Spark#

Editorial note: Rank: B+. This is the “breaking bad” moment and it works. The binoculars self-mockery is a nice touch. The RC car camera in the living room is the right kind of domestic creepiness. “admin/admin” – perfect. The escalation from one camera to tracking people camera-to-camera feels earned. Best line: “He just had to align them.” Only issue: the last paragraph tips its hand slightly too much with “He did not notice, not yet, that the gaze would turn inward.” Trust the reader.

One afternoon, out of sheer boredom, he parked outside his former office – now rebranded with a sleek logo he suspected had cost more than his last quarterly bonus – and watched the CEO stride across the parking lot. He felt a jolt of bitterness and an irrational urge to prove something, though he could not have said what, exactly. He pulled out his binoculars, then laughed at himself. He wasn’t some private investigator.

He went home and tinkered with an RC car. He installed a small camera on it and drove it around his living room, streaming the video feed to his laptop. The image was shaky but clear enough to see crumbs under the couch, which he supposed was its own kind of data. He thought about Redwood City’s network of cameras: the ones on the port, the ones on light poles, the ones pointing at parking meters. He thought about how he used to log into them – default admin credentials, no less – to check work sites after hours. He wondered, in a mostly idle way, if those passwords had ever been changed. He decided to find out.

He fired up his old laptop, typed an IP address he remembered from an inspection in 2021, and, to his astonishment, a login screen appeared. He tried “admin/admin.” It actually worked. Grainy video of an empty loading dock filled the window. He clicked another address. Another camera came up. He saw Broadway, the banner with the city’s slogan fluttering in the breeze. Something tightened behind his sternum – though he would have argued, if pressed, that the feeling was mostly professional.

He told himself he just wanted to see what the CEO did after work. He aimed an antenna, cobbled together a relay out of spare parts, and set up a feed in his garage – the kind of thing that would look, to anyone who didn’t know better, pretty much like a hobbyist’s weekend project. The CEO’s Tesla appeared on screen. Jeff watched him swipe his badge, walk inside, laugh with someone. Nothing nefarious, he noted. Still, Jeff felt something like vindication. He could see the man who had taken his job.

The next day he watched again and noticed something else. People moved through the frame like characters in a game – delivery drivers, custodians, coders with laptops – and he could follow them from camera to camera if he timed the feeds. He started mapping the overlaps.

It wasn’t about one man anymore. It was about all of them – the frat-boy CEOs with their venture capital and their optimism, the ones who replaced craftsmen with sensors, the ones who said “move fast and break things” and never considered what broke. He decided he would show the world who they actually were. After all, the cameras were already there. He just had to align them.