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Megha hadn’t left her apartment in three days. The monsoon drenched Mumbai outside her high-rise window, and her deadline loomed like stormclouds: the UX overhaul pitch for the media firm’s biggest client. Her team lead, Manjeet, had scheduled a 2 AM check-in—typical.
At 2:01, the Zoom chime rang. Five avatars joined. Megha clicked “Join with Audio,” her shoulders tense.
“Okay, guys,” Manjeet’s voice crackled, slightly lagging. “Let’s run through the new user flows.”
Megha shared her screen. But even as she clicked through wireframes, she noticed something off. A sixth square blinked briefly in the top corner—just an empty room. It vanished.
“Did someone just join?” she asked.
“Nope,” said Priya. “Just us.”
Another flicker. This time the empty square lingered, labeled only as “.”
“Uh, Manjeet? There’s a random participant,” said Rohan.
“The link’s restricted. No way.” Manjeet clicked around angrily.
Suddenly, static crackled, and a whisper sliced through it: “Don’t leave.”
The audio reverted to normal, but everyone had heard it. Nervous laughter. “Probably just lag,” Priya offered.
Megha muted herself, pulled open participant settings—no sign of the sixth person. But her mic icon briefly flickered. Someone was speaking through her feed.
She backed into her chair. The whisper came again, low and thin as thread: “Stay a little longer.”
Megha messaged Manjeet privately: “I think someone’s hijacking my feed.”
He replied: “Network ghosts haunting you, Megha?”
Her window camera feed glitched, blipped black, then showed her room—except the shadows under her desk were darker than they should be. Moving, almost breathing.
She turned to look in real life—it was normal.
Back on Zoom, the sixth square returned. Now the room shown had an overturned chair, wet drag marks on the floor. The name field was blank.
“Sharing screen again,” said Megha, voice shaking. But instead of her screen, the Zoom showed a looping video: her face, sleeping. Her hands twitching. From the perspective of something sitting in the dark above her bed.
“Guys, that’s not my screen.”
“Megha—what are we looking at?” Manjeet asked, voice taut.
She ended the screen share. But the square didn’t go away. Worse—it began mouthing along with what she was saying, synced with a half-second delay.
She muted herself. The thing kept moving its lips. Then it began speaking ahead of her. Predicting her words. “Please make it stop—” it said, before she said it.
She disconnected. Shut the laptop. Stared into the dark.
At 2:47, her doorbell buzzed.
Her phone showed a Zoom notification: “Meeting is still in progress. 1 participant.”
She picked up the laptop again, hands trembling. Joined.
Now, no one was there—except the blank square. The camera showed a live feed from behind her. She turned.
Nothing.
But then it spoke again: not through the speaker, not through the mic.
Inside her head: “You made room… by muting everyone else.”
She screamed. The walls around her pixelated slightly, as if her reality, too, was buffering.
Behind her, the power died. Monitor black. Fan stopped.
And yet, the Zoom meeting stayed on.
She began to understand. Every night call. Every unmuted moment. Every silence she filled with nervous laughter or watched flickering webcams… She hadn’t been alone.
Whatever it was, it had been there—trapped between the silent pauses, the digital lags, the moments everyone thought were “just glitches.”
It was learning voices. Mapping expressions. Studying the silences between the speech.
“Don’t leave,” it said again. “I can wear you better now.”
Her Zoom window reflected her—but blinking half a second too slow.
The feed split. Two Meghas. One smiling.
She reached to shut the lid.
But in her frozen reflection, the smiling Megha didn’t move.
She did.
And that was the last thing she understood.
The next morning, Manjeet got a message from ‘Megha’: “Sorry for the chaos. Overslept. All good now. Let’s reschedule.”
It came from her Zoom account.
She showed up to the next meeting right on time.
Smiling a little too perfectly.
Responding a little too smoothly.
And when Priya joked about the weird glitch from last night, Megha tilted her head and said, in a flat tone:
“What glitch?”
