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.