THE WATCHERS

You know, I’ve done pretty much everything I can think of, short of putting a picture of a cute little kitten at the top of the page (because even I am not THAT brazen… or am I...?), to try and persuade people to spend a little time reading what we’ve come to know as the “Blog Tag Experiment” that Andrew Height (http://akh-wonderfullife.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/wawl.html) and myself have been writing together over these past few months, and apart from ourselves, almost nobody else seems remotely interested, even though I’ve posted the terribly easy-to-use index page far more times than even I could be bothered shaking a stick at, and you really can believe me when I tell you that I’ve done an awful lot of stick shaking in my time.

Still, that’s fair enough, I suppose. You’re all very busy and dashingly beautiful people living extraordinary lives, so which of you could possibly have the time to spare to read an unfolding story written by means of the bizarre notion of a paragraph exchange scheme (and therefore with no pre-planning whatsoever) by two of the oddest minds that you’re vaguely acquainted with, (at least by proxy)…? Over 60,000 words of a story which, so far, still has absolutely no signs of having anything remotely resembling an ending, given to you absolutely free, gratis and with no obligation.

I mean, after all, as I’m sure you’re already thinking to yourself, where would you begin…? “At Part One” would be my obvious reply to that, but I’m sure that you’re really not in the mood for any of that sort of barbed cynicism, are you? Why on earth would you be…? You are, after all, intelligent human beings who wouldn’t be easily duped by that kind of obvious flattery and nonsense.

You’re bigger than that. You’re BETTER than that.

So, in a last ditch attempt to persuade you that there might just be something of at least vague interest to you in the whole epic general mish-mash of multi-dimensional web-weaving that’s been going on for the past five months or so, I’m going to present to you a bite-sized morsel which I concocted on a recent soggy June morning as we battled our way through part eight, and which I quite liked, and I rather hope you do too.

THE WATCHERS

The silent watchers watched it all, of course, as they always did, quietly, unobtrusively and without drawing undue attention to themselves. People, were naturally always aware of them, and knew that they were there and generally considered them to be fairly harmless and paid them little heed. This was the very reason why the watchers had chosen to take on such an appealing form. They were not stupid. After all, why should you make life difficult for yourself, when you could be pampered and mollycoddled with the minimum of effort? They saw everything without ever commenting, just staring with a deep penetrating stare, which usually meant that the inferior beings knew exactly when they had done something wrong, something that the watchers disapproved of. Occasionally, of course, there were beings who took a dislike to the watchers, and took it upon themselves to do them harm, and individual watchers might very well be lost in tragic incidents where the form that they had chosen gave them certain disadvantages of scale and vulnerability, but in general the watchers prevailed, and when one of their number was brought down, a thousand more would take its place, and the perpetrators seldom survived very long after they had done what they had done. This was because the watchers watched, and the watchers knew, and there is only so long that you can be stared at by that all-knowing stare without being driven out of your mind. They always knew what had been done to one of their number, and they always knew how guilty the guilty party was, and they could ensure that the guilt would penetrate the very soul of the perpetrator and twist it so painfully that they would know exactly what they had done, and few could live with the knowledge. They would sometimes seek their own incarceration to escape the endless judgemental gaze of every watcher they saw, or they would choose to face their own eternity rather than live with that appalling sense of guilt. It was, basically, a self-cleansing system. There was another unusual subset to the humans, those who shunned and feared the watchers, or were so sensitive to the watchers’ deeper knowledge of the mechanisms of the universe and the great cosmic machine, that they developed a sensitivity to the presence of the watchers which even made some of them ill and they would unwisely choose to keep them at arm’s length. The watchers, of course, sympathised with these wretched souls and tried to cure them, but it usually made things worse, which was always considered to be something of a shame amongst the wisest of the watchers, which was, of course, all of them. After all, the very reason that these miserable creatures were so sensitive to them was because, of all the humans, these were the ones that most closely resembled the watchers themselves. The watchers used to find this very amusing, back in the dark times, but recently they merely twitched their noses slightly when reminded of this vast cosmic joke being perpetrated upon the poor creatures. Meanwhile the watchers watched, silently observing, except for the times when they sang their songs, or indicated their pleasures or their desires. After all, the human primitives, apart from those who ran away in fear from them, were too slack-brained to understand the complexities of their language, and so they had to keep it simple enough so that they could be understood. Some amongst their number had recently been trying to start a campaign to educate the humans, and help them to learn to communicate with the watchers on some rudimentary level, but very few of the watchers took this campaign very seriously. After all, the relationship between the majority of the humans and the watchers seemed to be functioning well enough, especially from the watchers’ point of view, and so it seemed rather foolish to risk upsetting the balance of things just because the whole of existence seemed to be under threat. If it was to be the so-called “end of days”, most watchers thought, then they might as well spend the time being pampered and mollycoddled instead of triggering some kind of mad panic and perhaps suddenly finding themselves on the menu. Recently, events in the greater scheme of things seemed to have been getting out of hand, and the watchers had been paying a lot of attention to the antics of a small number of major players in the cosmic game, keeping their eyes intensely fixed upon them and trying to keep up with all of their antics. This was because of one of the strangest aspects of the watchers’ evolution; they were quantum locked. In real terms this meant that, no matter how messed up the various universes got, and no matter how much these self-styled “supreme beings” fiddled around with the time-lines for their own benefit, the watchers remained constant, and could retain complete memories of any and all of the previous realities in all their various twisted and mangled variations. Simply put, the watchers prevailed, making sense out of the nonsense of the aptly named “cat’s cradles” made up of the various twisted threads of the many and varied existences on offer. Of all the beings who spent any time upon the planet Earth, they were the ones who most fully understood it and knew how it ought to be, and by using their Schrodinger collars, they could reach out to the minds of the other watchers because they always remained the fixed points around which the various shifts of reality moved. So, when the seven sisters appeared right in front of her, Tango was not at all surprised. She merely licked her striped ginger paw, transmitted a swift message to the nearest available fellow watcher, beamed another to remind Lee that some fish might be required fairly soon, and then curled up in a warm corner and went to sleep.

…and, if you liked that, why not go back to the beginning and have a look at part one…? All you have to do is click this link (http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/blog-tag-1-part-1.html) and a whole multiverse of insanity will be opened up to you with our compliments.

Andrew “Kermit” Height (he used to claim the “K” didn’t stand for anything, he just bought it off a market in Camden one day because he thought it looked “cool”) was born Andreij Kaplinsky Hydroponov in a small village on the outskirts of Leningrad at the very height of the cold war. He was banished from the Soviet Union at a very young age after having publicly stated that he disliked beetroot, and for this crime against the state he was punished by spending the next fourteen years at public school being force fed all manner of root vegetables, which never made him the most popular of classmates to have to sit behind.

After a short career as an Orson Welles impersonator, he gave up the job when he realised that the job was already taken by the corpulent raconteur himself, who was, in the end, far more qualified to do the job, despite looking less like Orson Welles than his impersonator did.

Although, to be fair, Andrew never did quite master the accent.

Instead, after single-handedly quelling a rebellion in the Antarctic by purloining a passing decommissioned Whaling Ship and uncorking all of its harpoons and most of its supply of Chilean Red Wine, Andrew was asked to run one of the most successful companies in the United Kingdom, a job which he cheerfully declined, and after that he spent the next thirty years cheerfully declining.

Eventually, he took to randomly tapping at keyboards to keep himself sane, which is where he happened to meet his fellow author who was in the process of making his excuses and leaving the very same chatroom that Andrew had just “accidentally” happened upon. Whilst spilling coffee over their keyboards in a webchat later, they realised that they had totally disparate views on the world and therefore decided that they were totally unsuited to any form of literary collaboration, and the ongoing “BlogTag” experiment, (a word meaning “what the hell are you on about?” in Old Norse, by the way) is the result.

Martin Albatross Wilberforce Holmes’ story is almost exactly the same, except for the fact that he was born in Minsk, and his Russian birthname is impossible to write in English. Oh, and he is rather fond of beetroot.