off, says stress and night cycle deprivation make tricks out of data and memory. She tells me to sleep, to take my pills, as if I haven’t.
That evening, I fish my father’s old holoplayer out from my backpack. I’m not supposed to use personal devices here, but some rules are flexible at night. The little song it plays reminds me of a room by the sea, before my mother died, before words like safety protocol and perimeter breach shaped my days.
The holoplayer flickers as the walls hum—the same time as the corridor speaker sighs again.
“Clem. Did you forget me?”
It’s a child’s voice, my voice when I was younger, recorded now in shades I can’t remember making.
I look at my hand, half-expecting it to vanish. The walls don’t shift, but the sense of space changes, as if the surveillance center is a mouth closing over me. What if I forgot someone? What if the ghosts are just me looping through the feeds, my own presence baked into the circuitry?
Rain rattles. The monitors repeat familiar loops. The shadows grow longer. In the logs, I scrawl in the margin: Points of Contact. Do the ghosts want me to see them, or am I seeing pieces I left behind?
Then, one morning, Velasquez gives me a transfer. Ground floor, open reception. “You need people around you,” she says. “All these whispers, Clem. I need you steady.” She looks at me, heavy-lidded, worried, but I know she’s relieved to have me gone.
I leave my holoplayer behind by accident, tucked in the surveillance desk drawer. On my last night, as a kind of farewell, I queue one last playback from the cloud records: a hundred days of footage, speed-played. Something flickers. Between the empty hours, after every hardware reset, one blurry shadow stands—me, or someone like me, occupying the chair, unmoving, whenever I left the room.
I rewind three times, but it’s always there. Not a trick of the eye. The holoplayer, too, appears and vanishes on the desk, as if someone keeps returning for it.
In reception, surrounded by noise and faces, I almost convince myself the ghosts are gone. Only once, months later, do I brave the old logs.
Here in the new office, I write it all down. Those voices gave me doubt, and then connection—strange, frightening, but revealing. Maybe the network holds onto every presence, every trace and fragment, looping us back through echoes of who we were. Maybe it’s loneliness, mapped in light and signal.
But I keep the discipline: I acknowledge the ghosts. Some were truly my own voices, played back to me by broken machinery. Some were memories, half-deleted, waiting for me to notice. Each night, as rain spatters on the glass, I feel them—a community built from artifacts, mistakes, and longing.
I decide to visit the surveillance room again, just once. At the threshold, the monitors flick on all at once. A soft voice, unmistakably mine, says: “Hello, Clem. Ready to watch with us?”
Now I write in the margin: Yes. I sit awhile, with my old holoplayer, among the ghosts in the walls. At last, I understand. The watchers and the watched are never so far apart. And what we forget, the system remembers, stitch by stitch—until it returns us, not alone, but known.
###END###
