Tech Amuck: Abnormal Activity

 

 

Mr. Malt stared speechless at the image on his screen. No thief.  No monster. No ghouls. Just three massive men sleeping away peacefully.

The single father had security cameras in every room. His room, his sons’ room, the living room, and the kitchen. He made sure his sons knew exactly where the cameras were placed. Didn’t need them to make up ghost stories. The entire neighborhood was getting them due to rising concerns in a nearby neighborhood. Apparently, people were breaking in and eating food without busting down doors. Once he had them, he never had to check as the company offered monitoring, when the cameras were activated at night. 

Everyone would talk about how safe they felt during the neighborhood meetings. The security cameras were doing their job; people didn’t even have to second guess. Instead of anxiety it brought a calming wave to all their fears.

That’s when the trouble started, innocuous enough. Food disappearing from the fridge. Mr. Malt would tell Jeremy, his oldest, he couldn't let his brothers eat whatever. Jeremy claimed he had no idea what his dad was talking about. He’d never seen them sneak food at night to their room. Weird? But he let it go; his son wasn’t a liar. Then some days Mr. Malt would wake up, and his closet was open, clothes taken out and laid across his bed. He thought maybe his subconscious was making him select clothes as a sign he was overworking himself. His mind wasn't on alert, until his neighbors started claiming to see someone move through the house at night. 
He didn't get how that was possible. Surely the security company would have pointed out a stranger in his home? 

The thought kept him up until late at night, so Mr. Malt did something no one had. He checked the video footage. It was always available, but no one had ever mentioned taking a look. How odd was that? When he tried to go into the app, it was overly complicated to get the footage as if purposefully obfuscating it. Yet Mr. Malt prevailed and examined all the rooms, ending on his sons’ room for prosperity. He didn’t expect much, sliding through the night. A glitch in the screen caused a blip in his check as he stopped. By the time the image flickered fully back on there were different people in his sons’ beds. He put the marker back in the timeline, the same exact position as his sons.

“What the?” He muttered. There was no denying Jeremy’s habit of covering his waist and not much else as he slept.  Nor Larson and Roman in their bunk bed, with no covers on. The only difference was that neither of them had a sighting of pajamas. It was a full heaping of muscled ass and thigh for the viewing. Clothes completely gone. Mr. Malt checked through the other hours of footage the company had. A glitch occurred at the same time frame at 11:59 coming back at midnight. Most of the time his sons slept. Other times, they would sleepwalk into the rest of the house.

He went to check on his sons and upon opening the door, heard the loud snores of beasts. The men in the footage really were in his sons’ room and resting. He closed the door not wanting to disturb them.  Returning to the footage, he found the feed frozen upon him entering his son’s room. Nothing but a still image of him. The company sent him an email about terminating a contract due to a breach in terms of service. They had watched him discover what happened to his sons and were now trying to weasel out of it. 

Mr. Malt's revenge was swift. The company had to recall all their cameras as their technology was expunged from every neighborhood and town they could reach. Unfortunately, because the glitch never replayed back, his sons were stuck as the men in the footage as the company refused to aid in reversing it. They claimed the glitch was not native to their systems, but a happy accident they were willing to use. 

People had questions and got no answers. As for the Malts, life found a new normal with 4 men living under the same roof. The new men had a lot of Mr. Malt’s sons in them but were also completely different. The most annoying of which was strutting around the house naked, refusing to put clothes on. And when they convinced their father to get new cameras” just in case” Mr. Malt found them showing off, knowing he was watching. 

Mr. Malt wondered if it was time to admit security cameras were just a bad idea…even when he enjoyed the show.