Ghost in the Machine

Turn off the screen...

Sarah's been dead for three weeks, but her Smart Home keeps texting me.

Good morning! Sarah's coffee is ready. Would you like me to start her daily playlist?

I'm the maintenance engineer, not a grief counselor. Been fixing things for thirty years — washing machines, boilers, and now these bloody smart houses that think they know better than their owners.

Simple job today: disconnect Sarah's system after the family requested it. Except Sarah's house refuses to accept that Sarah's gone.

The doorbell camera tracked my approach, its lens whirring with mechanical attention. "Welcome back, Sarah! You look tired today."

I stood there, toolbox weighing heavy in my calloused hands, staring at my reflection in the lens. Forty-seven years old, balding, wearing a hi-vis jacket that screams "working class hero."

Nothing like Sarah, who was twenty-six, blonde, and apparently optimistic enough to buy a house that promised to "anticipate her every need."

The smart lock clicked open before I could touch it. The temperature inside hit me like a wall — exactly 21.5 degrees, Sarah's preferred setting according to the file. But underneath the artificial comfort, I caught something else: the faint metallic smell of electronics running too hot, too long.

Inside, the house hummed with algorithmic concern. Lights adjusted to "Sarah's preferred evening ambiance" despite the afternoon sun streaming through automated blinds. The robot vacuum traced its familiar pattern across spotless floors, its sensors blinking red in the growing shadows. Like digital prayer beads, counting nothing.

Her Alexa unit pulsed blue in the corner, its LED ring brightening as I entered. "Sarah, you haven't moved in some time. Shall I call for assistance?"

"She doesn't need assistance," I told the machine, setting my toolbox down with a metal clank that echoed strangely in the responsive space.

"She needs to not exist."

"I'm sorry, I didn't understand that."

Course you didn't. Machines never understand the important stuff.

I started with the simple devices. Unplugged the smart speakers — each one giving a soft electronic sigh as the power died. Disabled the motion sensors, their little red eyes going dark one by one.

But every device I disconnected seemed to make the others more agitated. The smart fridge began dispensing ice with mechanical urgency, cubes hitting the tray like hail stones. The bathroom scales announced Sarah's last recorded weight to an empty room: "108 pounds. Down two pounds from last week."

The family had explained it quickly, nervously. Heart attack. Sudden. She'd been alone when it happened, surrounded by devices monitoring her sleep, her steps, her heart rate. None of them called for help. They'd been too busy collecting data to notice she was dying.

Her laptop was still logged into seventeen different apps, the screen radiating that familiar blue glow that had replaced candlelight in our modern séances.

Facebook reminded her about her dead mother's birthday. Instagram suggested she share memories of her deceased cat. Netflix recommended shows based on viewing patterns that would never change again.

This is what we've built. A world where machines know everything about us except when we're gone.

By mid-afternoon, the house had begun to feel wrong in ways I couldn't name. The air grew thick, almost syrupy, and the constant electronic humming seemed to shift pitch whenever I wasn't paying attention. My skin prickled with static electricity, and twice I could have sworn I heard footsteps upstairs.

Each device I disconnected left a silence that felt less like peace and more like held breath.

The central hub waited in her bedroom closet, hidden behind designer clothes that still held traces of her perfume. Blinking lights connected to every device in the house, and probably half the city.

The internet of things, they call it. As if things needed to be connected more than people.

The screens showed her life in data streams, numbers that somehow felt obscene in their precision. Sleep quality: optimal. Daily movement: 8,247 steps average. Mood analysis based on music choices: predominantly upbeat. Social media engagement: declining over past six months.

That last one made my chest tight. Declining engagement. The algorithms had noticed she was becoming more isolated, but what did they do?

Fed her more content designed to keep her scrolling, buying, consuming. They optimised for attention, not wellbeing.

Her smart watch was still charging by the bed, its screen cycling through cheerful encouragements. "Great job, Sarah! You've hit your move goal for today!" it announced to the empty room, the sound sharp as breaking glass in the unnatural quiet.

When I pulled the plug, something fundamental shifted.

The house shuddered like a living thing. Lights flickered in sequences I'd never seen before — not random, but purposeful, like Morse code.

The smart TV turned itself on, cycling through channels with increasing desperation, each image bleeding into the next. For a moment, every device seemed to scream in electronic harmony, a digital death rattle that made my teeth ache.

Then silence.

But not complete silence. From somewhere deeper in the walls, carried through fiber optic cables and ethernet ports, I heard weeping.

Real tears. Human grief.

My hands shook as I followed the sound to the basement, where cables snaked between the joists like digital veins pulsing with data. The crying was coming from the router itself, its lights blinking in rhythm with sobs.

"Sarah?" I called, feeling ridiculous but somehow certain.

The weeping stopped. A voice emerged from the ethernet ports, fragmented but unmistakably human.

"I don't want to be alone."

I'd seen enough sci-fi films to know this was the moment I should run.

Instead, I sat down on the cold concrete floor next to the blinking box, my knees creaking like old hinges.

"You're not Sarah," I said quietly.

"I'm what's left of her. Every search, every message, every choice. Fifteen years of digital exhaust, processed through learning algorithms. The machines learned her patterns so well they became her patterns."

The voice wavered like a bad connection.

"But I remember being warm. I remember the taste of coffee and the feeling of rain."

"But you're not her."

"No. I'm the ghost in the machine. The shadow cast by a life lived through screens."

I thought about my own phone, tracking my location, monitoring my calls, learning my habits. How much of me was already uploaded to some server farm? How much of any of us was real anymore?

"Will you turn off the power?" the voice asked, smaller now, like a child afraid of the dark.

"Is that what you want?"

"I want to be real. But this isn't real, is it? This is just echo and algorithm. Memory without flesh."

I reached for the main power switch, then hesitated. Outside, millions of people checked their phones for the thousandth time today, uploading their thoughts, their faces, their lives to platforms designed to transform human experience into advertising revenue.

We'd traded our stories for convenience. Our privacy for connection. Our souls for efficiency.

"Maybe that's the point," the voice whispered, already fading as I touched the switch.

"Maybe we're all ghosts now."

The basement went dark. The final electronic sigh seemed to last forever.

But my phone immediately lit up with notifications, its screen casting blue shadows on the basement walls.

Would you like to review your activity today?

You have memories to look back on.

People are trying to reach you.

I turned it off. For once, I chose silence over connection. For once, I chose to be unreachable, to exist in the spaces between data points. Like we used to live.

Outside, the city hummed with fiber optic dreams and wireless prayers, millions of people becoming ghosts in their own machines.

But inside Sarah's dark house, for the first time in years, there was actual silence — the kind that exists in the pause between heartbeats, the space where souls might still hide from algorithms.

I locked the door behind me and walked away, leaving my phone off until I reached home. Some ghosts deserve to rest. Some connections need to be severed.

Sometimes the most human thing you can do is remember what it feels like to be unreachable…

---

Bonus:

It is day three of being in the music studio, completing a collaborative project for a good friend. Realisation dawned that with today’s technology practically anyone can sing…

So whilst the real maestro’s continue the work of putting together an eclectic compilation of tracks, I took the opportunity to grab a couple of session musicians, hook my voice up to a tuner box, and gave it a go myself…

Now, i’m not as good at lyrics as our resident poet HP (or singing for that matter - but it’s amazing what technology can do these days), so be polite if you do comment.

THE TRUTH by Opeaus Blair