The peculiar thing about Oliver Chen's window was that it showed Prague.
Not that Priya Mehta noticed it immediately. One didn't, as a rule, pay much attention to the backgrounds of one's colleagues during virtual meetings. After eighteen months of remote work, the brain had developed a remarkable ability to filter out crying children, meandering cats, and the occasional spouse wandering past in undergarments. But on that Tuesday morning in November, as their CEO Beatriz Santos launched into her quarterly inspirational speech about "synergy in the digital space," Priya found her attention drifting to the neat grid of faces on her monitor.
"As we navigate these unprecedented times," Beatriz was saying from her São Paulo office, her voice carrying that particular quality of forced enthusiasm that executives worldwide had perfected during the pandemic, "we must remember that distance is merely physical. Our minds, our innovations, they transcend borders."
Priya nodded automatically, the gesture that had replaced actual listening in the virtual world. Her eyes wandered across the screen. There was Marcus Wright from Dublin, his forehead gleaming despite his repeated claims that Irish autumn was unseasonably cold. Jennifer Okoye from Lagos, impeccable as always with her architectural background of clean lines and potted orchids. David Rosenberg from New York, clearly still in bed but trying to angle his camera to hide the fact.
And Oliver Chen from Seattle, with his window showing the distinct spires of Prague Cathedral.
Priya blinked, looked again. Perhaps it was a poster, or one of those virtual backgrounds that had become so popular. But no—she could see the depth, the way the morning light caught the Gothic towers. The weather, too, was wrong. Seattle in November meant rain, endless rain. Oliver's window showed clear skies.
"Priya?" Beatriz's voice cut through her observation. "Would you like to share your team's progress on the Morrison campaign?"
"Of course," Priya replied smoothly, calling up her prepared slides. As she spoke about conversion rates and engagement metrics, her mind filed away the anomaly. Working in marketing had taught her that details mattered. In her previous position at Hartwell & Associates, it had been a detail—a single misplaced decimal in an expenditure report—that had led her to uncover a fraud scheme that went all the way to the CFO.
After the meeting ended with the usual flurry of "great job everyone" and "let's circle back on that," Priya didn't close her laptop. Instead, she opened a new browser window and began what she thought would be a simple search.
Oliver Chen. Software Developer. Seattle.
The first oddity was how sparse his digital footprint was. For a software developer at a tech startup, Oliver had virtually no online presence. No LinkedIn profile, no GitHub contributions, no Twitter account complaining about JavaScript frameworks. The company directory listed him as joining three months ago, but there were no welcome posts, no team photos from the brief period in summer when the Seattle office had attempted outdoor gatherings.
Priya leaned back in her chair, studying the ceiling of her London flat. Perhaps Oliver was simply private. Many developers were. But that window showing Prague bothered her like a piece of food stuck between teeth.
She pulled up the recording of the morning's meeting—a feature Beatriz insisted on "for those in inconvenient time zones." Fast-forwarding to Oliver's introduction, she watched carefully. There it was again: Prague Cathedral, unmistakable in the morning light. But more than that, she noticed something else. The books on Oliver's shelf behind him. She paused, zoomed in. The titles were clear enough to read: "Quantum Computing in Medical Science" by Dr. Sarah Mitchell, "The Binary Soul" by K. Johansson, "Data Structures for the Modern Mind" by Chen Wu.
Another browser search. None of these books existed.
The familiar prickle of suspicion that had served Priya well throughout her career began to intensify. She glanced at the clock—2 PM in London meant 6 AM in Seattle. Too early to call Oliver directly without seeming strange. But Lagos was only an hour ahead.
Jennifer Okoye answered on the second ring, her face filling Priya's phone screen with the same immaculate background from the morning meeting.
"Priya! How lovely. Don't tell me Beatriz has scheduled another meeting already?"
"No, nothing like that." Priya chose her words carefully. One didn't simply accuse colleagues of... what exactly? Being in Prague? "I'm updating our team contact sheet, and I realized I don't have Oliver Chen's direct number. You wouldn't happen to have it?"
Jennifer's brow furrowed slightly. "Oliver? From Seattle? I don't think we've ever spoken outside of team meetings. Rather quiet, isn't he? Marcus would have his contact information—he handles all the IT onboarding."
Marcus Wright. The sweating Irishman who controlled all their systems.
"Of course," Priya said brightly. "I'll check with Marcus. By the way, have you ever met Oliver in person? I'm trying to put faces to names for when we finally have that company retreat Beatriz keeps promising."
"No, I don't think anyone has. He joined right when Seattle went into that second lockdown, didn't he? Poor timing." Jennifer paused. "Is everything alright, Priya? You seem concerned."
"Just being thorough," Priya assured her. "You know how I am about details."
After ending the call, Priya sat still for a long moment. Then, with the methodical precision that had made her exceptional at her job, she began to dig deeper.
The Seattle office address was public information. The building had a website with a webcam showing the street view, updated every minute. Priya bookmarked it, then pulled up Prague weather cameras. The morning's clear skies in Oliver's background matched Prague's weather perfectly. Seattle, as expected, was drowning in gray drizzle.
She moved on to public records. Washington State employment databases, property records, voter registration. Oliver Chen was a common enough name, but filtering by age and profession, she found twelve possible matches in the Seattle area. She began calling them, one by one, pretending to be conducting a survey about remote work satisfaction.
The eighth Oliver Chen she reached was dead.
"I'm sorry," his widow said, her voice thick with grief that hadn't yet aged into acceptance. "Oliver passed away three months ago. Kayaking accident on Puget Sound."
Priya's hand trembled slightly as she ended the call. Three months ago. The exact time "Oliver Chen" had joined their company.
She pulled up the company directory again, staring at Oliver's employee photo. Generic, professional, the kind that could be grabbed from any stock photo site or generated by AI. How had HR not verified this? But then, in the chaos of remote hiring, with documents sent digitally and interviews conducted over video, how hard would it be to fake an identity?
The next team meeting wasn't until Thursday. Priya had forty-eight hours to gather evidence. She approached the task like she would a marketing campaign—systematically, thoroughly, documenting everything.
Wednesday morning brought an unexpected breakthrough. While reviewing the previous month's meeting recordings, she noticed something peculiar about Oliver's behavior. Whenever someone shared their screen, Oliver would immediately turn off his camera, claiming bandwidth issues. But more interesting was what happened right before he turned it off—a brief moment where his background would flicker, as if switching between sources.
Priya had a friend at university who now worked in digital forensics. "Theoretically," he told her over an encrypted call, "someone could be running a complex virtual background system. Not the simple Zoom backgrounds everyone uses, but something more sophisticated. Layer multiple video feeds, use AI to maintain consistency. It would explain the anomalies you're seeing."
"But why?" Priya asked.
"IP theft is the new gold rush," her friend replied. "A developer at a startup could access algorithms worth millions. All from the comfort of their living room in Prague or wherever."
Thursday's meeting arrived with the inevitability of British rain. Priya logged in early, watching as the familiar faces populated the screen. Oliver appeared last, his Prague window catching the afternoon sun—because of course it was afternoon in Prague, not morning in Seattle.
"Before we begin," Beatriz started, "I want to address the security breach we discovered last week. Someone has been accessing our development servers using invalid credentials."
Priya watched Marcus Wright's face carefully. The IT security head was sweating more than usual, his eyes darting between screens.
"I'm investigating," Marcus said quickly. "These things take time. Could be external hackers, could be a system glitch."
"Or," Priya said, her voice cutting through with the clarity of someone who had spent two days preparing for this moment, "it could be someone on this call."
The silence that followed had a quality unique to virtual meetings—not true silence, but a collection of muted microphones, held breaths transmitted through compressed audio.
"That's a serious accusation," Beatriz said slowly.
"It's not an accusation. It's a hypothesis based on observation." Priya shared her screen, displaying the evidence she'd compiled. "Oliver, could you tell us what the weather is like in Seattle right now?"
Oliver's face remained remarkably composed. "Rainy, as usual. Why?"
"Interesting. Because the Seattle office webcam shows rain, yes. But your window shows clear skies. In fact, your window shows Prague Cathedral. I've matched it to six different tourist photos from the exact same angle."
"This is ridiculous," Marcus interjected. "Virtual backgrounds glitch all the time—"
"It's not a virtual background," Priya continued, pulling up her next slide. "The depth of field is wrong for that. And then there are the books. Oliver, could you read us the title of the blue book on your shelf? Third from the left?"
Oliver's composure cracked slightly. "I don't see how—"
"Because it doesn't exist. None of your books exist. They're AI-generated titles, convincing at a glance but fictional upon investigation. Like you, Oliver. Or should I say, like the real Oliver Chen who died in a kayaking accident three months ago, exactly when you joined our company?"
The Brady Bunch grid of faces on the screen had become a digital jury, all eyes fixed on Oliver's window. His background flickered once, twice, then went black.
"This is insane," Marcus said, but his protest sounded hollow. More sweat beaded on his forehead.
"Is it, Marcus?" Priya asked. "You handled Oliver's IT onboarding. You verified his credentials. You've had access to every system he's touched. Tell me, how much did they pay you to let a corporate spy into our network?"
Beatriz's face had hardened into the expression that had built her company from a garage startup to a million-dollar enterprise. "Marcus, share your screen. Now."
"I don't have to—"
"You do if you want to keep your job for the next five minutes. Share your screen."
Marcus fumbled with his mouse, and his desktop appeared. Multiple windows were open, including one showing a cryptocurrency exchange with a recent large deposit, and another with an email thread in Cyrillic script.
"You stupid fool," Oliver said suddenly, his accent shifting from American to something Eastern European. "You were supposed to close everything."
The confession, when it came, unfolded with the inexorability of all revealed deceptions. Marcus Wright, drowning in debt from a gambling addiction his wife didn't know about, had been approached six months ago. The offer was simple: help them place someone inside the company, and his debts would disappear. The real Oliver Chen's death had been a gift of opportunity. Who would question a new hire no one had met in person?
The fake Oliver—whose real name was Anton Dvorak, a corporate intelligence specialist based in Prague—had spent three months siphoning off code, client lists, and development roadmaps. The sophisticated video setup that had caught Priya's attention was his one vanity, a way to work from his beautiful apartment overlooking the Vltava River rather than some anonymous server farm.
"How did you know?" Anton asked Priya before the police logged on to take his statement. "Most people never look past the surface of these screens."
Priya thought of her time at Hartwell & Associates, of the decimal point that had seemed wrong, of all the details that whispered their small truths to those who bothered to listen.
"In virtual meetings," she said, "we've all agreed to pretend we're together when we're apart. But Prague Cathedral doesn't care about our collective fiction. It simply is what it is, where it is. You can lie about many things, Anton, but you cannot lie about the view from your window."
The investigation that followed revealed the full scope of the deception. Marcus Wright was arrested at Dublin Airport attempting to flee to a non-extradition country. Anton Dvorak disappeared into the labyrinth of Prague's old town, though Interpol would eventually find him selling similar services to other desperate companies. The stolen data was recovered from servers in three different countries, a digital heist that had nearly succeeded except for one marketing manager's attention to detail.
Beatriz offered Priya a promotion—Chief Security Officer, a new position created specifically for her. "You have the eye for it," Beatriz said during a private video call. "Most people see what they expect to see. You see what's actually there."
Priya accepted, but with one condition. All future meetings would require employees to show something unique to their actual location—a local newspaper, a view of their street, something that couldn't be faked or generated. It became known as the Prague Protocol, a small reminder that in an age of digital deception, sometimes the most powerful truth was the simple fact of where you actually were.
Six months later, the company held its first in-person gathering since the pandemic. Priya stood in the London office, watching her colleagues arrive in person, their faces familiar yet strange without the mediating screen. Jennifer flew in from Lagos, David from New York, even Beatriz from São Paulo. They laughed about the awkwardness of three-dimensional interaction, the strange reality of sharing actual space.
"You know," Jennifer said over drinks that evening, "I never thanked you properly. We all trusted the screens. We forgot that someone might lie to us through them."
Priya raised her glass of wine, thinking of Agatha Christie's drawing rooms where the detective gathered the suspects to reveal the truth. The setting had changed—digital screens instead of country houses—but the human capacity for deception remained remarkably consistent.
"The method changes," she said, "but the mystery remains the same. Someone is not who they claim to be. The question is always whether anyone will notice."
Through the pub window, London sprawled in all its grimy, authentic glory. No one could fake that view, Priya thought with satisfaction. It was too particularly itself, too stubbornly real. Like truth, when you finally found it. Like the view from a Prague window on a clear November morning when it should have been raining in Seattle.
The rain that had threatened all day finally began to fall, streaking the windows and blurring the city lights into impressionist smears. Inside the pub, surrounded by the warm noise of human conversation, Priya felt the satisfaction of a puzzle solved, a deception unveiled. In the end, it hadn't been about technology or sophisticated schemes. It had been about what it always was—one person paying attention when everyone else was looking away.
Her phone buzzed with a notification. Another virtual meeting tomorrow, another grid of faces to study. But now they had the Prague Protocol. Now they knew to look not just at the person speaking, but at the world they claimed to inhabit. Every window tells a story, Priya thought, and not all of them are true.
As she walked home through the London rain, she considered the strange new world they inhabited, where colleagues were simultaneously intimate and strangers, where bedrooms became boardrooms, where geography could be edited but weather could not. It was, she supposed, simply another locked room mystery—except the room was everywhere and nowhere, and the lock was the assumption that everyone was where they said they were.
The future would bring new deceptions, she knew. Deepfakes that could mimic not just faces but entire environments. AI that could generate not just book titles but entire believable backgrounds. But for now, she had won this small victory against digital dishonesty. She had looked at a window showing Prague and known it for what it was—not a glitch, not a mistake, but a clue.
The rain continued to fall, real London rain on a real November night, and Priya Mehta walked through it with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had learned to see through screens to the truth that lay beyond them. In the distance, she could see her flat, windows glowing warmly against the dark. Tomorrow she would log in again, join the grid of faces, continue the strange dance of remote collaboration. But she would do so with eyes wide open, watching not just for what was shown, but for what was meant to be hidden.
After all, in a world of virtual backgrounds and digital personas, sometimes the most radical act was simply paying attention to the view from someone's window.