Bengt Svank swipes his card in for another shift. As usual, he tries, swipes again, this time easing the magnetic strip between thumb and forefinger in order to trigger a green LED and a relay clunk as a spring bolt shoots across somewhere within the door housing.

Bengt pushes against the resistance of the hydraulic closer. As the door opens, the white light of his night times hits him, contracting his snow-shadow irises.

He ignores Katano saying hey from the induction station.

"You have a good day?"
"Yes, I guess."
"You, uh.. you get that book?"
"Yeah, thanks, Katano. I'll read it at some point."
"You find this very helpful. It's useful book. I wish when I come here to get such book."

Bengt pushes a button. The machine squeezes a cup of grey liquid out. He wonders what made him leave in the first place. On balance he sees that he was fairly used to having his circadian rhythms fucked with at 60° North anyway, so flat white nights - morning for twilight and dusk for an alarm call - was not insurmountable. It's tolerable. He gets a flash of perpituity: the night-shifts in the receding hectares of striplit half-metre polystyrene tiles running in vertiginous skew along the ceiling of the agricultural facility.

"Katano:" he says, "they, uh, they didn't, um, shut down the agricultural facility today?" Bengt sucks on the multisyllabic workds like mints.
"No, we, ah, had the jumpers around ten this, uh, morning, but, no, no difficulty." Suicides were commonplace, even regular, especially from the highrises and onto all commuter routes. They could derail hours of productivity, but - as the agricultural facility reached many stories underground, below even the commuter lines - you couldn't even hear a jumper hitting the highwalk. The cleanup could affect cold-freight transports out of the facility. But it seemed Katano was lucky this morning. There was only ever one man on shift, so as Katano left, Bengt drained the tea-like drink and headed to the production banks.

**

The local closed-circuit loop picked up on a few things: firstly, that the canteen contained people, doing things; secondly, that these people were following behaviour patterns, many of which were very familiar to CAICTV-Loop Process B, which acted as a fairly dumb control system for a bank of MLP services, located God knows where, but with all certainty bunkered, remote, probably underground and duplicated with massive redundancy and cloned sub-processes. These internetworked perceptron banks, even though exact clones, even though shown much of the same footage, ahd been exposed to the CC-system footage at marginally different times (due to network latency, input buffering differences - small beer, really) had, over a period of years, started giving wildly different results for the same slices of time-footage for the same input streams: they started interpreting the human behaviour differently. Not arguing, per se, but if one MLP service bank, weighted differently, decided that some non-typical behaviour pattern was aberrant, it would influence the output of the other MLP-SBs in its unit. The developers were unaware of these variations in interpretation due to the fact that the surveillance qualification processes were tested outside of the network, without appropriate scaling, and only for a matter of days continuously, at most.

It was for these reasons that a 'difference of opinion' among the MLP-SBs caused a flagging in CAICTV-Loop Process B's operations procedure. It looked up the reference from the flag, fetched the appropriate service and set in place a chain of events, based on, as far as it understood, an aberrant behaviour pattern.

***

Having deposited her laminate melamine resin lunch tray to be washed, Gretl upped and made for the door, to get in for the afternoon period. Two morbidly obese security personnel waddled like oak wardrobes into her path: "aberrant pattern 72," said wardrobe one, "sorry, we'll have to take you to Ops for refactoring."
"72?" No matter what way you cut it, Gretl could feel nothing but a weightless fear, aberrant patterns could mean anything from minor traffic infractions to expected murder. 'If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear' went the mantra, but to Gretl, and (she hoped) to many other people this was patent nonsense: she had no direct fear of punishment for, say, wedging a drilling tool in the face of a Police Enforcement, because, if that ever were to happen - which was technically impossible: she would be stopped before the point of trying - she would be leapt upon before you could say 'fugitive' - but she had an ongoing, and thankfully subconsciously suppressed fear of other people's incompetence, institutional inertia and attentiveness to personal and departmental targets over doing their jobs, whatever the hell they were, given that KPI-driven management ecologies blundered into creating those roles to avoid a prospective career-spanking.
"72: Motivational Performance Loss. You've been lax in your procedures upkeep, it would seem, for at least four weeks and, given it's a 72, likely to continue - " he turned to wardrobe number two " - correct me if I'm wrong," he stressed every word, "eh, Dartford?"
"Absolutely correct, Commodore." Commodore wasn't a rank in Organisational Security, so it must have been his name, which threw Gretl, although, frankly, she'd heard more unusual.

She was slightly more confused by the AP72 claim, given that Procedurals were more or less routine, she was way ahead on them. In all fairness, she spent most of her time adopting what she believed were bahavioural patterns consistent with completing Procedurals, pretty much without doing anything material. She must've been getting a bit sloppy...

"So, like I say, we'll have to take you to Ops." He prompted himself by winding his hand. "For refactoring."
"You appreciate the seriousness of this, Miss Staight." It wasn't posed as a question. 'Refactoring' sounded ominous, as if she was to be taken to a room to be physically reassembled. She mentally flashed images intimating frontal lobotomies and surgical or electrical interventions to her person. Thoughts of interview rooms, sleeplessness, watery tea served in machine-washed unbreakable mugs with a chemical residue.
"Step this way..."
Dartford and Commodore parted like great iron gates and Dartford proffered his palm, inviting her to walk through, in order for them to shut behind her...

Identity

Waitressing in the off-season, her friends sit at the Ikea tables tossing fries at eachother, waiting for no customers to come in.

The path to her house has just been resurfaced and planted-up with low birch bushes. It's nine degrees out, mild. She's wearing her white coat with the fake-fur trim, bought from an Indonesian man from a bankrupt stock sale at her school's sports hall. South-west wind blowing in over the island round her tights, reebok and the municipal planting.

Her mum's made lamb stew for dinner. She's not happy with this, pushes her fork through to the bone, imagines a medical cross-section, or a museum display, this taxidermied sheep spins in three dimensions, rotation about its forelimbs.

..

Two white trains running out in a grey-blue twilight, red lamps on a cab anthropomorphised to a lego figure by design: a black visor scanned by oblique tracers of yellow light form the other, a sky like emulsion and a steel wire of a horizon.

Juvenile-sweet alcohol in a bottle askance, girl in an orange tulip-dress witha black up-do, too much for this crowd. Todd Reise picking shots from Carousel, smooth, turning with a lickable black-gloss sheen and surface reflections. Some girl in wet-look leggings, one hand aloft, sittting on some headless kid's shoulders, lips in a pout of a roar of appreciation for the implied band, or DJ, or act. Her hair blonde and bias-cut like her tshirt. Two young males in suit jackets, jeans and skooshes of hair faomed on their heads, in a ruck, or an embrace. Flashlit on a backstreet, set to the right of frame: a bollard and unrelated mutt, head cropped off to the left. Anders on the train, four seats in front chatting incomprehensibly to a student friend in Reykjavik, they've some space in a bar to hang his technically adept but null paintings. Todd doesn't know why, but hes seeing the town a level 'up', on a plateau. There's a grit smell coming out of the over-cool air-conditioning, like rain on dry tarmac.

There's a rod along her trigger-grip on her fork-in-the-meat; a visceral dowser; a leyline defining her, her identity, she's rotated with her moorland familiar around this hairline axis. She sees herself; the lamb in its layers, shank-bone, muscle, skin and fleece; in in hunch at the kitchen melamine; icon and signified; rotating slowly around a bore through the terrain, gets comforting glimpses of children playing farm games on a dirt floor with knucklebones. The line like a pin to the earth, extending out vertiginously behind her to God knows what.

She puts down her fork.
"Mum, I'm not hungry".
Anna wafts I-don't-make-this-food-for-you-to-waste-do-you-know-how-much-this-costs? aside and picks up her coat to go to the petrol station, see if there's anyone there.

Regression

Tomatoes again.

Gretl picks at the orange discs.

Without colour constancy, Gretl would have thought them red. With her perceptual disorder, she picked up the real greenish cast of the fluorescent lighting, like a camera without a filter. Even after forcing herself to perceive them as red, she was looking a plateful of liquid matter, rather than juicy vine fruit. The lettuce yellow white crisp curls without flavour. Only maybe a bitter saponic taste, like shampoo in the eyes.

Gretl mashed through the salad like a production line, got up and slipped the plate into the pile with a clatter. Skinner had decided that piping higher-tempo music into the canteen would speed up the turnaround of sittings. He'd asked for something upbeat, and Chapman, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of music interpreted this as a request for a modern 'Workers' Playtime': updated 1940s factory music. Chapman went on a little mental musical journey from this via the shunting yard assemblages of Musique concrète and the Sci-fi hauntology of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to some early nineties techstep, meaning that Gretl pushed the food-shaped substance through her face to a soundtrack of aural abstraction owing no small favour to 1920s futurism.

Alberto Cavaldo, Futurist, in the sidings, with a tape deck. Svank in the in the polytunnels, indoors, picking tomatoes. The polytunnels are in series highrise buildings, descending into the basement forming a hyperlit bunker.

Looking up, Gretl's eye is caught by a cyclopic lens in the roof, a second and a third behind her whirring mutedly as tiny light-oiled servos swivel them left and up 45° simultaneously, describing a perfect arc. Gretl knows the machines are now surveilled themselves by Artificial Intelligence algorithms pattern matching for abnormal behaviour.

Those who controlled observational equipment soon realised the fundamental problem with multiple cameras is that the watched ceased to believe the premise of Bentham's Panopticon: that someone might be watching them, so they'd better behave. with so many citizens and locations to monitor, you would need a double; a cipher for every human on earth in order to know what they were doing. Every location would need a watcher; every human a shadow actor, assessing their morality from a silent screen. A flaw this obvious caused the cameras to pretty much be completely ignored - oh, sure: a break-in would be recorded, but how many frames every second? How grainy the quality? What angles?

If the crime had no effects, who would know it had happened, if it transpired that no one was watching? What if the only thing broken was the law?

The authorities had their response: get computers to watch people, so that if a law was broken that showed no evidence of it having being transgressed, the culprits could still be punished. Optical character recognition software, and crowd-behaviour analysis were adapted to catch people in the act of a crime, or, better - as prevention is better than cure - the act of acting like they might commit one. That way, crimes could be caught before they happened.

Eventually, as the closed-circuit system could (by degrees) be linked to the Criminal Justice system, suspects could be caught, tried and fined instantly, without the need for summons or arrest. With such a complete meta-system of visual coverage mapping the globe as a digital cartographic Doppelgänger, criminals guilty of an arrestable offence could be apprehended and detained in only the time it took to get to the scene of the crime, or wherever the guilty party had run (and been observed running) to.

With the crop just days from harvest on the 'C' hydroponic bank, Satoshi Kitano weighs a truss of taomatoes in his hand reverently. Six per truss. Nine trusses per plant. Eighteen plants per rank, two ranks on either side of the two-metre high shelving units and four shelves per side. This floor had nine rooms, each with eight banks in them and this building's farm descended six floors. Satoshi's suit was crisp and white plastic waffle fabric under the halogen lamps whose precisely limmited UV range gave everything the flat white light of a forensic photo's ringflash.

Pop-Art Archetypes

Matteo makes realist canvasses. Most people or wowed by the colours and mixed compositions he takes from advertising, snapshots: the glamourous and glamourless; the art of being teenage, being bored, being lost, being useless. The girls and sexualised boys, he makes fetishes using their iconography, he's aware of the power of their nudity and wields it casually: waxy chests and crash helmets, motorbike gauntlets and low quality fancy dress costumes - a chicken mask or friendly chipmunk's head.

Matteo is aware that this cheapness talks of lost nights at parties, 3am in a sweat-haze, flashed images of suburban buzz-headed boys swigging a brahma, a full-body bear costume and a miniskirt on his knee; talks of removed gay sex, mediated by a furry suit, reflecting childhood cartoons and first sexual stirrings and Jessica Rabbit as their archetype: a hyperreal simulacrum of an assemblage of a century's history of young bucks' fantasies and diversions in animation studios and Madison Avenue, backroom boys with pipes and bawdy jokes in fifties suits; talks of the semi-mythical American filmic trope of the kid in the chicken-suit handing out fliers for a lube shop for six bucks an hour; talks of the children of America's cultural diaspora, of not knowing these archetypes first-hand, working with the stereotypes and the taste you get recreating them, first on film, then exacted on canvas with the gloss of Rosenquist.

Prototypes

Tube, sewer pipe echo, hands supporting your balance, protecting your head on the damp curvature of the culvert moving between tributaries beneath the bypass. Looking back at Alfie. His hair's too long for a boy, but his silhouette like frame of withes sluicing through the run-off.

It's been an odd year for rainfall, a meniscus nudging up the baize on the reservoir with every wipe of rain across the map, like an over-tilted glass of water. Now in June, we're three days off being underwater and Alfie reckons we'll make a good camp on the island. And he's got hair like a girl's.

A silt gutter to the river's edge and twelve square feet of ditching topped with brambles comprises a 'good camp', and Alfie's right: there's discarded lighters, skeletons of magazines and humanshit. A great camp.

Alfie's mum: a blonde triangle and sodastream. She's maybe got a neck-scarf on at an angle, and a man's white shirt on, like an air hostess or a Charlie's Angel. Evel Kneivel whines and flywheels across light wire stairs and parquet, the banana bunch and someone else's sun-streamed Saturday mornings, the traces of thirties modernity, pine and the coos of collar doves on the island, flat roofs and curved windows as Alfie's mum smiles and passes them face-size beakers with saccharine-bitter squash drinks and light from half-plyed patio doors. She, a prototype for Alfie's friends' ideals: not a mum, but a girlfriend; nights at the yacht club bar, double diamond.

In the morning they discover a body in the silt, in the afternoon a cetaceous man with alopecia exposes himself to Alfie's sister and her friends on the riverside. They run back, laughing, to the bridge. The guy in the 24 hour wonders at the man in the anorak with bare legs and waterproof shoes. In the morning; there'll be half-day closing later, so they need to get to the spar 'pretty sharpish, young men,' and they're becalmed in the harbour with a row at the club and cocaine on empty melamine, tops as 'Rumours' echoes through the bar.