You know who’s looking. Unnamed individuals, rented personas, shrouded in flickering digital lights. Government voyeurism at its most efficient. A surreptitious network of spies and employees, could even be friends and neighbours, relatives. No real way to know.
Anyone could be one of them. Infact it was you who dubbed them “The Camera Men”. Your words had weight back then, people in charge were scared of what you wrote. But times had changed, systematic clamps were imposed, people singled out, made examples of, building locked from the outside and doused with legally sanctioned death warrants.
Times had changed, you had to start doing what ever you could to survive. Which meant a different name and a different life. You designed signages now for a living.
So be it.
“Camera Men”, why men you wonder, seems odd singling them out in this great design of governance. The gender of the eyes behind the many tracking cameras seem banal now. You shrug those thoughts off. Plan, you need a plan.
They see you, they are following your every move. Hawk eyes with zoom. Tiny-tiny fuckers with their red lit eyes. If only you knew who they were.
You could probably find out, but fat good that’ll do. You caught out in one of their farms, surrounded with water.
The strangest of all prisons.
You know their plan. You know their intent. You’re an example, that’s what you are. A big, voyeuristic, salacious “or else”. A warning of simplistic proportions.
They’re going to simply let you rot. That’s what they do. They’re bloody good at it to. Weaponized apathy.
No guns, no bullets, no violence, except the blood rain of subtlety, a dog whistle. They let your body atrophy, your mind fitter, your soul rot. Insanity games. Its all begun now, and you’ve still to touch a drop of water. Hunger gives way to parchment.
Its only after you drink, can your mind again begin to comprehend. The magnitude of your situation. Just like those twilight moments before you shock out of a nightmare, where reality start to peek through the dark night, when you realize, it was all a dream. It was all a dream. All a dream, you repeat.
Just like that, but only in reverse. This is you awaking into the dream. A dream full of insidious mares.
Its all recorded, splashed and consumed. A slow feral reality show that is your solitary confinement. Consumed by those you’re here to protect. Save. Or rather, those you failed.
Maybe this is what you deserve, your indignities fed to the millions. Maybe it is your fault. What was that old proverb you used to quote so often?
Something about being nailed. To a cross? No, that would be the long haired carpenter turned prophet.
You think of its source. A frown in born.
For some reason, it’s important to remember small things right now. Adage. He used the word adage.
Thank the literary Gods, atleast they have not forsaken you. It’s Japanese. You still don’t remember where you read it, but you remember the string.
“The nail that sticks out gets hammered down”. That’s it!
You feel much better now. Nails for comrades. That’s where you stand now. You could do worse. Cool iron comfort.
You look up at your audience.
The cool water just skimming your toes. More cool comfort. It feels good, no doubting that. Reminds you of all the summers spent languishing at the local beach. The water here is not like that though. This is where the river meets the sea.
How tables have turned. You find humour in the irony. How could you not. The inevitability of forces beyond us. Someday, someone is going to discover it was all a lark anyway. But you don’t have so much time. You discover it now.
Hurricane waters dancing with the torrents. It debates, it creates and it destroys. You’re in the eye now. You look back. At the shanty barn. It looks back at you. The water welcomes you with an open heart. A return to beginnings, a fluid hearth.
Some swear that you proposed a smile looking away.
What could that have meant? They wonder.
They wonder still.
The politics of defiance.
Read Part -I : https://steemit.com/shortstory/@mephentis/a-totalitarian-abduction-part-i
Read Part-II : https://steemit.com/shortstory/@mephentis/a-totalitarian-abduction-part-ii
Read Part -III: https://steemit.com/story/@mephentis/a-totalitarian-abduction-part-iii
