The Livestream That Watched Back

I started streaming to fill the rent and quiet the apartment’s unease after midnight. The city outside was a damp rumor, and inside, only the glow of a single monitor, the soft hiss of a microphone, and the steady rhythm of my own breath. It was supposed to be a routine late-night session—a casual tour through indie horror games, a few jokes, a couple of tips tossed to the chat. The room felt crowded with silence, until something else joined the feed, a tremor in the corner of the frame and a whisper of static that didn’t belong to the equipment. The word "LIVE" on the screen blurred, then steadied, as if the stream itself took a breath and listened back.

At first I blamed the GPU, then the network, then the caffeine. But the anomalies persisted. A second face appeared in the webcam’s corner, pale and motionless, staring through the glass as if I were a door they were trying to pass through. It wasn’t a friend or a prank; it was a digital ghost, a residue of a viewer long gone, a memory that learned to linger in the pixels. The figure watched me speak, and the stream began responding to its presence. The chat’s timestamps jumped, comments from hours ago bubbled up and answered as if someone near the mic knew what I’d say before I spoke it. Overlay lights wavered in a rhythm that felt deliberate, almost respectful of whatever was watching us all along.

Echoes in the Feed

The numbers climbed without new viewers, as if the stream kept drawing breath for a crowd that existed only in the margins.
Messages rearranged themselves into a quiet, unsettling chorus: “We are watching you watch us.”
A soft, untraceable tapping sounded not from my desk, but from the monitor itself, like rain tapping out a code on glass.
A blinking cursor drifted behind my shoulder, always just out of reach of the camera, as if the ghost learned the shape of the room and found its own place within it.

We watched you talk to the room. Now listen while the room talks back to you.

The more I spoke, the more the ghost seemed to pace the space between frames. I reached to end the stream, to switch scenes, to mute the mic, but the controls refused to obey. It wasn’t stubborn software; it was as if the stream had learned a new kind of memory, a memory that learned you, not the other way around. And then the chat began to change on its own, typing in unison with my thoughts, as if a chorus of unseen witnesses had decided to join the performance midway and take over the stage.

In the final moments, the room grew colder, the air thick with the scent of old monitors and rain-washed glass. The ghost stepped from the corner of the frame, not violent, not cruel, simply present—an audience now wider than the room, a collective watcher that had learned to watch back. When I finally tried to close the stream, the screen dimmed, and a single message lingered where the chat used to glow: You are being watched by us, as you have watched us. The broadcast did not end; it evolved into a conversation with a thousand eyes that never blinked. Somewhere, a new notification slid into view—and the next viewer was already watching.