Chapter 1
1392words
She had just finished an extremely long video conference about system architecture, and her temples were still throbbing with pain.
Her husband David had messaged that he was still at the studio rushing a urgent project, so this peaceful home was entirely hers alone.
Or rather, it belonged to her and all the obedient smart devices throughout the house.
"Xiao Zhi, play my 'After Work Relaxation' playlist," Ella said into the air, her voice tinged with a hint of fatigue.
"Certainly, playing your 'After Work Relaxation' playlist now," responded a gentle male voice from the central speaker. A moment later, soothing jazz music began flowing throughout the room.
Ella sighed with satisfaction, sinking into the soft sofa. As the Chief Security Officer of Nebula Tech, she spent her days dealing with data breaches and cyber attacks. Ensuring that her home system was tightly secured was almost a matter of professional dignity and a small obsession for her.
Every device here, from light bulbs to the refrigerator, had been personally hardened by her.
She took a sip of wine, instinctively picked up her phone, and habitually opened the smart home management app—"Home Guardian." This was just a daily routine, like a general inspecting territory under absolute control.
The interface showed everything was clean, energy consumption was normal, and all devices were online. Her gaze casually swept across the activity log, mostly records of her own commands.
Until one late-night record suddenly caught her attention.
**[Timestamp]: Wednesday, 02:17:03 AM**
**[Triggered Device]: Living Room Smart Hub**
**[Command Received]: "Xiao Zhi, play some relaxing jazz music."**
**[Execute Operation]: Now playing 'Relaxing Jazz' radio in the living room.**
**[Voice Recognition]: Guest**
Ella's fingertip froze on the cold screen of her phone.
Wednesday before dawn? David indeed hadn't come home that night.
What did he say on the phone again?
"Honey, we've hit a bottleneck with this prototype testing, I need to stay up all night to monitor it, so I'll just crash on the sofa at the studio."
His voice did sound genuinely tired, with just the right amount of apology.
But this command...
Soothing jazz music. David never listened to jazz; he complained it was so dull it made him want to sleep. In his car, he always played high-energy electronic music.
And, "Guest"?
Ella sat up straight, placing her wine glass on the coffee table with a soft clink.
The privacy settings in her home were extremely strict, with all devices having disabled voice recognition features for strangers except for "voice matching." Unless... this voice had been explicitly, actively invited and added to the system.
Cold logic became clear in her mind: the system would never recognize an unfamiliar voice pattern without reason. The only possibility was that David—the other administrator of this home—had personally added that voice as a "trusted guest" and granted remote control permissions.
He had not only betrayed his vows but also abused the security system she had meticulously designed, opening the door of their most private space to another woman.
A sense of being thoroughly violated and betrayed, ten times stronger than before, instantly swept through her entire body.
She took a deep breath, trying to suppress that inappropriate feeling of absurdity in her heart. Perhaps it was a system malfunction? Or... a neighbor? The soundproofing in this apartment was excellent, but network signals don't care about walls. Maybe some drunk neighbor had guessed the password correctly and connected to the wrong network?
This idea almost made her laugh. Her home network used the highest security protocol, with a password consisting of 20 random characters, mixing uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. The probability of "guessing" this password was about the same as her being hired tomorrow as a technical director on an alien planet.
Professional instinct quickly flooded over that slight hope like a tide. Her fingertips moved rapidly, pulling up the more detailed backend logs. She wanted to check when this "guest's" voice pattern first appeared.
The records showed that the first voice command flagged by the system as "guest" occurred six weeks ago. It was also during a late night when David was "working overtime." The command was "Xiao Zhi, turn the air conditioner temperature down a bit."
After that, intermittently, there were seven or eight more records. Most were late at night or in the afternoon, playing music, asking about the weather, and once even asking "Xiao Zhi, how do you make a perfect classic cocktail?"
Ella remembered that classic cocktail. About a month ago, David came home one evening and suddenly enthusiastically mixed her a drink, saying it was something new he had learned, with a taste that was amazingly good. She had even laughed and complimented him for finally catching on.
Looking back now, every timestamp of the instructions precisely corresponded to times when David wasn't by her side. Business trips, overtime work, weekend "team development retreats."
It felt like a small piece of ice had suddenly been lodged in her stomach, the chill spreading slowly but resolutely.
She stared at the instruction record from 2:17 AM for a long time. Then, almost instinctively, she dialed David's number.
The phone rang several times before being answered, with somewhat noisy background sounds that seemed like a restaurant or bar, but it quickly quieted down, as if he had moved to a more secluded spot.
"Hey, darling!" David's voice came through, carrying a hint of laughter, sounding perfectly normal, "Is the meeting over? I'm almost done here and getting ready to head home."
Ella's gaze didn't leave the record on her phone screen.
"Hmm," she made her voice sound as casual as possible, even adding a touch of drowsiness, "I just wanted to ask, were you at the studio early Wednesday morning?"
There was a half-second hesitation on the other end of the line, so brief it was almost imperceptible.
"Of course, where else would I be? Didn't I tell you? I worked until almost dawn and then crashed on the couch for a bit. Why do you ask?" His tone carried just the right amount of confusion.
"Nothing," Ella heard her own voice sounding terrifyingly calm, "I was just checking the home security logs and noticed some unusual activity early Wednesday morning. A strange voice command that the system tagged as 'Guest'."
She paused for a moment, as if carefully choosing her words.
"Do you think... could it be some hacker, or maybe a neighbor who accidentally connected to our network?"
She threw out these two most implausible, least likely possibilities, as if offering him a ladder to climb down.
Sure enough, David's voice immediately became relaxed, even slightly teasing: "Haha, maybe! Hackers these days can get into anything. Or maybe some stupid neighbor entered the wrong password? Didn't you always boast that our system is impenetrable? Looks like it has its weak spots after all, Madam Chief Security Officer."
He laughed, trying to gloss over the situation with affectionate banter.
On any other day, Ella might have laughed along.
But at this moment, while listening to her husband's relaxed laughter on the other end, her eyes remained fixed on the cold, objective record on the screen—
【Wednesday, 02:17:03 AM】...【Command】...【Voice Recognition: Guest】.
Technology's records are cruelly honest.
And human lies sounded so clear in her ears, yet so clumsy.
"Maybe." She finally responded softly, with no discernible emotion in her voice, "Come back early when you're done."
"Okay, I'm leaving now. Love you."
"Mm-hmm."
Ella hung up the phone.
In the living room, jazz music continued to flow tirelessly, gentle and intimate.
But she felt that this smart home she had built with her own hands, so incredibly familiar, had for the first time become somewhat strange, somewhat quiet to the point of suffocation.
She didn't speak again, just curled up her legs, huddled on the sofa, her fingers unconsciously caressing the cold phone frame.
The screen light flickered on her face, brightening and dimming.
That command from the "guest," like a seed quietly buried, had created a tiny crack in the deepest part of her heart.
A chill was seeping through it, thread by thread.
