The Wellness Wire
The camera feed flickered in 4K resolution — a woman in the building's swimming pool, doing laps at 11 PM. This was Elena's job now: corporate surveillance disguised as asset protection. She was a glorified spy, watching employees who might steal trade secrets, though mostly she just watched them live their painfully visible lives.
On her desk: a bottle of vitamin D supplements. The doctor said she was deficient, probably from never seeing daylight. She swallowed one dry, eyes fixed on the monitor where the swimmer hauled herself out of the water. Elena zoomed in slightly — protocol allowed 20x optical, though she rarely used it. Something about the woman's hair caught her attention. It was the same copper shade as Elena's before the gray started winning, two years ago when this department formed.
The swimmer sat on the pool's edge, head in her hands. Another bad night. Elena should have logged it — potential mental health concern, liability risk — but she didn't. Instead, she reached for the cable that connected her headset to the monitoring station and pulled it just loose enough to cut the audio. The woman's shoulders shook. Silent crying was technically still a security event, but some things didn't need to be recorded.
Her phone buzzed. A message from her husband: 'Coming home late again?' She'd text back something about the workload, the vitamins making her tired, anything but the truth. Which was that she spent eight hours a day watching other people's loneliness through cameras, and it was slowly becoming the only way she knew how to feel connected to anything at all.
The swimmer stood up, wrapped in a towel, and walked toward the locker room exit. Elena zoomed out. Reconnected the audio cable. Logged the time stamp. Swallowed another vitamin D. The screen showed only rippling water now, catching the fluorescent lights in tiny, fractured waves. Tomorrow she'd quit. Tomorrow she'd finally go swimming herself, instead of just watching. Tomorrow she'd tell her husband the truth.
She checked the time. 11:17 PM. Three more hours until her shift ended. The pool camera showed nothing but water moving in the current, endlessly rehearsing a stillness it couldn't quite achieve.