In the longer reach, the video had captured a moment of heroic self-preservation that would go on to inspire many people in both the abstract and even occasionally in practical application.

It could have been a good day for John Cooper, but it wasn’t. His wife and stepdaughter knew of the perimeter cameras. They knew about the door chimes and the alarm codes and the motion-detector lighting. But they hadn’t known about, nor would have they agreed to, Interior 1, the camera inside the house. And they didn’t know why he had needed to put it there in the first place.

CHAPTER TWO

John Cooper’s silenced cell phone shivered against his leg again. The barrage of text alerts from the network of cameras always ramped up around the time Carly came home from school, but this was getting ridiculous.

Until he’d become a self-taught expert in home security, John had never much noticed the all-hours parade of mundane creatures flitting, scurrying, snuffling, moseying, and waddling all over the 360 degrees he was worried about. On nice days it might crest over into a circus, and occasionally, in some clairvoyance of weird weather, you’d get a full-out episode of Suburban Wild Kingdom—flex-eared cats stalking small things in the grass, hackles-raised dogs making sport of the cats, squirrels losing their minds, and blue jays dive-bombing the whole spectacle. The cameras dutifully reported these scenes to John’s phone in text messages. And they reported. And reported.

It didn’t relent in the evenings, either, but the cast of the after-hours show became slightly more exotic and leggy, and sometimes even toothy when a curious coyote would venture down out of the hills. The night footage had been fascinating for a while. He’d never realized so much was going on out there. His household winding down into whatever passed for tranquillity at the end of each day didn’t mean all that much to the rhythm of the world. Other creatures still had things to do. Some of them in John Cooper’s yard even.

When the neighborhood went lights-out in every direction, it was the sort of place made of early-to-bed people. They’d be up productively soon. But if sleep wouldn’t come to you, then at least the ritual quiet was expected of everyone in the tidy darkness, even if you were wide-awake and staring at the shadows on the ceiling.

In the first weeks that the security system was live and pinging, John had watched a selection of deer, raccoon, opossum, and fox, all careful and walleyed in the night vision, picking their way in singles or sets over the lawn and around the trash bins. Their flat white stares were disturbing in their unblindness, pairs of blank spotlights snapping up out of the grass, alerting to things in the grayscape that John’s cameras didn’t show him.