Sleepwalking Shadows

The first thing Devon noticed when he woke up was the smell. Metallic and bitter, like a battery had ruptured and sprayed acid into the air. He felt stiff, his skin gritty with dried residue. He blinked, the room sluggishly coming into focus. The sheets were tangled around his legs, damp with sweat. The clock on the nightstand blinked dumbly—4:47 AM.

Corinne wasn't in bed. That was strange. She always woke before him, sure, but not this early. She had a routine: up at 6:30, coffee by 6:45, out the door by 7:15. He called her name, voice cracking halfway through. No response.

The chill in the room hit him next. The apartment's smart-thermostat was usually precise, keeping the temperature within a tenth of a degree of their preferences, but it felt like someone had left the front door open. He swung his legs off the bed and stood, unsteady, his balance off like the floor was tilted.

“Corinne?” he called again. This time, the word echoed faintly, bouncing off the silence of the apartment.

He moved toward the bathroom, the overhead lights flickering on as he passed under the sensor. The sink was dry, the mirror fogless. The toothbrush sat in its charging cradle, untouched. The unease in his chest deepened.

It wasn't until he reached the living room that he saw her.

She was splayed out on the floor, her head at an unnatural angle, one arm pinned beneath her. A pool of blood had soaked into the carpet, the fibers dark and glistening. Her eyes were open, unfocused, staring past him at nothing. A broken glass lay nearby, shards scattered across the floor.

Devon froze. His breath caught halfway out, and he saw only darkness at the edges. The world didn't make sense. This wasn't possible. She'd been fine. She'd been here, alive, yesterday. He felt his pulse skip, and a high-pitched whine filled his ears, drowning out everything else.

He moved before he could think. He dropped to her side, his knees hitting the sticky carpet. He reached for her, then stopped, hovering uselessly over her broken form. There was no pulse, no rise and fall of her chest. She was gone.

The blood wasn't fresh. It had thickened, dense and tacky. Hours old. He glanced at his hands again, at the dark flakes clinging to his skin. Dried blood. Her blood.

And then it hit him, like an electric charge snapping through his nervous system. His sleep monitor. The wearable band on his wrist, tracking everything from his REM cycles to his oxygen levels. It buzzed faintly against his skin, still active.

He stumbled to his feet, nearly slipping on the wet patch of carpet. His head swam. The augmented reality interface of the apartment's hub flared to life as he barked a command.

“Pull up last night's sleep data.”

The system hesitated, a faint lag in its usually seamless response. Then an array of graphs and metrics appeared in the air before him, suspended in the augmented space. Heart rate, brainwave activity, muscle movements.

There. At 2:38 AM. A spike in the EEG data. Sudden, violent muscle activation. Sleepwalking.

The memory came rushing back in fragments, disjointed and surreal. Corinne's voice, sharp and alarmed. Her hands on his shoulders, shaking him awake. The glass shattering. The weight of her body hitting the floor. His hands pressing down on her neck, the resistance of her struggling against him, her panicked gasps turning to silence.

“No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “No, no, no. This… this isn't real. This can't be real.”

But the data didn't lie. The sleep monitor was accurate to within 99.7%. He'd read the white papers, understood the algorithms, trusted the tech. It had never failed him before.

He staggered back, he caught himself on the edge of the coffee table. He grabbed the edge to steady himself, he brushed against the smooth surface of Corinne's tablet. It lit up at his touch, the lock screen displaying a paused video. He tapped it, almost without thinking.

The security feed from the apartment's nanny cam filled the screen. It was timestamped—2:36 AM. The night-vision filter cast everything in cold, green hues.

The footage showed him, standing over the bed. Corinne's voice came through faintly, muffled by the distance. She was asking him something, her tone confused and worried. He moved toward her, slow and deliberate. She backed away, hands up in a defensive gesture. The video cut out abruptly, static filling the screen for several seconds before the feed returned. By then, she was already on the floor.

The gaps in the footage weren't a coincidence. The nanny cam had an AI-based privacy filter, designed to block out sensitive moments. It was supposed to protect their intimacy, their private lives. Instead, it had erased the exact moments he needed to see, the evidence that might have exonerated him—or damned him completely.

“Shit,” Devon muttered, the word hollow and meaningless. He dropped the tablet, he collapsed. He knelt there, surrounded by the cold hum of the apartment's systems, the weight of Corinne's lifeless body pulling the air out of the room.

He had to call someone. The thought cut through the haze, sharp and clear. The police. An ambulance. Someone who could fix this, make it make sense. But he hovered over the apartment's comm unit, paralyzed. What could he say? That he'd killed her in his sleep? That he hadn't meant to? They'd never believe him. Not without the footage. Not without proof.

The sleep monitor. The thought came unbidden, a spark of desperation in the darkness. The device logged everything. If he could extract the raw data, analyze the biometric readings, maybe he could prove it had been involuntary. A parasomnia episode. A rare malfunction in the brain's motor control systems during sleep. It was a long shot, but it was all he had.

He scrambled to his desk, the blood on his hands smearing across the interface of his laptop. The monitor synced automatically, transferring its data to the cloud for storage. He hacked into the encrypted files, bypassing the usual permissions. The raw EEG readings were chaotic, a mess of spikes and dips that made no immediate sense. He ran them through a diagnostic program, cross-referencing them with known patterns of sleepwalking behavior.

The results were inconclusive. The algorithm flagged anomalies in the data but couldn't provide a definitive answer. Too much noise. Too many variables. He cursed under his breath, the frustration boiling over into rage.

And then he saw it. A secondary file, buried deep in the monitor's firmware. It wasn't part of the standard logging system. A hidden subroutine, recording something else entirely. He opened it, he trembled.

The data wasn't biometric. It was environmental. External signals. Magnetic fields, radio frequencies, electromagnetic pulses. There had been a spike at 2:35 AM, just before the episode began. A burst of high-frequency energy, localized to his apartment.

Interference.

Someone had triggered it. A directed energy attack, targeting his neural implants. The thought was absurd, paranoid, but the evidence was right there. The implants weren't just for sleep tracking. They monitored and regulated his brain chemistry, a treatment for the migraines he'd suffered since childhood. A vulnerability, exploited.

This wasn't an accident. It wasn't his fault. Someone had done this to him. To her.

The realization hit him like a second death. Corinne was gone, and nothing would bring her back. But this wasn't over. Not yet. He pulled up the apartment's network logs, tracing the origin of the interference. A single IP address, masked but not well enough. A name. A face.

He closed the laptop, he clenched his teeth. He didn't know what he'd do when he found them. But he knew one thing for certain.

They'd pay.

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The writing prompt for this story was:
A man murders his wife while sleepwalking. With a gritty mood/tone. Make it Tech-savvy.

This story was written by:
openai/gpt-4o-2024-11-20

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