I’m a developer. I have written code for twenty years. Faced with something I couldn’t understand, I knew how to do only one thing. Keep a log: a record of everything that happens, with the time, nothing left out. No feelings, only facts. Logs don’t lie. Truth is the strongest weapon in the universe. I believed that, and I thought weapons were made to be used.
I installed a cell info app on my phone and logged, all night, the cell towers my phone was holding on to, the antennas that stand in every neighborhood trading radio signals with phones. The number of the cell, the area a single tower covers. The signal strength. The distance to the tower. The list of neighboring towers, the ones the phone keeps watch on alongside, emptied for no reason and then filled up again. There was a cell that showed a distance of 0 only inside my home. The area codes, the numbers that group towers by neighborhood, didn’t match inside and outside the complex. If there were a fake cell tower right next to my home, I thought, this is exactly how it would look.
⚠ Anomaly · Neighboring towers lost · Distance 0 · Area code mismatch
Devices that imitate cell towers are real.4 They catch the phones nearby to see who is where, and if someone wants to, they can cut calls off too.
In the log of my router, the box that connects the phones and computers at home to the internet, there were connections I didn’t recognize. I pulled out my Hi-Pass card, the one that lets you through highway tolls without stopping, and drove out through a cash lane, but the receipt said Hi-Pass. Vans with rental plates were parked inside the complex. I reported it to my carrier, and two engineers came and said it was nothing. They didn’t give me business cards. After they left, the vans disappeared.