The All-Seeing Eyes

The year is 2058. Mass video surveillance is pervasive across the globe, due to widespread poverty, uncontrolled migration, increasing civil unrest and terrorist acts. The “Total Information Awareness” program, originally touted by President George Bush, has been fully implemented, with CCTV cameras in small locations augmented with near-real-time satellite imagery. Anyone outside of their homes can be followed and tracked in public and to an extent, within private businesses and corporate offices, with a notice of consent sticker all that’s required to make the public aware of the surveillance. However, the public doesn’t know the full story as to how these systems function, or if they’re even connected in any way. They are assumed to be closed loop, discrete systems, so consent is only a passing concern. “So what if Walmart watches me buy some motor oil, I’m not stealing”.

Splicers, the individuals in the video surveillance security apparatus tasked with tracking suspects, retrieving imagery, and stitching together video clips to prove criminal narratives in court, are some of the most valuable and mysterious security experts in the world. They number in the dozens and pile through thousands of hours of footage as well as monitoring real-time feeds from around the globe. Splicers can have only one of three security designations.  ”Observer” is restricted to public feeds, and their analytical videos are passed up the chain to “Linears”, the second level Splicers. Linears receive compilation feeds and have additional access to corporate feeds, but not government. The top-level Splicers will take video from Linears, apply AI and complex algorithms to fill in missing or corrupt sequences, and have access to some private feeds to include high security military installations and certain high value private individuals. Rumor has it, their designation is “All Seeing Eye”, or ASE, and further rumors suggest they have unimaginably detailed access to any electronic device capable of recording audio, video, location data, etc. Their security designation is a reference to the back of the US dollar, with an image of a pyramid topped by a large eye which sees all. It also happens to grace the screens of the terminals which the ASE’s operate. The initial Splicer deployment is so successful, ASE’s do not have to engage and remain mostly idle. However, a wave of unrest due to a global medicine shortage draws the ASE’s in to fill out the dataset and run predictive models, creating massive data pools of people’s private and public lives, some of which diverge sharply, suggesting criminality. One ASE (Codename Sheepdog 23) becomes interested in a beautiful young woman. Initially Sheepdog chalks his interest up to loneliness, isolation, and maybe a dash of voyeurism. He spends weeks casually collecting clips of who he only knows as The Blonde. He could retrieve her personal details with a few keystrokes to access the facial recognition database, but the request would open a case and bring the footage up in severity as a person of interest, so he prefers her anonymity. The more footage he collects, the more he mentally constructs a narrative of her life, basically stitching a “sun to moon” sequence documenting her public life from home to lunch to the office to dinner to home. Sheepdog keeps his fascination to himself and he eventually loses interest with the Blonde. But the power of the surveillance system revealed itself in a way he hadn’t expected.