Reed has come back from lunch drunk again. It was 15:06 when the doors to the lift slid open with a decompressing hiss and splurging out through the airlock to the never ending black void of reality came Reed accompanied by his favourite cronies Hibdiah and Jenkins. Jenkins is squawking at Hibdiah:

“You’re ‘sposed to be a facking muzza mate, three calvados and two bottles like the five pillars you cahnt…” He dribbles off to one side and becomes elaborately caught at the knees in a redundant waste paper basket/ashtray. He doesn’t fall to the floor but simply becomes embedded in the wall with the oblique ashtray as a cylindrical support.

Hibdiah seems not to have imbibed the amount of alcohol that Jenkins has attributed to him and turns to see his semi prone stance against the wall.

“I’m not a Muslim.” He replies in a cool tone before turning on his heel and losing his balance destroying his well-crafted impression of sobriety.

Reed marches between the two of them making a beeline for my section. We are on drone observation today, which is the most monotonous of tasks since the targets arbitrarily change. The task is to observe the footage in tandem with the damage analysis algorithm running in the background. It is my assertion that this process could be entirely automated but procedure requires human confirmation of collateral and civilian misappropriation, even though this process is shoe horned by the combatants clause, it is necessary to reinterpret certain misfires and equipment malfunction fall outs. Since the data is live and could conceivably be redirected en route I also see the process of reinterpretation as futile although counter claims of doctoring could be levelled at any such siphoned data and the procurer of said data. Our reinterpreting process down in adjustments is as advanced as you will see but these days papering over the cracks is becoming harder and harder as civilian understanding of more advanced data reinterpretation is gleaned.

“What the f**k is this!” Reed literally spits over the line of monitors, although none of the spittle makes it as far down the row as me.

“Observation Sir.” Say’s a grey voice, my eyes locked on my monitor.

“Let me see.” He comes careering round the monitors in the manor of a retrospective. “Excuse my retrospective manor…” he slurs before peering agitatedly at someone’s monitor. My eye’s are locked forward, intently boring into a pixelated topographical desert.

“This is the spread of ten feeds overlaid I take it, apply the reduction across the lot and minimize figurative casualties uniformly.” Reed says eyes narrowing.

My brain loops into a chasm as I hear these words, a colossal force of pressure sweeping across my brow. The urge to unleash a barrage of battering reprimand, an unholy litany of dissent directed in his pale gaunt canvas of a face. I stand up and take two steps towards.

“That contravenes the procedure for today’s targets.” I say staring intently at the bridge of his nose.

“I know that Hugh now please go and sit down.”

“This is my row today how will I account for this anomaly in my report?” I say already knowing the answer as I have done it so many times before.

“Write it up as it happened and then bring it to me.” Reed says without looking up.

I immediately return to my seat. This has not happened before; I am stunned but know better than to reveal this to anyone on the line. Reed is impenetrable to interpretation; alcohol only seems to intensify his steely resolve. None of us would have experienced the kind of training he had, a terrifying thought.

Another map appears on my screen and bunches of pixels fidget out from a clump of white in the top edge of the screen. I encircle a group of six or seven I am not exact. I tap the control and A key and they disappear.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidbamford.substack.com

“I don’t believe in what you have to say. I don’t believe in any of it; endless rhetoric and construction, a malaise of misinformed monotony, or perhaps a monologue of misappropriated mirage. A litany of lies spread-eagled on the desk of a powerful politician. Smiling as his intern unbuttons his fly. Get it on camera and stream it round the globe. A multitude of morons will watch agog, mechanically maniacally pulling at their penises. Powerful men telling lies in ivory towers, white pillars of phallic power baring down on a land of cowering idiots. Sucking up the spewed syntax through their Internet garblers. Their eyes fused to the white scroll.

You’d say I was a conspiracy theorist right? I’m there chattering about the tensile strength of steel in construction girders. I’m there tracing the lines between Saudi Princes and influential senators of southern states in America. But my approach is more holistic than that. The belief that any kind of control is being exerted is the myth. The desire is to let go and drift, to allow the rhetoric to become a sentient beast, a deity that we obey. It is through the act of trying to control, we assert the illusion of impact and reaction onto people.

The thing is growing in power and force, spiralling through its arc like a canon ball through the sky. Smashing through the castle walls as we all become increasingly embroiled in the monstrous whole.”

He steps back from his screen and observes what he has written with a flat gaze. The cold room around him seems to expand and retract with the juddering of his breaths. The clock ticks on to 12:01 and he knows that he must go to bed, but he wants to finish this post. The forum he is logged into is for Veterans of the Iraq war. This particular one is populated by mostly American men from the 1991 conflict, they are struggling with post traumatic stress disorder. He has read their posts about how the current imagery in the media that permeates their screens is bringing back the feelings of isolation and fear that they have struggled with for over two decades. His polemic is designed to make them feel better but he feels that he has not expressed himself correctly. Some people would call him a troll, an agitator who is deliberately mocking those who have served their country in the name of global stability. Others might call him a lunatic, or an agitprop activist. His posts very rarely received any kind of reaction at all. Simply blocked or deleted, more vitriol poured onto the endless flames of the Internet. A troll perhaps but he felt there was an oblique message hidden amongst his postulations of a grander narrative at work behind the seemingly random conflicts that engulfed their working lives. Perhaps if he could insert some level of awareness at the level of data correction he could feed those anomalies back into his calculations in the broader data set. This was not skewing the statistics, this was the creative element of his role, at this level it was important to throw in indicators so that you can ascertain the level of exactitude that you are feeding up the chain.

He lent back from his computer, the light of the monitor lit his small room and the traffic outside seemed distant. He saved his post and backed it up to a document as well. Normally he felt confident to post without any kind of reviewing or editing process but something about today made him feel hesitant. He had moved to this one bedroom flat to give himself space to focus but found increasingly that the four walls were closing in on him. He felt like he should paint them black, the ever decreasing confines as he metamorphosed into Adrian Mole, a sexually frustrated teenager trapped within the body of a sexually frustrated twenty something trapped within the body of a sexually frustrated thirty something; A Russian doll of repression pawing at his keyboard as he allowed his work to spill over into his free time.

Later he is away from his laptop and watching television with the volume turned down. The images of a TV chef spatter across the screen, cutting through fatty meat in close up. He turns it off and goes to bed.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidbamford.substack.com

The corridors are so brown, like the engraving on the fine mahogany finish can be seen as both brown and white but not purple. If you peel back underneath will you discover a bone marrow, seething with the history of the place? Inside the structure, the building itself like a living breathing organism that pulsates and writhes with the history of accepted fact, the knowledge as a den of understanding. A crèche for those inducted into the ways of natural thought. Acceptable behaviour and recognized approaches. How could I come to find myself here? We can wind back and go through a genealogical maze of class and social factors that led me up to this point. My father; a military historian, perhaps after his career, maybe during, a man who pottered in his study or a serious academic? He moulded the gears of history? Stood at the table with the men of science and policy. I was surrounded by the trappings of his obsession, mahogany, mahogany, mahogany but bookcases towering around me in my childhood, impenetrable walls of spines intertwined I would sit (imagining) in my nappy. Upwards towering, soaring waves of words, numbers, graphs, charts intermingling to create the tableaux of my formative years. Then Torrance like he would drag me away but never snapping. Just a baby/toddler/child. Later I would learn stealth and secrecy and the torch would be my companion in that Library of his. I remember discovering Hitler on his desk, books sprawled open amongst maps like parchments. His idiom of a face metallurgical on the yellowing paper, a hard dash across the spot below his nose. History.

Later maths but first language, learning the patterns of speech, vowel sounds tumbling to a halt at glottal stops and simplistic furrowing of the lips with umms and ahhhs. First mother, always mother first but later him. That library intertwined round my family like a membrane between which we drifted in and out. Trigonometric shapes drifting off the pages, cosine and sine and inefficient efficiencies that haunt me to this day. Interpreting and sifting, changing and moulding. Such an impressionable vessel and yet quickly becoming hard as steel.

I remember that I was happy there.

But the mahogany of these walls as I push my wheeled case full of books that I won’t need along this corridor. Forward, wheels perfectly in synch, no annoying straggler. Wiggling imperceptibly denying me the course to my room, to enlightenment, true knowledge and acceptance. This is why I am here, through boarding school and beyond. Write what you know, but I know nothing. Not at this stage, I am adrift. I dream of Paris of Hong Kong, I am just turned eighteen and boarding school is behind me but I can’t think about that place now. Not as I enter the mahogany hallways of this place.

“The walls look like mahogany.”

“The walls aren’t made of mahogany a*****e, keep moving.” A voice from behind perhaps my fathers. Perhaps another students, I was too enraptured by the beauty of the place to absorb the barb.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidbamford.substack.com

He knows me, he hates Reed but then everybody hates Reed so I dispense with the pleasantries as this entire floor seems to have done so already.

“What are we looking at then?” I say.

“This is a mock up…” He begins,

“Obviously…” I say. I like to do at least one interruption during a vocal report. Potenkin shoots me a look and continues.

“…the feed is being synthesized as live and we’ve got two operators using basic compositing software trying to drop in around the edges here and here…” He indicates the bottom and top left of the display. “You ready out there Danny!” He suddenly shouts over his shoulder out the open door. There is a muffled yelp in the affirmative in return.

“So this is Basra?” I enquire although I already know as I recommended this footage for this process but Potenkin doesn’t need to know that.

“Yes he replies, this was mostly a maimer but a few fatalities I recall.”

“Twelve.” I reply.

“Anyway, the footage is handheld, standard broadcast, EX I think, shot HD, transmitted compressed. The trick is overlaying the composite with the correct artefacting, it has to update at around 20 to 22 frames and that was the real struggle. Also moving it live without it blocking has been complex but…”

“Does it work?” I interrupt.

“Watch…”

The footage is edited although they’ve left some of the blast on for dramatic effect, they like that sort of thing down here. The frame rate on the camera isn’t up to catching the bomber’s body coming apart but once the dust has settled there is the usual rubble and a mangled young woman in the right foreground, her foot and left calf have been eviscerated but the wounds look fairly cauterized and her femur is poking though the top of her right leg, the wound is cavernous but the problem is most of the blood stays inside the body. As for the other victims strewn about whilst the majority of their wounds are cosmetic they smoke and plaster dust dulls the color. It is not vivid enough.

Potenkin visibly tenses which doesn’t fill me with confidence, “OK, run it with overlay Danny’ He says even though Danny can’t hear him.

The footage is repeated and as the bodies fly the blood has been regraded and a crimson wash covers the bottom right foreground.

“Too much, scale it back!” Potenkin shouts and the colours on the corpse cool slightly.

The footage lasts approximately 8 seconds and freezes on the final frame. I approach the plasma to inspect for artefacts.

“This is good I say.”

“The refresh is good, but as you can see the operators are still teething. The problem is being able to decipher the footage and get an accurate codec and FPS reading before we interject with the overlay. It leaves the operator a matter of seconds to interpret position and hue.”

“How long?” I reply

“Three days.” He replies

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidbamford.substack.com

Reed emails:

Section Leader Reed

Actions

To:

 Hugh *******

Cc:

 ***** ******, ******, ***********

09 May 2013 11:12

Hi Hugh,

Sorry about the swearing.

Can you pop down to Adjustment Ops and try and be social in a way that implies get the f**k on with it?

Best

Reed

do with this… I stand up.

My back creeks and my legs are stiff, I’ve been here for twelve hours now and I feel pretty good considering. As soon as I move away from my desk my brain reasserts itself into a slightly more sequential mode of functioning. Statistical analysis requires a broader spectrum in your cognitive approach. When I become congruent I struggle if I’m being honest (which should not be encouraged).

I could describe the office but I don’t really see the point. Approximately 75 to 100 people work on this floor at any one time although as I understand it there is space for up to 150. A cubicle is about 3 meters by 5. The lights are halogen strip. There are full length windows to the far right although the blinds are usually drawn. The atmosphere is not oppressive, the people are normal and healthy as far as I understand it. Some of the people on this floor even play squash together but that doesn’t mean I have to go does it? I’ve never created a model for the wants of social niceties although what one would achieve with such data is debatable.

Adjustment ops is in the basement. Ops stands for operations for those who don’t know. I’m being sarcastic I know that you know. Think of them like the media department, it’s uncomfortable to consider them in any other way.

I’m in the lift. I’m thinking about the trailer for this film that I watched at my desk maybe two or three days before. It detailed the unstable life of a young white woman. living in America although parts of the scenery appeared to be Paris. They didn’t appear to be, they were Paris. I could see that they were Paris. It seemed that she was having trouble making her life fit together and whilst extremely attractive was unable to make her relationships with men work. I felt that the overall tone of the film was supposed to be uplifting, and that ultimately women like this were to be celebrated as a mark of true individuality in white western capitalist culture. To me the overtones of the film seemed to be a discourse about depression. I suspected that the film would never engage directly with this in terms of explicit referencing of the mental health condition, to engage with the idea directly would be deemed to controversial by the films financial backers, perhaps they would cite examples such as Madonna’s ‘Who’s That Girl?’ as an example of the sort of thing they were looking for in discussions with the director. I had no intention of seeing this film, I have spent too much time analysing media from the middle east and find films about depressed white people to be mildly ridiculous. They are always framed in these flurries of activity and awkward yet entertaining social situations. It resembles no experience of depression that I have ever come in to contact with although I am forcing the reading of depression onto it. The idea that individuality should be encouraged and celebrated is laughable to me. Perhaps I’ve been working here to long, perhaps not.

PING

That’s the sound of the lift if you’re not clear on that. It may well be unclear if that sound came from the reality of the situation or the interior monologue of my thoughts on current independent cinema whilst in the lift. I need to get to Media Ops regardless.

Media Ops is in the basement, they have glass panels separating their booths and some of the operators have even moved partitions out of the way to share working space. This kind of thing would never be tolerated in U Section but then I suppose the ‘creative’ members of the team must be allowed their little idiosyncrasies. The floor is dark and wide and the desks near the lift are only content interpreters and checkers mostly. I stop at ones desk who I do not recognize, he is wearing a Public Enemy t-shirt.

“I need to see Potenkin.” I say. The op looks up at me like I’ve said something ridiculous but doesn’t quite stretch to rolling his eyes. U section still carries a little bit of weight down here but not much.

“You’re U section Hugh, just go straight in.” He says. He knows me, I feel vaguely confused by this. I walk away.

Potenkin’s office is at the other end of the open plan, he leaves his door open anyway so I just walk in. He’s standing in front of a supersized flat panel monitor, which takes up most of the wall facing his desk. He has a poster of the Ridley Scott 1984 ad on the opposite wall.

“Is that suppose to be funny?” I say. He turns to and sees me.

“Oh for f***s sake.” Is his less than salubrious response.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidbamford.substack.com

I’m lucky that I’m actually working when the section leader swings by my desk. Reed (that’s how we address him, I don’t know his first name, it’s a quasi-military set up but then I suppose we’re a quasi-military organization) never really swings by as much as pops his head over the parapet.

“We’re not a military organization Hugh.” He says to me in a voice that resembles authority but seems more inclined towards wilful collapse.

“I know that Reed.”

“Then why do you keep phrasing these traffic reports like it’s Stalinist f*****g poetry evening?’

“Please don’t swear at me, it makes me tense when you swear at me.”

And that is the end of that conversation, I presume Reed is trying to appraise the work that I am doing here but his management style leaves a lot to be desired. I believe that he has been on courses to adjust his technique as I some members of U section have made formal complaints against him. In my opinion the members of staff filing these complaints are clearly missing the hierarchy of our organization. Reed sits on the complaints panel (I checked the staffing graph as U Section offers a completely transparent information structure and for all the non-transparent information one simply refers to the back end of the site) so therefore any complaints made must be filtered through him. Knowing Reed he probably still allows most (if not all) to go to panel as it gives him an excuse to go up stairs and sit with Jenkins, Wallace and Hibdiah and discuss the merits of the team members in our section before sending him off on a two week management retreat in a Swiss skiing lodge so that he can adjust his management style.

It is important to note that whilst Reed is technically a subordinate of Jenkins and Wallace (and to extent Hibdiah) they were all resident at the same campus of St. Andrews University and whilst this proves nothing in terms of their social relations it does prove that information from the University database is relatively easy to obtain, I mean in comparison to the data that I work with on the day to day. To day to day. Today, I have cross-referenced the vector information of their rooms on the campus from a 3D model interpolated from the building blue prints with certain combinations of figures in their main and ancillary bank accounts over the period of their graduation to the present day which is now, now now. Accurate up to approximately 5.05am this morning, the results were inconclusive which makes me feel that a third algorithm will be required to harness the original data and provide me further details of the management dynamic that immediately surrounds me.

I’m Hugh by the way. I went to Cambridge and did pure maths. Physics and computing are just a hobby. My methodology may sound haphazard to you but we take a holistic approach here in U Section. I am not military intelligence and as far as I’m aware we answer to no branch of government (in the UK at least) although most of the models we run and the data that is produced is available to them. There are a lot of names for what we do. Cyber-crime, Anonymous, hacking, a whole movement sprung out of 4Chan. I’ve never been involved with that, I don’t take part in the activity of individuals. This society is no longer managed that way.

You wouldn’t understand. In Iran (maybe Egypt) in the 70s there was a movement, a statisticians ripple that swelled and then contracted, the numbers supporting the myriad of extremism that would cascade through over the next 30 years, a shadow. That’s how this department was formed really, the models are technically classified but if you excel as a student in certain maths departments around the country you may be invited to ruminate with a professor over a brandy on the implications of these figures and the modules derived thereof. Interpretive statisticians, quantitative creatives. You wouldn’t understand.

My father was a military man but I never knew him, the way that things have unfolded in my life, the way that I am. I sometimes think I have been influenced by his career choice, perhaps he saw it as a calling. I am whether directly or indirectly a servant of the military and the work that I do furthers their cause, society at large needs us. Liberals may argue differently but they know what we are and why we are here. The money that flows through the fingers, that trickles down and oils the most dejected in our society. I keep the tap running, government, military, industrial, sociological concerns are a by product of a system that is running above optimum efficiency, overclocked. I have to keep working, I don’t know what my father has to do with this…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidbamford.substack.com

I’ve logged in, how I’ve logged in shouldn’t matter at this stage because if you’re a person worth speaking to then you’ll know how I got here. Follow the algorithms, in port out port. Outboard motor laptop chugging through an encrypted link, what does it matter? I’m here, imparting the data and exchanging other people’s data for yet more information, cascade, downfall, exponential growth. The buzzwords dissipate and become redundant before they’ve even been spoken, formed by a human tongue, bowled over the palate the erotic curvature of the ‘O’. This is an exchange that we’re involved in here and nothing more, if one side gains another loses but the inter denominational transnational balance of global funds can be treated as a self-regulating entity. Do you follow me? Are you following me? Because if you are I’ll know about it before you even click the button, it’s not a button anyway, I’m tracing your finger movements over a track pad your mouse hand, sweaty palms, registering moisture, iris movement, BPM, all correlate and you can be stratified and registered, logged on, logged off. Doesn’t matter. The job is the job and I do the job, jobs worth what it is worth and I’m pleased to be taking part to be honest. This is a war after all and I am part of the war effort. A thankless task I’m sure you’ll agree but through the filter of the digital I allow real events to take shape. Well as real as they can be…

U Section.

I have a cubical now, previously I had my laptop and clung to the edge of Hoskins desk but Hoskins is dead now. I mean Bob Hoskins is dead, the real Hoskins is still alive but I don’t see so much of him anymore. In the Bob Hoskins obit they mentioned the Super Mario film and that made me slightly angry and nostalgic at the same time, I don’t think Bob would’ve wanted it that way, but it was the first Hollywood adaptation of a computer game and that I suppose makes me feel a pang of nostalgia, like part of my childhood make-up, my ‘identity’ has been co-opted by a national institution, although Hollywood is an oligopoly, it is hard for the Iranians to differentiate between the two, I’m always trying to explain that to my Iranian counterparts. Their section is called:

ترجمة الرقمية والاعتماد منتدى مجلس.

I doubt it means anything, Kayvan is always ribbing me, I don’t even know his real name, he doesn’t know mine. U section is much better organized I’ve been led to believe. In my cubical I have a nodding dog, it is reminiscent of a Lurcher but perhaps I only think this because my mother kept Lurcher’s as a child, it has a spring neck that sometimes makes me feel like he is a grotesque biological experiment gone wrong, I mean, what if it was a nodding dog, presented in a glass case. Dead of course but eat your heart out Damian Hirst, maybe that could be his next piece. I mean for him to eat his art out in a public sphere, camera, cage, suspended, Blaine.

I don’t have time for this job, I have my cubicle, my nodding dog and my poster for Rossellini’s Rome: Open City. There are a trio of German soldiers surrounding a woman, her arms raised in a tableaux of defiance. I have seen the film, people always think that I haven’t, when they walk past the cubicle they say ‘Bit arty for you Hugh’. Wink and a nod, wink and a nod, but I have seen it. I imagine that when this war is over, when section U has been disbanded and that we can once again walk in the streets without fear then I will make a low budget verite piece, much in the vein of this film. Depicting the destruction that has been wrought but also containing the hope of a new beginning, a future that hold s alliance and cooperation at its heart rather than suspicion and surveillance. That is what I think when I look at the picture/poster. The image, the signifiers all interrelated and codependent, I know the scheme that has been employed, great propaganda like the soviets, communists. I know, I know.

Hugh, that’s my name. Don’t wear it out, wares in doubt, be they hard or soft. I’m a software man, hardboard outboard motor. Hardware is rigged, like powerhouse juggernaut; don’t wear it out, constantly overclocked as the motherboards mesh together. Hyper-board, I am hyper bored as I string together to stumble over another peer to peer message board. I’ve devised an algorithm to scan them for certain combinations of letters in both Farsi and English that when matched up with the database over at P Section we can begin to correlate a wider spectrum of terminology to initiate a global IP sweep as it were. Obviously a lot of the statistical work is completely theoretical at this stage and truth be told so is my algorithm in terms of the results it will ping back but I’m confident that the data will have some baring on the wider theatre of operations.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidbamford.substack.com