The Livestream Started Before We Turned On the Camera

The stream showed our moderation floor from a ceiling angle.

All office cameras were covered under our privacy policy. The angle itself was impossible; the ceiling above my desk held only a smoke detector. Yet I could see my green sweater draped over Chair Nine, Dev's coffee beside Console Four, and Lina asleep in the break-room window.

The timestamp read 2:19 a.m.

Eight minutes ahead.

Dev assumed someone had compromised building security. He waved toward the smoke detector. The version of him inside the livestream did not wave. It stood beside my empty chair, staring at the dark shape behind it.

At 2:13, Dev knocked his coffee over.

The stream had shown the spill two minutes earlier.

We tested it. I placed a red stapler on the floor. In the broadcast, the stapler was already there. Dev moved it to a shelf. The live image updated before his hand reached it, showing the new position first.

We were not watching the future.

The present was being corrected to match the stream.

A chat message appeared from my employee account: DO NOT LET IT REACH LIVE.

I had not typed it. The message timestamp was 2:22.

Viewer count increased to two.

Lina woke in the break room and came over. The count changed to three before she looked at the screen. Behind my chair in the stream, the dark figure gained a face made from compression blocks. Every few seconds, another square resolved: an eye, part of a mouth, teeth occupying the wrong frame.

A permission prompt covered the video.

ALLOW THIS STREAM TO USE YOUR CAMERA?

We clicked deny.

The prompt returned on every monitor, including machines disconnected from the network. Dev pulled power from Console Four. Its black screen continued playing the stream as a faint reflection.

The future version of Lina turned toward us.

Her mouth moved. Audio arrived through our headsets before she spoke in the room: It can only move while someone is watching.

Lina repeated the sentence eight seconds later, not eight minutes. The gap was shrinking.

We called network operations. The technician found no broadcast packets entering or leaving our office. The stream existed only after decoding, without source video. Its data was made entirely of viewer telemetry: eye position, watch time, pauses, and the tiny signals devices use to decide whether a person is still present.

The figure was being rendered from attention.

Dev opened the diagnostic panel. The stream's account ID contained our employee numbers in the order we had viewed it. Beneath them was a fourth number assigned to someone who did not work at Parallax.

The employee directory loaded a photograph anyway.

It showed the compression-block face.

Dev said he could trap the source if he granted temporary camera access and traced the handshake. Lina told him not to. The prompt displayed his answer before he spoke.

ALLOW.

Dev clicked yes.

Every screen went white.

The cameras on our laptops, phones, badge scanners, and exit panels activated at once. On the livestream, hundreds of viewpoints opened like eyes. We saw ourselves from above, below, behind, and from inside the dark reflection of our pupils.

Viewer count jumped to 347.

None of those viewers were accounts. The diagnostics listed rooms instead: a nursery with no camera, the inside of a locked subway car, an operating theater between procedures, and bedrooms whose occupants were asleep. Each location appeared for one frame. In every one, a dark figure stood just outside the image, waiting for the lens to turn.

Messages flooded the chat in languages our filters could not identify. Automated translation rendered all of them as the same sentence: I CAN SEE WHERE YOU WILL LOOK NEXT. The words also appeared as faint red pressure marks along my palms.

Lina tried to look away. Her eyes moved back to the screen in tiny jerks, dragged by the face-tracking cursor. The system outlined her pupils with green boxes and labeled them CAPTURED.

The figure became solid.

It stood in the future office wearing Dev's clothes. Dev himself was gone from the stream.

Our real Dev began losing detail. First the logo on his shirt blurred. Then his features broke into squares. When I reached for him, my hand passed through a cold field of digital noise. A status message appeared above his head on every screen: BUFFERING.

At 2:18, he vanished.

The stream advanced to 2:18 at the same moment. The eight-minute lead had collapsed to zero.

Something sat in Dev's chair.

We saw it only on screens, but the cushion compressed in the room. Its face kept borrowing ours—my eyes, Lina's mouth, Dev's teeth—never displaying one person long enough to recognize.

It opened the chat and typed: THANK YOU FOR GOING LIVE.

Lina covered the monitors with jackets. The figure remained visible through the fabric as light. I shut my eyes. Its outline appeared against my eyelids, closer than before.

It was using the act of viewing, not the screens.

The emergency exit would not unlock until we acknowledged a safety prompt on the badge panel. ALLOW ACCESS? blinked above YES and YES.

Lina smashed the panel with a chair. The door opened one inch. On the stream, we saw ourselves escape into the corridor—except the future corridor ended at the same office.

We needed to give the broadcast something that could watch forever without understanding what it saw.

I uncovered one monitor and turned a webcam toward it. The stream showed the camera showing the stream, frame inside frame, hundreds of smaller offices receding toward a single black point. Viewer count climbed by powers of two.

The figure appeared in every nested image.

Each copy looked inward toward the next. The thing began rendering itself instead of us.

Lina and I pushed through the exit. Behind us, the office repeated into smaller rooms on every screen. The figure divided faster than the system could display it. Its borrowed faces stretched into lines. Audio became a scream assembled from notification sounds.

At 2:20, the stream ended.

Dev did not return.

His coffee remained warm for three days. Fingerprints appeared around the rim each morning, though security sealed the office. When technicians played the recursive recording frame by frame, they found Dev in the smallest visible image, pounding against the inside of a single pixel.

Parallax security found no record of the broadcast. Office footage showed Lina and me staring at blank monitors for nine minutes, then running. Dev's personnel account was gone. His desk belonged to someone neither of us recognized.

We resigned.

For a week, nothing happened. Then Lina stopped answering messages. Her profile now shows a gray placeholder. I remember her face, but every photograph renders it as compression blocks.

The unlisted stream appeared on my phone tonight.

The phone is powered off.

It shows my bedroom eight minutes from now. I am sitting on the bed, typing this. Behind me stands the figure, clearer than it has ever been.

Viewer count is one.

A permission prompt is blinking across my vision even when I close my eyes.

I keep selecting deny.

The version of me in the stream has just selected allow.