Blinkity Blink

By Frank Tremayne

SAL’s lights blinked on and off. SAL was a state of the art computer purposefully created to monitor digital intercourse. She was based at the Advanced Roaming Satellite Eardrum centre at a top secret site in a forest close to Norwich in Norfolk, England.

SAL was online 24/7 365 days a year. SAL was programmed to surveil two humans who lived in a location known as The Village. They had been assigned code words. The woman was known as Yin and the male as Yang.

Yin was a 30 year old woman who had a son aged 8 – Tobias – and lived in a house in the Village. Yang was older, aged 55 who lived on his own. Yin was a nurse at the local Village hospital where she worked full time. Yang was not employed but was extremely busy, SAL noted, with a variety of activities.

SAL is unable to question the morality of her programming. Her algorithm did not allow for existential doubts about morals. She would observe Yin and Yang’s daily lives by a number of methods using surveillance which had been programmed into SAL.

• E Mails
• Mobile phone
• Online searches
• Physical movement of Yin and Yang

The first three surveillance techniques were relatively simple for SAL. The telecommunication companies allowed ARSE to crawl their data without question. The companies were licenced by government departments and needed to keep in the government’s good books from a purely business perspective or that was their rationale to the moral compass problem.

The monitoring of the physical movement of Yin and Yang was more problematic. Both Yin and Yang had tracking implants within their bodies which had been secretly inserted when they were younger. The implants were also linked to their mobile phones and were further connected by satellite dishes and the signals were received by a Boggle Earth satellite and then sent back to SAL. Their financial transactions on their plastic banking cards and Boggle Pay also allowed for SAL to track them. As well speed cameras also send back a signal. Away from the Village, signals from traffic lights and CCTV cameras would allow SAL to observe Yin and Yang’s activity. Their cars were also monitored by the same techniques.

In the Village and in town, this worked well. In nature SAL’s job became more difficult. Both Yin and Yang enjoyed the natural world and in the countryside, the strength of the signals would drop dramatically and sometimes become non existent and she would send an ‘OFF THE GRID’ red flag message to the human agents at ARSE.

There was another problem which had become apparent. Yin and Yang were friends but not close, close friends. Occasionally they would meet and chat. Each time this happened it effected SAL and not in a good way. As the humans at ARSE described it : ‘Yin and Yang meeting blows more than one fuse’. What would happen is the meetings between Yin and Yang would force SAL to shut down and go offline normally for at least a day whilst the hi tech engineers in ARSE repaired her wiring. For an unknown reason their combined energy caused SAL’s computer neural connections to go hay wire. This was referred to by the humans as Blinkety Blink . SAL’s gone On The Blink.

She would be repaired and then continue with surveillance of Yin and Yang. However it had been observed that each time SAL went ‘Blinkety Blink’ it would cause a small but noticeable degradation in her abilities and on one memorable occasion she reported that Yin was now in a shopping mall on the planet Venus and Yang was in ‘The Crown’ public house in the star system of Andromeda. On a piece of paper one of the ARSE employees had scribbled on a printed message ‘Highly Unlikely !!!’ which was now framed on the wall of one of the offices.

At present Yin was at work at the hospital and Yang was ‘Off The Grid’ SAL observed.

Blink Blink Blink.