The Watching Monad

Novella · 75 pages · Self-published ebook · 2026

Evidence of mutual desire

Thomas stands at an office water cooler, watching Susan through a glass wall. He notices the colour leave her face and feels exhilarated by it. In Sandor Karacsony's The Watching Monad, the alternating narration shows Thomas taking authority over Susan's actions by interpreting fear and withdrawal as evidence of mutual desire.

Susan feels watched before she can identify who is watching, and the chapters move between the same places without producing the same account. Thomas knows he is the source of that unease, yet his version converts her alarm into intimacy. The reader sees both positions at once. Thomas recognises the signs correctly: his distortion begins after perception, in the story he builds around what he sees.

A TikTok video titled "The Monad is watching" gives that story a source without explaining it. The text leaves open whether the Monad creates Thomas's obsession or draws out something already present. Either way, he is being changed, though he chooses the explanation that protects him. Thomas tells himself the platform has helped his feelings "take shape," a phrase he repeats until it stops sounding borrowed.

His language grows more elaborate as his conduct is increasingly hard to defend. Susan, a colleague he barely knows, becomes a destined partner. He reaches for gravity and cosmic union, then pictures their connection extending beyond ordinary time. At that scale, he no longer has to ask what Susan wants. He believes the relationship has already been decided, so her actual response can only appear temporary or mistaken.

Susan has lived with anxiety and learnt to question fear that arrives before proof, and those habits now delay her acceptance of a threat that is real. Thomas grows more confident for exactly as long as the delay lasts. When the day begins to feel wrong, she checks whether she took her medication and regulates her breathing.

Whatever the TikTok video does to Thomas, the workplace had already supplied the means. Glass walls expose Susan through the working day. An emergency-contact file hands Thomas her home address, and no one asks why he wants it. Both mechanisms reach a colleague who has already decided what her actions mean: the building and the spreadsheet do the same institutional work, making his pursuit of Susan administratively easy.

At the river, Thomas believes he has arrived for a courtship. Susan sees a bleeding colleague approaching her with a damaged body and an inhuman voice: two accounts of the same event that never converge. He presents injury as an offering and reads her attempt to escape as play. Here the alternating structure takes its biggest risk: it runs both perceptions through the same physical event without adjudicating between them. Her narration keeps the scene fixed in physical fact: Susan is trying to get away, whatever Thomas calls the encounter.

The final movement loses concentration. Images of gravity and ancient union recur after Thomas's delusion is fully established. Susan's walk through nature is prolonged by explanations of why the outdoors steadies her, then by childhood memory that makes the same point again. Thomas's movement through the woods repeats his altered perception past the moment of discovery. The narration starts explaining effects already carried by the two voices. The delay reduces the pressure of the confrontation.

The Watching Monad is strongest when its alternating accounts remain close to the same scene. Susan's distrust of her own fear gives the threat credible room to grow. The later pages weaken under repeated cosmic imagery and extended staging, as if the novel no longer trusted the workplace alone to carry a threat it had already made concrete in a glass-walled office and an unguarded emergency file.