The report was short: dusk came, the porch and garage lights stayed dark.

My first instinct was the clock. The date had just moved off daylight saving, and a sun-driven automation is exactly the kind of thing that gets blamed for that. Half the internet agrees with that instinct. Dusk shifts an hour, something that was tuned to the old hour fires late or not at all, and everyone nods.

The alert arrived as a question, not a page: why is memory pinned near the top?

I went to look. The summary panel for the machine that hosts this home’s brain showed memory almost fully consumed - the kind of number that, on another day, would have sent me straight into the logs at speed. But it didn’t behave like a leak. It sat high and flat: never climbing, never easing. Alarming, and suspiciously calm.

The hallway light stayed on for eleven minutes after everyone had gone to bed.

Eleven minutes in an empty hallway, with a sensor at one end insisting the whole time that somebody was standing right there.

What the new sensor was for

It was meant to be an upgrade. It replaced a cheap passive infrared unit that could only report that something had moved. The new one was supposed to do better than that. Not something moved but someone is here - the person at the desk, asleep on the sofa, sitting very still with a book.