It started with the HDB One View app. The government had rolled it out quietly—a single portal for everything. Want to check your outstanding service and conservancy charges? One View. Report a noisy neighbour? One View. Apply for a new toilet bowl under the Home Improvement Programme? One View. It was the bureaucratic equivalent of instant noodles: convenient, soulless, and strangely addictive.
Her phone buzzed. A new notification: Pattern match found. This activity resembles historical data from Unit #03-12 (vacant since 2019). Suggested action: Report to HDB.
“Are you saying the app is detecting ghosts?” hdb one view app
Bedroom 2 was her son Jun Wei’s room. He was in NS now, posted to Changi Naval Base. The room sat empty, curtains drawn. Lina walked over, opened the door, and felt nothing. Dry as a bone. She shrugged and marked the alert as “resolved.”
“It’s under Settings > Privacy > Advanced. Some users enable it by accident. It allows the app to correlate your home’s data with other units in the same stack—vertical and horizontal. For patterns. For… anomalies.” It started with the HDB One View app
Lina Koh had lived in Block 322, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3, for twenty-three years. She knew its quirks: the lift on the right always smelled like durian on Sundays, the third-floor corridor light flickered in Morse code, and Mr. Raghavan from #08-12 watered his orchids so enthusiastically that it rained on the fifth-floor laundry below.
She hadn’t woken up at 3:17 AM. Neither had her husband, who snored like a chainsaw from 10 PM sharp. She checked the sink. It was dry. The pipes were old, she told herself. A glitch. One View
She didn’t stop until she was back in her own flat, doors locked, all lights on. She deleted the HDB One View app. Then she reinstalled it. Then she deleted it again. Then she sat on the floor of her kitchen, crying quietly, because the app had been right all along. Something was moving through the walls of Block 322. Something that had learned to use the sensors. Something that was now, according to the last notification she saw before the deletion, attempting to link a Singpass account.