It stands. It remains. It stands sentinel over us always. The tower stands, high above all these streets we walk down, black, silent, distant. It stands out from all that surrounds it, not only by being higher than everything else around it, but by its seeming alienness. It has been placed there to stand out, to be separate, to be apart. The very strangeness of it compared to all that surrounds it seems to only emphasise that there is a difference between it and all that surrounds it.
It is the watcher. We are the watched.
The black tower is serviced, weekly, by black blacked-out lorries, flanked by black motor bikes and black cars, that provide protection for them, that reverse into it to keep it supplied. There are also the black helicopters that land and take off from its roof, either patrolling above our streets or bringing new staff shifts and taking the old ones away and other - more mysterious – unknown journeys.
There are as well, the black vans with blacked-out windows that suddenly emerge at speed in multiples of three and race down the streets to a place the black tower, or the constantly hovering helicopters have marked out. Then the miscreants – whatever their offence – are bundled into one of those vans by the black riot-geared officers and rushed back to the black tower... and never seen or heard of again. And, if you know what is good for you, never mentioned or alluded to again.
Nowadays we tend to watch each other... and ourselves, just as much as the black tower watches us, almost doing its job for it.
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