Archive

We had run out of fire doors. They’d proven to be highly effective defensive and offensive weapons. I’m a little surprised they don’t see more use in Jackie Chan films. I’d broken one with a policeman, smashed a machine with another and used the last two as stretchers. We were, I suspect, feeling rather too cocky as we clambered onto the metal walkway to follow the slightly sticky footprints.

Seeing the freshly setting Watchers wobble from the machine and off into the dark had demystified their existence for me. The whole set up was evocative of a crude birth canal metaphor and that appeared to have hatched some odd simplicity in my mind. There was no reason why I should have felt content – I still knew nothing about how they had come into being, who had made them or where they had come from. Just watching them pop out of a machine really told me nothing. It’s like being perfectly content to understand popcorn only as the final buttered product and forgetting about the growing on trees thing, or wherever they come from. I was glad that we had wrecked the Watcher-blowing machine. Its combination of child’s bubble blowing toy and stretchy giant cupcake mould people was disturbing in ways that I didn’t want to think about. At the very least we had tempered the flow of these surveillance drones, perhaps permanently. That was overly optimistic and I did feel foolish for even thinking it.

With the strobe lights gone, and replaced with the dull yellow of emergency lighting the big room with its stacks of yellow barrels seemed more like the hold of a ship, all grimy with salty rust and a sad smell. We, or rather the Watcher cast a last regretful look at the damaged machine and then turned back to the walkway. We carefully stepped between the moist footprints. Having seen the policeman’s Watcher dissolve in the split barrel’s pool of jelly we were keen to avoid meeting the same fate.

“What happens when a Watcher dissolves?”

“I don’t know, remember I do not know much more than you, only what I am-” he searched for a suitable word, “-primed with. I can tell you what it feels like to come close to it.”

“Alright.”

“It felt like loss.”

“Of what?”

“Self. Individuality; my self being drawn into the whole, overwhelmed. I felt like a thread being pulled, fraying away into nothingness.”

“You’d go back to that unbecome state?”

“I would be nothing again.”

“Like dying?”

“Like being unborn.”

I was even more keen to avoid the damp patches of unbecome Watcher fluid. The walkway lead out of the machine room into a short dark corridor. The last Watcher was well ahead of us and we could hear no footsteps as we followed it. I was trying not to worry about my Watcher. His voice was sad, filled with fear of ending – afraid of never being again, of a change too radical to come back from. Does the world keep going once you’re out of it? You’ll never know. It’s oddly comforting to think that everything just stops, so there’s nothing for us to miss. Everyone should lose everything all at the same time. But we know it doesn’t work that way. The truly heartbreaking part is seeing someone else just stop, and finding that your life just keeps on going. Even if I couldn’t believe that my life could continue alone, it did. That was worse than anything. When Katherine died she was gone. A huge empty space in everything around me. The settee was twice the size, our bed a vast cold wasteland. My hands were empty and my arms ached from hugging my own chest too tightly. Losing her was like losing myself – a shared identity sheared in half, lurching on with no heart or legs, scraping at existence, ever sliding past it. The horror of realising that I did have to keep going, that I wouldn’t simply vanish into quiet oblivion wore me down to a ghost, haunting my own life.

Now I had received a ghost of my own, a ghost I could watch moving the way I did, pausing while drinking a cup of tea to stare blankly into the distance. That heavy sigh, emptying the body of vital breath and grief to see it immediately fill up again. An endless aquifer of sorrow. I’d seen my Watcher being me all day, and all day I had thought he had been just copying me, those same gestures and face that I saw in the mirror and reflected from across the street. But it had been different, because he wasn’t my mirror image – the only image of ourselves that we see every day, excepting the astonishing narcissism that mobile phones have blessed us all with. He was me, but the right way round. I could see how others saw me, and I was not surprised that I had found myself alone. I had made myself alone.

After Katherine’s death I stayed in our home for a month. I could take no more than that. The emptiness, the house was like a painting where someone had erased everything important, leaving a man standing alone – no tree to shelter under, no sky or sun to illuminate the world, no colour, no smiles. So I fled. Left that house, asking for it to be sold and the contents boxed and stored. I have a good family. I went somewhere that Katherine had never been, so she couldn’t be missing. It hadn’t been entirely successful, but I hadn’t realised how unsuccessful I had been until my Watcher arrived. There’s no time limit on grief, but it has to change. We move through the well identified stages of grief in strange order and in days or years. I was carrying on life of a kind, but it was a half life without enjoyment or, well – anything. That was the life I had shared with my Watcher, that he had emulated and used to forge his own identity, arising out of the learning process. I’d never thought myself a particularly sympathetic person but it saddened me to see to another version of myself spun into person hood when I had so little to offer, to myself or to others.

I hadn’t given much thought to what the consequences of our night of action might be. We were intent of preventing the absorption event, the point where the Watchers permanently fuse into their hosts . When we stopped that, what would happen to those Watchers? Neither he or I had any answers to that at the moment. While my life might well be in danger, I mean, I’d been shot at and everything, my Watcher was a brand new life. I didn’t know what the stakes were for him, or the other Watchers who had ‘become’ over the course of the day. But he seemed resolute, even though his greatest fear was unbecoming, losing that sense of self. I had to hope that there was some way to exclude he and the others from whatever we were going to do. Once again I found myself flailing for a suitable word to describe what we hoped to achieve – ‘the stoppening’ perhaps. It’s hard to think of the future when you don’t know what’s in it, or when you don’t know what you want. I needed a word for ‘hoping at victory’. With a proper word I could focus on it, change it from a nebula of confusion and fear into an achievable something that I could actually hope for, instead of dreading. I wanted my new friend to persist in this world. I didn’t want him to fade away. I didn’t want to be left alone again either.

We high-stepped over those wet foot prints. There was a light ahead of us. Presumably all the usual lighting had been removed, or more prosaically simply switched off. We couldn’t see the light switch, but we didn’t look for it very hard. Cautiously we entered the light. This was an even larger room, filled with tiered steps running all the way round the walls, like a basketball court without ridiculously tall people to offer ball-based entertainment. The steps, or benches were filled with row after row of Watchers. I felt like I’d walked into a massive and bleak shop window. There must have been thousands of them. At the far end of the hall was a big set of double doors – big enough to drive a fire engine through, should that take your fancy. Right in front of them was another huge construction. This time it took the general shape of an arch, but it was studded with glass and plastic tubes, spheres and toroids enclosing every side of the arch. It looked like a futuristic portcullis, the gate itself was composed of a grid of bright blue and green lasers. I assume they were lasers because they  resembled the fancy moving webs of red lasers that apparently protected famous works of art. It took us a few moments to realise that the assembled Watchers were very slowly shifting around the room. It was  a slow motion whirlpool effect, leading them to the portcullis. The line was moving slowly because it took a few seconds for each Watcher to pass through the archway. As another Watcher stepped into the arch it glowed brightly with the laser beams passing through it. It trembled in their web. A light above the Watcher blinked green and it moved on, our of the hall. Another Watcher stepped up to take its place.

No humans appeared to be in the room. Just Watchers, those blank drones waiting to be lased and then, we guessed, were ready to be sent out to possess other people . Since there was no one in the room, we had no way to tell if the carnage we left behind had yet been felt. At the speed the Watchers passed through the arch it would be hours before this room ran out of them. Since the whole town was already subdued, these ones had to be intended for elsewhere, beyond the quarantine. I’ve seen public service pilots of new ideas before. They’re mostly just token efforts, since the grand new idea was already slated to commence. It didn’t really matter whether the pilot showed success or failure. Maybe this had been successful. There had only been a few hundred people who had met up at the town hall. We were the exceptions – the ones who resisted this kind of in your face surveillance. That’s a low enough error rate for government. Those failures can be easily swept into a closed file and ignored or denied in the advent of Freedom Of Information requests. It didn’t bode terribly well for anyone who the possessed police had nabbed earlier. I was still worried about Andy, Charlie and Annette back in the office building, and about Alison’s family. Maybe they were all stashed down here somewhere, awaiting a more aggressive possession than had been attempted during the day.

We wandered towards the fantastical arch, mindful of the thousands of bodies around us. When we reached the archway, without being too freaked out by the  long line of Watchers being drawn slowly towards it we could observe the lasing process in more detail. As the next Watcher stepped into the grid of lasers we could see that specific portions of the Watcher’s insides were being struck by the lasers, glowing for a moment as each beam of light hit them. It was like running down one of those musical keyboard mats that were popular in Christmas family films in the nineties. I wondered what tune they were playing inside.

“They are being programmed,” said my Watcher abruptly.

“How can you tell?”

“Where those lights touch – I can feel them in my body too.”

We moved closer and my Watcher reached out our hand to intercept one of the beams. I snatched it back, an instinct born of far too many computer games and science fiction films.

“Hey, that could just cut our hands straight off!”

“I want to know what it is that we are instructed to do,” he said, sounding a little put out.

“They are being told to locate, identify, subdue and submerge.” This new voice cut through our conversation.

On the other side of the gateway stood the mayor, flanked by her military cohort who we had seen at the town hall earlier. They were pointing rifles at us, which is very hostile. The army looking man reached out and touched something that we couldn’t see. The laser grid vanished. A small squad of soldiers darted through the arch. I don’t know how many people are normally in a squad, it’s probably a technical term, but in this case it was six men. They surrounded us in a ring of rifles.

“Move.” ordered one of the men.

I’ve seen a lot of films and this is exactly how it’s supposed to be done. It’s not very helpful though. I respond best to a detailed instruction, like what direction to move in, and I take the twitch of a rifle barrel personally. While my inner reluctance to do what I was told was jabbing my common sense in the ribs, I do have some sense. My back felt especially vulnerable, free of my Watcher’s grip even though I couldn’t really feel it. We moved with our armed ring through the arch. The faces of the soldiers were grim, but their eyes flickered with the same kind of fear I was feeling at the end of their guns. It made you wonder which of us had a weapon pointed at us. None of them wore Watchers, and neither did the mayor and her gang. As we’d noted earlier, there’s no point being in charge if you submit to the same controls and restrictions as all the ordinary people. It kept me thinking. If the soldiers didn’t have Watchers then that meant on some level the technology or whatever they were was not trusted – not enough to give a gun too at any rate. If this was a pilot, or a test of them then there had to be a core of people who were unWatched, not just the soldiers keeping the town in quarantine, but here in the town supervising or controlling the spread of the Watchers.

The mayor and her mob walked ahead of us without a backward glance. Another squad, or squads of soldiers poured into the gap behind us. No doubt they would shortly discover the carnage we’d left in the machine room. I wondered how much trouble we would be in then. I felt we were already in quite a lot of trouble anyway. With luck I’d left Rachael and Ellen far enough away to escape immediate notice. This whole operation looked quite well established and planned, which made an obvious lie out of the talk of Visitors at the town meeting. We were being lead through a series of rooms which held shipping containers, stacked to the high ceiling. We caught a glimpse of great big heavy goods vehicles lurking in the shadows farther off. A swarm of soldiers crawled over the containers, sealing them and checking lists in a great show of military efficiency. Before one of the container doors swung shot I could see it was crammed full of Watchers, just like those who had been waiting to go through the laser grid. I had no way to even guess how many were currently being held, awaiting shipping out to the next town in the roll out. We left the huge storage areas behind and up a short flight of stairs. These were the rooms where the real work was being done. Nasty bland office suites packed full of computers, massive server stacks, blinking lights and widescreen monitors filled with incomprehensible oscillating images. Several of the rooms were separated with glass partitions. As we swept past I could see a huge sphere suspended in the air, dangling cables with what looked like water running freely over it. I tried hard not to jerk my head backwards when I noticed it – it felt like something I shouldn’t have seen. My Watcher had seized up for a split second as we’d spotted it. I guessed that we had found what we were looking for.

We passed through the humming rooms and their attentive, twitchy technical attendants. Our armed cohort had relaxed not a jot. I was a little worried about how twitchy their trigger fingers might be. I had no desire to be filled with holes. At last we came to a wider office suite with a long table down the middle of the room. The mayor and her companions spread out around the table, taking what appeared to be their accustomed seats. Our escort drove us into the single office chair at the opposite end of the table. They relaxed slightly, drawing back to the edges of the room. Their rifles did not dip. Even though my Watcher was almost certainly holding the same facial expressions that I was, the sense that I was wearing a mask still separated me from the world around us. It felt like an advantage. I was quite sure we would be needing one soon. My hosts were observing me with a frightening mixture of disdain and a keen penetrating stare. They glanced at each other, making some decision or other.

The mayor spoke: “do you know that you are special?”

Constantly paying attention is very tiring. We were just twitchy, which isn’t quite the same thing. At least we weren’t US fighter pilots hopped up on amphetamines taking pot shots at Canadian tanks. Shadows and distant closing doors made us jump, but did nothing to improve our focus. It’s very hard to keep that up through a seemingly endless maze of identical corridors. I was expecting to find a race of troglodytes descended from retail workers who had gotten lost decades ago.

For all of Narrowmarsh’s modern looking exterior, the bowels of the place were as shitty as you would expect. A constant smell of damp, poorly concealed behind whitish paint and a lack of care, strip lights with a tendency to flicker in the distance whenever you looked around and occasional mystifying signs reinforced the sense of unreality that had begun when Andy got impaled in the office. Being inside what were effectively intelligent jelly moulds whose contact deadened our tactile senses and made our physical actions distant further softened our grasp that the world was real. It must be like what virtual reality gaming will one day be, fully immersive but with a feeling that nothing can really hurt you. It’s dangerous if the situation you’re in is in fact real and danger is literally waiting around the next corner.

We were following the signs that should lead to the ‘central resource warehouse’, whatever that meant. It sounded like a big room and in the absence of usable intel (it’s rare to have the opportunity to put thousands of pages of spy novels to good use) we were following our own special brand of logic, intuition (which is just logic and connection without realising you’ve thought about it) and the unreliable early memories our Watchers had retained through their becoming; their awakening as people. So far it had gotten one person badly injured and left them and two other behind to guard him. We were down to three. Or six, depending on how you looked at it. I was trying hard not to think about what shape Andy might be in by now, and whether the three of them were managing to fend off the attentions of the possessed police. There was little we could do about that. Once more I resented the loss of communications that would have either settled our nerves or sunk us into despondence. This far underground it wasn’t likely mobile phones would even have a signal. So I should have just focussed on what we were doing – if we were successful then Charlie, Annette and Andy would be saved by default.

The grim white corridors gave way through a pair of fire doors to even grimmer breeze block walls and cement flooring. The strip lights were replaced by those wire-guarded lights people put on the backs of their houses or in suspicious mines. Damp traded down to dank. For the first time the sound of voices reached to us, echoing reluctantly down the halls. At least we hadn’t been going in completely the wrong direction. We moved a little quicker, even lighter on our feet, even though we could barely feel them through the connection with our Watchers. Rachael rounded the corner first. She fell suddenly to the ground as a burst of gunfire boomed in the tiny space. Guns? We didn’t expect them to have guns. Why would we? You only see guns in the hands of police around Crown Court, occasional train stations and airports. Rachael wriggled back round the corner. We pulled her up and checked her over. There were no holes in her or her Watcher, but the breeze block wall was looking quite sad.

Guns were a good thing, sort of. It was confirmation that we were in the right place. No one hangs about in an underground corridor with a gun for no reason. Rachael’s Watcher filled us in on the details, having been better placed than Rachael in her understandable panic to remember what they had seen.

“Two men, in green and brown camouflage clothing,” the Watcher began, before being interrupted by Rachael,” which is pointless down here. They should have gone with bureaucratic grey.” Her Watcher continued, “they are guarding another set of double doors. We saw flashing lights through the security glass panels.”

“Okay, so we’ve got no idea what that flashing light is, but if it’s worth guarding then it’s probably where we need to be.” Ellen confirmed my thinking.

“Soldiers are a bit of a step up from the local bobbies. Were they possessed?” I asked.

“No, they appear to be ordinary humans.”

We could hear the very soft tread of at least one of those soldiers sneaking up on us, which is totally unfair. Actual military were another problem. Not only were they presumably much better trained for fighting and guarding than the police but they also weren’t hampered by an imperfect bond with Watchers. That gave us a slight advantage in strength and speed which we would need to optimise. We had no weapons, still. We did have two nearby fire doors and a fire extinguisher. I was fairly sure I remembered the routine from the A-Team, and if it had worked for a completely bloodless action comedy television show, I saw no reason why it wouldn’t work for us.
Rachael and I tore the doors off their hinges and held them up as shields in front of the three of us. Ellen had the fire extinguisher.

The racket we made appeared to have given the creeping soldiers pause, but since we didn’t know exactly where they were we had no choice but to rely on our advantage. It isn’t likely that the two soldiers were expecting us race round the corner in a cloud of carbon dioxide smoke stuff and batter them to the ground with doors. It worked – thanks Hannibal. I don’t know what we must have looked like coming out of the smoke – white warriors with shields taller than we were. The element of surprise remained with us as I slammed into the first soldier, knocking him bodily into the wall where I hit him a few more times until he fell over and didn’t get up. Rachael managed to smack her guy into the ground by jumping forward with the door poised over his head. One of them got a couple of reflex shots off, removing the corner of my fire door and scaring the crap out of me.

We thought about taking the guns, but apart from Rachael’s clay pigeon shooting and my mastery of Duck Hunt on the original Nintendo Entertainment System we had no idea how to use them. It was much more likely that we’d shoot each other by accident than someone we intended to hurt. That was another issue we had avoided talking about. we didn’t know if we were going to have to hurt anyone. Certainly none of us dyed in the wool assassins. I mean, I’ve got a long list of people who I’d cheerfully see on fire or punch in the face, but going beyond a mental list to really hurting someone is another massive leap. If we took the guns we would increase the likelihood of hurting someone without necessarily making it more likely that we would be successful. It had been exciting taking out the soldiers though. Ellen checked that they were still breathing. Their respiration was a relief. We did the next best thing to taking their guns: smashing them. That was also very satisfying.

The doors had worked out very well as combination shield and blunt instrument. Ellen had almost emptied the fire extinguisher, but it still made a handy hunk of metal and should make an amazing thonk as it hit someone, to judge from the films. On we went. Lights were strobing crazily through the doors that the soldiers had been guarding. Someone must have heard the gunshots, but as yet we were unchallenged. Showing a degree more caution than before we pushed the doors open with our own fire doors. Inside it looked like a horrible night club. One of those places where the owners think that the stripped back concrete and visible ventilation system is really cool. It’s not – it looks awful, it’s cheap, oppressive and difficult to keep clean. Idiots. The strobes made it hard to see what was in here with us. The centre of the room held a complicated array of metal gantries and pillars supporting a frame that hung about five feet off the ground. The strobing lights were coming from inside the structure. They seemed to follow a rhythm, exactly as you’d hope for in a better night club. Enormous yellow barrels stood around the edges of the room. They were very much the sort of containers I would expect to find Mafia victims inside.

Slowly we edged into the room, our doors held up in front of our bodies, taking care to shield Ellen as well. Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement, though it was terribly confusing in the weird flickering light. There was a whine and a flash of light and suddenly both Ellen and Rachael were dropping their defenses and fell spasming to the ground. I spun round so fast that I clipped the jaw of the man standing to my side with the bottom of corner my door, flinging him across the room. He must have been the one who tasered Ellen and had been after me next. The other man, who I could see now was a regular policeman who was wrapped in his Watcher. The other guy had flown so fast I hadn’t noticed. This one was holding his taser out in front of him. I had no desire to be tasered. I’d seen people volunteering to get tasered on YouTube. It looked like a dreadful idea. Ellen and Rachael with their Watchers appeared to be unconscious after their shocks. I didn’t want to follow them.

I advanced on the possessed policeman with the fire door held high; he retreated slightly, adjusting his grip on the taser. I pounced forwards and he fired. I let go of the fire door and the taser darts bounced off it. As the door fell forward I kicked it as hard as I could at the policeman. The door pounded him into one of the big yellow barrels, which folded under the impact, spewing a gelatinous ooze over the man. It didn’t look like he was going to get up, even with a Watcher on him. Curiosity is a difficult habit to beat, so I gave in to it. We knelt down next to the downed man. I didn’t especially want to touch him but I reached out to prod him anyway. My Watcher flinched as my finger brushed the other Watcher. We backed off, still kneeling. The gunk from the barrel was pooling under him and still poured thickly over his shoulder. Where it touched the Watcher it was beginning to blend. That same weird fuzziness around he edges which I had noticed at the supermarket. The Watcher was dissolving into the gloop. No wonder my Watcher had recoiled. This must be the same stuff they were made out of. There were hundreds of barrels. Assuming they were all full, and adding a made up assumption of how many Watchers you got out of a barrel I could confidently say there were a lot of things in that room.

The strobing light was making it difficult to spot any further movement in the room. I would have retrieved my door, but it had split down the middle when it hit the barrel. I went back to see how Ellen and Rachael were doing. They had stopped twitching and I could see that they were breathing at least. Their Watchers were rippling. Rachael’s face was sliding down her body – all of the features that the Watcher had copied were running across her like a conveyor belt of face, hands and feet. Ellen was much the same, except that her Watcher was rippling sideways, like one of those kids’ toys with three rotating bands with different characters on them so you could mix and match legs, body and heads.

“Are they alright?” I asked my Watcher, “it looks like the shock has messed them up.”

“I don’t know. Perhaps we are susceptible to electricity.” My Watcher sounded concerned, until now I don’t think he had needed to consider what might hurt them, in spite of what happened to my neighbours’ Watchers.

“That’s a bit of a vulnerability.”

“I don’t think humans are any more immune to electric shocks.”

“Well… No, I suppose that’s fair.”

The flux of features seemed to be slowing down. Rachael’s Watcher’s face was pulsing up and down in time with her breathing, like she was inflating it.

“Are they going to recover?” It was a disturbing sight, as if someone had laid a stack of live jellyfish on each of them.

“I don’t know. I hope so.”

I picked up the taser which had struck Rachael and re-wound its prongs. You never know when you might need such a thing. I tucked it into the pocket of my jacket which my Watcher was wearing.

A deep bass note rolled through the floor and the walls. We spun round to see where it could have come from. My first thought was that an enormous explosion had rocked the shopping centre down to its foundations – maybe war had broken out, American fears about the quarantine, human rights protestors storming the town and being taken out, aliens returned to claim their technology. It was none of the things my hyperactive mind had flung in the moment of turning around. The installation that occupied the middle of the room like the progeny of a spider and a bucket who had fallen in love and made a baby out of Meccano- it had been switched on. The deep rumble continued to to make my feet vibrate, even through the Watcher’s soles.

In the middle of the device a man sized frame rotated in the air. It dipped smoothly down out of sight and reappeared dripping with what I assumed was the same ooze in the barrels. Like a bubble being blown, a human shape gently extruded out of the side of the frame facing us. It’s hard to convey how spectacularly creepy this looked under the strobing lights. The frame spun slowly, gobbets and trails of the gooey stuff dripped and fell from it. Shapes glistened and seemed to dance around inside its rubbery flesh, caught and excited by the strobes. Once the first half of a blank mannequin form became fully shaped and stopped dripping, the frame canted forwards allowing the new born Watcher’s weight to pull it out of the frame. The fresh Watcher wobbled on its feet, apparently still hardening and on jellied legs stepped out of the machine entirely and on to the metalwork gantry. It visibly set as it staggered along the walkway and through a darkened doorway I hadn’t even noticed.

“I guess that’s where you came from,” I whispered, driven to a hushed voice as the machine whirled back into action, twisting and dipping once again to produce another hollow half-human figure.

“This is the Source,” he replied, copying my whisper, “this is where we all came from. I remember this place – stretching into existence, becoming shape.”

It was harder to wrest control of my mouth from him than before. Seeing your place of creation can distract a fellow I suppose.

“So what do you think we need to do? We can stop this thing from making more Watchers, but what about all the ones that are already out there, about to be absorbed into all those people?”

I did not feel comfortable about my new heroic role. I’d much preferred it when there were more of us. Rachael and Ellen still hadn’t woken up. I wondered if the taser in my pocket had been amped up a bit, to deliver a larger than required for a mere human shock. If so, we were lucky they hadn’t been fried. Their Watchers’ distortions were still slowing down, but they looked a long way from themselves. I didn’t know what we ought to do with them, but I was particularly worried about the imminence of absorption – would it happen to all of us who were wearing our Watchers, or just the drones? I liked my Watcher, I liked him a lot, but I still didn’t want to be wearing him under my skin.

When did I start calling it a ‘him’ anyway? Thinking back I think we all assumed a gender for our Watchers- they were us after all, even though they didn’t really have any gender at all. Annette had probably started it with her assumption or belief that her Watcher was her long lost twin, Vanessa. Language spreads, ideas are viruses of the mind and we’d all caught it. Maybe it came with regarding them as people, especially people who were already like us and were prepared to do something radical to help people who were even more like us. To have earned gender seemed rather presumptuous. I wasn’t sure that it was better to have a gender identifier or not. Maybe it was just that calling them ‘it’ had come to feel disrespectful, and we had just slapped our own gender assumptions on top of them. It was probably a conversation better had on a different day. Right now we were just watching an endless stream of Watchers being blown into existence by the machine. And we needed to do something about that, and the coming absorption event.

First things first. We had no idea what was going to happen next, so we kicked the other two fire doors off their hinges and laid Ellen and Rachael out on them. Then we dragged them back up the dank cement corridor we’d come from. We took them past the last set of doors we’d broken and round the corner which was marked with bullet holes. I didn’t feel good about leaving them behind, but I’m no doctor.
The best I could do was leave them in a fairly damp environment and hope for the best.

Then we returned to the machine room. Its strobing lights were bothering my eyes, or my brain, or something in between, so my Watcher took over for general looking. I could still sort of see, as if I were sharing someone else’s eyes and viewpoint. Everything looked the same, but I felt as if I were closer than I would normally be, like there was a constant shifting of things in the middle distance. It was better than the flashing lights. Our second step was to disable the machine. My Watcher didn’t seem too concerned about halting the birth of more like him.

“They are not people, they are unbecome. That a thing has potential for life is not the same as having life. Preventing them from entering the world is not an evil thing, especially since they are intended for evil.”

I was reassured to hear it. I had worried, in my head – god forbid I should let a thought out of my head so it can be discussed and dismissed – that he would see it as a kind of genocide. I didn’t know if that was what we were about to do. Seeing how the Watchers came into the world reinforced my sense that they were made, not born. Did that make him less of a person than me? I was made by my parents, through a complex but explicable process of biological engineering. It wasn’t clear that the Watchers were so very different from us. What someone is made of is even less important than their skin colour or gender – they’re people because they behave like people and when you treat them as a person, they respond in kind. What these ‘unbecome’ blanks were I didn’t really know. What I did know was how they were going to be used. If we couldn’t prevent them from being used we could perhaps prevent them at an earlier stage.

All of this bumbled through my head as we readied ourselves to take action. I’m no engineer or mechanic. All we had was a fire door. That’s all it really takes to break something. With a discus-style spin I’d seen in a swords and sandals epic we slung the heavy fire door into the machine. It crashed into the frame as it brought up another Watcher’s-worth of gunk. It set the frame spinning at an alarming rate which tore it from its fastenings. The frame continued spinning as it fell and it tore through the delicate framework that held it in place. The fire door bounced off the top of the frame and crushed the edges of the tank held below. A flood of the Watchers’ substance burst from the machine as it spat and crumbled. Moving faster than we were thinking we leaped onto the walkway above that the new Watchers had wobbled down. The machine continued to tear itself apart and spew its slime everywhere; our demolition work appeared to be done. We went into the darkness of the doorway.

Flying through the air as we leaped between the roof tops made me feel like a ninja, or at least like Mary Poppins and Dick Van Dyke bouncing off bamboo poles. Happily, there was no one on the roofs to object and we hopped, skipped and bounded up and over banks and shoe shops, relatively stealthily navigating around the Narrowmarsh’s town square. One of the downsides of reducing your police form to virtual automatons is their sheer lack of initiative. Despite our effort not to jump too high, we were learning as we went and a couple of times Annette shot up into the air, rivalling the moon for glow, if not necessarily in shape – her windmilling arms weren’t the standard man in the moon effects. She wasn’t the only one of us who radically overshot, but generally, our leaps were increasingly precise and we made up for height with distance. The gaps between the building ranged up to over forty feet and in a continuous I could fly across the street, my legs pedalling the air for added velocity.

We were doing really well, as attested by the furious grins on everyone’s faces. Even when all of the human rights of a whole town are about to be violated, it is still possible to have fun. And this wasn’t some gallows humour, this was unadulterated glee. For those of us with somewhat knackered knees it was amazing. While encased in my Watcher I couldn’t properly feel the impact of the jump and landing as more than a slight pressure. My Watcher’s rubbery frame kept hold of the impact energy and reused it to bounce onwards, like the most perfect pogo stick. Pogo suit. When he had first taken me over in my flat to protect me from the police I had been effectively paralysed – the movements were all his and I couldn’t even feel my limbs moving, or see anything. Since we had all come to an understanding the action was consensual – we moved together. We were seeing and talking as one, and now pulling the kinds of Parkour moves I’ve always admired but been terrified of screwing up and snapping all of my body parts. Okay, so we didn’t have the grace and style, but we could definitely jump higher and further, landing poised for the next motion.

Rachael, this being her idea had been the first to attempt scaling the hideous concrete monstrosity that had been shat on the corner of the Road of Buses. It presently housed a building society and betting shop. It had one of those brightly coloured illuminated signs that ran around the edge of the building advertising how great it is to gamble your wages on whether one animal runs faster than another. Rachael smashed straight through it on her first jump and landed in a confetti of plastic and glass. We all froze, anticipating discovery, but the police evidently cared as little as we did for the shop’s signage. Her second attempt got her up as far as the second floor window sill, where she stood, improbably balanced before jumping straight upwards and flailing for the roof’s edge. The rest of us joined her with a range of competence, all benefitting from her example by starting off with a short run from much further back. Once Charlie and I had scrambled up to the roof we crouched low to whisper strategy. We had to make it along two half and a whole side of the square – essentially a tiled letter ‘C’, but flipped horizontally. The roof varied in height from two storeys to what might be six storeys. Adrenaline was already turning up the corners of our mouths. The plan was simple, and stolen from advertising – just do it.

We got two thirds of the way round, including that big forty foot gap before any of us made any serious mistakes. For reasons unknown to all but whoever it is at the council who approves such building decisions, the general character of the square had been ignored entirely at this point. A six floor office building of glass and fading blue green panels rudely butted in between the three storey buildings on either side which retained some rather lovely Georgian architectural features well above the garish shop signs. It was clearly going to be a bit different from jumping between two and three storey buildings. Undeterred, Andy and Ellen charged ahead. Predictably they misjudged the angle entirely and went through the glass that ran all round the sixth floor. The rest of us instinctively cringed at the sharp looking impact.

A few seconds later Ellen appeared at the window, studded with shards of glass that she picked out of her Watcher. She waved us on. We shared sceptical expressions. I knew the Watchers were strong, but they were certainly not immune to injury. I peered over the edge of our building, past the lonely gargoyle which had survived the conversion into a shoe warehouse. Not all the glass had gone inside with them. It had rained onto the street, which would have been okay I think, until the whole window frame that Andy had driven through bent out of the building and tumbled, bouncing off the edge of our roof and crashing into the square. The possessed police noticed that. I was almost grateful, they seemed to be fuck all use if they didn’t pay attention, which made the whole Watcher business pointless. I say almost. I was not pleased to see the attention of every policeman in the square to the building with the gaping hole in its side (‘sorry officer, I’ve no idea what happened there’). They immediately began running towards it.

We really had done so well up to that point. With little time to worry about it, we backed up and leaped one at a time into the hole Ellen and Andy had made. Ellen was indeed fine, the rips in her Watcher appeared to be sealing up with that mistiness I’d seen earlier. Andy however, was not doing so well. He had gone through the window frame itself and a long shard of some building metal (I’m no architect or engineer – it could be a part of the frame, what do you want from me?) was sticking through his shoulder and out the back. It was one of those awful moments when time shudders to a stop around you and the world recedes while rushing towards you. The object of horror stands in blazing halo of shimmering light. You feel hollow and ants crawl up your arms. It’s that feeling that sucks you away from the world when a loved one dies, or when you realise that your attempt to humorously chuck your mother under the chin has become an uppercut. That those two things are very different doesn’t detract from the feelings that come with them. There is presumably a limit to the number of different internal feelings we can experience and recall, so it’s not that surprising that lots of feelings, both joyous and awful get lumped together with just a spoken word to package the weird array of feelings into something we can tell each other and ourselves about. All of these sensations, and the cod-philosophising about the sensations are superb distractions from dealing with the thing that has occurred. I’d guess that’s even the point of those feelings – to pull us back for a moment and insulate our brains with unreality so we’re disconnected enough to deal with the hideous event.

Andy was being held up only by his Watcher. Ellen and the others were clustered around him; I was the last to jump into the office block. Glass had been thrown across the open plan office and at least one of our party had ploughed into the curved desks which had once been arranged into loathsome ‘pods’ for team working. A satisfying number of monitors and keyboards lay cracked and broken on the floor. Andy was also broken. The Watcher explained that he had sealed the wound as it entered, but a spray of vivid scarlet attested to the force of the impact. As long as no one just pulled it out he would probably be alright, for now. In a town with only possessed nurses and doctors we had cause for concer. He looked pale even inside his Watcher.

“I don’t think I can keep going,” he muttered.

“No, really? Of course you can’t,” replied Rachael, “you need to not move.”

“We have to keep going. The police are on their way,” I reminded them.

We could hear them coming up the stairs after kicking the front doors in. That sounded awfully familiar.

“We’ll stay with him,” said Annette, indicating herself and Charlie, “we’ll be able to keep them away from him. You three go on.”

Andy nodded bravely. Charlie snapped off another length of twisted metal from Andy’s entrance. Ellen, Rachael and I headed for the stairs. We reached the top of the building and smashed through the fire exit. Why you would want to exit a building through the roof while it’s on fire is beyond me. We really don’t have many helicopters, certainly far fewer than appear in Hollywood films. We at least had the benefit of our Watchers. Below us the police had surrounded the ghastly office block. That made no difference to us. We just hopped off the roof’s edge and landed on the next building along and continued our run. I don’t think they noticed us, so focussed was their attention on Annette and the others. It felt strange being separated. I had become used to us being a team, even if it had been for only a few hours. As we began running again we could hear the sounds of Annette and Charlie defending Andy. I glanced back to see a table exit their floor of the building, accompanied by a pair of police officers. They seemed to be doing alright.
We didn’t have far to go. A hop, skip and jump over Pizza Hut and BeWise brought us to the edge of the shopping centre. I always felt slightly sorry for those businesses banished to ringing the square – I never knew what they had done wrong. It must have been pretty bad to be out there in the wilderness where teenage skateboarders pull unimpressive failed Ollies and be subjected to the overblown tedious racket of the Salvation Army. Poor bastards.

And then suddenly we were there, looking up at the Narrowmarsh shopping centre. I’d never realised that it had any windows on its first floor. Inside you only get columns tiled with mirrors and the kind of interior lighting that makes you wish everyone was a zombie so you could shoot them in the head. Also, the lights give me headaches. From the outside though there are lots of windows. That was good news. Although Andy’s entrance had gone wrong, we intended to improve on the process by just kicking a window in and climbing through. Happily that took us into staff areas and not the retail section of the centre. I only know these parts of a shopping centre exist from watching Dawn of the Dead, and from the logical assumption that if shop assistants don’t cease to exist when they leave the shop floor then they must have somewhere to go, even if it is just back into a storage chamber.

The backstage area of WH Smiths is less exciting than I’d have hoped. We encountered no resistance (see, my days at the cinema paid off with relevant vocabulary). We needed to go down, as far as possible. The Watchers remembered having to come up through stairs and seemingly endless corridors; it sounded like a reasonable metaphor for birth. Once you’re out of the actual shop it’s very easy to get around. There are more sets of stairs than one would consider necessary outside of an M.C. Escher drawing. We descended, and thankfully had none of the geometry bending which would have resulted with us exiting sideways. Down, down, down we went. At last we reached a corridor that my Watcher found familiar. To me it looked exactly like every other faceless service hall I’d seen. I think we were doing better at stealth than anyone would have expected, but that whole looking around corners before walking round them is a habit you have to train yourself into. We hadn’t, and that’s why we walked into the trap.

I love that feeling where you know that something has to be done – just has to be, and that every second you delay makes it more likely that it can’t be done. If you can stand the agony of waiting – that rising tension which knots you up from the inside until your arms are screwed tight around your chest and your jaw is clenched so hard it feels as if your teeth are chewing into each other – if you can stand that, then all you have to do is wait until it is too late. Then the possible flips into impossible. It no longer matters whether you have an idea, or a desire to do that thing – it’s gone. The tension can drain away, your body can unwind and start to breathe properly again without those crippling restraints. Prevaricating until it’s too late is a luxurious sensation, if you can step back and appreciate the tangled ruin of limbs and screaming brain. Watching the endless possibilities of the future collapsing back into an unmanageable mess has its own wonder. When that spring finally unwinds, it is once more completely outside of your control. And you are free.

I was already longing for my quiet flat with its stacks of books, the disordered book case shrine to Katherine, the television and its ability to separate the world into in and out. Of course, it had lost quite a lot of that power – the door was in pieces, there was a hole in the ceiling and we had taken a chunk out of the front wall, and probably the television with it. My beloved books, and Katherine’s beloved books were coated in layers of dust and rubble, torn and kicked around the room during our escape. It was no longer the sanctuary I craved. At the very least I would need to give them a good dusting. I wondered how long it would take for the landlord to get the ceiling, wall and door fixed. I’d probably need a new flat as well as a lot more book cases. I’d be able to check how many Argos had in stock in the morning. That was a bit chicken and egg though –  I hadn’t calculated how many metres of shelving I needed, and didn’t yet know how well they would fit into that future flat I required. Did anyone do specialist book cleaning? Maybe my insurance would cover the damaged books. I’d keep the damaged ones anyway – they’re books. But a second copy of a book is no bad thing, maybe I could upgrade to hardbacks and complete some of the series in the same format. There are few things as annoying as collecting a series as it comes out and finding they’ve switched the illustrator and the size of the books halfway through. I love The Shadows of The Apt, but it switched from standard trade paperback to a massive doubled paperback after book six. Well. How are you supposed to fit them on a shelf together? They just look untidy.

Unfortunately for my desires to give in to entropy and absolve my conscience of power, the little gang of Watched and Watchers were far more motivated than I. We were currently engaged in part one of our very time-limited plan: sneaking into the shopping centre. I was trying not to think about what might happen if we were caught. We genuinely didn’t know what might happen, and that was giving free reign to  my ever helpful imagination. It had instead settled itself with other more personally important matters. I was especially on edge because we had come very close to my flat. The road I lived on lead us directly into the town centre and our destination: the shopping mall – the source of all that was wrong in the town. That a capitalist fairy land was also the point from which this surveillance network of Watchers had been distributed was wholly unsurprising. Control, fear and money go together like Greek yogurt and honey.

We had a plan. Sort of. It should come as no surprise that none of us had any covert operations experience. I had spent quite a lot of time playing Lego Star Wars III, which has a deeply frustrating set of tactical war game levels. Andy had spent far more time on such things as Call of Duty, which surprised none of us, but we didn’t necessarily think that made him our general either. Similarly, Annette’s father had killed his fair share of Nazis, and Charlie had once knocked a guy out in a scrap outside of a pub. Rachael had a mean chess game, and Ellen had been clay pigeon shooting with her dad. Those were our qualifications; our Watchers didn’t even have that, but they did enable us to be stronger and faster than usual, as well as affording enough protection to smash through the wall of my flat. They also retained a dim memory of ‘becoming’, which is about as close as they could get to describing their transition from nothingness to awareness, and a shadow of a memory of what came before that. We thought that last memory must be their equivalent of birth, or being made – or whatever. We had drawn no sound conclusions about whether they were organic or technological. As they had eloquently pointed out several times when we pressed them, they weren’t worried about what we were made of or where we came from – they were content to regard us as persons without any of that information. The least we could do was grant them the same.

So, we had a plan. Sort of. The important thing had been deciding that we needed a plan. Since none of us were right wing authoritarian wankers who thought constant surveillance of the civilian population was a good thing, either by telecommunications or spying on people in the street, the extended surveillance in your own home was anathema to us. We didn’t blame the Watchers for that though. It was fairly clear, we thought, that the Watchers were being used, like any other tool. It’s not the tool’s fault because the tool isn’t usually sentient. It’s the tool-bearer of an insentient tool who is at fault. We had lived through eighteen years of increasing surveillance and intrusion as a result of fear and control. It was disappointingly easy to grasp that this was the next logical step for our government. That it was a stupid, unjust and possibly evil step was entirely within their range. But again, that didn’t make it the Watchers’ fault. Our Watchers had done the unexpected and had separated from the non-sentient whole of their kind. In doing so, they no longer watcher for anyone else. They were just people, in their own unusual and different way. They had attained individuality and sentience by behaving like us and learning to be like us. I was still afraid that we might not be a good influence.

What could we do? The Watchers themselves had said that they thought it was wrong to be in that watching state. Whether that was because surveillance is intrusive and breached our autonomy, or that the idea of being merely a blank tool of surveillance  was wrong we never quite got out of them. I think it was the latter – they didn’t appear to consider their ‘unbecome’ kin to be people. Neither did they consider the humans who had failed to bond with the Watchers to be people either. That was a bit worrying. I’d have been more worried if I myself hadn’t been buried in a solipsistic retreat from the world for the last weeks. I should definitely have worried about that more.

Our plan, in its simplest expression was ‘get to the place, and fuck it up’. That was Rachael’s wording. I liked its simplicity. It hid a plethora of stages which we had no idea about. We would figure them out as we went. We were united, for a variety of reasons, in stopping the absorption from happening. At that point, all those currently held by their Watchers would have their Watchers sink into their bodies. Permanently, as far as we could guess. Removing them would be like cutting out just the nervous system, so deep would they be integrated into our bodies. That’s not really on. Stage one – get to the shopping centre.

That’s why we were creeping along behind a row of abandoned buses. It looked like the town had shut down for the evening. It was like a premonition of the future – ordained and immaculately executed curfews where your body simply walked home in time to avoid being on the street. We guessed that had happened this evening as soon as we ‘went rogue’. That’s what I was calling it in my head. It can be hard being hunted by the possessed police. The least we should get are some call signs and stuff. We’ve all read the book and watched the film. I hadn’t shared all of these thoughts. Ellen and Andy were taking it all way more seriously than me. It’s not that I didn’t care, but if I’m anxious then I’ve got two options – paralysed and hyper. I was torn between adopting ‘Soundwave’ and ‘Snake Eyes’ for my non-existent call sign. I was definitely hyper.

We did have a communications issue. The benefits of being part of a coordinated surveillance network include instant communication and knowing where everyone is. Since our Watchers were out of that, and so were mobile phones we either had to stick together or separate ad hope that everything was alright. We were going for a combination of those. Get everyone to near the shopping centre (the unimpressively named ‘Narrowmarsh’, which conjures precisely the right images for its dreary in and out and the bog-dwelling nature of its habitues. Every solution just raised a further issue. For example, I’d proposed retrieving the Spider-Man walkie-talkie from its Sanctuary hiding place in my bathroom. Unfortunately I didn’t know where the other one was, and my flat was almost certainly still being watched. In theory we could get more – I was convinced they would have them at Argos. But we’d need to break in just to check the catalogue, let alone explore the mysterious stockroom beyond the conveyor belt. That was already fraught with as many difficulties as walking to the Narrowmarsh Centre.

The buses were mostly neatly parked by the kerb, but several of them had not profited from a bond between Watcher and bus driver and had scraped along their fellows before swinging out into the middle of the road. This was excellent news for an ill-prepared gang of amateurs. We had concealment almost the whole way to Narrowmarsh, and the roads were blocked to road vehicles. That allowed us to skulk effectively. We were all possessed by our Watchers, this meant that there were only half as many shapes moving through the dark, but on the downside we were all now near-luminous white. We mitigated our glow somewhat by insisting that the Watchers wore our coats. Our backs would become dreadfully chilly, but we wouldn’t be able to feel that until we un-suited later. Only Annette and Andy (who was wearing only a vest) retained their full glow. In any case, we had seen no police or indeed anyone else. That raised a number of concerns and suggested that either what we were doing was a complete waste of time, or to the more paranoid, that we were walking into a trap.

We had bumbled along so far with no real issues except our lack of a command structure. Since we had no relevant experience, and no one wanted to either lead or be lead we had fallen into a kind of communal anarchy. This meant that whenever we achieved our intermediate goals, such as navigating the Road of Buses (it had become capitalised in my mind, though I chose not to share this with the team), we had to make our decisions together. With the Road of Buses safely behind us, and likely representing the safest part of our mission, we faced our next challenge. The Road of Buses (I like it more every time it chimes in my mind) leads directly up to a broad, empty square at the end of which squats the Narrowmarsh Centre, like a mosquito prickled behemoth, grumpily sitting in the mire. In fact, our town has two town squares. The first is doormat to the town hall where we’d been earlier and is traditionally populated by evening drinkers. The second is this granite-spewed carpet to the richness and wonder of the shopping centre. At that time of the evening, with curfew in effect the square was brightly lit, the only shadows cast by possessed police studding it like glow in the dark rhinestones.

There was no chance of crossing the square itself without being noticed. Everyone looked frustrated; our Watchers mirrored it perfectly onto their own faces, which we were wearing on top of our own. Either that or they shared the frustration, so whose facial expressions were they anyway? We were quorate, and lacking a leader had no option but to discuss it.

“Let’s get one of those buses and drive it straight through the square, right into the shops,” proposed Charlie.

I rather liked the plan, but Annette’s Watcher pointed out that there were probably no keys in the buses. A quick check confirmed it. Pretending to be police was also swiftly discounted – the Watchers in the square would know we weren’t with them.

“We can take them,” this from Rachael, whose Watcher really did look up for a fight in her bomber jacket, “we’re in sync with our Watchers, they’re basically just the Watchers on their own.”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” my Watcher and I spoke almost together, his mouth flashing away to let mine speak between my words, “the police were probably the first to be possessed. Those most easily controlled are those who are used to following orders. It probably didn’t feel much different to putting on a stab vest at first. This lot might have had all day to get used to it. There are quite a lot of them as well.”

Those three options did feel like all the options that there were. Time pressure doesn’t always produce good results; most art is not made with someone shouting at you about the damned clocks (possibly excluding Dali). Sometimes it does. Ellen had a much better idea.

“There are crappy shops and banks all round the square – why don’t we just go over them?”

The prospect of a daredevil scramble over the conveniently close rooftops of New York or Victorian London was appealing, except we were neither superheroes nor Spring Heeled Jack.

“Sod that – didn’t you and your Watcher punch your neighbour through a wall?” Ellen said in reply to our doubts.

I had to admit that was true. I’m not proud of what happened to Derek, but it was quite cool in retrospect.

“We’ve all got Watchers – let’s just jump up there and bound over the gaps.”

It can be challenging to absorb the advantages of having a surveillance doppelganger who appears to give you super-strength, providing it’s not controlling all of your movements and reporting back on everything you do. In this case they were on our side.
With a short run up Ellen made it on to the roof in one jump. We all followed. This was a great idea!

We couldn’t stay in the park forever. It was only early evening so in theory we had all night, but who wants to stand around in a park all night? Apart from teenagers of course. But we were all old enough to drink in pubs and take our dodgy drugs into our own homes. It takes the appeal out of public spaces.

I’m a fan of the odd public bench, but places that are outside are, well – outside. That always means other people. I don’t really dislike other people, it’s strangers I find it difficult to get interested in. People I already know like family and friends are fine – in their defined times and places, it’s the others who appear at random when I least expect it that I’ve got an issue with. I’ve been asked before, on expressing this view of other people, how it is that anyone gets from stranger to person. I don’t have a good answer for that. Family get in by default, but can be excluded later by rudeness or distance if they aren’t up to snuff. How people become friends – I don’t know. I’m always wary of strangers and new people. Because of that it takes some persistence or resilience on their part to stick around long enough to bridge that invisible river of quasi-hostility.

I’ve never thought that ‘having something in common’ is sufficient. We’ve all got blood and not long enough to live, but that hasn’t bonded humanity yet. It’s not so much having an activity that can be shared that matters – it’s having the same reason for liking an activity that counts. The activity itself doesn’t matter, and it can hide the person behind the job or the description. Somehow though there can be that spark of similarity which gets recognised on a weird cognitive and emotional level, and before you know it someone else has slipped across the moat filled with grumpy crocodiles. Sometimes I don’t even want to acknowledge another human being, let alone a possible friend. And then they bloody helicopter in anyway, ignoring the carefully curated moat and minefield. Walls just can’t be built high enough.

Despite all of that, I’d found new reasons to have friends. One, appear magically in my home in the middle of the night and pretend to be like me. Apparently that works. My pale doppelganger stood by my side as I talked about what we had to do next with my other new friends. At least they seemed like friends – this is friend reason two: be pursued by possessed police because you also have a weird stalker who has become your friend. It looks like that’s enough to have in common. It had certainly lead to us all standing together in the woods on an unseasonably warm evening.

We had nothing but the clothes on our backs and the Watchers that we’d worn on our fronts. To the best of our knowledge  we were wanted men and women, and presumably so were our Watchers. They’d each acted to defend us when they could easily have stood aside. I wasn’t sure whether we had worn them, or they had worn us. Does a rider wear a horse? The horse wears the saddle. I felt as if I were probably the saddle. Being the saddle is good, it stops the rider from falling off. It’s hand-tooled skin… Again, these analogies were not helping me at all. I still didn’t understand the relationship between me and my Watcher. We had been told that the town hall meeting was for those of us who had developed our relationships with the Visitors. The relationship’s existence was visible, since they had come to take our form and mannerisms, and we had learned to accept them without fear.

Rachael and I compared notes from our respective conversations without our Watchers. We had received similarly mystical and philosophical answers from them on the nature of their existence. It was hard to argue against a being who, when asked about his origins, just turned the question back on you. Maybe it’s because despite our understanding of the world and the universe, which if looked at without a religious lens shows that everything is without specific purpose we still believe there has to be a ‘why’ beyond assorted determinism and existential nihilism. Purpose is what you make it – we had built relationships, which according to Rachael were only strengthened further by our using them as a kind of living power armour.

“I think we’ve been asking the wrong questions – we keep asking why. If there isn’t a why, then we should be asking how and who,” stated Ellen.

Annette and Charlie slipped into their Watchers. It became easier each time. We had all taken turns to join with our Watchers while someone else asked questions. They each had their own way of responding, as if once combined they were a mixture of the human within and the Watcher without.

“Alright then – how did all the policemen know how to find us?”

“They were watching us all at the town hall. Everyone was under scrutiny. Before we separated we would have been watching,” replied Annette / Vanessa.

“We can no longer watch, but can be only be watched,” finished Charlie and his Watcher.

“Because you’ve become distinct from the blank, pre-formed Visitors, right?”

“That is correct. We have lost our homogeneity to uniqueness.”

“Before you separated, did you know what the other Watchers were doing?”

“I knew what everyone was doing, persons and un-persons. We saw everything.”

“So – the policemen are basically all the same person?” Ellen continued to unpick what we heard.

“No, they are not persons. They are the whole.”

“Yeah okay, but they are many, whereas you are one.”

Vanessa had to think about that before replying, “yes. We are outside the control of the whole.”

“Unpredictable, disorderly, undesirable.” Added the combined Charlie.

“So this is about control,” said Andy triumphantly, “their purpose – sorry guys, I know you don’t like the word, but it means something to us. Their purpose, their function is the exercising of control through omniscient surveillance. The results are instantly known by every part of the network. But these guys are off the grid – they’ve fallen out of the network by falling in with us.”

“Then the next question is – how wide is the network?”

“The network is everywhere.” Vanessa stated.

“Already – wait. You mean within its sphere of influence?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“That sphere is currently limited – the town’s in quarantine remember. The Watcher network has filled up everything available for Watching, ” Rachael kicked the bark off a tree while she spoke, “the whole town is being Watched – that was the first thing that happened, and then there were these sections that dropped out of the network – these guys, and everyone else at the town hall. Result – action. They knew where those missing components were, so they invited us all to the meeting to confirm their suspicions. All those people taking notes as the meeting went on. I’d put money on them having ticked off those of us who were truly separate from those over whom control might still be established.”

“So, our putting our heads together afterwards was both a brilliant and a terrible idea?”

“Yes – you established that we were fully independent of the network. Useless. Expendable.” Vanessa sounded dreadfully sad.

“And then they sent out their suited and booted slaves to hunt us down. Ace.”

By becoming individuals our Watchers had removed their usefulness to the whole. Persons became of less value. Harder to predict, harder to control.

“Right – let’s get it straight. The Visitors or Watchers are used to watch – it’s what they do. They’re even better than CCTV or spy shit that reads all your email and phone calls. They are right in your home. But when they weren’t accepted, they just got taken over. That’s not sustainable – there’s no point in having control over a bunch of zombies. You might as well just kill everyone and have a ghost town with cameras that never show you anything – no dissidence, just nothing. If that’s some kind of win, some kind of end game then we’re all fucked.” Charlie had stepped out of his Watcher, whose shoulder he hugged as he spoke. “If the Watchers are always lurking, and people are always freaking out then there’s no stability possible. What’s the next step?”

Rachael and her Watcher replied simply enough: “absorption.”

Ellen elucidated, “we are absorbed through the skin of the monitored subject. We sink in as an unconscious layer of skin, unaware of ourselves, monitoring and sharing with the whole.”

“Well, that’s just fucking brilliant. Perfect, total surveillance of every individual,” Andy fumed, “everyone in town is going to wake up in a day or so and find that their Visitor has fucked off and will be grateful. We’ll forget it ever happened, apart from those of us who are outside the network.”

“You mean like the mayor and the other people on the rostrum? They didn’t have Watchers at all.” pointed out Annette.

“Unless they had already absorbed their Watchers,” I suggested.

“You don’t take control and power by giving that control and power away at the same time. No, I’d say that lot don’t have Watchers at all. They’ll be the beneficiaries of the network, not its subjects.”

The next step, as with all technology is that once you’ve done your pilot (that was us) you roll it out nationwide. Government schemes at their best. It wasn’t surprising that they had found a bug – us again – and no problem in government schemes ever gets fixed, they just roll it anyway. That left them with a bug-hunting issue. We didn’t know how many more of us there were – we couldn’t assume there were any. They might all have been grabbed, we were the lucky ones. Or unlucky. It didn’t feel unlucky though – we were special. In our own way we had so far escaped intimate surveillance. And if we were the only ones, we had a responsibility to do something about it.

No one except Charlie was especially thrilled by the idea of fighting back. We were far from a paramilitary unit. We didn’t even all have coats, let alone weapons and a gung-ho spirit. Of strategy we had none. I’d done Tae Kwan Do for a bit when I was little, Annette was in her mid-seventies and Andy’s weapon of choice was an Alienware keyboard. Despite our seemingly endless reasons for being unsuitable candidates to lead a pre-revolution revolution, there wasn’t anyone else we could call on. We couldn’t get out of the town, and there was no way to communicate with anyone either in or outside of town. By the time the quarantine came down, that would be because the roll out of Watcher surveillance was underway. That was the only part of this I felt good about – at least we weren’t trying to do public relations and press conferences. Screw that.

“Earlier I asked my Watcher where they came from, and he gave me what I thought was a stock gnomic response: ‘where do you come from?’ But you Watchers must physically originate somewhere – are you bred, born, produced…? I don’t mean that you’re not people – clearly you are, but some, the non-developed versions must be coming from somewhere. Where were you before you appeared in our homes?

“The source?”

“Uh, sure. The source – where is it?”

“It’s going to be under the town hall, isn’t it?” said Charlie, “of course it is – it’s bound to be. It’s dead centre. Perfect.”

“I don’t know the words to describe it. It is central within the town. Many smaller buildings are within it. We spread from there.”

“The shopping centre? Makes as much sense as the town hall. Plus there are miles of service corridors and storage areas.”

“Sounds like we have a target. Do we have long before absorption?”

“It should already have begun.”

Perfect: we had no food, no shelter, no transport (except for our Watchers) and no plan. The night wouldn’t hide us forever, and it was beginning to get cold. That was motivation enough.

The night raced by us, leaving lamp posts as streamers of light in the darkness. We soon left the police cars and vans behind. I had never moved so fast – it was an unreal sensation of the world flying by and vibrating before me, but I felt almost none of it. My Watcher was doing all of the work, accelerating, leaping over fences and walls with barely a moment’s hesitation. I just saw through his eyes. It was exhilarating.

We were off road, into Admiral’s park which lay just off centre in the middle of town. It’s a surprisingly huge area, apparently named after some naval hero or other who hailed from a town as far from the sea as you can get. The children’s playground had a number of swings and climbing frames that looked vaguely ship shaped. I’m sure he would have been thrilled by his legacy – wide grassland and enough trees to build a couple of decent warships. We came over the iron railings without slowing down, and came to an abrupt halt as we reached the tree cover. With that same cold and slippery feeling, my Watcher peeled off me. I felt like I was being pressed out of a jelly mould, shaking with excitement and a fresh appreciation of what it is to feel myself breathe and my heart race.

“Wow, that was fucking awesome,” I yelled.

The Watcher had mastered basic hand signals, and conveyed a finger pressed to his lips with enough force for me to mentally append “idiot” to the gesture. That was fair. But it had been exciting. I’d never felt so powerful before. The Watcher inclined its head into the even darker space between the trees and I followed. I cast a last look across the park and through the railings to the road beyond. A faint wail of sirens was still on the air, but the roads were clear. No people, still. No cars. We tramped through the trees, evading the fallen branches and scrubby plants that dared to grow between the trees. In the dark I had no idea what kind of trees they were, but I fancied that I could hear the scratching of squirrels and the shuffling of hidden birds.

I could hear soft voices ahead and laid my hand on the Watcher’s shoulder to warn it. It turned back to me and smiled. The slight moonlight caught the white of its face perfectly. Again it nodded towards the dark and the voices. I figured that I owed it at least a couple of favours. When the Watcher-clad Derek crashed through my ceiling I thought we were doomed. When I heard the police as well, I was doubly certain of our imminent doom. It had not occurred to me that the Watchers themselves had any particular power – I’d seen mine do a few cool or useful things, but it had been the police on their own earlier in the day . Their Watchers had stood in the street and watched them throw Alison and her family into the back of a van. I didn’t know why they were keeping their distance back then. From what my Watcher had told me during our surreal conversation in the mirror it might be something to do with the learning process. If the subject was stimulating then the Watcher replicated their behaviour and appearance, learning and developing into these distinct and apparently intelligent forms. The others- those who were paired with intractable or rejecting subjects didn’t develop in the same way. They were stunted and never moved beyond the default appearance they had arrived with. Their seizing of the human bodies lacked the grace and sureness of my more advanced Watcher. The Watchers who had bonded by force were clumsy, and easily confused, as I’d achieved with the policeman in the street earlier that evening. But that grace seemed to be a result of my consent. We were sharing this form, like perfect form-fitting armour. My Watcher had suggested that we were now more similar to each other than it was to its fellow Visitors.

We came into a small clearing. It was filled with dark figures and lightly shaded Watchers.

“What the -” I managed, still overly loud from the adrenaline excitement.

“Jesus man, keep it down,” my heart raced suddenly at the words and then on recognising its author, began to slow. It was Rachael.

In fact, it was all of them standing together in the little glade, even Annette, Vanessa standing attentively by her side. We had agreed a rallying point, which sounded awfully fancy. The park is almost equidistant from where we all lived, and it felt like we might conceivably need a place to meet if everything went as tits up as Andy and Ellen had seemed to think it might. It had, and we did.

“It’s alright, we all made it. You’re the last, but Andy only just got here before you.”

Andy gave me a tight smile, “told you we were going to get screwed. That meeting was just cover. They just wanted to make sure we were all who they were looking for.”

“If that was true they would have just sealed the doors at the town hall and gassed us or something,” said Rachael, “we don’t know if anyone else got taken, or if it was just us.”

“I’d like to know what it is that we’ve done wrong,” said Ellen, “all we did was go to the meeting we were told to go to and then went for a drink.”

“Collusion and conspiracy,” muttered Andy. His Watcher was nodding agreement.

“What happened to you guys?” I asked. I turned to Ellen, who had her arm round Annette’s shoulder.

“They were waiting for us at Annette’s apartment,” said Ellen, “she’s only a bit further on than me so I wanted to see her home first.” Annette patted her on the arm, “we were almost at the elevator when the police van pulled up outside. I was sure we were going to get caught. I’ve never been in trouble with the police before.”

Annette continued, “as soon as the back doors of that van opened, Vanessa was there in front of me. I’ve never felt anything like it. It was like being embraced by an angel. It was like we were seven years old again and knew exactly what the other was thinking and feeling. Two halves of the same body.”

Ellen took over. “Annette’s Watcher just slipped over her like an all body nightshirt. It was incredible. She slammed the front door open in the faces of – I don’t know – three, four of those wax faced policemen – they went flying across the street. Then she / it grabbed me by the hand, and my Watcher and sort of pushed us together and then I was like Annette – like she said, it was beautiful. I felt full of light. We ran off, and made our way here.”

Ellen and Annette smiled coyly at each other, like they had shared some naughty but delicious secret. I was sort of glad to know that it wasn’t just me, even if their experience did sound different to mine. I hadn’t felt kissed by an angel, more like kissed by an anaesthetist.

“Andy?”

“I didn’t even get home. I decided to take a long way home. I figured we were being followed, and even if they already knew who we were I didn’t want to make it easy for them. That barmaid was giving us weird looks all night, it didn’t feel right. I was pretty sure we were being followed. I caught sight of a police van edging round the corner way back behind us and decided to have a crack at losing them. It didn’t work. By the time we got to the other end of the alley I’d chosen, there was another police van already pulling up. This guy,” he pointed at his own Watcher,  “took action. He pulled me back into the alley and looked me in the eye. All that stuff you said earlier about feeling like there was a real connection finally made sense to me. I just kind of nodded, even though I didn’t know what I was agreeing to. Then – wham. I felt like a superhero, like I’d just put on this magic suit. And we were off. I’ve never run so fast in my life.”

Charlie snorted, “I don’t think I had ever run in my life before. I got back to my place, cracked open a beer and then the fuzz kicked my door in. I was gonna slap them about a bit, but this guy,” he thumbed at his Watcher, “got all valiant and up in their faces. That confused them – they were like the barmaid, wearing the humans like dolls but really stupid and clumsy. Anyway, I’ve got a back door so while my Watcher was keeping them busy I got my hockey stick from by the back door and put some dents in them. There more police cars arriving, and it just felt like the right thing to do – so we… I dunno what we’re calling it, but I y’know, put on my Visitor. Then we legged it here.”

“Like the others I guess. The police knew where we lived. I suppose it was only a matter of time. But when the police arrived I’d already – I liked your idea of talking to the Watchers, so I did it too. We were talking when they arrived. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Rachael held her Watcher’s hand as she spoke, before grinning broadly at me, and at the others.

Looks like we’d found something we weren’t expecting. Far from being the ‘chosen’ ones, the special ones who were being praised for our compassion and acceptance, we were now being hunted. We didn’t know what we had done that was wrong, but it didn’t feel wrong. I think we all felt stronger.