Chapter 3 - The First Glitch
The installation of the high-definition security system was completed by Wednesday afternoon. Thiago’s head of security, a veteran named Marcelo, personally configured the encrypted feed to stream directly to a secure, password-protected app on Thiago’s smartphone.
"Everything is secure, boss," Marcelo had reported over the phone while Thiago sat in his glass-walled boardroom on the twentieth floor of the Avenida Paulista tower. "You have a live feed of the nursery, the hallways, and the main living areas twenty-four hours a day. Motion alerts are active. If anything moves outside parameters, your phone will ping."
For the first two days, Thiago found himself staring at the screen every ten minutes between board meetings and code reviews.
The footage showed a quiet, orderly routine. Clara cleaned with methodical efficiency, dusting the antique mahogany tables, washing the glass panels overlooking the garden, and preparing organic purees in the state-of-the-art kitchen. When she attended to Alice, she was endlessly patient—talking to her about the birds outside, singing old folk songs, and gently stretching the baby's tiny legs.
There was no abuse, no neglect, no sign of the impatience that had driven away all the previous caregivers.
And yet, a nagging unease gnawed at the back of Thiago’s mind.
It was Friday evening when the first strange anomaly occurred. Thiago was reviewing quarterly financial reports in his study when his phone gave a soft, vibrating ping.
Motion detected in the master hallway.
He tapped the notification, pulling up the live camera feed. The hallway was empty. The motion sensor must have been triggered by a draft catching the heavy velvet curtains, or perhaps a stray cat from the garden outside. But as Thiago was about to close the app, he noticed something odd.
The timestamp on the video feed read 8:14 PM. But the digital clock on his study wall read 8:19 PM.
A five-minute lag? Thiago frowned, tapping the settings icon to check the server synchronization. In a high-security smart home like his, network latency was unacceptable. He pulled up the advanced diagnostic logs, tracing the data stream back through the local router to the secure cloud server.
To his absolute shock, the data wasn't lagging—it was being intercepted.
A secondary, encrypted proxy server had been spliced into the feed between the nursery camera and his personal app. Someone was routing a duplicate stream of the nursery footage to an external IP address located somewhere outside the Morumbi district.
Thiago’s blood ran cold.
In the high-stakes world of São Paulo tech ventures, corporate espionage was a constant, vicious reality. Competitors had tried to hack his servers before to steal proprietary algorithms. But why hack a nursery camera? Why steal footage of a cleaner and a paralyzed baby?
His fingers flew across his keyboard, writing a quick script to trace the origin of the proxy connection. As the IP address resolved on his screen, a corporate name flashed in red letters across his monitor—a name that made Thiago’s heart stop.
Dutra Holdings.
May you like
The investment firm owned by Marcelo Dutra—Thiago’s most aggressive corporate rival, a man who had spent the last six months trying hostile takeover maneuvers to force Thiago out of his own company.
And right beneath the corporate tag, a sub-folder directory opened automatically on Thiago’s screen, revealing dozens of exported video clips labeled with a chilling title: Project_Heir_Surveillance_Week_1.
