Reflections on Watching

Working as a Watcher has certainly been educational. For the last... two weeks, I think... we’ve been watching people. Yes, Watchers spend a lot of time watching. Go figure.

My mentor, whom I’m going to call Kate (mainly because that doesn’t resemble her real name at all), has been showing me various ways to go about this. There’s more to it than I would have guessed; among other things, Kate is filling me in on various rites that we don’t use, and why we don’t use them. Those explanations are varying mixtures of gross, funny, and terrifying.

I’m a little more disturbed by this than I expected. It’s not that this part of the work is all that difficult - not compared to some of the stuff I’ve done, anyway. No, it’s that the Watchers will apparently watch anyone, at any time, doing anything. There is no privacy. Most of the rites they use are in a more secure section of the archives than most of us have access to, so unless somebody happens to stumble on one of them independently, nobody knows about them. Or how to defend against them, which is really the point.

Also... Do you remember, quite a while back, when I mentioned that time isn’t quite as simple as people think it is? Well, guess what: the Watchers can not only look at what you’re doing now, but from some angles they can see what you’re doing an hour ago - or what you’re doing an hour from now. Longer, in many cases. In some cases, much longer.

They’ve always warned us that we were being watched, that someone might see what you’re doing at any time. Doing this has really driven the point home, though, and it’s left me with a weird sort of claustrophobia. The idea that someone can be (and in my particular case, probably is) watching me at any time, let alone all the time, is just disturbing.

Reflections of a Deranged Cultist is a work of fiction. No strange rituals were used to bend space and time in the writing of the post.