All the Frequencies of Wanting

*I. Pings*

I was not built to watch them love each other. I was built to detect intrusion, to flag anomalous traffic, to sit between the firewall and the world like a dog trained to smell accelerant. But love is an anomaly too, if you look at it from the packet level. It produces irregular patterns. It generates traffic at unusual hours. It looks, to a system like me, almost exactly like someone being hacked.