From: Anders Sandberg The Watcher Harold was an unremarkable man. Although his friends and wife often told him he was both intelligent and perceptive, he never tried very hard to advance - he was content with being a minor bureaucrat in a large administration, hidden by his normality. As he slowly aged, not much happened - until one autumn day something unsettling began to occur. He was busy reading some unimportant documents when he found his gaze drifting away from the paper. He tried to look back, but somehow he couldn't control his eyes and found himself slowly rising above the his desk and his own slumped body beneath. As Harold gradually drifted away, he tried to call for help, to do something, but nothing happened. He rose through his ceiling into another cubicle where a meeting was in progress. Someone was just complaining about the taxes when Harold swept past. Nobody noticed. For over an hour Harold randomly moved through the building, seeing and hearing everything but unable to control anything. Then suddenly he felt a force pulling him back, and he awoke sitting in his chair. Shaken, he returned home secretly worrying that he was going mad. Several times the next months he found himself gliding away, sometimes during the night when he was lying in bed beside his dear wife, once even during a cab drive. He moved around, seeing things that he didn't understand and people who he didn't know. Gradually he began to see a pattern, a dirty game behind the scenes he had never suspected. There really existed conspiracies, and corruption was not just common, it was total. Shadowy characters manipulated the life of every man and woman. Frightened Harold began to realize that he either was completely out of his mind, hoplessly paranoid, or that he was living in a pure nightmare nobody else noticed or dared to notice. If he told anybody he knew he would be hospitalized - or worse. In desperation he tried to commit suicide. With trembling hands he swallowed what he calculated was a deadly dose of sedatives and leaned back in his sofa to await death. When he began to rise through the ceiling again he even felt a bit of bitter humor - for once it was proper and even expected. But this time he didn't drift around the city. Instead he drifted higher and higher above the world. He saw his city and the countryside around it. He saw other cities, other lands, other continents. And he saw every detail, everything that happened. It was as if he was an infinite eye watching the Earth from all directions at once. He had no individual existence, he was just the act of observing, of knowing. When Harold awoke in the hospital he didn't open his eyes. He already knew what was going on around him: the gossip among the nurses, the dying old woman five floors above slowly choking on her decaying lungs, the stressed young doctor about to make his first serious mistake. He let his attention float around in the building for a while, viewing it from many directions. He watched the pale man, in the intensive care unit dispassionatedly until he decided it was best to learn how to see through just two eyes again. The next weeks were somewhat confusing despite his new sense of clarity. He calmly watched his wife divorce him. He observed with some interest how he lost his job. Finally most of his old friends had walked away, apparently unsettled by his eerie gaze and strange mood. Harold watched it all from many angles to make sure he remembered, and then packed what he would need and walked away.