Bad Monkeys

white room (iv)

ONE OF THE FLOOR TILES HAS TURNED black. She’s prodding it with her foot as the doctor comes in.

“Maintenance had to replace it,” he explains. “One of the other inmates was feeling claustrophobic. She tried to dig her way out.”

“What did she use, a chair leg?”

“A ballpoint pen. My colleague Dr. Chiang got called away in the middle of a session, and he made the mistake of leaving his belongings on the table.”

“Your colleague. So you weren’t there when it happened.”

“No, it was on one of my days off. You doubt the story?”

She shrugs. “Nice job of color-matching.”

“If you’d like, I could call maintenance back in and have it pried up.”

“Don’t bother. Even if the organization put something under there, all you’d find is an ordinary patch of floor.”

“What would they put there, though? Some sort of microphone?”

She shakes her head. “The spy gear won’t be in the floor.”

“Meaning it is here somewhere?”

She glances at the smiling politician on the wall. “Eyes Only,” she says.

“You’ll have to decode that for me, Jane.”

“I told you about Panopticon, right?”

“‘The Department of Ubiquitous Intermittent Surveillance?’”

“That’s the one. Eyes Only is one of their intel-gathering programs. It uses these miniature sensor devices that are kind of like contact lenses, only smaller and thinner—so much so that they’re undetectable without special equipment. Now in theory you could plant these things anywhere, but in practice Panopticon only puts them on eyes. Representations of eyes, that is: photographs, paintings, drawings, sculpture…Any time you see an eyeball that’s not in an actual person’s head, there’s a chance it’s monitoring you.”

“How much of a chance?”

“Nobody outside Panopticon knows for sure. If you ask, they tell you, ‘Less than a hundred percent, but more than zero.’ It’s a joke, see? ‘Ubiquitous intermittent surveillance’ means they aren’t always watching, but they always might be.”

“Do you think they’re watching now?”

“I think the odds are closer to a hundred percent than zero.”

The doctor reaches to take down the photograph, but it’s fixed firmly in place. “Well,” he says, “I suppose I could get a towel or a washcloth to drape over it.”

“Don’t bother. I don’t really care if they’re watching. Besides, those aren’t the only eyes in the room.” She points to the identification badge clipped to the front of his lab coat. “And you’ve got more photo I.D. in your wallet, right? And maybe some snaps of the family?”

“They can see out of my wallet?”

“No, but they can hear.”

“The Eyes have Ears?”

“It’s an imperfect metaphor. Panopticon’s run by geeks, not poets.”

The doctor takes out his wallet and does a quick survey of its contents. Peering into the billfold, he asks: “Do they put these devices on currency, too?”

“Oh yeah. Smart money, they call that. They use it to track cash transactions.”

“Interesting,” says the doctor. “And disturbing.”

“It’s scary when it works. But that’s the other half of the joke: the Eyes go blind a lot, and they miss stuff—whole trucks, sometimes.”

“Who told you about Eyes Only? Annie?”

“We covered it in dream class. But I guess you could say it was Dixon who really schooled me on the subject.”

“Did Mr. Dixon work for Panopticon?”

“A subdivision of Panopticon,” she says. “One that you really don’t want watching you…”