one nation...under watch

The pen is the tongue of the mind.
- Miguel de Cervantes

Talk about close: With five minutes until the midnight deadline, I just managed to submit my short story entry to the NYC Midnight 3rd Annual Short Story Challenge a short while ago.

As with the other NYC Midnight challenges, there are a few requirements to adhere to, including that the story has to be 2,500 words or less. The genre and subject categories are assigned in accordance with what heat you are placed in - 22 this time for me.

Title: One Nation...Under Watch
Synopsis: Just trying to do his job, Representative Jack Malarcky realizes a little too late the consequences of an innocent proposal as his normal life, under the vigilant eye of the nation’s surveillance system, spirals out of control.
Genre: Political Satire
Subject: Surveillance

By Melissa C. Navia

I remember when the idea first came to me, nothing more than a passing thought. I hadn't even considered it the night before as I reviewed the next day's proposed topics to discuss. The ride to work was preoccupied with pressing matters, like what was for lunch and how many hours until the weekend. And when we filed into chamber, the incessant buzzing of the cameras overhead as we passed through the doors didn't seem so out of place.

But then the arguing began. First there was Rep. Burns who spoke for thirty-three minutes about the spreading vandalism. Threatening graffiti, smashed cameras, and people going to work in mustached disguises to avoid being identified on closed-circuit television. Was the latter even illegal, he asked. If not, then it should be, was the murmured response. Stone-faced agents from the newly dubbed and unwieldy named NSWVA (National Surveillance, Watch, and Vigilance Agency) noted the exchange and tapped away at their paper-thin laptops. Then there was Rep. Laurel who spoke passionately for an hour about the growing paranoia. Apathy, she cried, was at an all-time high. The new crop of jobs in the surveillance industry had produced workers who were spending endless hours reviewing footage of city streets and suburban lawns, listening to millions of conversations about what happened yesterday and didn't happen today, thinking away at new methods of biometric scanning, and infiltrating each other's homes and businesses, only to leave them tired shells with worn-out eyes and ears the rest of the day. The American Optometric Association was reporting an explosion of people in need of prescriptions and the NYPD had counted 962 people staring vacantly at trees in Central Park this past Monday, between the hours of 5 and 9 PM, when many of them had to be carted off home. Something must be done, Rep. Laurel insisted, and the NSWVA took note.

The buzzing overhead began to penetrate my thoughts. But no sooner did I try to shake it away when Rep. Jetham hurried up to complain for fourteen minutes that we needed more money, more money, more money. His district was not an anomaly, he gestured dramatically. Every city, state, and program was in debt. Every week the Capitol votes for more funding to go to cameras, recorders, scanners, operatives, data profiling, electronic thing-ama-jigs, and bugs. Bugs! he repeated, as he shuffled off mumbling that his eight-year-old son's newest game console was outfitted with three new types of trendy surveillance bugs.

Again, the buzzing resurfaced, louder than before. I had yet to hear any solutions offered to the growing headache of problems, and I stole a glance at the agents seated above. And when I turned to look back, Rep. Adams had taken the floor. Quieter than the others and noticeably more upset, he had only one complaint: the unexplained disappearance of people. A hush fell over the chamber. The buzzing was now more unbearable than ever, I cringed, as the agents above shuffled uncomfortably in their velvet-lined seats. His brother-in-law had gone missing over two weeks ago with no explanation at all. The police were uncooperative. The courts had slammed their doors. And no one, he accused, in the Capitol has offered to look into the matter.

Have you asked them to look, offered Rep. Laurel, into his surveillance files? They claim they did, was his listless response, and said that there was no recorded kidnapping, so he must have left of his own accord. Silence fell over the room again.

And this buzzing! Rep. Adams continued, covering his ears. I can't sleep anymore with these maddening sounds wherever I go!

So that was when it happened. I stood up and hurried to the podium to pull Robert away. Back to his seat he went, his sweaty hands still cupped over his ears as he avoided the gaze of the agents above. And as I watched him go, the rest turned to me. What could I say? After what we had just heard, I couldn't imagine sitting through much more. So I proposed the only thing I could think of to make the arguing and the problems and the ceaseless buzzing go away:

"Why don't we stop all the recordings of…everything…and go back to the way things were before?"

And that was it. There, I said it, for everyone to hear. And yes, the recordings, too. However it could have been captured, it was, etched in electronically encoded time.

So I really shouldn't have been too unnerved when the agents from above, with the awkward acronyms embroidered on their jackets, stood up to speak. The random acts of vandalism would soon be stopped even before they start, thanks to the newest in CCTV and biometric technology, one said to Rep. Burns. Our superior surveillance systems have practically eradicated unemployment, another reminded Rep. Laurel, and the AOA could not be happier to know that the eye prescriptions they are handing out today will be the wave of eyeglass/contact lens surveillance technology tomorrow. As for money, chimed in a third, and Rep. Jetham looked away, everyone should know that money spent on surveillance means less money needed elsewhere. Surveillance is the first line of defense, and soon, it will be the only one. And as a reminder to all, said the sternest of the group, our improved surveillance operations are still and will always be the most efficient way of removing criminals from our streets. Robert did not look up.

Vigilance is protection.

And with that, they marched out. The meeting was adjourned, with me still standing at the podium, wondering what terrible thing I might have just done. I walked to my seat, picked up my papers, and left Robert grumbling about how upset his wife would be when he went home.

Hours later, I was driving home, along the same route I had always used. Yet this time was different. Everything seemed new. As I waited at a traffic light, I spotted one, two, nine, seventeen nests of CCTV cameras positioned in the intersection. The shiny, silver clusters panned and jerked up and down, right and left, capturing everything in sight. But I could’ve sworn, and maybe I was wrong, that at least two of them were locked on me. And when the light turned green, I gladly hit the gas, and they, too, obediently followed until I was out of sight.

Not to mention, because I guess I should, the graffiti I must’ve ignored every time I had passed them before. The Camera Lies. Vigilance is a Hoax. Watch Out. All of them were in drab, scrawled bubble letters, some of them incomplete as if they had been interrupted in mid-execution. Further up, I spotted officers violently striking down video cameras that had been hastily set up on sidewalks. A teenager lay sprawled on the floor in handcuffs, as his (I assumed) smashed cameras lay broken at his side.

I shook the image away and turned the radio on, as I sped up to make it home. The increase in CCTV traffic, announced the reporter, can be thanked for the heightened operating noises of public recording devices. And then the broadcast cut to the one sound I had been trying to avoid all day: that mind-numbing buzz. Turning the radio off, I swerved into the driveway. I gathered my things and ran indoors, foolishly ignoring the tall, well-bundled man staring at me from my neighbor’s front lawn. Once inside and breathing hard, I stole a glance through the blinds of the living room window, but the figure was gone. Maybe he had been my neighbor, I convinced myself. But let’s be honest, I knew he wasn’t.

I was exhausted, I’ll admit, and should’ve have been far more careful, but hindsight is so much clearer from the trees by which I now sit. At the time, I didn’t think not to make any phone calls to my cousin in Connecticut or my sister on Long Island. I didn’t think not to mention the day’s earlier incidents to my friend who called from Arizona. And of course I didn’t think it strange to walk into my room and find the television on, a faint buzzing emanating from its spot on the wall. I was too tired to make a conspiracy out of it, and so I went to sleep, under the watchful eyes and ears of the NSWVA.

The next day I tried to make small talk, but Reps. Burns, Laurel, and Jetham blatantly ignored my meager attempts. Where’s Robert? I inquired. He’s gone, scribbled my secretary on a notepad and then proceeded to rip it up and throw it away. I got the hint, said nothing more, and thought of lunch only hours away.

Over an egg salad sandwich—that’s when they came. Agents from the NSWVA. I was escorted to their offices at the other end of the Capitol, where they sat me down and told me plainly, in their stern, robotic way, that they were sorry to see me resign my position as elected official. Oh really? I gasped. Effective immediately, they replied. But why? I persisted. And the rest I don’t quite remember. But if you really must know, I’m sure you can refer to the surveillance files and see what the video says. Look them up: Jack Malarcky. Given the suffocating buzz in the room, I’m almost certain the whole scene was recorded ten different ways.

And that would’ve been it, the end of the story, but the fact that I’m telling you this should be an indication that it most certainly was not. I did as I was told, quietly as I was asked, and the next day I found myself sitting alone at home. No one called, no one knocked on my door. So I disconnected the television and ripped out the telephone wires and, after dropping it in the toilet, smashed my cell phone to bits. All of these things I took outside and left them by the street.

Then depression set in, and I slept all day. When I awoke each night, there was nothing for me to do but go out for late-night drives and stops at the convenient store. Then post-nasal drip developed into a sinus infection and a frustratingly temperamental fever. Next thing I knew, I was a bundled mess of coats and scarves and gloves and hats every time I stepped out of my door. It was mid-January, what else was a sick man like me to do? Yes, mid-January, I remember thinking, when it struck me that my annual membership to the wholesale grocery store was about to expire. With no paycheck in the near future, I did what any respectable person would do—I went and bought everything in bulk that I could. Bags of rice, cartons of milk, larger-than-necessary boxes of cereal, dozens of packaged frozen foods. It must’ve looked strange, I admit, but I couldn’t have imagined who would bother to be looking. And then, as if the rest was not enough, one night, as I prepared to go out for a drive, I turned the ignition only to hear the sounds of a struggling engine. So I opened the garage, rolled the car in, and went to sleep convinced it couldn’t get any worse.

But it did.

The next day, as I tried to make sense of the inner workings under the hood of my car, they came as quietly and as quickly as they had done for me only a few weeks before. The agents with the acronyms burnt into their cores arrested me without even a word. A nice to see you again would have sufficed, but even that would’ve been asking too much.

Less than an hour later, I stood before a judge who informed me what I was being charged with, a direct result of the suspicious activities they had caught on the cameras in my house, the ones across the street, and the latest in trendy bugs planted in the chassis of my car. Not to mention, he reminded, the conversations we recorded and the behavior our operatives (he motioned to a clump of well-bundled men in the corner) duly noted.

But wait, I interjected, frantically explaining the depression, the sinus infection, the now-expired membership card, and the sputtering engine. The judge looked on as an agent from the NSWVA stepped forward:

“That’s not what the cameras said.”

And with that I was sentenced to ten years in jail for the countless number of illegal recorded activities I had committed, and, in case it could ever be proven that they had indeed not been illegal, I was sentenced to another ten for wasting taxpayers’ money and the state’s time. Indeed, if I had known that a trip to the supermarket was going to call for the installation of nine HD surveillance cameras around the perimeter of my house and the round-the-clock watch of five internationally trained operatives, I would’ve never left the house.

But I did leave the house, and a jail in the countryside was where I ended. Once there, I was shocked to see the state of disrepair into which the state’s highest-security prison had fallen. What would be my home for the next ten (or twenty) years was an atrocious mess of rust and decay. Even the cameras were in disarray, and the entire compound was dangerously understaffed. What’s the reason for this, I asked a tired-looking warden. No money, he laughed, to watch the criminals anymore. I smiled at the irony and wished Rep. Jetham all the best.

So with everything falling apart, and the locks on the jail cells less than sturdy, it was only a matter of time before the worst of us devised a plan to escape. And when we did (unmonitored, of course), the wardens stepped aside. We were murderers and drug dealers, rapists and thieves, but we were also people who had disappeared for doing nothing at all. There was me, as you know, but there were also men like Robert and his brother-in-law who had spent weeks, months, and some even years for doing everyday things and trying to live decent lives…

I’m not trying to make excuses; it’s just the very truth. From the hills, we met with other groups of escapees, and together the self-proclaimed leaders planned the attack. Sitting in the trees, writing to you, I can see the houses and the buildings down below. And I guess I could quietly slip away, hail a cab or catch a bus, and once in the city I could alert authorities and give away the horror being plotted in the hills above. But on second thought, it would be a waste of money and my time. I’m sure the judge who sentenced me will understand.

And besides, if anything good is to come of this, I'll finally have done something interesting—and illegal—for the cameras to record.