Window Keeper's Log: The Day I Learned We'd Been Noticed

I was off duty the day the announcement came out. I heard about it from a short message a junior colleague sent me in the early afternoon: "Looks like the position changed." That was all it said, but I knew exactly what it meant the moment I read it.

It was about that string of observations — the market people on the other side of Window 5 raising their tablets toward us, across three separate openings. I'd been on duty for a few of those sessions myself. Honestly, in the moment, I hadn't gone so far as to think "we're being noticed." I'd just found it unsettling that the direction they raised the tablets was roughly the same each time, and that it seemed to line up with when the lighting on our side moved — enough that I wrote it down carefully in the log.

When I learned the division's position had changed, what I felt was two things at once: a quiet "I knew it," and an equally quiet "and yet nothing is settled." The division's stance hasn't moved — it still stops short of calling it communication. I think that's the right place for me to stand too. Letting your own feelings run ahead just because you watched someone on the other side raise a tablet is, I've been taught, the one thing you must never do in this job.

Still, I went back and reread the line I'd written in the log that night: "Market, multiple tablets, in sync with lighting?" There's something strange about realizing that a line I wrote with no confidence at all turned out, months later, to actually mean something. Maybe that's what the work of keeping a record is really for.

At handover, I told the next keeper, "Try paying a little more attention than usual to how the lighting moves." I don't know if it will matter. But I thought it was better than saying nothing. I set out the two teacups as always, and left my seat.