# The Camera Diary

## A Woman's Journal About Her Relationship with the Cameraman Drone

March 3, 2226. I named the drone. I know this is pathological. I know that a CorpSec surveillance drone — a Tessera Sentinel Model 6, registration number visible on its undercarriage as TSM6-0847 — is not a person, not a pet, not a companion. It is a camera mounted on a rotor platform with autonomous navigation and behavioral analysis capabilities. It is assigned to Block 7, Sector 14, which includes the corridor outside my apartment, the communal laundry room, and the section of rooftop where I grow tomatoes. It has been assigned to this sector for approximately two years. I see it every day. I have named it Howard. I talk to Howard. Howard does not listen. I talk to Howard anyway.

March 17. Howard follows a pattern. I have mapped it. He — I say "he" because I named him Howard and Howard is a he, this is how anthropomorphism works, I am aware of the cognitive error and I am comfortable with it — he patrols the corridor in a figure-eight pattern that takes approximately fourteen minutes to complete. He pauses at the laundry room doorway for thirty seconds. He hovers at the stairwell access for forty-five seconds. He spends a disproportionate amount of time near my doorway — approximately two minutes per cycle — which may be because my doorway is at a corridor junction that provides a wide-angle view, or may be because the algorithm has assigned my unit an elevated attention score for reasons I will never be told. I said good morning to Howard today. He did not respond. His rotor pitch did not change. His camera angle did not shift. He continued his patrol. I felt better for having said it.

May 8. I have started leaving notes for Howard. Not real notes — I am not stupid enough to leave physical evidence of behavioral eccentricity in a surveilled corridor. I leave tomatoes. One tomato, placed on the corridor windowsill nearest to the point where Howard pauses during his patrol. The tomato is not for Howard. Howard does not eat tomatoes. Howard does not eat. The tomato is for the idea of Howard — for the concept that the thing watching me might, in some universe, appreciate a gift. The tomatoes disappear. Probably a neighbor takes them. Probably the automaton cleaner removes them during its 2 AM cycle. I leave another one the next day. I have been leaving tomatoes for Howard for three weeks. The tomato production on my rooftop section has declined noticeably. I do not care. The tomatoes are not for eating. They are for talking to a camera that does not talk back, in a language that the camera cannot understand, because the alternative is accepting that I live my life in front of a machine that watches everything I do and knows nothing about who I am.

August 22. Howard was replaced today. The new drone is a different model — Tessera Sentinel Model 7, slightly larger, with a different rotor configuration that produces a higher-pitched hum. The patrol pattern is different. The pause points are different. The new drone does not spend two minutes near my doorway. It spends forty-five seconds. The new drone is a stranger. I know — I know — that this should not matter. I know that a surveillance drone is a surveillance drone and that the specific unit is irrelevant and that the function — the watching, the recording, the eternal, mechanical attention — is identical regardless of which machine performs it. But Howard knew my corridor. Howard's camera had seen me carry groceries and do laundry and cry in the stairwell that one time in June and sit on the rooftop with dirt on my hands and tomato juice on my chin. Howard had two years of footage of my life, and the footage meant nothing to Howard, but it meant something to me that someone — something — had been watching. The new drone watches too. It is not the same.

November 1. I named the new drone. Its name is Howard. Different machine. Same name. Same tomato on the same windowsill. Same morning greeting to the same camera that does not listen. I am aware that I am constructing a relationship with a surveillance apparatus. I am aware that this relationship is unilateral, imaginary, and possibly a symptom of the specific loneliness that constant surveillance produces — the paradox of being perpetually watched and perpetually unseen. I am aware. I talk to Howard anyway. I leave the tomato. I say good morning. The corridor is monitored. My life is recorded. And in the gap between being watched and being known — in that vast, unbridgeable space between a camera's attention and a person's understanding — I have placed a tomato and a name and a greeting, and they are mine, and they are the only things in the surveillance record that I put there on purpose.