Several hours ago the watcher had become the sleeper. It was inevitable. Organics, particularly mammals, ran by internal clocks. Even the most dedicated implant could only extend the circadian rhythm by so much before autonomous body functions began to suffer. But the watcher had known this to be, so had taken steps to account for it.
The watcher had induced a deep sleep, almost a narcoleptic coma. Their implants served to activate the glymphatic system to release cerebral spinal fluid while stimulating synchronized waves of neural activity. This would cleanse the neural system of toxic proteins. At the same time the implant took control over areas of the hypothalamus releasing hormones to control the circadian slave oscillators controlling any effects of altered sleep patterns. The result would fool the majority of the body that it had a natural sleep and yet still allow the watcher to be woken at the right moment.
The watcher had set passive sensors in strategic locations around the room. To prevent detection and scaring away of the prey the sensors had no active component so were limited in their scope. But to their advantage the room was small and mostly barren so there was little cover of paraphernalia to mask readings.
This was fortunate as the prey, when they arrived, was wearing a full stealth suit. The suit had gravity compensation allowing the occupant to float, using an ion emitter of low charge, and fast decay, to propel the suspended form. The outside was a mixture of reflective, and absorbant, surfaces intended to dispel, capture, or reflect any known sensor. The suit emitted no light and would not reflect any, instead a field emission warped light around it making it invisible to most levels of the spectrum. Active sound emitters finished the rig, capable of masking any noise the occupant of the suit might make and including any sound within half a metre of the suits exterior.
The suit used a thin band of super high frequency radio waves on the electromagnetic spectrum to build a picture of the world outside as the same suppressant technology that rendered it almost invisible to detection also rendered it blind. This was it’s only drawback. When setting the passive sensors the Watcher had ensured they used broad spectrum to detect across all frequencies, the suit was visible to the system.
The sensor sent a signal down a microcable at an undetectable voltage straight to the control unit hardwired to the access port on the back of the watcher’s head. This reduced the chances of detection to almost zero. The signal was quickly passed to a small surveillance computer, attached to the Watcher’s other access port, that determined the level of reaction. It passed on an instruction to the Watcher’s implant to wake them.
The implant started the process of recovery from deep suspension. First it fired instructions into the suprachiasmatic nuclei to change circadian rhythms and release hormones from the hypothalamus into the brain. The nuclei acted as the master oscillator controlling the body’s sense of time and tiredness. The implants manipulation of the nuclei would first wake the Watcher, and then act as if the body had been awake for a short time, reducing the effects of sleep. To aid the transition the implant created concurrent conditions in the optic chiasm below the nuclei which added the deception of the autonomous systems. The clock adjustment spread throughout the oscillators of the brain on a hormonal wave, followed by a secondary wave of adrenaline and serotonin bringing the mind to a pleasant alert state.
The implant system relayed all the information from the passive sensors. The data was being refined moment by moment as the sensors tracked the motion and actions of the intruder. Hooper woke up gently and smiled inside the box. The waiting was finally over.
