Undersea Cables Never Sleep

The sphinx moth on Marcus's balcony had returned every night for three weeks, drawn to the pale glow of his monitors like I was — drawn to him, to the easy laughter over lukewarm coffee, to the way he quoted Camus during deployment disasters. We were friends, or something like it, in that peculiar way lonely people in their thirties attach themselves to each other in foreign cities.

Then came the Tuesday I found the packet sniffer installed on my workstation.

"Marcus," I said, holding up the cable he'd surreptitiously replaced. "Care to explain?"

His face didn't change, but something in his eyes did — that shuttered look people get when they've been caught, but also when they've been waiting to be caught. "Corporate," he said quietly. "They wanted to know about your side project."

"My side project?" I laughed, bitter and sharp. "I'm building a tool for detecting data breaches. You're helping them perpetuate one."

"I'm just—" He stopped. "I have debts."

The sphinx moth fluttered against the glass, its wings surprisingly delicate for something so moth-colored, so nondescript. It had always seemed ominous to me, that creature feeding in darkness. Now it just looked tired.

"You're not a friend," I said, and the worst part was how final it felt, how empty the space between us had become. "You're just another compromised node in the network."

He didn't argue. He just packed his things — the old photograph of his mother, the succulent that was mostly dead, the coffee mug that said CHAOS ENGINEER. The elevator cable hummed as he descended, taking with him three months of easy camaraderie, of shared cigarettes in the stairwell, of the particular intimacy that exists between people who understand each other's jokes.

That night, the sphinx moth didn't return. I told myself it was just the season changing, or the weather turning cold. But some part of me — the part that still believed in riddles and answers, in the possibility of being known — knew the truth. Nothing returns to a place where it's no longer welcome, not even something as small as a moth, or as large as what I'd thought we were.