Eye

"The Eye, Sector 2, reporting for duty. I swear to uphold the social standards stated in the doctrine of the order, I swear to deal with all blasphemous violations, swiftly and without mercy. I am the judge, jury, and executioner, the fist of our lord."

He shovelled cheesy, fried potatoes into his starved mouth, at a pace of eager greediness, with one hand, whilst slurping from a can that came with heart attack risks with the other hand. He crammed and crammed more crisps into his gaping hole of a mouth like a relentless conveyor belt, allowing a cheese dusting of crumbs to fall and accumulate, littering his crotch and polo shirt. As he hand spaded the last palm full of puffy, potato snacks into his wide open mouth like a basking shark sucking up zooplankton, he began sucking and licking the flavour granules that coated his fingers, smacking his lips as he did so. Feeling an urge to stand up, he tried to tense his muscles in preparation for lifting his body mass up, but is whole lower body felt numb from the lack of blood flow, causing pins and needles to tingle in his toes. He wriggled his toes and flung his legs up and down to reanimate them, before attempting to stand again. Success. He brushed himself down with both of his hands, before pacing around his small workspace to immediately sit down again, breathing heavily from the exertion.

Feeling especially bored three hours into his shift, he decided to pass some time by picking at his nose, getting whiffs of cheese as he did so, and placing any excavated sticky, warm globules on the underside of his desk, with the rest of the encrusted accumulation of his nose garbage. Every now and then, he would give a cursory, disinterested gaze at the CCTV screens he was responsible for, and saw the same old nothingness he expected to see at 3am on a Tuesday in October. The majority of people would be sleeping; consciously detached from the misery of their lives and dreaming of alternatives. Leaving him to keep an eye on the unfortunate night workers or the depraved who relied on the masking of the night to conduct their deeds. There was something about the darkness that brought out the worst in people; as if the blanket of black provided sufficient cover and comfort for people to reveal their despicable, hidden selves, that they concealed during the day hours. But nobody could hide from him.

As he began working his left nostril with his index finger, his peripheral vision caught movement on camera 2, the lower Highstreet. He saw two women walking home together and immediately straightened up in his seat to watch them, very carefully. He zoomed in to investigate the pixelated picture with an eagerness fuelled partly by perversion, and partly by a desire to cite them for violations. The magnified aspects of their bodies that he fixated on were their cleavage and legs, and he grunted to himself like a deviant while he gawked. Women were his favourite to watch, and to punish. Often not because they were violating anything, but mostly as a show of power over the opposite sex. His therapist explained to him that his inherent disdain towards women, stemmed from a lack of breast feeding and nurturing he received as a child, and that he didn't hate women, but in fact, hated his mother, and the reason he can't stop eating, is because he yearns for his mother's teat ( he didn't think he did), and was told that his incessant urges to shove things down his gusset, was because he was trying to obsessively replicate the receiving of nourishment from his mother's bosom. He didn't buy that horse crap, but he paid the lady and went home and he cried a lot, especially when he thought about his mom's teats. He was certain it was power. He liked power. As a shy and often bullied boy, he was always being disempowered by some bigger and more confident kids, even girls, especially girls. Now held a position in which he could wield power over others -to the fullest extent - he would assert it whenever he could - because if you give a man power, he'll overuse like some masturbatory act.

As he watched the women like a roue, his right hand hovered over a red button in the centre of his control console. He fixated on them, hoping they'd slip up and defy the order, tracking and tracking them, waiting and waiting, but the women did nothing. Disappointed, he flipped the safety cover over the button and slumped back into his seat, to begin picking his nose again. After a few minutes of excavating, he noticed an irritating fly buzzing around the room and just watched. It landed freely on any surface it felt like being on, seemingly aimless and spontaneous. He admired its behaviour and the fact that it could go wherever it pleased, with nobody giving a damn about its whereabouts and its purpose. It seemed strange and unfair to him, that this tiny flying thing could just exist and have no obligations or rules to live by. It had an abundance of food and water and freedom of movement - now that was freedom. Though, he thought ,'what about its biological imperatives?' Surely something controlled it and drove it to act this way? Could it be really free? Was anything truly free in all of nature? Freer than he? He rapidly slapped his open palm onto the desk, crushing the bug with a wooden thud, then twisted his hand around to stare at the squashed, moist, thing stuck to his hand for a few moments, before finally rubbing it off onto his trouser leg.

Feeling peckish he went to the fridge which had a picture of teats on it, forcing him to giggle to himself as he remembered that he'd told the day shift watcher about his therapy session. He grabbed a microwaveable cheeseburger and a full fat coke out of the fridge, then placed the burger in to cook. While he waited, he looked back at the screens to see that camera screen 4, the park, had begun automatically tracking two men, who appeared to be engaged in a fist on fist skirmish - they were brawling - and this went against the order's social standards. He immediately dashed over to his seat and lifted the safety cover off of the red button, which was labelled 'The Fist of Our Lord', and scanned the scene to read the auto AI generated Sitrep, which had already labelled the aggressor as the left hand figure, and listed his name, address, and in a bigger and red text, instructed the kill order. KILL. As was his duty, the judge, the jury, and the executioner, he pushed the button firmly downwards, and watched a burst of muzzle flashes emit from the weapons mounted on the camera, temporally blinding the scene, and as the image returned, he saw that the aggressor was taken down and now on the floor, with a pool of blood gathering around him.

At that moment, the microwave pinged which caused him to startle and glance back at it. He'd completely forgotten about it in the heat of his task, and rubbed his stomach as the realisation of hunger came back to him. He then looked back at the camera to check the scene again, and saw the victim, who appeared to be okay, give the camera a thumbs up and walk out of sight. It was now protocol to announce the kill and to log what had happened in the events book. He radioed a crew in to clean the bodies up and feeling little remorse and completely detached from the life he'd just ended with the press of a button, lumbered back over to the microwave to grab his burger and coke.

As he sat down, he remembered that he needed to send an email, so he started up the app, and began to type with his right hand, as he stuffed the hot burger into his mouth with the other. He began typing out a personal sob story in which he 'the victim' was suffering at the hand of 'workplace negligence', and how his office chair which he sat in for twelve hours a day, had a worn down cushion, which was causing him severe spinal discomfort. He feared (he typed), for his long-term health and wanted to save the order vast sums of money in workplace compensation pay outs. He even decided to go as far as to suggest that it was a severe violation of his human rights, citing the H&S at law act, a few bible verses, and the Geneva convention. He clicked send and then slumped back in the uncomfortable chair, resting both of his hands behind his back and closing his eyes for a short nap.

The End