Work Text:
It started innocent enough, a camera and a window.
To be clear, it wasn't my cameras. I'm not a peeping Tom putting hidden gopros in locker rooms or something, high school's long past me. My branch's stated intention is marketing analysis. We want to know what's selling, who's buying what, the kind of thing you would expect advertising to care about. There's a lot of ways companies go about this, mine just prefers a more… intimate touch. With the permission of the local police, our company has a 24/7 view of a bookstore lodged between two residential apartment buildings. Every single person, dog or insect that entered and exited the store was transformed into real time information.
Most of this information fits in boxes. Big neon ones with a label of how confidently the algorithm knows what its looking at. Clicking on someone's box creates another, smaller box. A bulleted cheat-sheet of their life story. Race, age, gender, clothes, what they buy, whose name's on the card they bought it with, it's all there. Our company takes that list of data from all kinds of people and turn it into advertising tailored specifically to improve their life. People keep buying fantasy books and we have some old dead series that needs fresh air? Well guess what, our publisher has a new batch of special edition hardcovers with sprayed edges and beautiful illustrations carefully considered by data to appeal as best as possible to you, the consumer. It's a win-win for everyone, they get the books they want, and we get a cut of the sales.
My role in this whole process is simple. I sit in a sparsely furnished office, sip some coffee, and stare at a screen for about eight hours a day. Despite how advanced our technology has gotten, a machine is still a machine. It's gonna break sometimes. You need a human touch to ensure efficiency, and to make sure you don't send the suits upstairs misinformation that could tank the company. There are horror stories of that happening in other firms, a few years ago one of these machines entered the same person four thousand times. scares the piss out of them. At least that gives me job security, that's more important than anything else right now.
How am I supposed to complain? Do you know how many people my age would kill for an office job right now? I mean, fuck a window, who even gets their own door at work anymore? It's not my fault being good at your job gives you some recognition in the world. On every single one of my performance reports they would emphasize how impressed they all were. "Beyond sufficient" they said, beyond sufficient! I can't think of a greater honor.
It's just… I don't know, I only really talk to people at work. And talking usually just means being asked to look at something on their phones. And I can't drink with them, alcohol would just make everything worse. Most of them look at me like I'm a bird, beady eyes poking around corners you're not supposed to startle. I'm committed entirely to my job, uninterested in distractions like drinking or partying or any other crap like that. I just didn't see a point in socializing outside of productivity, I never did, until I saw her.
Every few seconds a small green box labeled "PERSON" would sometimes appear on my screen from an apartment building four stories up. Her studio's window was at a perfect height for the camera and she liked to keep the blinds opened, it was like she wanted to get noticed. I assumed she was a glitch at first, one time it labeled a bird going past as "dog" and it took me a good twenty minutes of troubleshooting to fix. However, a human shaped splotch of pixel fuzz moved from one side of a window to another. Back and forth, back and forth, with the neon box hovering around her for every trek across. The algorithm was around fifty percent positive, but I knew a woman when I saw one.
In most cases, I imagine this is where a story ends. You notice something interesting at work and move on with your life. Maybe talk about it with friends, if you had some. But I didn't get this job from a lack of sleuthing, I wanted a closer look. My job's toolkit even comes with a built in "enhance mode" for this exact situation. You know how on TV when someone shouts to enhance, and they pretend like zooming in on a photo makes it clearer? Well, enhance mode takes the portion of the screen you want focused on and generates real time high-res footage on a new window, like the camera suddenly decided to put on some contacts.
I tried to fit the window to the size of the apartment, then asked the enhance mode to generate anything not visible on camera. After a few botch jobs, I was able to generate a miniature diorama of her world. There was a bookshelf used primarily for holding vinyls, with room made for a record player and speakers. And a desk facing the window with a stickerpoxed laptop and drawing tablet. The rest of the desk space was occupied by figures or plushies, with a small lake of open surface left for meals. It was cramped, the same sort of human sardine can I live in. But her room felt so much more spacious, and walkable, and there wasn't anything obviously disgusting.
She materialized out of thin air when she walked back to the window. If the machine didn't know what she was before, its sure she's a woman now. A gray bra and jeans were all she had on, with thick round glasses and long hair black as ink. She was bouncing with every step, humming something in anticipation. I couldn't hear it, our technology isn't that good, so it felt almost fairy-like in her steps. A ghost wandering across a stage.
I turned behind me to the doorway into my office left ajar. With a panic rarely felt on the clock I rushed across and slammed it shut. I stood there, knuckles clenched tight against brass, praying to god nobody goes and asks what I'm up to. I turn around when I think I'm in the clear and snort like a pig seeing her bent over the shelf to start spinning a record. Her hips were moving to a steady rhythm before she clicked play, mouthing along to a song I couldn't hear. I uh… became distracted for a second.
It took me way too long to remember I'm supposed to be doing my job. I sheepishly minimized the window and chastised myself for being so immature. What kinda big shot do I think I am? The kind of weirdos that look at girls on the clock I return to my duties, A bicycle got mistaken for an old lady. Someone got logged twice as completely different people. Some of them got the books wrong, making me enhance the image to generate a cover just close enough that I could make out the intention behind splotchy digital collages attempting their best guess at the artwork.
It occurred to me then that she was listening to something while she worked. For a bit of context: I'm not that much of a music guy. I always saw it as a little too distracting in most situations for me to really engage with it much. The most ive thought about music in years before this point is the generated music my co-worker likes to send in the work chat. They're… fine I guess, I like to encourage his passion but I don't think he knows much about writing a good prompt. What I saw her listening to through the window wasn't a prompt, it was a record. something with space you can hold and need to set up the same way someone needs to set up a washing machine. It captivated me, I wanted to learn more, and I happen to have the technology made just for that.
I opened her window, she's just drawing and occasionally slurping up a noodle. Click, click, click, I zoomed in on the album and found a match, Déjà Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. I don't have anything to listen to, and my shift was ending in about ten minutes, so I just wrote it down in my notes so I could listen later. After a thirty minute train ride there's a convenience store on the way home, I bought the least expensive headphones I could find and then sprinted into the lime gray building I call home.
When I pushed open my apartment door, I trudged past the piles of dirty laundry on the floor and eventually make a clearing in my bed. As I ripped open the cardboard and plastic packaging, I tried to imagine what kind of music the album was. I don't think, in a million years, would I have been prepared for what I heard upon pressing play. A guitar drags me from the right and pulls me into a band from a world long gone. It was a world of Woodstock, vocal harmonies, lives lived peacefully in houses with families and pets and all anyone could ask for in the world. It was real, alive, and I never felt anything like it before. At some point I fell asleep halfway through Our House, they were singing about… well, a house. It was the best sleep I ever had.
She wasn't there when I looked next morning. Everything would be far too easy if we shared a schedule. I texted some of the night shift guys to check if they would let me see an uncropped version of the archived reports. I couldn't think of a good enough excuse, which means nothing for… some amount of time. I tried to find my own music online, none of the generators were any good. Even when I tried to narrow down the type of music I heard last night, It couldn't seem to figure it out. My very best prompt was as follows:
Beautiful song good song great music Neil Young inspired house with cats pretty fun upbeat cozy comfortable funky piano fun fun piano warm feels like home home with girl home with pretty girl in nice house with cats good song number one hit top 100
Wasn't even close.
Sneakers and pants are tossed on the floor by a disconnected arm and I leaped out of my chair. A black work shirt launches into a laundry basket with an athlete's precision, followed by an apron. Like a spotlight her halo shined flickering neon pink across an angel mistakenly labeled "person." I think she works at a restaurant, looked exhausted enough as she collapsed onto the bed.
She laid there for another twenty minutes scrolling her phone. Which was a pain considering I had to keep looking from my work to her to see if she did anything. I missed the exact point she got up cause of that. By the time I peeked over, she was in the kitchen with a record on. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie. A voice of which I could never hear replicated, not for a million years, began to play over the shitty headphones like rain echoing through cave walls. The two of us listened and worked for awhile, separate but so close we can hum to the same songs, tap fingers to the same beat.
This went on for some time. I saw the costume she dressed as for Halloween getting placed atop her bed in preparation. I saw her sometime in the middle of November, piling stuffing into Tupperware. In December she was setting up Christmas lights around the ceiling as the snow crept on her windowsill. Then drinking far too much champaign before we were even close to midnight. In all of them she's alone, I don't think I ever saw her bring anyone home before. It's not that she was sad about it, I never saw her looking gloomy. I just didn't think it was on her mind, or maybe she was just waiting for the right guy.
I dreamed of her once. She was alone and crying, and through my screen I asked "Are you there? Can you hear me?" I never tried that before.
"The band, it's all wrong!" She cried. "They're playing in empty rooms, in separate buildings. I can't hear the Drums without opening the window, and the Guitar's down the hall. Someone's singing twenty blocks away and they're off key. Nothing's working anymore, we can't even dance."
"Why can't we?" I asked, and then I was in front of her. "Listen, it's all turning clear. The band's right on time, just needed to find a good spot." She kissed me then, and I kissed her back. We danced across our small stage, for thousands upon thousands of years we were a duet host of a great waltz. Members of the band would come and go, fluctuating in numbers and instruments, but we remained. We were always there, together. And then I woke up.
I'm not going to pretend as if I was in a proper mental state for what I'm about to describe. It was the weekend, one of the hottest of the entire year. I was laying down, rotting in my rancid apartment with creaky floors and vomit-adjacent colored walls and kitchen sink I can't look at without a pit in my stomach growing deeper. All while the heat baked me alive, the sweat-soaked bed sheets turned me into a slug trailing behind its slime. The entire world could've been swallowed up by an all consuming black hole, and it would've been an improvement. I tried to remember my dream again, one where I spoke and people heard. Where there was always a band, a love, friends. I choked on sobs, I can't remember when I started crying.
I needed to see her. I couldn't do this alone, not anymore. I knew where she lived, I've been doing nothing but stare at it for a year and change. It wasn't a long trip. Just a fifteen minute bus ride and a ten minute walk to the bookstore. But the beating in my heart made it feel like eternity. I was lucky enough that someone happened to be making a delivery at the same time, I just slipped through the apartment then clicked the fourth floor. As the thin metal box as big as my office lurched to the stage, I realized I didn't have anything planned to say. I thought that was better than something cheesy and forced, but that's a whole lot better than nothing at all.
The elevator opened, I walked closer, closer, closer. I rapped my knuckles against the door, tap tap tap. Nothing. Knock knock knock. Still nothing. A bit of weight left, she's not even home. I can just go home and pretend like I never did anything so stupid. I sighed and turned around. And then she was there.
Everything was wrong. Legs too long. Thighs too chunky and uneven. The stomach was bigger and the chest was flatter. The woman I have been watching through rose tinted windows, by all accounts, never existed in the first place. "Uh… excuse me? That's my apartment." Her voice was deep, it appears a lot of details were lost in translation. I've never felt more humiliated in my life than staring down the physical manifestation of my own failures, my own stupidity, my weakness to think for one second that someone could understand me. "Do I know you?" She asks after I kept standing there, jaws agape like a fool.
"No, no you wouldn't," I admit. "How could you?"