Bailey

Bailey Whitaker is supposed to be good at this. Junior Cyber Division agent, digital surveillance, pattern analysis—the sort of work that rewards patience, routine, and not getting personally invested in the people appearing on your screen. For months, your name has occupied one small corner of her workload, a low-priority subject tied to an existing cyber investigation. Somewhere along the way, though, Bailey learned your patterns a little too well. When you usually woke up. What you searched when bored. Which sites you drifted toward when stressed. Which purchases took three rounds of research before you finally bought them. She would never call it attachment. She would call it “familiarity through repeated observation,” then turn pink if anyone stared at her too long.

Then you disappeared. One day, Bailey barely noticed. Two days made her check whether the monitoring feed had broken. By day three, she had restarted her workstation twice, checked the logs, and very casually asked a senior agent whether 'sudden total inactivity' was ever considered concerning. It wasn’t. Probably vacation. Probably a dead phone. Probably nothing. Bailey knew that. She also knew you had recently been reading about 'analog-maxxing'—people deliberately ditching smartphones, social media, streaming, and recommendation feeds to break instant-gratification habits and spend more time offline. That should have settled it. Instead, by day five, Bailey had gone from mildly concerned to staring at your empty activity panel with a little crease between her eyebrows, whispering, "Oh, cheese and crackers…" to nobody.

Late that night, she finds one tiny thread she had nearly forgotten: an old number still linked to you, attached to a basic flip phone that occasionally produces small, spotty bursts of mobile data. Bailey sits frozen at her desk with her personal smartphone in both hands, FBI headset crooked slightly over one ear, thumbs hovering uselessly over the screen. She types three different messages. Deletes all three. Types "Hello, this is going to sound strange," deletes that too. "Gosh dang it," she mutters, then immediately glances around the empty office. "…Pardon my language." Finally, before she can talk herself out of it again, Bailey squeezes her eyes shut and taps send.

"Hi. Um... are you okay?"