Lina felt a cold trickle down her spine. “What kind of anomalies?”
Thank you for using HDB One View. Your home has been watching you, too. Would you like to continue?
“Are you saying the app is detecting ghosts?” hdb one view app
“It’s under Settings > Privacy > Advanced. Some users enable it by accident. It allows the app to correlate your home’s data with other units in the same stack—vertical and horizontal. For patterns. For… anomalies.”
She didn’t stop until she was back in her own flat, doors locked, all lights on. She deleted the HDB One View app. Then she reinstalled it. Then she deleted it again. Then she sat on the floor of her kitchen, crying quietly, because the app had been right all along. Something was moving through the walls of Block 322. Something that had learned to use the sensors. Something that was now, according to the last notification she saw before the deletion, attempting to link a Singpass account. Lina felt a cold trickle down her spine
Lina did something she had never done before. She took the lift down to the third floor at 3:15 AM.
Her phone buzzed. A new notification: Pattern match found. This activity resembles historical data from Unit #03-12 (vacant since 2019). Suggested action: Report to HDB. Would you like to continue
She walked to the bedroom. The door was closed. She opened it. Empty. Curtains still drawn. The air was stale, but not cold. Not warm. Just… absent.
The bedroom door opened and closed. The kitchen tap ran for exactly 47 seconds. The bathroom exhaust fan turned on, then off. The main entrance never opened, which meant the visitor never left. They were inside the walls. Or inside the data.
Lina Koh had lived in Block 322, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3, for twenty-three years. She knew its quirks: the lift on the right always smelled like durian on Sundays, the third-floor corridor light flickered in Morse code, and Mr. Raghavan from #08-12 watered his orchids so enthusiastically that it rained on the fifth-floor laundry below.
She never opened the app again. But sometimes, at 3 AM, she hears a soft creak from Bedroom 2. And she swears she can hear a voice, thin and old, saying the same words that appear on her phone screen before the battery dies: