The Eyes of the Overwatch
The train trundled over long-rusted tracks, screeching as the brakes struggled to slow the steel juggernaut. I held a suitcase containing everything I owned in my right hand, and leant against the window with my left, gazing out into the dull, grey sky outside. Somehow, they had taken the life out of that too.
I don't know how many years it had been under their rule. Life beneath the eyes of the overwatch was timeless; eternal. When every day was like the last, telling one from the other was pointless. Days meant nothing so weeks meant nothing until years rolled over one another, collapsing into a single, indistinguishable event. That event was life, and it was one from which only one escape promised hope. Although everything seemed to be remaining the same, there was an essence of decay to it too. The Combine drained the life and soul out of us, as if our oceans and animals weren't enough. Something in the water, they said. All I knew was that it was killing us.
I surveyed the rest of the carriage. Behind me, the bench was seated upon by another passenger who looked on the brink of tears, which I could sympathise with. His regulation blue outfit was dirty from years of crouching in the dirt, praying for the beatings to stop. Empty grey eyes mirrored the empty grey sky. He was dead. Yeah, he breathed and walked and probably talked, but the soul that pulled those strings wasn't there. This puppet danced for no-one, and for no reason at all.
I turned my head to see the rest of the carriage was empty. The train jolted to a halt and staggered me, indicating that we had arrived. When I rose, a man stood at the end of the carriage. This was odd, as I knew he wasn't there before. The door hadn't opened and he couldn't have come in through the roof – by all evidence he could have only materialised out of the cold, stale air. In all honesty though, I didn't even care. Something like that would have raised questions, once. It might have fired some spark of curiosity inside, but now I didn't even care.
The man looked to be in the latter half of his twenties, but his eyes were older. Wisened, jaded. Locked doors hiding trials and triumphs much beyond his character. His face was consumed by a beard, shaved close to the skin, and his hair was short. Glasses perched upon his nose, an unusual sight in this dystopian hell. He looked around the carriage, apparently as confused about his arrival as I was. The doors opened and he rushed out before me, not running but with a brisk stride. When I collected my suitcase and stepped out into the cold Russian air of City 17, he was gone.
My induction into the city was uneventful. This one seemed like every other I'd lived in, except for one thing: the Citadel. I saw it as soon as I left the station: a great, space-age monolith juxtaposed into a 20th century urban district. Great cables and wires stretched from rooftops high and low up to its perfectly smooth walls, sections of which slid out and up like segments of a shell to allow gunships, dropships and city scanners passage into the area. This monument of tyranny housed the Administrator, Dr. Wallace Breen: the so-called 'ambassador for humanity.' He was the human face of the Combine to those at street-level but it didn't do much to quell the general hatred of them. Seeing him now, my face contorted with spite for the man on the screens – the man who, at this very moment, was surely sipping Merlot at this opulent office high in the Citadel.
I looked around the square outside the station. A tall statue stood at the centre of an unimpressive plaza. Metrocops guarded secure perimeters, and a few citizens sat on benches or walked about, wasting away the meaningless hours, whiling away the time before their bodyclock reached its inevitable end. This long and uninterrupted event called 'life' was made up mostly of this now but other exciting activities included: trying to sleep, feeding on the putrescent manna that the Combine distributed and having your face kicked into the dirt and concrete. The end was as simple as can be, yet always out of reach. I shook my head, and left the plaza.
