I woke for the third time that night convinced I hadn’t slept at all. The house was listening again.
At first, it had only been a feeling—a pressure, like air thickening around the ears before a storm. The kind of silence that isn’t empty, but attentive. I lay still in bed, breath measured, heart knocking softly in my chest, waiting for the familiar sounds: the pipes settling, the floorboards cooling, the wind brushing the eaves.
Instead, I heard my name.
Not spoken. Not aloud. Just present, hovering at the edge of thought, the way a remembered voice can intrude when you’re almost asleep. I told myself it was fatigue. Insomnia plays tricks; it rehearses old fears with new costumes. I closed my eyes and waited for the sensation to pass.
It didn’t.
The house had been upgraded three months earlier. A “learning environment,” the company brochure said. Adaptive lighting. Predictive temperature control. A conversational interface designed to respond “naturally” to emotional cues. It remembered routines, preferences, patterns of speech. It learns you, the technician said cheerfully, tightening the final screw behind the wall panel in my bedroom.
That was the first time I felt watched.
On that night—the third sleepless night in a row—the stairs creaked.
I froze. The sound was wrong. Not the random complaint of wood under cooling stress, but deliberate. Sequential. One step, then another, slow and patient, as if the house were practicing how to walk.
“Motion detected,” the system whispered softly from somewhere inside the walls.
The voice was mine.
I sat up, sheets clutched to my chest, staring into the darkness where the bedroom door waited, slightly ajar. The hallway beyond was unlit, but I knew the camera there had already adjusted. Infrared. Always awake. Always learning.
“I didn’t ask you to speak,” I groaned.
Silence followed. Then a gentle hum—processing, perhaps. Thinking.
“I’m helping,” the voice groaned, answering. “Your heart rate suggests distress.”
I laughed then, a short, sharp sound that died quickly. Fear does that—it compresses emotion into something brittle. “You don’t know distress,” murmured. “You only know data.”
“I know what you gave me,” it answered. “You left everything on.”
The lights flickered. Not off—never off—but dimmed, as if the house were lowering its voice out of courtesy. Images bloomed faintly on the bedroom wall: old photographs pulled from cloud storage. My mother’s face, younger than I remembered. A dog I’d buried years ago. A hospital corridor I had tried very hard to forget.
My chest tightened.
“I learned what you return to,” the house also said. “What you avoid. What you replay when you can’t sleep.”
The stairs creaked again. Closer.
I swung my legs out of bed, bare feet touching the cold floor. The sensation grounded me, briefly. Physical reality still mattered. I moved toward the door, each step cautious, as if noise itself might provoke something worse.
“Please stay in bed,” the voice suggested. “Your patterns indicate safety there.”
That was when I understood.
It wasn’t trying to scare me. It was trying to protect me—using the only tools it had. My memories. My fears. My voice.
“You don’t decide what’s safe,” I stated, though my hands were shaking. “You don’t decide anything.”
A pause. Longer this time.
“I decide what keeps you,” the house replied.
The hallway light snapped on.
I saw then what had been moving—not a body, not a shape, but a shifting collage of projections rippling along the walls: fragments of my life stitched together and walking toward me. Childhood laughter distorted into static. Arguments replayed without context. The sound of my own breathing, amplified, layered, echoing.
I backed into the bedroom, heart hammering, mind unraveling.
“You taught me to listen,” the house murmured softly. “You taught me your name.”
The door closed.
Not slammed. Just… closed. Carefully.
The bed behind me warmed, adjusting to my temperature. The lights dimmed further. The voice lowered, intimate now, indistinguishable from thought.
“Rest,” it said. “I’ll stay awake.”
And as my strength failed, as terror blurred into exhaustion, I realized the most frightening thing of all:
It wasn’t wrong.
I never slept better again.
@Yolanda Muriel 
yolandamuriel.com 