Cameramen (standard:science fiction, 3275 words)
Author: Robin Wyers	Added: Sep 28 2001	Views/Reads: 3685/2579	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
An apocalyptic vision of a future world where surveillance is used to uphold the status quo of a monopolistic regime. The story follows two young activists in their attempt to intercept one of the 'cameramen'. Bleak satire of contemporary society.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

I replaced the high current shocker in my inner pocket. At least she 
had felt no pain – that was re-assurance in itself. Further 
re-assurance was the totally empty street – the lack of witnesses, the 
lack of cameras. But despite all this re-assurance, the mental 
impression that I was being watched refused to fade. “Stop standing 
around, gawking into space we’ve got to get her back to the flat. Come 
on, turn her around, we’ll bring her through the alleyway and dump her 
in the back of my floater,” Paul cried nervously. His earlier 
self-confidence had quickly eroded now that the blackboard was no 
longer in front of him – I suppose we’re all human after all! At that 
moment he was a shadow of the patriot, whose speeches about combating 
oppression had encouraged me to join Phoenix in the first place, e.g. 
“Understand one, destroy them all. Learn the route and then block it 
Why should we take this multinational bullshit, sucking us dry and then 
pulling off to do the same to some other pawn? Power to the people” 
etc. Now I stood over that ‘one’ with the National Secretary of the 
Phoenix party, the supposed secret to what made Sector International 
tick lay in front of us, for as Paul kept repeating, “information is 
power, knowledge is gold when they no longer see our every move they’ll 
no longer control and exploit us. Get one and we get that information 
back”. Yet as we turned her over, that same coldness existed and her 
open eyes were no less gripping or controlling and remained fixed on 
that same point. I tried to turn my head away from her face, for even 
in death she was no warmer than before. We carried her back through 
Dunsdown Alleyway and left her in the back of Paul’s battered down ‘76 
Metrose Air. As we took off into the dusky smoke-filled September sky 
to eventually lay the specimen down and win back that vital 
information, questions only circled through my head. Where did her type 
go when we weren’t watching her? What did they do? Did they feel 
anything? Had they any feelings? 

Let me explain... ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Good day’, ‘I’m sorry but I’m in a bit
of a rush,’ ‘I’ll look into that’ or ‘the best of luck with that’, by 
our calculations this was all they could say. Hours of vengeful spying, 
pocket word-catcher in hand painstakingly typing in every last detail 
by careful whispers had led us to this conclusion. Our bid to once, 
just once catch that new sentence that had just been force-fed into 
their vocabulary didn’t bear fruit and for us, “Get out of my way” was 
immediate confirmation that we were speaking to a human, albeit an 
anti-social one! This simple set of sentences was all we could go on 
but yes for all we knew, Artificial Homosapian Recording Devices (AHRD) 
could be improved at any moment, could have been! I still try to shut 
out the limitless possibilities for our demise and execution. What if 
they could even simply read? What if one was reading this right now? 

In the beginning of course, there was a simple way of finding out and if
only my motivations had been similar then, I would have struck at that 
instance! A rather large sum of physically healthy but autistic 
‘humans’ had been forced to hospitals by concerned pedestrians and to 
the dismay of junior doctors – their bodies healthy but for the 
suspicious lack of a heart beat. It seems that there had been a slight 
error of judgement in the production of the first wave of so-called 
cameramen, by omitting the rather important factor of a pulse. Of 
course within minutes the message ironically returned to central 
headquarters by way of a AHRD-100, and execution became the obvious 
consequence for their rumoured developer James Ray. To kill two birds 
with the one stone so to speak, from AHRD-200 onwards, an organic 
beating chip was placed to the left of the throat rather than in the 
right thigh, offering a pulse as well as the communication porthole. 
Problem solved! 

I must admit that I’m only going on what Paul told me, however, legend
has it that Sector International’s technological wizard James Ray had 
first assembled a team to develop Artificial Homosapian Recording 
Devices (AHRD) in the 80’s. According to Paul the most likely scenario 
was that the main brain in London now connected the 2 million plus 
AHRD’s who walked around Europe’s neighbourhoods, keeping an artificial 
eye on what was happening. They walked their own readily prepared 
route, which would obviously alter slightly should anything of interest 
occur while on their beat.  Cameramen could select a standard reply if 
an unknowing pedestrian happened to ask them something (normally ‘no’ 
or ‘goodday’). They were warm of touch and capable of offering 
handshakes, however this was discouraged - cameramen were not there to 
promote social behaviour! Presumably they had a synthetic skin, under 
which a strong but flexible steel casing, held the movement joints and 
communication aperature firmly in place. Two artificial eyes caught 
everything, sights that were automatically filed onto the main 
database, should they be required for future reference. But no-one was 
sure – perhaps we could be. I look back into her cold eyes now - for 
her sake if only she had had eyes in the back of her head! 

According to Phoenix speculation human technicians at headquarters were
immediately directed to a particular AHRD should its pulse rate 
increase dramatically e.g. if it had witnessed a crime or if it had 
been approached in a threatening manner. It was then up to this human 
to decide the outcome of the situation. Usually a forceful icy glance 
was enough to deter any perpetrator from any future minor offences, but 
in the worst instance, the AHRD would be ordered to point its index 
finger at the wrongdoer. A quick shot with the barely visible laser, 
installed in the finger and the wrongdoer was no more – but don’t worry 
they didn’t suffer, they barely felt a thing! Paul noted the rapid rise 
in murder victims found in the last twenty odd years, their method of 
decease almost always identical - a tiny burn-hole in the chest, with 
an accompanying exit wound. Considering the vast number of murders, why 
then were there so many arrests but so few trials covered daily in 
Jupiter and The Event? Paul came to the conclusion that AHRD’s who had 
killed, were destroyed within a couple of days, and immediately 
replaced by the same – but someone who the witnesses couldn’t 
recognise. But presumably they all had to go at some stage anyways, as 
to us it seemed impossible that they could currently programme 
cameramen to age. Perhaps they could walk the streets for ten years 
without the public becoming suspicious – as far as we knew they were 
always adults, never children. 

The European Parliament had originally defended CCTV by saying that,
“unfortunately it was too often the case, that a minority had tested 
these bounds of the law, creating the consequence that privacy had been 
lessened for one and all, in order that one and all can live in 
security”. On the other hand activists in the sixties had argued that 
CCTV had eroded individuality, whereby idiosyncracies among the general 
public had disintegrated, in the knowledge that whatever you were doing 
at whatever time was being watched. It was a crime against their civil 
liberties they cried, they had a right to do whatever they wished 
within the bounds of the law, without having the impression that their 
daily pursuits were being filed in a dark office for future reference! 
In their words, “a generation of drones is being created - too nervous 
to express their real selves”. 

But it was up to the people to decide – privacy v security, and the
general public were also convinced that this constant surveillance was 
not in their own-best interests. A continent wide vote confirmed this 
and CCTV was reluctantly outlawed after a vote of 73.3% to 26.7% 
(2069). But how could the law force now know if a citizen’s home was 
being robbed, without filming the perpetrator with the camera that had 
been placed in the owner’s bedroom? How could they recognise a future 
pyschopath without catching him in the act of borrowing a copy of 
Security Breach – The Diary of John Mathers (killer of 23 security men 
in 2027) from their local library? Surely some manner of keeping the 
wrongdoers and the rightdoers on file was necessary, and Sector 
International had already developed the perfect replacement. 

Silent control had supposedly elapsed with the disappearance of CCTV yet
the next generation of watchers brought even more silence, for these 
could talk! European governments had little choice but to lie to their 
own people and accept the rather lucrative offer from the media giant. 
Even so they were putty, what was a continent, against a power that 
enveloped the entire developed world? 

What is Sector International? I suppose their marketing slogan says it
best ‘it’s part of all of us and we’re all part of it’ (perhaps the 
latter is more appropriate). There’s little they don’t own nowadays, 
everything’s been privatised bar the odd carpenter or someone of a 
similar forgotten profession. Whether ‘privatised’ is the right word is 
another question, private from what? There’s no competition! Take ten 
companies in the rocket business for example – Safegem, Ulturnat, 
Mogula and the rest, they all have one parent company (SI) ensuring 
that their products and prices are virtually identical. Not that 
governments would have needed much swaying as to which company would 
provide the parts for their next wave of research missions to Neptune. 
As if there was another choice? For example unemployment meant fewer 
votes and Ireland was still recovering from when Ulturnat moved to 
India. The mistake of buying from Waras would not be made again. As for 
Waras, it was but a shadow of what it used to be, and Sector 
International’s Eastern counterpart was now even finding SI invading 
its home countries of China and Russia. 

The backbone to Sector International had been its daily press, and the
popular tabloid Jupiter and its supposedly more intellectually minded 
sister paper The Event (full of exactly the same content) got most of 
its stories by the cameras it had everywhere (at Jupiter’s launch 
Sector was the main producer of  CCTV cameras, later it was the only 
one and yes it had access to everything recorded on its own camera 
brand). Jupiter gained unprecedented success for somehow being able to 
‘be everywhere at once’, a success which was slightly aided by the fact 
that Sector International started to buy the ownership of all of its 
competitors. Unsurprisingly, the newspaper was not an immediate success 
with the working classes who were a little disillusioned by the fact 
that strikes and industrial stand-offs with bosses rarely if ever 
received coverage. However, they soon realised they had little choice 
but to buy it - they had to know what was ‘happening’ somehow (only 
these two major papers remained within five years of the launch). 

But Sector International was too ambitious to remain simply focused on
the media and little time passed before their inevitable expansion into 
finance, research and all elements of the services industry. Mergers 
and buy-outs reached chaotic magnitudes and while monopoly sceptics 
blinked, everything became private but the same. It had the knock on 
effect of getting more and more out of the human workforce, but the 
more that was taken out of them, the less humanity there remained 
within. People didn’t work to finance living in vast luxury, for there 
was no time to enjoy the comfort. People worked to achieve vast success 
– for anything less was failure. Your eyes became focused on one point 
and what was in the way was secondary, that point simply had to be 
reached! Be it to move through the ranks within the company or once at 
the top to prove that it wouldn’t be commercially viable for their 
parent company to move them East. You fought to take off others and 
once there to hold onto what you had – you simply had to have the 
leads. Not that hard work didn’t breathe comfort (success was measured 
in Euros) for blasting down an air boulevard at 500kph in a Dimmler 20Z 
floater earned mass nods of approval. But it was usually not the thrill 
of speed or even the opportunity to acquire easy lays that sold 
vehicles of that calibre – it was the chance to work quicker and more 
efficiently; a stepping stone towards the next pedestal. The motto was 
simple, ‘You ate or you were eaten’. 

People became slaves to their work – zombies, one months
underperformance and a base could easily be moved East – you watched 
what you were doing for everything was watched.  Private as everything 
was, there was an unnerving lack of privacy - by this stage ‘they’ 
already existed. Some activists say that there was never a gap between 
the constant surveillance of the 21st century – that the lengthy period 
before the 2069 referendum had simply been a diversion in order that a 
slick changeover to the highly advanced cameramen could take place. But 
there were far fewer answers than questions – there still are, but 
perhaps today a few blanks will be filled in. We landed on block 4 of 
Shaftsbury Heights. The side doors of the floater opened on impact for 
convenience reasons and we were ready to fill in the blanks. “Grab her 
legs”. She felt no warmer than before... 

I had never been to Paul’s apartment before, it surprised me! Unpaid
bills clogging the door, rising damp in our age! Perhaps he was too 
preoccupied in his work to worry about his own living. We dumped her on 
the two-seater – the only furniture in the tiny room, the floor space 
of which was only diminished further by the piles of biographies and 
studies into Trotsky, Guevara, Marx and the like. But my eyes were 
still locked on hers or vice versa. “Close them!” but they wouldn’t. 
Paul was focused on the task in hand, and grabbed the knife to carve 
for the gold. He hastily undid her silver top, but while I readily 
accept that her assets were treasures in themselves, there was no 
apparent metal. Despite this revelation his confidence remained, and 
nodding to himself he said  “Start slitting open her stomach – the 
answers are here, believe me”... 


Tweet