The Sleep Recorder.

I’ve always been a bit of a data junkie. I track my steps, my heart rate, my screen time—all in the name of self-optimization. So, when I found "Somnus," a sleek new sleep-tracking app, I downloaded it instantly. The interface was clean, the promises were grand: it would analyze my sleep cycles, identify disturbances, and record any nocturnal sounds to give me a complete picture of my rest. For the first two weeks, it was boringly brilliant. It produced clean graphs of my REM cycles and a few pathetic audio clips of my own snoring. It was exactly what I wanted: predictable, sterile data.

The first anomaly appeared on a Tuesday morning. As I sipped my coffee and scrolled through the previous night’s data, I saw a strange spike on the audio timeline, labeled by the app as "Ambient Anomaly: 3:14 AM." Curious, I plugged in my earbuds and pressed play. I heard the familiar, gentle rhythm of my own breathing. Then, another sound faded in. It was a second set of breaths. Deeper, slower, and with a slight, wet rattle at the end of each exhale. It sounded impossibly close to the phone’s microphone, which sat on my nightstand, inches from my head.

My blood ran cold. I paused the recording, my heart hammering against my ribs. I live alone. My windows were locked, the deadbolt was on. I replayed it, cranking up the volume. There was no mistake. It was the sound of respiration. I tried to rationalize it. The wind? The old radiator? An echo from my own breathing? But no explanation felt right. The sound was too organic, too… present. I spent the rest of the day feeling a prickling unease, the sense of an invisible stain on the clean data of my life. I told myself it was a glitch, a bizarre bug in the app.

For the next few nights, the recordings were normal. The "ambient anomaly" didn't reappear. My paranoia began to subside, lulled into a false sense of security. I started to believe it had just been a technical error. Then came last night.

I woke up this morning with a profound sense of dread, the kind that settles in your bones before you’re even fully conscious. My hand was trembling as I reached for my phone. I opened Somnus. There it was again, a long, angry red spike on the audio graph, this time labeled "Vocal Anomaly: 4:22 AM."

My breath hitched. With a sense of grim inevitability, I put in my earbuds and hit play. I heard my own restless tossing and turning. Then, the other breathing started, louder this time, closer. It was a slow, deliberate rhythm, a predator’s patience. I listened, paralyzed, as the breathing continued for a full minute. And then, it stopped. In the dead silence that followed, a new sound emerged. A dry, scraping whisper, a sound like dead leaves skittering across pavement, forming a single, unmistakable word right next to the microphone.

"Leo."

I threw the phone across the room. It hit the wall with a sickening crack. This wasn't a glitch. This wasn't the wind. This was intelligent. It was in my room, and it knew my name. I spent the next hour in a full-blown panic, pacing my apartment, checking locks, peering into closets. But I knew it was pointless. I hadn't seen or heard anything with my own ears. The only evidence was on the phone.

After my terror subsided into a desperate need for answers, I retrieved the phone. The screen was cracked, but it still worked. I couldn't go to the police. What would I say? "My app whispered my name?" They’d think I was insane. My only hope was to find a logical explanation within the app itself. I dug through the settings, my fingers flying across the screen, until I found it: an advanced diagnostic tool for "Audio Source Triangulation." The feature used the phone’s multiple microphones to differentiate between sounds originating from the external environment ("Room Ambient") and sounds originating from the device’s own hardware ("Internal Feedback"). It was a tool for debugging, for finding glitches.

My heart pounding, I ran the diagnostic on the recording of the whisper. The progress bar crawled across the screen, each percentage point an eternity. I prayed for the result to say "External." That would mean someone was in my room—a terrifying but understandable horror. At least it would be real.

The analysis finished. A small text box appeared on the screen.

Source Analysis Complete.

Vocal Anomaly at 4:22 AM:

Origin: Device Hardware (Internal Microphone).

I stared at the words, my mind refusing to process them. *Origin: Device Hardware.* It wasn’t a glitch recording the wind. It wasn’t a burglar whispering in the dark. The sound had never been in my room at all.

It was coming from inside the phone.

The breathing, the whisper… it lives in the circuits and the silicon. The phone in my hand wasn’t a window to the world; it was a cage. Or perhaps, a voice box for something trapped within. I looked down at the cracked screen, at the object I had held to my ear a thousand times, and a new, more profound horror washed over me. I wanted to smash it to pieces, to grind it into dust. But a paralyzing thought stopped me: if I destroy the phone, do I set the thing inside it free?

As I stared, frozen, the speaker on the phone crackled. It wasn't a notification. It wasn't a call. It was a single, soft, slow breath, exhaled into the silent room. And this time, I didn't need an app to hear it.