Does the company keep all these gigabytes of personal data?

Leach has to smile at his latest recruit: a screen-obsessed young man called Graeme (typical) who is good-looking and slim (extremely atypical), who is nerdish-boyish (of course) but whose shirt and coat are elegantly cut (extremely unlikely).

Keep? echoes Leach. OK. Personal data used to be gathered during arrest and documentation, from mug shots and slow shit like that. After the crime had been committed. If we only used facial data from arrests we’d have to arrest everyone to get it.

(expected dutiful laugh from Graeme)

Now it’s ours for free. We are paid to collect it, paid to provide it and sometimes … paid to sell it. Money for jam, my boy, money for jam.

Graeme notices the smirking, even a chortle. Their semi open-plan office area contains eight desks in oddly puzzle-form layout, so while some are facing away from or at tangents to the others, everyone is within earshot.

I was only checking about the … legality of it.

We have used it to catch people who violated lockdowns, right? And at riots. And what better role for our work. Since then … Look, whether it’s lawful or not to keep data is not our concern. We’re just making a buck collecting it. Ethically, not our problem. That’s for the Home Affairs minister. If you can’t trust elected politicians, who can you trust?

(general laughter)

As for consent? Ditto. That’s nothing to do with us either. If they access the facial images, Home Affairs will request consent as required. Of course they will.

(general laughter)

Unless it’s one of us. Then again … you wouldn’t be told if it was you.

(silence)

Come on, you know this. Data goes to the US. CIA, all that. The government will cover for us no matter what. If the public wants to know who has access to their confidential data some government minister will invoke a confidentiality clause: stating the public can’t be allowed to see their own data, not even the data of who can see their data. Because it’s confidential.

(no one knows whether this is intentional humour or not)

Leach tries to be the funny guy, using whatever authority his position allows him. It would be a fair assumption to say he is more at ease in the company of men, with or without authority, than of women, even his wife, in the calm and quiet of the family home.

The men expect him to continue.

Because Leach is a man of few gears he moves best in confined areas, as now, half-standing, half-stepping across to the display screen. But he never walks if he can lope. Then he steps back again, thinking aloud.

At the moment, he says, the minister wants us more than he wants to run the Prime Minister. And that’s saying something, because we are how he’s going to make that happen. Or so he thinks. He’s been looking at YITV in China. Over there everyone’s in the data bank and the CCP is planning one camera per head of population. The Social Credit thing and the rounding up of Uighurs, well, the last one won’t happen here, but the government wants all the riffraff gone. So what I’ve been doing is getting into the camera business, too. Otherwise he’ll buy the bloody things from China.

Who will, the minister …?

Must we talk about the minister, says Evan. What sort of person locks innocent people in detention, for years, maybe for decades, just to make a point? He did.

Jesus, Evan, says Leach, and very slowly: I had no idea.

About what?

That you were so political.

It isn’t political. It’s moral. Making laws that lead to enough suffering and despair to be classified as human rights abuse.

I think we’re getting off the point, says Leach. Morality is not in our remit. For the time being, he says sternly, he’s our man. Until he gets kicked out and then some Labor hard-nut will take his place.

This current lot, says Graeme, have uncompromising personalities …

No one has a personality anymore, says Leach. Just their ID. He looks at his iPhone. And that’s nothing for you to worry about. Until we find software to read your worry.

Did you know, says Graeme, looking around the office, the Chinese are using biometrics to breed pigs? Anyone? It’s true. Chinese love their pork ribs. Industrial piggeries hold thousands of pigs.

How do they do it then?

They body-tag the pigs, answers Leach (the spoil-sport). Use CCTV to scan them and AI to monitor them. Too many to monitor by eye. People in white coats scanning a hundred monitors would be like watching Wimbledon without the fucking strawberries.

He is satisfied to see Graeme laugh.

And it’s non-intrusive, see? Got to be careful with pigs because pigs are like humans. They get stressed out.

Very careful, says Graeme. If pigs get stressed they bite off the tails of other pigs.

Jesus. And I said they’re like us? Or is that just Chinese pigs?

Few of Leach’s staff doubt his essential interest is the money. If they are as perceptive as his wife they know he derives from all this coveted surveillance some dreadful satisfaction.

By the way, adds Leach. Under no circumstances is anyone, especially anyone new … to use the term Big Brother. Ever. Anywhere. To anyone. And now might be the time to remind you of your contract, where it says you never disclose details of what we do or how we do it. Surveillance and analysis. That’s what you say. Yeah? Same old.

Their screens draw them back to where they are most themselves. As if, in a mere few seconds, they have forgotten Leach.

He slumps, then sags. Staff are good to perform to, and yet explaining things is onerous. He stares at the display screen on the office wall, as its slowly shifting screensaver of galaxies and no doubt wormholes overlapping into countless alternative universes. It absorbs him as if he’s noticing it for the first time.

Leach starts off flashy and fast, like a speedboat, until he cuts the motor, and he wallows.

With the meeting over Graeme mentions the office lighting. No one responds. New staff are unsettled by the unnatural ambient lighting in the offices, especially if they realise everyone else is oblivious to the subtle but distinctly odd shifts of colour.

Leach is experimenting with different mixes of coloured light in his unending search for more efficient monitoring and mapping of people’s faces. Each lighting phase lasts an hour. With every new phase the light changes colour and the algorithm begins afresh: every worker’s image and FRT data are saved and filed automatically in the instant before the process begins again with different ambient light.

You could call this research. Or you could call it crazy.

At home he has asked Asha if she thinks AI systems are capable of reading emotions.

Emotionless machines reading emotional faces?

Yes?

She won’t say. Then says: Data analysis is not theory of mind, Bruce.

Certainly Leach is hoping their developing software will read from the basic face the basic emotions. One day more, much more – intentions, personalities. Yes, he does believe in personalities, he just loves to sound cynical. Intentions!

Nonsense, she says. People play-act, and dissemble, and over-emote and sometimes can’t emote at all. Some people are funny by being deadpan. Why do you ask?

Because if we could do that, the next thing, he says, is to sort of reprogram them, just like you do.

I don’t reprogram people! She is appalled.

Of course you do, you say all the time how this EMDR lets you reprocess memories and feelings.

No, I don’t reprocess them, they do.

Same thing.

It’s nothing like the same thing. It’s simply modifying traumatic cognitions into more acceptable ones and lowering the associated emotional distress.

Umm.

As against some diabolical imposition of state control.

I wouldn’t put it like that.

This is the way the world works, he thinks. Surveillance is a new normal. A piece of digital code doesn’t indulge in disparaging comments, or condescending looks, or being racist (intentionally that is). If people have nothing to hide we won’t catch them. If they are conspiring, we will. Conspiring is the toughie for the ethicists, because being seen in groups could be innocent, but sometimes it’s conspiring, which leads to committing, and that progression is the ethos of the brief. You could say Home Affairs is protecting you because they’re exposing you.

The following night Bruce Leach dreams of citizens wandering across Federation Square in a maze of bright points, not just their faces but their limbs and torsos too, their entire bodies pinpricked in a brilliant geometry. Whichever way and wherever they move these points dazzle and remain as if pins have pierced the skin and let the body’s light shine through. At very least they illustrate the silly saying: our bodies are made of stardust.

Most mornings Asha wakes and gets out of bed before him. Avoiding his early morning pin prick.

When he sees her in the kitchen she is naked and lit up like an Xmas tree. Her dark body is covered in fairy lights.

Except he is still asleep. As she is beside him.

Then she wakes and gets out of bed before him.