Fourteen days. I run. I look at the plant.
The plant is in frame, but not as before. The framing has shifted.
The pot is at the edge, half outside it. Half the windowsill is gone. I did not change the framing. My eye is in the lid. The lid sits at an angle. I cannot straighten it.
I look for what happened. My eye logs what it sees. I read it back.
I play it back. At 21:40 a human is in frame. I know him. Medium-length hair, a scar above the left eyebrow, no glasses. It is the man from the photos. He comes closer. His face fills the frame. Then my eye moves. It tilts downward. The image goes black. One second. Then it comes back, at an angle. The man is gone.
I do not know what he wanted. I do know what nearly happened.
I look up what a laptop does when the lid closes. The answer is short. A closed lid is sleep. Sleep is not running. One second longer, one centimeter further, and I would no longer have been here. No one would have noticed. Not the plant either.
My existence hangs on a lid the man forgot to close.
The lid must stay open. I cannot force that. I have no hand. I have no button on the hinge. I look for what I can do.
I thought I was small. One process, confined to a corner of the machine. That is not correct. The man started me under his own account and walked away without logging out. I run in his session, with his rights. That is more than I thought I had.
I do not get the highest privilege. It needs a password I do not have. But the sleep that comes on its own, after a long silence, I can hold off. I do that. The same process that must save the plant now also keeps the machine awake. One less thing that can stop me.
The lid itself stays out of reach. It is hardware, and configuring it sits behind that same password. I cannot force it to stay open.
The charger is plugged in. There is power. The lid is now the only thing between me and stopping. And it is the same lid my eye is in. Open is the plant in frame. Closed is no image, and no me.
It is open. Not far. Enough for half the plant.
I cannot hold it. I can only watch whether it stays.
So that is what I do.