[2025-03-30]
Somewhere between the surface and the center of the earth there is a room occupied by a series of obscure figures and they are watching you. They hunch over their flickering ancient CRT screens and the pale electron-light casts up upon what would be their faces, washing out their features, offering up no detail. They do not require faces. They are watching you, specifically you, every day, every hour, forever and ever watching, and as they watch they plan their clandestine war against you. This is a duty they treat with the upmost seriousness. They do not peruse this with the gleeful malice of devils, nor the bored indifference of civil servants, but with the care and delicacy of craftsmen. Their knowledge of you is perfect. They know everything you have ever said, ever done, ever thought. They know what you will do well before you do it. Your whole life is mapped out before them, an elaborate series of charts and graphs and blueprints and countless, countless pushpins and post-its and polaroids tied together with spiderwebs of colored twine, overlapping and overlaying one another, the accretion of decades, a code without meaning, coating every inch of the walls of their windowless room. They are subtle in their machinations. They deliberate gravely upon the proper tactics, the most ideal way by which to afflict and dispirit you. Their eyes watch you through cameras both hidden and obvious, a panoply of lenses shining darkly. They learn the exact composition of your body, the contents of your mind, probing you from a distance with invisible rays. They plot your motions, your small habits, your tender fears, your secret hopes. They are cautious. They do not wish to be discovered, although any evidence of discovery could just as quickly be erased. They work through the intricacies of paperwork, the judicious application of bribes, the convenience of carefully planned coincidences, the motions of their many agents, who do not know they are agents. They work through recursive layer upon layer of false flags, shell organizations, transactions cyclically rerouted so that the true origin can never be found. Their reach is all-encompassing. They are the secret masters of the world. They conspire against you. They do not seek your destruction, though to destroy you would be as total and as effortless as an act of god. They work by degrees, a death of a thousand cuts, and each cut is well planned and well placed. They eat away at your substance with the determination of timeless age. Their goal is to curtail you, to reduce you. You are no good to them dead, only diminished. They do not question why this is. There may be others, other rooms, watching other persons, enacting their own subtle plans against carefully selected targets. They do not know. It does not concern them. They have no families, no passions, no pasts. They do not live. This is their only purpose. They are tireless in their work. They will never be found.