The Security Camera Watched Me Back

I did overnight security at a large warehouse, one man, one booth, a wall of monitors, patrolling a dark empty floor the size of a football field. The cameras were the old kind that could pan and tilt, controlled only from the booth I sat in, or from a control room upstairs that was locked and empty all night. I had the only key to both.

One slow night, walking my rounds across the main floor, I glanced up at one of the ceiling cameras and saw it turn. Slowly, smoothly, tracking me, following me as I walked. I stopped. It stopped. I walked. It turned to keep me in frame. My stomach dropped, because I was in the booth-controlled camera and I was not in the booth, and the control room was locked, and I had the key in my pocket.

I told myself it was on an automatic sweep pattern, that the timing was coincidence. So I tested it. I walked to the far left. The camera panned left, all the way, staying on me. I walked to the far right. It followed, all the way right. It was not sweeping. It was watching me, deliberately, and something was controlling it, and there was no one in the building but me.

I went cold all over and started walking fast back toward my booth. Behind me I heard the little motor of the camera as it tilted, and when I glanced back it had angled down and around, no longer following my body but pointing at my booth, at where I would sit, at my chair. And then the intercom on my desk, the one that only connected to the empty locked control room, clicked on, hissed static, and clicked off.

I called my supervisor and sat in my car in the lot until dawn. They checked the system the next day and found nothing wrong, no remote access, no fault, no explanation for a camera moving with no one at the controls. I did not go back. Some jobs are not worth the last thing you see on the monitor being your own empty chair.