The October Music: Second Verse - Day 14

Eye in the Sky
I don’t know of anyone that remembers life before The Eye happened. Most probably can’t. Many weren’t born. Some simply choose to forget. Whatever the case may be, I guess it doesn’t really matter in the end. There’s no use in talking about what reality had been or could be in the future because, well, those are just thought exercises. And they’re ones The Eye doesn’t like.

See, it watches us. Sort of. It’s less like a Big Brother sort of watching and more just passively gazing at anything and everything on the planet all at once. It surveys its domain with a kind of nonchalance, I guess. I mean, if a massive, sky-spanning eye could look nonchalant, anyway. It doesn’t really seem to care all that much what people do or say or anything like that. That’s nice in a way.

It's when people start thinking about life without it that it starts to get…upset. That may be a nice way of putting it. When it gets the sense, somehow, that someone is planning or plotting or thinking in some way of getting rid of it, The Eye stops being passive and stares directly at the person. And I mean directly. Its focus is completely diverted and the pupil shifts to fall on whoever was considering the action.

The scrutiny alone would be discouragement enough, but there’s something in that gaze that makes things worse. It makes a person’s blood boil in their veins. Hair stand up straight and then fall out. Skin grow tight and split. It’s almost like they are being cooked, although by what force, who can say? Minor offenders get off relatively lightly. They may be sick for a few weeks, but when they recover, they understand their transgressions and don’t repeat the actions.

Those of us that continuously consider what it hates, though, get a more drastic punishment. If you’ve never seen a person burst like an overcooked hot dog, I can assure you that it’s much worse than you could possibly imagine. It’s not something I want to repeat. You learn quickly what you can do and what you cannot do. Basically, the unspoken rule is that if you behave and accept that The Eye is there, you’re not going to have any problems. Sure, you may feel like someone’s watching you the rest of your life – because it is – but you get to live what passes for existence as unmolested as possible.

There are some, though, that long for freedom and have devised a plan underneath the watch of The Eye. See, they get around planning by retelling The Odyssey to one another. Specifically, the part with Polyphemus. You know what I mean. They call themselves Nobody and discussing literature isn’t a crime against The Eye.

But Nobody is planning. Nobody is thinking abstractly. And Nobody just got its hands on a nuclear missile. They call it The Stick. The problem is they need a distraction.
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And my name just got called.