There's a little-known feature in modern smartphones, buried in the system settings submenus, called "Ambient Biometric Presence Detection." Officially, it's meant to unlock the phone without touching it, by sensing the owner's body heat.
Tonight, at 3:07, my phone lit up on the nightstand. No messages, no calls. Just a system notification that read:
"New user detected at 0.02 meters."
I woke with a start. Two centimeters? Two centimeters from the phone there was only me. But I was lying on my opposite side, facing the wall. The phone was behind my back.
I reached out, trembling, and picked up the device. I opened the camera app and switched on night mode, the one that brightens even the darkest black. I held the phone above my head and took a photo toward the ceiling, trying to frame the empty space above me.
The flash didn't fire. But the screen processed the image for a few seconds. What appeared in the photo wasn't my ceiling. It was a face. A face made entirely of thick, gray smoke, with two empty sockets glowing with a bluish light, the same light as my phone screen.
The most terrifying part? In the photo, that face was less than a millimeter from my ear. Its smoke lips were parted, as if about to whisper something.
At that moment, I felt a sudden warmth on my earlobe. A damp warmth. And then a voice, which didn't come out of the air but appeared like a text message directly in my mind:
"Thank you for keeping the screen on so long. Your retina has absorbed enough light. Now I can use it to see too."
I threw the phone against the wall. The screen shattered, but the blue light didn't go out. It stayed suspended in the air, floating above the glass fragments. And in that light, I saw the pixels starting to assemble that face again, but this time it was much more solid. Much more real.
Now I'm sitting in the farthest corner of the room. My phone is broken, but I keep receiving notifications. I feel them vibrating directly in the bones of my skull.
*Bzz. Bzz. Bzz.*
The last vibration was the longest. It was a translation: "Detection complete. Merge in progress."
I feel my eyes starting to glow with that same blue light. And as I write this to you, I'm no longer sure whose fingers these are.
Have you noticed how bright your device's screen is right now? Are your eyes burning a little? Maybe it isn't tiredness. Maybe it's just the download finishing.