The City of One Thousand Eyes

This is reposted from the Anpac Gang Tumblr.

 In the recently refurbished city of New York, where each person is guaranteed a minimum quality of life simply for living, where the ancient smog of the fine precursors lazily licks the window panes, and where images of two eyes, simply watching you without judgment, adorn the landscape as frequently as street numbers, lives a man named Harold.

Harold had nothing to do with the decision to adorn the city with eyes, and in fact, no individual can be held responsible. It was a public effort; Harold had no objection to the installation of the eyes, because the eyes do not record anything, nor are they there to intimidate anyone, nor are they to remind you that the government is “always watching.”

No, scientists simply discovered people are significantly less likely to commit crimes when they feel someone watching them, and merely the presence of two eyes gives them that feeling. Once this very cheap way to prevent crime was discovered, the city government wasted no time in implementing it, and it was expected that nearly every population center on the planet would soon follow suit.

Harold understood this, for rationality is sovereign of all the mental faculties, and Harold took great pride in being a citizen among his peers.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are Harold. You’ve known no life outside of New York, nor outside of the vaunted democratic virtues of the United World Government. Like most people, you actively sought out employment; but unlike most people, you found opportunity. It’s important to Harold that no one misunderstands, he was never afraid of being unemployed, for the government readily provides for the unemployed to have all the necessities plus a little extra spending money. Harold works not out of fear of poverty, but out of his internal need to produce wealth for his society.

So when I say Harold puts on his government issued pollution filtering mask, opens the door, and leaves his apartment building to walk through the numbered and categorized streets of New York to work every morning, I mean he does so of his own volition.

You navigate the city streets– hardly paying attention to the great hydroponic processor facilities looming in the distance, for they have become part of the landscape– thinking of work, thinking of home, thinking of family. You have a pretty good life.

Then one day, imagine your life begins to change.

Harold’s arc begins with a simple realization. He doesn’t love his wife anymore. He does the appropriate thing. He waits for the kids to be preoccupied, shut the door to the kitchen, and quietly converses with his wife about their feelings, as adults do. They work through their feelings, and it turns out she doesn’t love him anymore either. They’re not sure how they arrived at this point, but they mutually decide that it would be best to proceed with an amicable divorce.

An epiphany grows slowly over time, of course. He did not suddenly wake up without loving his wife one day. Rather, the feelings, the passion, the fire, which had once possessed them to wed and to enter this very apartment as groom and bride, all smiles, all giggles, all secretive whispers and intimate kisses, was gone now. No one’s fault, really. The human heart is a fickle thing; its wishes and whims wax and wane with the tides. The way of the world dictates that all fires eventually burn out, just as it dictates all young romance eventually gives way to the drudgery of routine, of taking turns driving the kids to school, of once a week designated date night at the Olive Garden.

Still, memories of other people carve homes out of your heart, and Harold had no interest in reliving painful memories, and he agreed his children deserved the stability of remaining in their childhood home, and so he moved out into an apartment as the divorce continued.

I can not stress enough, this divorce is as amicable as such affairs get. There’s a little cold draft between them, but no more than in their loveless marriage, and he keeps the children at his new apartment during his 3 day weekend. He agrees to pay for any child rearing related expenses the mother has, and the mother never lowers herself to spending any of this money on personal pleasures. She, like most people, lives on Universal Basic Income, which provides enough to care for children and for herself, and to have a little bit of spending money left over, but Harold– having a job– makes quite a bit more than that, and extends to his family an appropriately enjoyable lifestyle. Additionally, he has to work the other four days at his job, and so he cares for the children the three days he has off, and cherishes them greatly.

Still, on the days he does work, he comes home to the vacant echoes of a room empty of life. He comes home to darkness, without the soft glow of screens illuminating the soft faces of his children. Without even the cordiality of his wife, cold as it may have been during the later years of his marriage. He comes home, eats a lukewarm meal he picked up on the way, and falls asleep by himself.

This amicable arrangement continues in an easy equilibrium for a little over a year. After the courts have finally completed all the necessary paperwork, he stands outside the court staring at the little paper in his hand telling him his marriage is over. He stares at it for a long time, and suddenly feels a strange anger well up inside him. He wants to kick over a trash can and yell, but when he looks up and sees those two eyes staring back at him, he feels guilty, tucks the document into his jacket, and walks out of the building.

Harold has neither time for himself– nor romance– since on the days he does not work he cares for his children. Granted, the world is not experiencing a shortage of single parents, but putting in the effort to meet people, deal with children that aren’t even his, and participate in a game he’s well over a decade out of practice in, is just too much for him to really contemplate.

Then, one morning, another realization comes upon him. He’s bored by his job. It makes sense he’d be bored, he does the same thing every day and the nebulous hope of a promotion on the horizon through excelling at that seems to have evaporated into fantasy. You most likely know what it is to be bored by a job, or by school. It’s different from being bored by a relationship, a job isn’t just something you can just walk away from one day. Harold could, theoretically, just quit and live on UBI, but doing so comes with a significant salary decrease, and his children would experience a decreased lifestyle quality. He takes pride in how spoiled his children are, he secretly delights in the envious looks from others, and how the other children flock to his to see all of their neat toys. No, he can’t walk away any more than you, or anyone else, can.

So of course he comes to a wholly natural conclusion; if his job bores him, tough shit.

He gets up every morning, same as usual, same as you, and drags himself to work. It’s different now, for he must drag himself, because regardless of how tough your shit is you can’t reconnect what has been severed. Every morning, he walks to work, his head hanging a little lower, his walk a little slower going, a little faster coming home. He starts looking at anything to distract him, the clouds, the smog, anything but the vast carbon dioxide scrubbing structure looming in the background, where he worked. Just like with his marriage, when he started there his mind was on the bigger picture, a part of a grand purpose far bigger than himself. What purpose could be more noble than reversing centuries of damage to the environment?

No higher calling than the return of Terra, the Earth itself, to its once glorious status as a garden, the gem of the solar system, could exist.

In fact, when he started, his job was not only a duty, but a part of his identity. He enjoyed wearing his uniform to work, and sometimes he’d even wear it other places even though he’d had plenty of time to change. People would pay him a modicum of respect, maybe even starting a conversation about it and expressing admiration for the project in depth.

Still, reminders of that fact merely compound his feelings of guilt. He comes to hate being there, hate the files, the desks, his co-workers, and even how looming and monolithic the structure itself was. It just sits there, larger than the largest skyscrapers. You could see it from anywhere in the city. As you get closer, the air gets cleaner, and you can even take off your mask. He began to hate that too. He started wanting to keep his face covered, so no one could look at him and he could sneak in and out as quick as he could. Then, as he’s entering the building, he notices another poster; two eyes, looking directly at him. He banishes his selfish thoughts, takes his mask off, and offers the lady at the front desk another customary smile.

Now, again, picture that you have been single for three years. You’ve come to terms with your divorce by now, but you haven’t really gotten over it, and sometimes you still spend your alone time thinking about what went wrong. This is where you are when your boss walks into your office, starting what would seem a typical conversation.

But it isn’t. He’s there to fire you. You ask him why, you think perhaps your performance has been slacking off due to your steady slide into ennui. Maybe the divorce hit you a bit harder than you thought, and you don’t even really know what you’ve been doing at work. No, he assures you, your performance is fine, they’ve just been steadily automating more and more, and human labor has become significantly less necessary. He’s telling the truth, by the way. He likes his employees, considers them friends despite the awkwardness their hierarchical inequality brings into any social interactions between them.

Harold exits the building at an even more hurried pace than usual. His mind swims like swarming eels, electric with spurts of rage and grief. You should be happy. You hated working there, so why aren’t you happy? He passes through the streets and the eyes following him. He passes through the city, taking advantage of New York’s excellent public transportation, through the clean streets where homelessness has been eradicated. He returns to his house, situated comfortably in that utopia, and grits his teeth in the dark heartbeat.

He grabs the lip of his table. He feels a scream welling up in his throat. He feels the need to flip it, to smash it, to destroy his house, to smash the windows, to burn it all down. He feels like he’s being watched.

He looks around. No one’s there, no one but a single poster of two realistic eyes looking through them, directly at him. Did someone put it there recently? Did they put it there when they knew he’d be fired to watch him, to watch his life crack at its weakest points and collapse into dust, and to remind him that decency and duty demanded he bear his fall from grace with pride?

No, it was always there, even before he moved in. You just get used to them; you stop seeing them. They proliferate, until they’re just as much on the walls of your own skull as on the walls of the city.

You call your wife– ex wife– with shaking hands, you tell her about how you lost your job. Your tears leak through your teeth no matter how hard you try to hold them back. They drip onto the phone, they seep into its cracks, but your ex wife doesn’t acknowledge the taste of salt. She acknowledges the lifestyle changes the news brings, but your inner pain is her business no longer. She tells you to take care, leaving you the last drop of human concern anyone has for you, and you cling to it even as you hang up. Then you put your phone on the table.

You take deep breaths, but even the air inside your house tastes like smog. You throw open your door, and you start tearing the posters down. You rip your hands through the eyes and throw their viscera onto the streets. Passerby become concerned. You ascend beyond noticing as you cover your fingers with the blood and guts of your life’s great lie. You tear until the police finally arrive, and as their batons bruise your body and their boots on your chest make it difficult to breathe, you look up at them through the stains of your own blood, and your darkening vision, and you thank them, because someone is finally being honest with you.

Written by Sherly. You can find her at her Patreon, "Sherly Creates."