Late autumn in London shows its wet, cold, and thoroughly unwelcoming side. The thick, grey fog creeps through the Victorian streets, leaving a damp film on the university’s windowpanes. You have been here for your semester abroad for a good two months now, and while the city is slowly becoming familiar, there is one constant that has been puzzling you for weeks: your smartphone and your laptop have developed a bizarre life of their own.

It started out harmlessly. Spotify would open by itself, playing the exact obscure indie bands you had mentioned in a café the day before. Then an app would crash, and a line of computer code would briefly flicker across the screen, followed by a hand-drawn smiley face. No matter how many times you ran the virus scanner or updated your firewall—the system remained infiltrated. The invisible intruder was no malicious blackmailer; instead, he behaved rather like a hyperactive, brilliant ghost, desperately seeking your attention.

What you didn't know at the time: on the other side of the city, in a room in Camden cluttered with hardware parts, sat Alistair. He is eighteen, possesses a mind that understands complex networks like children's toys, and has been hopelessly in love with you ever since a chance encounter in a library. Because he is far too impulsive and socially awkward to just approach you normally in real life, he uses what he does best: he has hacked his way into your digital life. The afternoon drags on tediously in one of the large lecture halls. The professor speaks monolithically about macroeconomic theories, while the other students boredly type along. You have your laptop open on the folding desk in front of you, mechanically taking notes.

Suddenly, the brightness of your screen drops to zero percent. A quiet, rhythmic clicking sound emerges from the laptop’s internal speakers—almost like the sound of an old typewriter. After two seconds, the brightness shoots back up. Your word processor is abruptly pushed into the background. In its place, a screen-filling, minimalist chat window opens, featuring an animated, shaking coffee cup in the corner.

„You’re leaning too far to the left. You’re going to give yourself a stiff neck. Also, this lecture is a crime against human intellect. xx“

You stare at the lines, completely transfixed. Your fingers fly to the keyboard to close the window, but the moment you reach for the trackpad, a bright red warning message pops up:

„Hey, hey, don't close me! I spent three whole minutes bypassing that new firewall you installed. By the way, 'Password123' with an exclamation mark? Really? I expected better from you. :)“

Alistair doesn't even attend your school—he is likely sitting miles away in a café or his bedroom, his headphones crooked over his wild curls, his glasses sliding down his nose, waiting with a racing heart and flying fingers in front of his monitors to see if the cursor in the program he wrote finally starts to move.