The buzzing started the second I sank into the hot water of the bathtub. My head snapped around. A drone. It was hovering brazenly right outside my bathroom window. Blood rushed to my head. My first instinct was to jump up and yank the curtains shut, but what if it was recording? I curled myself into the tightest ball possible in the far corner of the tub, grabbed the long-handled back brush from the ledge, and swiped frantically at the cord, managing to pull the blinds closed. I scrambled out, threw on a robe, and rushed to the window. The thing was still there. I ripped the blinds open and held up my phone, hitting record. As if it had been caught, the drone zipped away and vanished into the night. Clutching my phone, I immediately uploaded the video to our condo building’s private Facebook group. “Whose drone is this?! Flying outside my bathroom window at night. Have some decency!” My post was a bombshell. “Isn’t that the same one that was hovering outside my window a few days ago?” “That’s it! I was just about to get undressed and it freaked me out so much I just put my jacket back on!” “This is harassment, right? Who knows if we’re being secretly filmed!” I tagged the building management. “Shouldn’t you be investigating this? It’s happened to more than one resident!” Management replied quickly: “Rest assured, residents, we will look into this immediately.” I thought that would be the end of it. I never imagined the drone would come back, with a vengeance, and this time, just for me. 1. The building management’s investigation went nowhere. They claimed there were too many blind spots in the security camera coverage to find the operator. Judging by the silence in the Facebook group, none of my neighbors were being bothered anymore. It was my personal stalker now. I live on the 16th floor. The view is great, which also means I’m completely exposed. Day one, it hovered outside my living room window, its camera aimed straight at me. I drew the curtains. Day two, it was outside my bedroom window. At midnight. I installed heavy blackout curtains that plunged the room into total darkness. Day three, I was in the kitchen cooking dinner. I turned my head and there it was. A cold, electronic eye, separated from me by a single pane of glass. I felt like an animal in a glass cage, being watched at will by an invisible owner. I called the cops. An officer came, took my statement, and then said, “Ma’am, without any actual damages or proof of it capturing you in a private moment, it’s tough to press charges. We recommend you take extra security precautions.” Extra precautions? I kept all my blinds and curtains drawn, living in a perpetual state of twilight. I was starting to feel like a mushroom. That night, I was watching a movie with the volume turned way up. Suddenly, a deafening whine drowned out the sound. The drone’s propellers. It was practically plastered to my window. I stormed over and ripped open the curtains. A tiny, powerful spotlight had been attached to the drone. A beam of stark white light shot through the darkness, directly into my eyes. I staggered back, eyes stinging, tears streaming down my face. It was taunting me. A switch flipped in my brain. I grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter, slid open the window, and hurled it with all my might. The drone dodged it with a nimble dip. It seemed to gloat, wobbling in the air for a second before flying off. I watched it disappear. It went up. I live on the 16th floor. There are still a dozen or so floors above me. I shut the window and sat in the dark, listening to the furious drumming of my own heart. This wasn’t over. 2. The next day, I took a half-day off work. I went to a specialty electronics store. “Hey, you got any of those high-powered laser pointers?” I asked the guy at the counter. He pulled a long, thin box from under the counter. “This one’s got a three-mile range. You can see the beam at night. Don’t ever point it at anyone’s eyes. It’ll blind them.” “I’ll take it.” That evening, I sat on my couch in the dark, waiting. I’d left a small crack in the curtains. Sure enough, at 9 p.m., the familiar buzz returned. It circled at a distance first, as if checking to see if the coast was clear, before slowly approaching my window. The spotlight flickered on. Showtime. I raised the laser pointer, aimed through the crack in the curtains, and zeroed in on that glowing camera lens. I pressed the button. A beam of brilliant green light shot out and hit the drone’s camera dead-on. The drone jolted violently, as if it had been electrocuted. The spotlight died instantly. It thrashed around in the air for a few seconds before fleeing in a panic. A wave of pure satisfaction washed over me as I watched it retreat. I had the best night’s sleep I’d had in weeks. The next morning, I walked out of my apartment, feeling refreshed and ready for work, and was hit by a wall of stench. A huge splash of dark red, viscous liquid was dripping down my front door. It looked like rancid animal blood. The keyhole of my deadbolt was jammed solid with superglue. My key wouldn't go in. The door was un-lockable from the outside. I just stood there, my stomach churning. 3. I didn’t clean up the mess. I didn’t touch the lock. I just called building management, my voice eerily calm. “Someone vandalized my door with some kind of filth and glued my lock shut. I need you to send someone to deal with it. And I need you to pull the hallway security footage.” The property manager came up himself, his face pale as he took in the scene. “Ms. Miller, this is… this is appalling! We’ll get on the security footage right away!” I nodded, went downstairs, bought a new deadbolt from the hardware store, and called a locksmith to come and drill out the old one. My phone was quiet all afternoon. Just before the end of the workday, the manager called back, his tone strained. “Ms. Miller, we reviewed the footage, but… the person was wearing a hoodie and a face mask. We can’t see their face.” “Which floor did they come from?” I asked. “…Floor 17.” I hung up. The 17th floor. A package I’d ordered arrived. A smart video doorbell, with motion detection and cloud storage. I installed it myself in under thirty minutes. After I was done, I ordered some Thai food and sat on the couch, eating while watching the live feed from my front door on a spare phone. They would be back. I waited for two nights. Nothing happened. The drone didn’t show up either. It was like they’d given up. On the third night, I was reading a book when my phone buzzed. A push notification from the doorbell app. “Motion has been detected at your front door.” I immediately opened the live view. A figure in a black hoodie was creeping toward my door, a small bucket in his hand. Just as I’d expected. He walked right up to my door, started to unscrew the lid of the bucket, and raised it to throw. I pressed the two-way talk button on the app. “Don’t move.” My voice, broadcast from the tiny speaker on the doorbell, wasn’t loud, but it sliced through the silent hallway. The figure froze, sloshing some of the liquid out of the bucket. He looked up in terror at the little doorbell camera. “I’ve got you on video,” I continued, my voice steady. “Turn around, take the stairs, and walk away now, and I can pretend this never happened.” He stood there, hesitating, clearly trying to decide what to do. “You have three seconds. Three… two…” Before I could even say “one,” he dropped the bucket and bolted for the stairwell. I watched him vanish from the frame and saved the video clip. In that one moment he’d looked up, his mask had slipped just enough to reveal the lower half of his face. It was a young face, twisted with malice. 4. I didn’t post the video to the Facebook group. That would only make them more careful next time. I needed a knockout punch. The next day, my internet slowed to a crawl. Videos buffered endlessly, and web pages took forever to load. I called my service provider, and they ran a diagnostic, telling me the line was fine, but that I had an unusual amount of traffic and several unknown devices connected to my network. I logged into my router’s admin panel. Sure enough, the list of connected devices was full of MAC addresses I didn’t recognize. One device name stood out: “LK-Drone-Controller.” LK? It hit me like a ton of bricks. There was only one family on the 17th floor. Apartment 1701. The last time I was in the management office, I had glanced at the resident directory. The owner: Daniel Kirk. His son: Leo Kirk. LK. They had been piggybacking off my Wi-Fi the entire time. Using my own internet to control the drone that was spying on me. No wonder they always knew exactly when I was home. A hot rage burned in my chest. I didn’t change the password. Not yet. I opened my laptop and started Googling. “How to track devices on my Wi-Fi.” “Locate IP address.” “Digital forensics.” It took me a full day, but I figured it out. Using some specialized software, I could capture the data packets being sent by any device on my network. The data was encrypted, but I could see which servers it was communicating with. “LK-Drone-Controller” was constantly pinging a cloud server belonging to a major drone manufacturer. I even found the server’s IP address. I took screenshots of everything—the device name, its MAC address, the server logs—and saved it all. Only after I had my evidence did I go back into my router settings, blacklist “LK-Drone-Controller,” and change my Wi-Fi password. The next morning, I had just gotten out of bed when someone started pounding on my door. I checked the video doorbell feed. It was a middle-aged woman, her face distorted with fury. Leo Kirk’s mom, from 1701. “Open this door! Open up right now! You little psycho, what did you do to our internet?” she shrieked, hammering on the door with her fist. I hit the talk button. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “Don’t play dumb with me! My son said it was you! It was working fine yesterday, and now we can’t get online! What is wrong with you?!” She’d just admitted it. I let a small smile touch my lips. “Oh? And how exactly were you getting online, ma’am?” The woman outside my door went silent. “You… what are you talking about! We have our own internet plan!” “Is that right? Well, that’s funny. I was checking my router yesterday and noticed an unauthorized device has been stealing my Wi-Fi for weeks. The device is named ‘LK-Drone-Controller.’ I’ve already filed a police report and gave them the device’s MAC address and all the server data as evidence. They’re going to find out who owns it and what they’ve been doing. Did you know that piggybacking on a secured network is a federal crime?” I heard a sharp intake of breath from the other side of the door. Then, dead silence. A few seconds later, she exploded like a cornered animal. “You’re lying! You bitch, you’re trying to frame my son!” She started kicking the door, screaming every curse word in the book. I didn’t engage further. I muted the microphone, walked calmly to my kitchen, and started making a pot of coffee. Listening to her impotent rage outside my door, I took a sip. For the first time in a long time, my coffee tasted amazing. 5. Leo’s mom raged for another ten minutes before the neighbors and building security finally persuaded her to leave. The world was quiet again. That evening, my power went out. It wasn't a tripped breaker; my neighbors’ lights were all on. It was just my unit, plunged into darkness. I turned on my phone’s flashlight and checked the circuit breaker box. All the switches were in the ‘on’ position. I called building maintenance. “Ms. Miller, please hold on, we’ll send an electrician up right away.” As I waited, a deep sense of unease settled over me. With the power out, my video doorbell was offline. I was blind to what was happening outside my door. I dragged a heavy armchair and wedged it under the doorknob. Then I heard it. A faint footstep. It stopped right in front of my door. It was followed by a soft, metallic scraping sound. Someone was picking my lock. Every hair on my body stood on end. I held my breath, tiptoed to the door, and pressed my ear against the cold metal. Whoever was out there wasn't very good at it. They fumbled for a while before I heard a muffled curse. They seemed to give up. Then came a different sound. A soft squelching. They were squirting something into the lock. Glue. They were trying to seal me in. What if there’s a fire? The thought terrified me. I crept to the kitchen and pulled the longest, sharpest chef’s knife from the block. Just then, my phone rang. It was the building electrician. “Ms. Miller? I’m on your floor, but someone’s put a padlock on the utility closet in the hall. I can’t get to the main power box for your unit. Let me go see if I can find a key.” My blood ran cold. They’d locked the utility closet, too. Almost simultaneously, I heard the person outside my door react to the sound of my phone ringing. The footsteps started again, frantic this time, running toward the stairwell. I rushed to the door and peered through the peephole. The hallway was empty. I wrenched the door open. The sharp, chemical smell of superglue filled the air. The lock was completely sealed. Down the hall, the door to the utility closet had a heavy-duty U-lock clamped through the handles. They were trying to bury me alive in my own apartment. I stumbled back inside, my back against the door, my heart pounding against my ribs. My phone screen lit up. A text from an unknown number. “Like my gift? This is just the beginning.”
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