TAGGING DEVIANTS
You realise that you’re a deviant when you’ve been electronically tagged. Tagging deviants was the latest device dreamed up by the Anticlock authorities to ensure that all our activities were closely monitored. Once you’ve been electronically tagged, you know for sure that you’re on the outside and there’s no way back in.
It was 6 November the date it happened, the day I knew for sure that I would never be accepted in this dismal Anticlock realm. Only in exceptional circumstances was anyone on the Deviants List ever reintegrated into the system. The word on the street was that money was the only solution. You could buy yourself immunity from surveillance with one million antics. Antics are the Anticlock currency. I’ll tell you all about that some other time. Anyway, one million antics were obviously beyond my reach.
The Snoops who fixed the tag to my ankle treated me with contempt. In their eyes I was an undesirable alien, a reprobate who needed to be closely monitored in case I went off the rails and threatened the natural order of things in this best of all possible worlds.
It was a strange sensation being tagged. I’d never been treated like an object before. I felt as if I was no longer human. For the very first time I had genuine sympathy for slaves, robots and wild animals. I realised what it was like to be utterly defenceless. My controllers didn’t bother to speak to me, just barked orders in my face, hoping that I would retaliate and give them a pretext to beat me with their truncheons for disobeying their commands. So I said nothing and complied with their demands in sullen silence.
They began by removing all my clothes. There’s nothing like being stripped naked to make you feel powerless and insignificant. I lost all sense of dignity and self-respect under the relentless gaze of the Snoops. They searched what I’d been wearing very carefully, suspecting that as an `undesirable’, I must be carrying illicit objects or banned substances. Fortunately I had nothing on me. I occasionally smoked marijuana but there was none in my pockets. Spliffs are banned of course in Anticlockwise.
After I put my clothes back on, they pushed me against a wall and photographed me holding a white card against my chest with my number scrawled on it in capital letters: AC937/X8. They took my fingerprints and a retinal eye scan. I must have appeared uncooperative. One of the Snoops decided to crack me round the head with his truncheon to knock the sullenness out of my system. When they’d finished with me, I walked away in a daze. Tagging Deviants – Electronic Control : I now had a practical understanding of what the strapline meant.
My life’s been different ever since. I never feel as if I am on my own any more. There’s always someone’s tracking me down, checking that I’m not straying off-course. I feel like a prisoner in a cage. And that’s not all. Being electronically tagged has changed my relationship with Tia.
After 6 November we never again felt as if we were alone together. Tia became quite paranoid about the whole affair. I tried to reassure her that it was just a tracking device and that it wasn’t listening to what we said or worst still relaying pictures of us back to the Snoops’ HQ. But she had little faith in my words.
She remained convinced that they were spying on our most intimate feelings, especially when we made love. The mere presence of the tagging device in the room with us made us both feel self-conscious, almost humiliated. It’s not pleasant imagining the Snoops leering at our sexual embraces.
The Anticlocks have a way of getting into your mind you see. That’s the real problem. It’s psychological. Their surveillance culture makes everyone fearful and suspicious of everyone else. We’re all looking over our shoulder all the time. Electronic tagging has just made me more aware of it, that’s all…
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