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...