The funny thing is, the whole mess started with something most people don't even think about anymore: internet. Not passwords, not hackers, not even money. Just a cable. One quiet line running from a pole to my house. Until the morning I woke up and realized someone had decided it didn't belong to me anymore.
When I bought that little house on Alderbrook Lane, it wasn't because I dreamed of settling down in a picturesque neighborhood with perfect lawns and matching mailboxes. It was cheap. It was solid. And it had a detached garage that I could turn into an office.That was the dream: a door I could close, a desk that didn't wobble, and enough quiet to work without hearing my neighbor's television bleed through the walls.I worked remotely as a systems analyst for a private contractor. Not the movie kind of stuff. No explosions, no satellites falling out of the sky. Mostly infrastructure, redundancy planning. Boring things that only matter when they fail. But boring or not, the job demanded one thing above all else: stability. Low latency. A connection that didn't blink when everyone else in the neighborhood fired up Netflix at 7:00 p.m.So I invested in it. Trenching done clean. Conduit buried properly. Patch panel mounted straight. A fiber modem that could handle far more than I actually needed, because that's how I sleep at night—knowing the system can take a hit and keep going.I was proud of it. Quietly proud. I didn't talk about it. Didn't show it off.But someone noticed anyway.Her name wasn't actually Karen. That's just what everyone called her once they felt safe doing it. On paper, she was Lorraine Bellas. President of the Alderbrook Homeowners Association. Retired. Organized. Impossibly punctual. The kind of person who didn't knock so much as announce herself by standing in your peripheral vision until you noticed her.She had a clipboard. Always. And that clipboard seemed to carry weight. Not physical weight, but social gravity. People straightened up when they saw it. Conversations shortened. Dogs were suddenly leashed. Trash cans were wheeled in a little faster.At first, our interactions were harmless. Polite nods. Neutral smiles. A comment about the weather.