Flash! Fiction by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

67

The Fly

I don't really mind the cameras out here. It's not like there's an omniscience — good or bad — behind the ubiquitous electronic eyes that watch over us. But then, I outgrew believing in omniscience long ago.

Occasionally, I do feel those eyes following me on my way to the office, on the train, at the station, in the subway, street side, behind the green glass and steel walls of the office tower, 57 storeys up, through reception, and finally to the sanctuary of my office.

When I imagine all those eyes — and I do this a lot less than I used to — I try to picture a random scattering of buzzing, annoying, but mostly harmless houseflies, each outfitted with thousands of ommatidia to receive and filter infinitely more visual data than a fly could need, especially since it ends up in the filth and rot.

I used to work in video surveillance in the lower 7th precinct. That's the area from the PPG complex down to the Coliseum and east to the Lincoln Projects. There were always four of us on duty. It was a 24/7/365 operation. We were the overnight crew.

The PPG block has more cameras per hundred square meters than any metropolitan area in North America. From the subway and maintenance tunnels underground to the 85th storey of the centre tower, there is no place to hide in camera (Walt, my partner, took online law classes at the community college) in this vast vertical city block.

From a bank of 25 monitors, Walt and I could see every part of PPG every five minutes. It was very hard on the eyes and the nerves to watch the monitors loop through feeds hour after hour. By the time I left, I think I must have observed every square inch of 68

PPG 600,000 times. But that's nothing compared to Walt who claims to have viewed the PPG loop more than a million times.

Like the PPG complex, the Coliseum was high profile, meaning all its cameras were functional and regularly monitored. They all had to be in good working order to track the crowds that came pouring out after games and concerts. These were the feeds that attracted the police detectives, their tattered warrants waving about, directing the forensic investigation as if this was the first time.

On paper, the Lincoln Projects were important, too, but in reality watching the Lincoln cameras is where most surveillance rookies got their feet wet. On any given day, only half the cameras in Lincoln were live and pointing in the right direction. But those that were working frequently showed what even veterans like Eddie found difficult to stomach and marked the end of more than a few surveillance rookies' careers. Eddie's partner, Nate, was an excep-tional new recruit whose guts were made of iron. He was truly gifted for Lincoln.

Technicians went into the Lincoln quad every day that police escorts were available, but the backlog of malfunctioning or vandalized CCTV equipment was permanent. Nothing could change that. Maintenance priority was given to the perimeter, and there remained large swathes of the Lincoln interior where we were virtually blind.

There was one camera in the middle of Lincoln, Unit #39, Level 14

SW, that had been programmed to play reruns of the Andy Griffith's Show all day, every day. It was too dangerous to go in that sector even with a police guard. So, for the past five years, our monitor loop just bypassed that camera. If you knew the code and pass-word, you could access the camera, and Eddie and Nate regularly 69

watched the show after lunch between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning, a statistically slow hour according to Walt.

Me, I preferred Russian novels, at least until my headaches became too severe. My family doctor advised me to spend less time at the computer and see an optometrist. I started listening to books on tape and soon became addicted to spy thrillers. It actually made my work more interesting, and, aided by my new bifocals, I was able to focus on details much better during my watch.

It wasn't long however before this new state of affairs turned dicey.

I saw something I shouldn't have seen. Drawing on my newfound spy instincts, I decided not to tell Walt, Eddie or Nate. I told only one person who I knew would tell only one other person, THE person in the footage. Within a week I was promoted to a top secret project that is so hush-hush I can't talk to anybody. I miss Walt and Nate and Eddie, and the daylight still bothers me.

First published in Danse Macabre, Volume 6, Number 4, May 2011.