The tired professional reached for the box of doughnuts across the cluttered desk, choosing a pink frosted one with sprinkles as her acrimonious snack. She had promised herself that she would not touch them, but it was 5:44 AM and they had been sitting there, with the lid of the box slightly askew, for three days.
She thought that someone must have brought them in for a birthday. A new hire, probably. Not anyone who had been working here long enough for their enthusiasm to be suffocated.
She refocused her eyes to the hundreds of screens in front of her, each screen divided into dozens of smaller ones. She was trained to process vast amounts of visual input and retain only that of significance to her department. It was like panning for gold in an ocean, if the gold was potential terrorist activity.
She broke off a piece of her doughnut, letting crumbs and sprinkles fall into her keyboard, and popped it into her mouth. It was stale enough that it just tasted like frosted cardboard, but she hadn’t expected much better of it. She picked at the sprinkles briefly before casting the doughnut aside.
The thing she liked about the overnight shift was that she could watch people end their day, and several hours of darkened screens and fitful sleeps later, begin a new day. When she first got recruited, she told her friends over celebratory drinks about how interesting it was to watch so much of humanity go through the motions of daily life.
“We’re always on camera, we just aren’t always aware of it,” she had said. “I have access to every lense in the Northeastern Seaboard at work, somebody’s always watching.”
Her friends had laughed uncomfortably and started another toast to her having such a promising government job immediately out of graduate school. That had been five years ago. She was still at the same job, but her friends had all been hired, promoted, and transferred, planting roots in different parts of the country she would never visit.
Now, her friends were people who didn’t even know she existed. The faces she recognized and watched every day. She gave some of them names, pretending to understand their motivations for carrying on with their routines. There was one old man with a tank of crayfish in his living room. She called him Herb, and thought that maybe he had had a wife who died and three grown children who almost never called or visited. But she watched him care for his crayfish every day.
There was one woman in her late 40’s, who she liked to think fondly of as Maureen, who laid out a cardboard stage outside the corner bistro and sang opera on Fridays at 7 AM.
There was a preschool with a snake for a class pet, and at recess, the tiny students would feed the snake live mice.
There were hospitals where babies were born and where people died, over and over every day. It was overwhelming how much human life she watched with the instruction of picking out its evil. All she saw was good.
She sighed and returned her attention to her screens, it was almost time to watch her world wake up.
rose lit world 