Table of Contents

• Home
• Introduction
• Where Goths Come From - Neef
• The Watcher - Hobbes
• The Resurrection Shuffle - Barbarella
• Cassandra - Cosey Mo
• Drunken Old Bastard - Sandro
• Alcohol - Trayce
• Shadows - Entrippy
• Entropy - Kage-Ryu
• Is There A Point - Trajik
• Whispers - Kitsune
• Confessional - Sandro
• Garden - Entrippy
• Radio - Cam
• Cold Spell - Nikolai
• Slices - Neef
• A Bottle of Something Strong - Jraff
• The Light Fades - Tim
• Rain - Tim
• Self Help - Gothic Gallae
• Cato - Trajik
• Addiction/Fragment - Trayce
• Heal Thyself - Nikolai
• Shattered - Hobbes
• Travelling Song - Solitaire
• Distance - Stranger
• Legacy - Stranger

Written by Hobbes - ACG's Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat

The Watcher

We found the eye between two pages of an old second hand book. The sheet faded yellow with age, crumpled and smudged by the unknown artists hand. It had been left there by the people from the future. We don't know why, we can only guess. Sometimes we called it the watcher.

It could have been a message, an idle thought, a warning, we lacked the skill to interpret it. Why did the people from the future want to contact us, what was there reasoning, why this way? Did they assume we could understand them? That we were more advanced than they thought? Had they misunderstood us, as we were failing to understand them ?

Sometimes I was afraid of its power, occasionally I thought it might be some sort of perverse joke. Was it all a mistake? NO, it had to have a meaning, I thought as I stared at the crumpled drawing. It was a simple picture of an eye in black ink, the eye had many layers, fine lines and textures. I pictured the unknown artist painstakingly etching out the lines. The artist of the people of the future.

My girlfriend screamed at me
"Leave it alone, come away, come to bed, you're becoming obsessed" She hated the picture, she hated my fascination with it, the time I spent studying it. The time it took away from her. And so I would leave the picture and go to bed where I would hold her and kiss her and tell her I loved her. Then we would make love and I would fall asleep and dream of the eye.

I would dream of the future and see the people from the future watching us, observing us, learning from us, I would see visions of great cities and utopias. I saw visions of equality, freedom, affluence and beauty. I also saw visions of destruction, decay and environmental devastation, people overcrowded, underfed and fighting for survival. In my dreams the future had many many faces and no two the same. Only the watcher remained constant, and sometimes I would awake happy, sometimes sad and often uneasy.

But they were only dreams and so I went back to my contemplation of the eye.

I scanned the picture and put it on the web, I opened online discussion forums to talk and theorize about the eye and its message. Many ideas were put forward on various methods of analysing the image. My girlfriend sighed when she saw what I had done. It had originally been ours, a point of contention between me and her, now she had to share me with all the other people who were discussing our watcher.

I thought about the artist . Who had drawn the eye? Who had the vision and the insight to create this message? Who from the future knew to leave a message were it would be found and be given meaning to so many people? Was it the artists attempt at immortality? Was it one attempt to live on through their art? What did the artist dream about, how did he live, what was his life like. who did he love? What about the future?

I sought to understand the future through the picture, maybe that was the message. I drew pictures, wrote notes. I created a 3D computer simulation of a vision of a future city. I showed this to my girlfriend and she got annoyed

"Stop wasting your time, this is not important , this is now, not the future "
"But I'm trying to understand"- I explained.
"Live for now, for now ...Live for me" she cried
I hugged her
"Don't be silly" I said "you know that I'll always love you"
She left the room and I turned back to my work. Looking down at the picture of my watcher.

I went for a walk, feeling the need to clear my head. Walking through the city looking for glimpses of the future, anything to help me understand. I wondered if the watcher was a message to everyone from the people of the future, or a personal message to us. Had we been destined to find it? What sort of gift had I been given?

Anyway I still didn't know if it was a warning, a threat or a good will message. My brain was beginning to hurt. My girlfriend had arranged for us to go out to dinner with some friends. A chance to relax and a time to be together. One of our friends had read about what I'd been doing online and looked at my work. We got into a big argument about the importance of my discovery and the meaning.

My girlfriend was really pissed off that night, she stormed off to bed after a screaming match, and I spent the night sitting in front of my computer working on the puzzle.

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