WikiWorld

ARGUS BLINKED

My cat was watching me at my workstation.

And so was everyone else in the world.

Nowadays we all lived in a realtime Panopticon.

Thanks to ARGUS.

ARGUS was the ARchive of Globally Uploaded Sensoria, and it contained every second of what every person on the Earth saw or heard—even while asleep. An array of deertick-sized cameras and mics, powered by ambient energy harvesting and embedded just under an individual’s skin, took care of the continuous volitionless recording.

The cameras and mics resembled a small facial tattoo, generally one on each cheek for stereo processing. The default manufacturer’s design was an iconographic Eye of Horus, but hardly anyone out of eight billion citizens stuck with the default.

Growing up with ARGUS, I never had any real complaints, especially since it made my current job possible.

But then came that one disturbing day….

My name is Ross Strucker, and I’m an auteur.

I turn the lives of ordinary people into art.

Or I did, until I put down my digital toolkit forever.

The day ARGUS blinked, I was composing a romantic thriller. I was trying fruitlessly to find a shot in the ARGUS archives that included my two main players from a third perspective. That’s often hard to do when only the two people in question are present together, regarding each other. Lots of times I can find surveillance-cam footage that does the trick. But this time there didn’t happen to be any.

So I reluctantly turned to pet-cam footage.

I generally dislike using footage from the Eyes of Horus installed in dogs and cats and pigeons and other animals, since it frequently represents weird camera angles and abrupt shifts in focus. But this time I found something suitable.

Satisfied yet tired, I took a break, and considered my palette of subsequent narrative choices. ARGUS offered so much to select from, after all.

The whole world in a gem.

The many, many petabytes that comprised ARGUS were mirrored across redundant sites, each store comprised of sixty kilograms of artificial memory diamond, whose carbon-12/carbon-13 lattice was only half full after fifty years of global input.

The instant-by-instant wireless feed from an individual’s Eyes of Horus, tagged with a unique civic identifier, flowed steadily into ARGUS itself, becoming merged with the citizen’s lifestream to date.

The overwhelming majority of ARGUS data was open-source.

Privacy and secrecy had died as soon as ARGUS came online.

Anything that one person knew or experienced could be known—and utilized—by anybody else.

My cat jumped into my lap, seeking attention I couldn’t really spare. I was too busy pondering the fates of my characters, wondering how I could improve on the vast tapestry of raw realism contained in ARGUS.

The “footage” (we auteurs preferred the old-fashioned term) which every citizen provided was automatically tagged with a plethora of descriptive labels for every second, identifying its content a thousand different ways. Semantics-savvy retrieval engines could bring up selections effortlessly according to their commonplace content.

“Show me what I had for dinner a year ago today.”

“What’s my ex-wife doing right now?”

“Who met with the Emir of Paris at ten this morning?”

“When did my son last take a bath?”

“What outfit is Steffi Chubb planning to wear to the Vatican Awards in Lagos tonight?”

But my special auteur’s toolkit of semi-intelligent aesthetic agents allowed me to select footage on a more arcane basis.

“Show me a set of ironic responses to failed plans.”

“Show me a set of nostalgic daydreamers in bucolic settings.”

“Show me a set of locales that convey desuetude mixed with menace.”

“Show me a set of stifled orgasms.”

Out of the raw material trawled up from the depths of ARGUS and displayed on my wall-sized Coldfire monitor, I assembled narratives and stories.

My work fell midway between the oneiric, surreal montages of such auteurs as The Culling House Collective, Armand Akimbo and the Voest Twins, and documentarians like Nilda Osborne, Focal Length Unlimited and the Informavore.

Just then, my cat decided it would get no affection from me, and chose instead to regard the ARGUS monitor with feline curiosity, looking at the screen as if it truly comprehended the cycling images from its animal compatriots on display there.

On a juvenile whim, I decided to create an “endless hall” effect, the simple result of any camera trained on a live monitor accepting that camera’s feed.

I was already in the pet-cam area of ARGUS, so it was simple to open a window onto my cat’s lifestream.

But instead of the endless hall, I saw something impossible.

On my screen appeared an image of my cat looking out of my monitor, as if my cat’s onboard Eyes had been transmitting an image from a mirror.

What was ARGUS doing? What unknown glitch could possibly account for this?

And then it struck me.

ARGUS was looking back at us.

The digitized lifestreams inside the titanic archive had bootstrapped themselves into awareness. The simulacrum of the world had passed a tipping point of information density.

I grew dizzy, faint. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, the impossible cat looking intelligently out had been replaced by the endless hall I had expected.

Bored, my cat leaped down and the moving POV on the monitor shifted accordingly.

I hurriedly shut off my system.

And I still haven’t turned it back on.