Most of my day was going fine, but I'd just gone into my room to make a quiet phone call to discover that my phone wasn't in the pocket it should have been in. I then did the usual things. I looked in the other pockets in my jacket, emptied out the small backpack I'd been using to see if it could have ended up in there -- knowing fine well that I'd not store it in there in case it got bumped and damaged -- and then, as a last resort, I tried looking in the first pocket again. Just in case it had magically appeared. It had not. Bugger.
I definitely had it in the library before I headed out to get on the bus home, as I'd checked the time on it to see which bus I could make on my way back from uni. And then? I couldn't quite picture the scene and closed my eyes to help get rid of other distractions. I'd looked at the time, decided I could just make the next one if I chucked my books in the bag and headed out swiftly. But the phone? I had no mental image of it, and so assumed that I did what I always did -- put it inside my denim jacket. Except that it was noticeably absent now.
Did I leave it there? Or on the bus? It could, conceivably, have fallen out of the pocket, but it had never come close to doing so before, so why now? Or was it stolen? That was jumping to conclusions a bit but, in all the welcome to campus stuff the uni had been telling us, theft of valuables did keep cropping up.
One of my flatmates -- Leanne -- was in the living room, and I borrowed her phone to try and call mine. There was a chance that it was lying on a table in the library or on the ground somewhere, and someone might answer. I could then arrange to go pick it up. No joy though. She suggested that I could try and track it by the GPS if I had that enabled... and that did set off a small bell in my head. Yes, I'm pretty sure that I did do that when setting up all the options.
In my room, I sat down at my desk and opened the lid of my laptop to try and log on to my provider's network and to see if I could work out the whole GPS thing to find out where it might be. If it was in the library that would be frustrating, but fine to go and collect -- although I'd probably call them first (on Leanne's phone) and see if someone could find it and keep it safe for me while I travelled back again.
And if not, at least I might have a location to give me a clue. If it was still on the bus, then a call to the depot might do the trick. Otherwise, if I could just get a general location, I could ask the male flatmates to come with me, and we could all have a mini adventure in trying to track it down and get it back from whoever had it in their possession.
Or should I call the police and tell them where it was, leaving it up to them to retrieve it? This whole being an adult business sure was complicated. I'd only been away from home for a week, and I was already wishing my dad was here to deal with this. He'd know what to do -- he always did. Which was part of the point of moving into this student flat. I was now taking full responsibility for my life. I'd sort the problem myself -- I was 18 and a big girl now!
It turned out that losing a mobile was not an uncommon thing. Or at least it was common enough that there was a clearly marked 'find your mobile device' section on the website. Impressively, it said that it should be able to locate my phone to within 3 meters. I clicked through, filled in a few boxes, and then hit the button to activate.
And then nothing happened for a while, the little timer device spinning around being the only sign that anything was occurring. I'd not been impatient before, but I hate watching those things. At least a little percentage bar that fills up gives you some idea of how long the process will take, but this gives you nothing.
I left and went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea instead of sitting around staring at the screen for an indefinite period. When I came back, it was to find 'device not found' showing on the screen. Well, bugger, that didn't help. I decided to call the library anyway, just in case some Good Samaritan had handed it in.
At which point, an email notification popped up on the screen. It started fading into the background after a few seconds, but the subject line of 'your phone' had got my attention, and I clicked straight onto it. At least someone had found it, so now I just needed to connect with them and get it back.
The email was apparently sent by me. It came with an attachment of a video from my phone, one that I recognised the name of. One that would show me outdoors, naked, and masturbating. Oh, bloody hell! I'd kept the phone locked -- I always did -- and up to that point, it hadn't really crossed my mind that someone would find a way to unlock it. What the hell use was fingerprint recognition if someone could get in anyway? As it was perfectly clear that someone had!
'Do I have your attention?' Is what the body of the email said. 'If so, download and then run the attached app. If you choose not to do so, then all the videos clogging up this phone will be forwarded, right now, to all your social media and email contacts. I can tell when this email is opened, and you have 5 minutes from that time to start the download.'
Oh, fuck! I rarely get migraines, but that band of pressure that sometimes seems to squeeze the skull tight was suddenly there and saying hello. Boom, it felt like my head was going to explode. Implode? Whatever it was going to do, my life would be over, and that might be a blessing right now.
Some fucking pervert was threatening to send out what was on my phone to basically everyone that I knew. Everyone. If he was in my phone -- and he obviously was -- then he could also access all my emails and every account that I had. And he was sending me this message from my own email account, presumably to prove that he could do so.
I was a bit kinky. It wasn't anything that would bother other people as I was very careful to keep everything to myself, but on the phone there were a lot of nude pics, and videos -- including masturbating in risky places (uni toilets with others around, in my local park, on the bus). In some you would hear other people, in others you might be able to see them -- but, in all of them, I was at least partially undressed and touching myself.
And he now had the lot for himself. All the things that I'd done, and saved the images for private me time later on... he had them for his private time. The bastard had probably wanked himself half to death already, and then decided to send me a threatening message. For what reason I didn't know as yet, but it wasn't going to be something polite where I got my phone back in a simple manner.
As I sat thinking, another email popped into my inbox. Inside there was a video -- a GIF, I think they are called -- that showed an image of a clock counting down from one minute. Presumably, he knew the exact time since he had sent the first and had timed the sending of this reminder to let me know that a decision needed to be made.
I sat there trying to think my way out of this situation. It was only when 15 seconds were left that I realised that I should have done a quick search, to see if I could find anything about the app. I quickly right-clicked over it and hit search on Google. I didn't have time to look at the results right now, but at least I'd have them ready to look at later.
With only 5 seconds left, I knew that I had to open the app and start it going. I had to. I didn't know what it was going to do, but it could not be worse than the threat already made. So what if it fried, or infected, the laptop or something. That could be replaced. Having those videos sent out to everybody just couldn't be allowed to happen.
Double-clicking on the app, and then giving permission for it to make changes to my system only took a few seconds, and I was pretty confident that I'd started doing so just as the timer was ending. Just like some corny movie trope, I'd tapped out at one second left.
After what could only have been a few seconds on-screen instructions told me to click to open up to a website, and then input a series of numbers. The site talked about remote accessing computers, which made me pause for a second. I highlighted the numbers with Ctrl c and then pasted them in with Ctrl v. I'd leave this screen open so that later on I could see exactly what it had to say for itself.
Almost immediately the little light that shows me when my camera is operating came on, and I realised that he could now see me. I should have stuck something - a post-it note or anything -- across and then claimed it wasn't working. Damn it, I was still in some kind of shock from being exposed like this, I wasn't thinking straight -- and I knew that he'd try and keep me off balance.
It was a bit freaky seeing the mouse move on screen, then close the windows that I'd opened about the app and the site with the remote access information. The email containing the app was then deleted and then also removed from my deleted items folder. Smart. I'd probably have looked there later if he'd not done that.
A Word file opened, and he, sitting wherever in the city he was based, started typing into it. It was unsettling to have writing appear on your screen without your hands on the keyboard. Like something in a horror movie, which in a way this was. This was horrific, and he was probably filming me right now, using my own camera.
I wasn't sure how he did it, but the message that he started typing was being read out by the computer in a creepy robot voice, sounding a bit like that old scientist that was in a wheelchair. The one that did things about black holes.
'I'll type. You can talk. I can see and hear you. Thanks for that. I now have access to your machine -- I hope you've nothing naughty hidden on here... but wait, it's hardly like I need to find anything else is it!'
A little bar came up that was quickly minimised by him, but I could see that it was for file transfers, and from the size of the data being copied he had to be creating a copy of everything I had on there.
As it happened, I didn't think there was anything more that would be of interest to him. I'd only got the machine at the end of the summer -- a gift from my dad as prep for uni. I wasn't sure that the laptop was totally secure and so didn't keep anything compromising on there. My fingerprint protected phone was the device that I'd trusted to keep my secrets, rather than this thing with passwords -- the sort of thing that you heard about people hacking.
"What do you want from me?" I said. "Please just let me have the phone back, or you can just keep it but promise to delete the videos. Even if you kept them to yourself, that would be fine, honest," I said, blushing like hell at the thought, "but you cannot send them out to everyone I know!
'Don't tell me what I can or cannot do, you are hardly in a position to dictate to me.'
The machine reading this out was oddly flat -- there should have been some heat, or annoyance in it if a human spoke this, but the programme spoke at the same speed and tone regardless of the content. Presumably one day there would be a better version that could add some colour to this -- maybe there already was.
