The Sunday graveyard was her favorite shift, because things tended not to happen for long stretches as the last weekend hours bled into the new day - but if they did happen, and they did, it was often, almost always something she felt was worth the hours of quiet passivity.

There were the murders and would-be murders, of course. Those, first and foremost, occupied her attention when they came on the screens. If the police arrived where she directed them in time if they were listening, watchingand stopped it, then that was a real sense of accomplishment she got to savor for 20 minutes or so, which was nice.

And if she didn't catch on in time - if the cops were slow, indifferent - then there was a kind of poignant regret, the record of that failure to be filed away, maybe, or broadcast later, because tragedy could be just as useful in its own way.

The priorities flowed downwards from there, burglaries, then fires and dissemination, loitering. They got her attention as they came. To her right, on the cloth wall of her office, was a faded poster laying out the precise categories in their dozens, each in its place. She hadn't looked at the thing in months.

After the police came the media lines, which needed constant maintenance. Recordings of the serious crimes - robbery, murder, the more striking acts of vandalism - and the heroic police response would be clipped and flagged to the desks of stations and presses. They went out an hour or so after the scene was cleared so the vultures knew it wouldn't be worth finding the scene themselves.

Finally, there were the downed power lines, clogged drains, potholes, burst water mains - the ordinary municipal disasters that occupied most of her time and very little of her attention. She had never seen the repair crews arrive on scene before her view clicked over to another street, maybe another city, wasn't sure, really, whether there was anyone to receive those calls. Whether they weren't just still photos, geotags consigned to a decaying database somewhere, unacknowledged. Thought of her own street, the unfilled holes, the sidewalk buckled, the power out after a storm sometimes days, weeks at a time, but she had once seen, when the view clicked over, some workers in yellow hard-hats clearing a fallen tree from the road. Thought of that as a comfort.

All of it came to her through sixty screens in six rows of ten, the mass wider than it was tall and glowing, always glowing. If there was a logic to what they showed, then it was beyond her. They were streetscapes mostly, where the cameras tended to cluster, but most public places were likely to appear. Some office interiors too, and select private homes. What she saw, she accepted, the changes coming at the click of an analog switch.

She let her eyes wander, unfocused for the most part, but dragged them back for the changeover every 60 seconds. It advanced down the rows, left to right and top to bottom, until in an hour it was all new.

On the bottom row, three from the end, screen 58 switched over to reveal a fast food restaurant, which she recognized, vaguely It could have been next door, it could have been across the country. There was no way, was not supposed to be any way, to be sure. It was shuttered, empty, probably abandoned, but well-lit - an unlikely target for vandals. On a bench on the sidewalk, a man slept. She could wake him, would be expected to, but who would know? Not the police she failed to call.

On the last screen a man in an office chair stretched his arms overhead.

Screen 60 - this was her favorite out of all of them - was always tuned to the a version of the same scene. One she had never had to clip, had never had to share. In a dark room, a figure in a chair, backlit by a bank of glowing, flickering screens. The rest made her expand, stretch beyond herself into the endless nights, but for the other watchers she felt a kind of fondness that made her shrink back down, feel the human scale of it.

There was a simple math to it, too. If they each watched one at a time, then, so obvious it didn't bear acknowledging, there was always one to watch her.

Then, on screen 24, at the corner of her eye but unmistakable, a driver in a green SUV struck a woman on the street, knocked her to the asphalt and continued on, disappearing from view a moment later. In reality, she had seen, what? a green blur, the hint of violence vanishing. But the aftermath was still there, the woman rising now painfully, her belongings scattered along the street.

With a click, Screen 59 changed.

She keyed it in mechanically, the codes recalling the screen, the timestamps, just a few seconds and then, she thought again, a few seconds more, to capture the woman staggering to her feet. That would play, they would appreciate that. All of them.

When it was done she felt empty and clean. Took in the street fully now. It was two lanes, an intersection, the details resolving themselves as her adrenaline subsided. A four-way stop, the woman, limping offscreen, clutching her leg, a trickle of blood, but only one corner of it on her camera. Up the road, a streetlight flickered. When If the police arrived, the woman would be long gone.

The man in the office chair dropped his arms, rolled his shoulders forward and back again - and the screen clicked over.

It was a woman this time, her hair halfway down to her shoulders. It was always hard to make out the details. Her head was angled down and to the right, she seemed to be staring intently and as she raised her hand to the screen she raised her hand to the screen a moment later, and the realization sent a shudder down her spine. She stood suddenly, ending the little office chair rolling back into the door behind her.

Even as she turned and began pacing the tiny room, itself barely six feet wide, she felt a mortal terror at the thought of looking the camera in the eye and kept her eyes on the screen, though she knew she thought there was no one watching.

The police announced their arrival in flashing blue and red on screen 24.

It could simply have been a mistake. Confirmation that it was all random after all.

She stopped, steadied herself, stood behind her chair with her hands resting on the cheap vinyl seatback. Allowed herself to suppose for a second that it wasn't an accident.

It could be, she thought uncertainly, a sign of trust. An admission that there were more pressing things, more dangerous people, to focus on. It was almost convincing.

What were the chances, really? Out of those thousands and thousands like her, her nameless, faceless colleagues, that she should be able to watch herself.

So it was almost certainly a message for her, a sign that she had been singled out. She glanced quickly over her shoulder at the vent high on the wall that she knew concealed her own camera, felt her stomach drop and leaned heavily on the chair, fixing her gaze again on the back of her own head.

Then again, she thought, it might not be a sign of confidence at all. She had let things slip, here and there. She thought of the woman clutching her leg, and the police now long gone, finding no one. A waste of time they might remember. Thought of the man on the bench, still sleeping. Never intentionally but you never could be sure what they noticed, in the end.

She watched herself sink back into the chair, back rigid. She had been cut off, she now saw, from the other watchers. She could stand up now, leave, live another life somewhere else secure in the knowledge that no one would see her leave.

She stretched a hand out to touch her own silhouetted form and, with a half second's lag, saw the motion echoed. Why, after all, couldn't there still be someone out there watching her? So maybe not one of the others, knit together in that one-to-one web, but there was a constellation of supervisors above her, too.

Still, she didn't feel watched anymore. Maybe she hadn't felt watched before, either. Not anymore than she or those countless millions of others, her subjects felt it at the grocery store, on the street And how many knew? How many wanted to know? in their beds as they slept.

She found herself suddenly, unexpectedly hoping that someone was there after all. A specialist, maybe, or an investigator. They would see ,she would make them see, that she was an exceptional watcher or, even better, an unremarkable one.

She ran once more through the screens, looking for something that could be used. She studiously ignored 60, pretended as if it was as it had always been. She wanted to show off a little - but of course Sunday was dying and there were just two people across all 60 screens.

Herself, and a man wrapped in a tattered down jacket, curled up on a bench.

Maybe, if it had been her choice, maybe, but just maybe, she would have looked past him, but she felt the weight now, after all, and what could she do? What else could she do?

She keyed it in without looking at him again. No media codes. They wouldn't have had any use for it him. Just a simple alert to the nearest police station, in some town she would never know.

He turned over on the bench, his face hidden for a moment from the camera.

In the distance, softly, she heard the sirens start.