There was another bulletin on the Neural Network News last night about widespread police brutality. Of course there is no such thing as an actual official police force any more – there is no need for an actual police force any more, not since the introduction of the Neural Net back in 2064. The police are all on the inside now – as we all know very well! Every citizen on planet Earth is under the direct 24 hrs per day surveillance of an impartial and all-seeing Artificial Intelligence known as The Panopticon. We don’t need clowns in uniform any more, hitting people over the head with their truncheons, or firing on crowds with their water-cannons! But – getting back to the news story – what happens a lot these days is that certain citizens take up masquerading as uniformed police officers and going around beating up people as part of what I suppose you could call a kind of ‘historical hobby’. Just like people used to enact the American Civil War, back when there still was such a place as America. Recently, it seems, levels of police violence have been sky-rocketing. The Panopticon has been turning a blind eye to this gratuitous police violence and the individuals involved have not been penalized. Research has shown – according to the news bulletin – that there is a deeply engrained need in the human psyche for us to be bullied and harassed and intimidated by men wearing uniforms. Without authoritarian paternalistic abuse of this sort the human race will grow sickly, and may even – the research suggests – die out completely. The decision has been made therefore to tolerate the activities of the hobbyists, who are in reality no more policemen than you or I! That’s all very well, I can’t help thinking, but what is next? The re-introduction of traffic-wardens, even though there is no longer any such thing as private transport? The reinstatement of teachers, even though knowledge can now be downloaded directly into the occipital lobe, as and when needed? Perhaps we should bring back priests, even though God has now been scientifically proven to be nothing more than a primitive superstition which has been cynically exploited for centuries by power-hungry psychopathic elitists? Or maybe we should be considering the re-introduction of braying jack-ass brain-dead politicians, even though the entire planet is now governed by an incorruptible inhuman AI? Where – I would like to know – will it all end?