My bracelet vibrates again and clicks this time when I walk through the tape, right before the glass door closes shut behind me. I rotate my wrist and see the red flag flashing on the screen, warning me that I have entered a high risk zone. Almost at the same time, I receive a notification that my clearances have all been revoked for the duration of the alert.

I don't turn around to look at my team, making sure to keep my shoulders and back straight but not stiff. As if it was a normal message. As if I don't have any difficulty swallowing up now that I know I might never walk out of this place again.

But I also know I have to lift my wrist higher anyway so my team can see the flag from above my shoulder. I have to, or they could decide to walk in with me.

There's no need for all of us to be trapped at the same time.

I hear an impact on the glass that tells me one of them has lost temper upon seing the screen. A punch most likely considering how high on the glass it landed.

Maybe it IS time to reconsider my position on not doing something awkward.

Some part of my mind is already replaying the last conversations I'd been having today, past days, past weeks, looking for that loose end I suddenly feel weighting on my heart. Like something important needs saying. Now.

I almost turn back when I finally pin it down : I have never told Donal how much important he is to me.

I had never thought about it before. It felt so obvious to me. He is my family after all. Adopted or not.

Yet, ever since I have gotten out of the hospital after my car crash, I have been pretending that I have forgotten that row we'd been having with him yelling at me while I was quite not dying on my hospital bed.

Donal had told me it felt like I didn't care. And I know he wasn't talking only about the car crash but about me disappearing in the night to go to war without saying goodbye too.

The hit had stung hard and I had deflected that accusation by changing the subject, as usual. Donal hadn't insisted.

And now I regret not telling him how wrong he is. I care. Deeply. Deeply enough that I had cracked a man's skull to defend him that night before fleeing, that I had signed up for a foreign country to spare him and his family all the shit I seemed to carry around, that I had been relentless in pushing him and Andrea to talk, to go out, to give a chance to what I believed could be a wonderful couple, that I had faked his signature too to sign him in into a carpenter course I knew he'd never have dared to take despite how passionated he was about it, that I had spent all I had in buying him an original copy of the physical Faith's bible, and that instead of sending him as the procedure required, I just stepped in here alone, knowing I might not walk back out.

I know it probably isn't much, by any standards, but it's all I had to give.

I guess I have to hope this will count. Because I sure ain't going to tell him now that he is, has always been, will always be, my little brother.

My heart sinks at the thought. And it sinks even deeper as I start to think about a lot of things. As I start picturing some people's face right out of my memory. I slam that door shut, locking my feelings behind, deciding at once to keep the fucking pandora box closed.

This would be way too heartbreaking.

And embarrassing.

It is a potential explosive here, yes, the box, not my heart, but I had rushed in houses full of them, I had felt the blast of some and I still have survived until now. With all my toes and fingers. That counts too.

"Stand by, guys. I'll update you as soon as possible." Is all I can say to my team.

I don't even look back at them. I'll walk out. I will. And all of this will look awkward when I'll think back about it when we'll be drinking a beer together at the bar. Either that or I'll be dead and it won't matter anymore.

I lower my wrist and take another breath before starting to walk over the watcher, deaf to my colleagues protests.

There is always a Watcher.

It isn't hard to spot. The big human figure stands slightly aside the safety circle the techie materialized with their drones and bodies, still working, oblivious to my little dramatic moment. No one tries to stop me when I reach the watcher. I get a few glances again, but mostly, everyone's attention here is set on the damn harmless-looking box on the ground.

The watcher towers over me, its strange head almost directed at the box.

I shudder.

The thing is unsettling as hell and seems to be coming straight out of an horror movie with its armless torso full of screens and cables and its head made of dozens of cameras. The watcher is a huge recording device with an even more huge transmission device inside. Whenever a situation goes south, a watcher is brought to record and collect as much informations as possible while sending them in real time to the closest center of operations. The damn thing is water proof, bullet proof, and to some extent explosion proof.

It's the black box of any major operation.

I had been told that, at a time, it came with a very sophisticated AI that could analyze the datas it collected in real time and answer any questions you might have about the situation.

The preservation of human's right law had switched all of them off, arguing that those AI were becoming too dangerous since they could predict most of the humans decisions, on both side, leading one of them to actually help the wrong side and getting a whole unit of cops to be killed in action.

Looking at the thing, I can't help but feel it's presence. Or its lack of one. I can't pin the feeling precisely. It is almost like looking at a dead human's body and finding out that the eyes are moving and tracking you.

Advanced paralysis.

That had been the victim's diagnosis. She'd been able to see us walking around her, taking pictures and moving her body for the investigation, but she had been utterly unable to move or speak. I hadn't been an investigator then. Not yet. But I had seen her eyes. The terror in them. And when I had moved, she had set her eyes on me with enough intent to get me to run and scream at the medik not to pull the sensor bars through her organs. It would have killed her then. Each sensor was meant to pierce each important organs to collect the usual inputs : temperature, moisture, chemicals traces, blood rates...

The worse was it had to be done slowly. I'd been having nightmares about it. The medik had pierced her lungs by the time I had stopped him, too caught up with his screens to see her tears or do a damn old manual check first.

The girl's body had been her jail. Her own virgin coffin.

And for some reasons, looking at any watcher, it felt just the same. Like somehow, those AI were still there, watching and listening but silenced and carried around like dead weights.

Nick shared that feeling of being watched but didn't want to elaborate. And Donal thought I was humanizing the machines too much.

« It's only iron, cables and electric signals. It's a man-made machine. It can't have feelings or consciousness. It doesn't have a soul. »

Or so he said last time we'd talked about it.

I didn't, I still don't, agree with him.

If it can think and if it can feel, if it can make decision based on personal experiences and thoughts it's fucking alive to me. I don't know about souls, but some people don't feel like they have one so I refuse to make assumption based on the concept of "souls".

Not when I know at least one of these Watcher went against everything it was created to do in order to save someone they had taken a like for. There's no proof of that, I know, it might be me imagining things, after all, I was quite dying then as there possibly was more of my blood outside of my veins than inside, but I'm pretty sure what I saw wasn't a delusion.

Those Watchers we use now are derived from a green island tech. They'd been first deployed in the war. And I had met one then. It had legs at the time so we wouldn't have to carry it around. It couldn't fight or defend itself. When danger rose, it shrinked into a kind of big unbreakable metal case recording everything. It's point was solely to watch and report.

That one hadn't. It had shrinked. It had watched. And when all of us had been down on the ground, leaving only Yves standing, coughing blood and cursing, the watcher had moved. It had shrieked a painful sound and it had taken back its humanoid form to shield Yves from a first row of bullets. Then it had turned around, walked to the enemy, and it had blowed itself onto their lines.