SUBJECT

I gazed at the screen, bored, exhausted, morally disgusted. The sight was of a wife and husband lying in bed, the wife reading a book, the husband snoring away. This went on for an hour, and I only watch because their kids are asleep, and I don't feel comfortable watching children sleep anyways. The wife eventually put her book on the bedside and drifted to sleep. I realized then I didn't write down a status report in -- 30 minutes? Dammit. I was supposed to type one up every ten minutes or more. I prayed that they wouldn't notice, and if they did, they wouldn't care. That was usually the case with a small incident like that, especially with this family. Nothing they did was terribly worth noting.

I typed up the report in the prompt. "SUBJECT 2 STILL ASLEEP, SUBJECT 3 RECENTLY FELL ASLEEP AS WELL. SUBJECT 4 AND 5 REMAIN ASLEEP TOO." Not phrased too smoothly, but this wasn't exactly a poetry workshop, so I submitted. There were a couple seconds of loading, indicated by a spinning circle, then the text turned green. "APRV" flashed right next to it. Who the hell was "approving" this system, anyways? It couldn't be some sort of program, because these computers were fast, far faster than anything sold for personal use. They were supercomputers.

My shift was almost over. I tended to get the 10:00pm-7:00am shift, so I didn't see much of the family's behaviors. Not that I cared, from what I heard they were average, boring, upper-middle classmen. Not