Surveillance. A Short Story. Part 1.

The three worst feelings in the world: shame, regret, and the desperation of no way back.

Linear time, by its nature, opposes revisiting past chances and opportunities. Nature allows us to learn and try again, despite the burdens of the past. Every trip-up, every cut - a lesson. The weight of knowledge is great, but it must be carried. Or not. Like the love and need for air, that is the way it is.

Everything was a choice.

Jude knew that better than anyone. He told his shrink the same: "It's like being stuck in an episodic loop where every beginning starts the same and every ending ends the same. I want a way out. I see it. And I do achieve it, but the place I have arrived is exactly where I came from."

Then he lost his insurance because he lost his job as a software engineer. AI had replaced him first. He thought - like everyone - he was special, but, in the end, AI replaced everybody, leaving the face of the labor force to fend for themselves. The boss said something about compute. Jude understood, but it didn't make him feel any better. In fact, it only made it worse.

Void of savings after six months of gambling it away on crypto meme-coins and prediction markets, he had next to nothing. Making it or breaking it was the new American way. Couldn't die. It was too expensive.

Finally, after one more night of online poker after selling his TV (borrowed), his MacBook (layaway), and the last of his clothes deemed "cool" by the second-hand store in town, Jude couldn't even pay rent for his apartment. Everything was gone. And no, there was no shining light of divine liberation that washed over Jude; only the cold, endless street and sidewalk to the left and right of him as the day turned to night, where even the lights barely sputtered to guide him if he dared to tread those modern-day trenches of turmoil and treachery. His parents had considered helping him, but then they, too, got fired, which led them to reconsider their decision.

Everyone was getting fired, except for Verse.

Next to Jude's nothing, was his former workmate (he built the AI that replaced Jude) and kind of friend, Verse. Out of kindness and pity, Verse told Jude he could stay with him for a "set" - Verse said this viciously - amount of time. Jude, as noted, had nothing, so he had no choice. And why wouldn't he want to stay with a man like Verse, who had everything - money, a car, an apartment, and a future. To have was to be alive. To be alive was to prove one had won. Then, there was just the matter of holding onto it and acting like it didn't matter at all - like it hadn't even been that hard.

So, Verse had everything, Jude thought, except for one thing.

"On the couch?" It was Jude's first night at Verse's. "Are you sure? Don't you sit here?"

The light of the nascent moon was already a bright, semi-blinding white coming through Verse's window. Would it be strange for him to ask him to make it darker? Probably.

Jude didn't feel like seeing out of his eyes lately. He wanted to see things through someone else's eyes. He eventually understood this feeling was more connected to the truth that he didn't feel like existing as himself. Not suicide. Just an extended break from himself, his ego, and the burden of carrying it all around: the successes, the failures, and the preparation and will to go forth once again.

"It's exhausting," Jude murmured under his breath.

"Hmmm?" asked Verse.

Motioning his head back and forth, trying to avoid the glare of the moon and the stars, Jude lied and said, "It was nothing."

"I sit there." Verse said, pointing to a very comfortable, very new-looking salmon pink ottoman, seemingly already over what Jude may or may not have said.

"Looks nice." Jude nodded at the footstool. "It's even got one of those."

"It is," Verse confirmed. "And it does have a footstool."

Jude nodded, instantly feeling stupid.

"You can sit in it too whenever I'm not around."

Jude thanked him when Verse then provided the requirements and the deadline if Jude did not complete them.

"I didn't even know you had a girlfriend."

"I do." Verse tried to hide his anger (embarrassment) by opening a beer from the fridge and trying his best to finish at least half of it. He got there, leaving a quarter on his shirt. "I just never bring her around." Verse burped. "We're in love."

"And you want me to try and sleep with this person?"

Verse nodded. "For me."

"As what?"

"As whatever I need it to be for myself."

Verse's tone was terse as the trail of the moon's light cut over the floor.

"So," I began to say, "like your own little affair militia?"

"Sure. You can call yourself whatever you like. I don't care."

He said this as he simultaneously dipped himself into his salmon pink ottoman, dipping himself into it like a cookie into a glass of milk by putting his butt first, then fully committing in a mild-mannered leap. Jude watched Verse's legs fly up into the air, then spread wide for a moment, and finally curl into one another into a lopsided cross-legged pose. The chair rocked and swayed but never tipped over.

"Does she know about this?" Jude asked. He realized how stupid this question was and suddenly felt his job was justified in firing him. "Or no?"

"Of course not," Verse said. "She will after though, if things go accordingly."

"And you want me to go all the way?"

"What?" Verse seemed confused. "What do you mean?"

"You just said you want me to try and sleep with her."

"You?" Verse laughed. "Not you. No offense, but...you have nothing. There's no way she's going to be interested in you." Quickly, Verse looked Jude up and down. "No, definitely not...no offense. I want you to watch her flirt with the men at the bar and observe her go home with someone...live."

"Alive?" asked Jude, now more confused than ever.

"You're actually hard to talk to," Verse sighed. "I've never experienced this at work. Are you nervous?"

"Yes. Clearly."

"Sit here."

Verse pointed at the side table next to the salmon pink ottoman. His thin legs were draped over the side of it, dangling and kicking around like a little kid on a swing too high for them. Jude wanted to defend himself, but he also didn't want to sleep on the street. His self-worth would just have to take it. Luckily for Jude, it always had. Nothing new under the sun or the moon.

He sat next to Verse as he took out a pair of thick, black, Ray Orbison-style glasses. The glass was thick and shiny, a deep blue - Technetronic. Immediately and out of nowhere, Jude felt dirty, wanted, but not in any sexual sense, but...criminally accused. He didn't like it, but he didn't like many things at that time, so he sighed and did his best to ignore the oily feeling.

Verse handed him the glasses and ordered him to put them on; because of Jude's predicament, he did as he was told.

A glassy beam of chalky, pixelated light filled Jude's vision. For a moment, he thought he was dead. Perhaps the glasses had exploded the instant he slipped them on, but then his sight returned, and there was Verse: still in the same spot, still in the same position as before.

Kick, kick, kick.

Jude blinked once, twice, his vision strangely clearer than before. Why, he did not know. Thoughtlessness only carried him deeper into those down days, yet he still felt himself there, after the noise, the distractions, the hard aches had vanished. If this was death - even a little death - it wasn't so bad. Here he could exist, Jude thought...for a little while, at least.

"Record." Verse sank further back into his ottoman, as if trying to merge with it. He smiled at Jude while a faint red light, drifting from Jude's direction, washed across his face.

"You are now recording me," Verse informed Jude. "Now..."

Verse reached over, tapped the side of the glasses twice with his pointer finger, and the red light in the frames that had washed his face faded away.

"You are still recording me," Verse informed Jude, again. "But it looks like you aren't."

"What's going on here?" asked Jude, holding the glasses out in front of himself like they were a dirty diaper.

"Yes," Verse said. "And you still are. It took some tinkering on my end, but these are what you will be using to watch M."

"Is this even legal?"

"Of course not, but it's ok," Verse insisted. "For my purposes, anything is legal."

Jude didn't even know how to respond to that kind of logic which was probably why Verse was lounging in the salmon pink ottoman and he was doing whatever they said.

"Wait," Jude said, stopping it all. "M is her name?"

"My girlfriend?

"Yes."

"Yes."

Verse took out his phone, typed a few things and a picture of a pixie like young women with short, brown and bobbed hair and a crooked smile, eyes no bigger than Jude's and a mouth thin as two Twizzler's placed on top of each other - airs of innocence but grounded in exhaustion - appeared before him in the lenses of the glasses.

"That's M."

Part 2 will be available for free next week.