White Space Season 2

to Stephen. The only thing that might make it weirder would be watching through the eyes of one of the other Watchers working for Conway Industries. Stephen had no idea how many other Watchers were in The Program. He knew only of the four sharing his shifts. But Stephen did know there was at least one other group of four Watchers on the island, intel he’d gathered after overhearing something from a superior.
    But just how many Watchers there were, or people in The Program being watched, Stephen had no idea. So far as he knew, none of the Watchers was actually implanted with the chips that allowed for remote viewing of their feeds. But since the program was secret, and none of the participants knew they were being spied on, Stephen hedged on the safe side, always acting as if someone might be watching him.
    Any of us can be spied on.
    Stephen was forever careful in what he said, saw, and read, always cautious to never cross his bosses or give them cause for suspicion.
    To most people, seeing and hearing everything the chips showed, from so many varying subjects’ views, would be little more than a chaotic blur of confusing images and dissonant noise. But Stephen was one of the enhanced — through drugs and genetic modification — and his gift was an ability to process massive amounts of data at once.
    His gift hadn’t always been a gift, though. Once it was a curse.
    Stephen had developed autism as a child, but thanks to Conway Industries’ experimental programs, he was able to live a normal life. No, not just normal. Conway made him better . They had turned an occasionally debilitating weakness into an asset. Stephen was now someone who could separate and filter information at an amazing rate, easily spotting anomalies, while still maintaining a normal life in all other ways, even if so much of that life was now a façade.
    Stephen’s job was to watch, and nothing more; to keep an eye out for sudden awareness within the patients — awareness that they were being spied on. There had been only three such instances in his half dozen years of watching, a trio of times when someone seemed to suddenly become aware that they were being watched, or at least sense that something was wrong.
    The first was Patient 0191, a 41-year-old woman who began showing acute symptoms of paranoia, watching people a lot, and running from some at random. She’d even put towels and sheets over everything in her house with a reflective surface. She knew she was being watched, but didn’t know how, nor by whom. Since she wasn’t an immediate threat, Stephen flagged her for an adjustment during her next trip to the doctor’s. Sure enough, Patient 0191 was back online in a week or so, returning to Stephen’s screen with no hiccups in her daily routines, going through life’s motions as if nothing was amiss, and never was or would be.
    Another of Steven’s subjects, 0319, a 39-year-old man who worked at one of the dive bars in the tourist district, began speaking directly to his unseen observer.
    “I know you’re watching me,” he said, staring into the mirror with squinted eyes. “What I don’t understand is why. ”
    Stephen ordered that Patient 0319 get picked up immediately, as The Program needed to find out what had gone wrong, what the man knew, and to ensure that he didn’t go off telling people what he suspected. Stephen never learned what became of the man after he was picked up. He knew only that 0319 was no longer in the feed, his slot in the large monitor replaced precisely one shift later with fresh-streaming surveillance of a 15-year-old girl with long, black hair and a slight speech impediment.
    Stephen wasn’t sure what it was about the monitoring process that these few, isolated cases managed to sense. Surveillance was done discreetly with tiny chips and even tinier nanobots — so small they were virtually undetectable. Why a rare few were able to feel something amiss, while most were completely unable, was something Stephen wondered often. If the scientists at Conway Industries knew, and they probably did, they certainly weren’t telling someone in Stephen Anderson’s low-on-the-totem-pole position.
    As he again wondered how some people could just tell , Stephen thought of Patient 0466, a 51-year-old man named Sal.
    While Stephen was never told the patients’ names, he was usually able to figure them out quickly by watching them go through their daily routines. Enough people had called Patient 0466