“My God.” Bobby said. “What a disaster.”
“Oh, garbage,” she snapped. “Come on, Bobby. Pretty soon the whole world will know the WormCam exists; it won’t be possible to keep a lid on it any longer. It has to be a good thing if the WormCam is prized out of the hands of this sick duopoly, the federal government and Hiram Patterson, for God’s sake.”
Hiram said coldly, “If Earth News have WormCam technology, it’s obvious who gave it to them.”
Kate looked puzzled. “Are you implying that…”
“Who else?”
“I’m a journalist,” Kate flared. “I’m no spy. The hell with you, Hiram. It’s obvious what happened. ENO just figured out that you must have found a way to adapt your wormholes as remote viewers. With that basic insight they duplicated your researches. It wouldn’t be hard; most of the information is in the public domain. Hiram, your hold on the WormCam was always fragile. It only took one person to figure it out independently.”
But Hiram didn’t seem to be hearing her. “I forgave you, took you in. You took my money. You betrayed my trust. You damaged my son’s mind and poisoned him against me.”
Kate stood and faced Hiram. “If you really believe that, you’re more twisted than I thought you were.”
The Search Engine called softly, “Excuse me, Hiram. Michael Mavens is here, asking to see you. Special Agent Mavens of…”
“Tell him to wait.”
“I’m afraid that isn’t an option, Hiram. And I have a call from David. He says it’s urgent.”
Bobby looked from one face to the other, frightened, bewildered, as his life came to pieces around him.
•
Mavens took a seat and opened a briefcase.
Hiram snapped, “What do you want, Mavens? I didn’t expect to see you again. I thought the deal we signed was comprehensive.”
“I thought so too, Mr. Patterson.” Mavens looked genuinely disappointed. “But the problem is, you didn’t stick to it. OurWorld as a corporation. One employee specifically. And that’s why I’m here. When I heard this case had turned up, I asked if I could become involved. I suppose I have a special interest.”
Hiram said heavily, “What case?”
Mavens picked up what looked like a charge sheet from his briefcase. “The bottom line is that a charge of trade-secret misappropriation, under the 1996 Economic Espionage Act, has been brought against OurWorld: by IBM, specifically by the director of their Thomas J. Watson research laboratory. Mr. Patterson, we believe the WormCam has been used to gain illegal access to IBM proprietary research results. Something called a synaesthesia-suppression software suite, associated with virtual-reality technology.” He looked up. “Does that make sense?”
Hiram looked at Bobby.
Bobby sat transfixed, overwhelmed by conflicting emotions, with no real idea how he should react, what he should say.
Kate said, “You have a suspect, don’t you, Special Agent?”
The FBI man eyed her steadily, sadly. “I think you already know the answer to that question, Ms. Manzoni.”
Kate appeared confused.
Bobby snapped, “You mean Kate? That’s ridiculous.”
Hiram thumped a fist into a palm. “I knew it. I knew she was trouble. But I didn’t think she’d go this far.”
Mavens sighed. “I’m afraid there’s a very clear evidentiary trail leading to you, Ms. Manzoni.”
Kate flared. “If it’s there, it was planted.”
Mavens said, “You’ll be placed under arrest. I hope there won’t be any trouble. If you’ll sit quietly, the Search Engine will read you your rights.”
Kate looked startled as a voice — inaudible to the rest of them — began to sound in her ears.
Hiram was at Bobby’s side. “Take it easy, son. We’ll get through his shit together. What were you trying to do, Manzoni? Find another way to get to Bobby? Is that what it was all about?” Hiram’s face was a grim mask, empty of emotion: there was no trace of anger, pity, relief — or triumph.
And the door was flung open. David stood there, grinning, his bear-like bulk filling the frame; he held a rolled-up SoftScreen in one hand. “I did it,” he said. “By God, I did it… What’s happening here?”
Mavens said, “Doctor Curzon, it may be better if -”
“It doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re doing, it doesn’t matter. Not compared to this.” He spread his SoftScreen on the tabletop. “As soon as I got it I came straight here. Look at this.”
The SoftScreen showed what looked superficially like a rainbow, reduced to black and white and grey, uneven bands of light that arced, distorted, across a black background.
“Of course it’s somewhat grainy,” David said. “But still, this picture is equivalent to the quality of images returned by NASA’s first flyby probes back in the 1970s.”
“That’s Saturn,” Mavens said, wondering. “The planet Saturn.”
“Yes. We’re looking at the rings.” David grinned. “I established a WormCam viewpoint all of a billion and a half kilometres away. Quite a thing, isn’t it? If you look closely you can even see a couple of the moons, here in the plane of the rings.”
Hiram laughed out loud and hugged David’s bulk. “My God, that’s bloody terrific.”
“Yes. Yes, it is. But that’s not important. Not any more.”
“Not important? Are you kidding?”
Feverishly David began to tap at his SoftScreen; the image of Saturn’s rings dissolved. “I can reconfigure it from here. It’s as easy as that. It was Bobby who gave me the clue. I just hadn’t thought out of the box as he did. If I restrict the spacelike interval to a couple of metres, then the rest of the wormhole span becomes timelike…”
Bobby leaned forward to see. The ’Screen now showed an equally grainy image of a much more mundane scene. Bobby recognized it immediately: it was David’s work cubicle in the Wormworks. David was sitting there, his back to the viewpoint, and Bobby was standing at his side, looking over his shoulder.
“As easily as that,” David said again, his voice small, awed. “Of course we’ll have to run repeatable trials, properly timed.”
Hiram said, “That’s just the Wormworks. So what?”
“You don’t understand. This new wormhole has the same, umm, length as the other.”
“The one that reached to Saturn.”
“Yes. But instead of spanning eighty light-minutes -”
Mavens finished it for him. “I get it. This wormhole spans eighty minutes.”
“Yes,” David said. “Eighty minutes into the past. Look, Father. You’re seeing me and Bobby, just before you summoned him away.”
Hiram’s mouth had dropped open.
Bobby felt as if the world was swimming around him, changing, configuring into some strange, unknowable pattern, as if another chip in his head had been switched off. He looked at Kate, who seemed diminished, terrified, lost in shock.
But Hiram, his troubles dismissed, grasped the implications immediately. He glared into the air. “I wonder how many of them are watching us right now?”
Mavens said, “Who?”
“In the future. Don’t you see? If he’s right this is a turning point in history, this moment, right here and right now, the invention of this, this past viewer. Probably the air around us is fizzing with WormCam viewpoints, sent back by future historians. Biographers. Hagiographers.” He lifted up his head and bared his teeth. “Are you watching me? Are you? Do you remember my name? I’m Hiram Patterson! Hah! See what I did, you arseholes!”
•
And in the corridors of the future, innumerable watchers met his challenging gaze.
Two
The eyes Of God
History… is indeed little more than a chronicle of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
— Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
Chapter 13
Walls of glass
Kate was in remand, waiting for her trial. It was taking a while to come to cour
t, as it was a complex case, and Hiram’s lawyers had argued, in confidence through the FBI, that her trial should be delayed anyhow while the new past-viewing capabilities of WormCam technology stabilized.
In fact, such had been the wide publicity surrounding Kate’s case that the ruling was being taken as a precedent. Even before its past-viewing possibilities were widely understood, the WormCam was expected to have an immediate impact on almost all contested criminal cases. Many major trials had been delayed or paused awaiting new evidence, and in general only minor and uncontested cases were being processed through the courts.
For a long time to come, whatever the outcome of the case, Kate wouldn’t be going anywhere. So Bobby decided to go find his mother.
Heather Mays lived in a place called Thomas City, close to the Utah-Arizona state line. Bobby flew into Cedar City and drove from there. At Thomas, he stopped the car a few blocks short of Heather’s home and walked.
A police car silently cruised by, and a beefy male cop peered out at Bobby. The cop’s face was a broad, hostile moon, scarred by the pits of multiple basal-cell carcinomas. But his glare softened with recognition. Bobby could read his lips: Good day, Mr. Patterson.
As the car moved on, Bobby felt a shiver of self consciousness. The WormCam had made Hiram the most famous person on the planet, and in the all-seeing public eye, Bobby stood right at his side.
He knew, in fact, that as he approached his mother’s home a hundred WormCam viewpoints must hover at his shoulder even now, gazing into his face at this difficult moment, invisible emotional vampires.
He tried not to think about it: the only possible defence against the WormCam. He walked on through the heart of the little town.
Out-of-season April snow was falling on the roofs and gardens of clapboard houses that might have been preserved for a hundred years. He passed a small pond where children were skating, round and round in tight circles, laughing loudly. Even under the pale wintry sun, the children wore sunglasses and silvery, reflective smears of sunblock.
Thomas was a settled, peaceful, anonymous place, one of hundreds like it, he supposed, here in the huge empty heart of America. It was a place that, three months ago, he would have regarded as deadly dull; if he’d ever found himself here he probably would have hightailed it for Vegas as soon as possible. And yet now he found himself wondering how it would have been to grow up here.
As he watched the cop car pass slowly along the street, he noticed a strange flurry of petty law-breaking following in its wake. A man emerging from a sushi-burger store crumpled the paper his food had been wrapped in and dropped it to the floor, right under the cops’ noses. At a crossing, an elderly woman jaywalked, glaring challengingly through the cops’ windscreen. And so on. The cops watched tolerantly. And as soon as the car had passed, the people, done with thumbing their noses at the authorities, resumed their apparently lawful lives.
This was a widespread phenomenon. There had been a surprisingly wide-ranging, if muted, rebellion against the new regime of invisible WormCam overseers. The idea of the authorities having such immense powers of oversight did not, it seemed, sit well with the instincts of many Americans, and there had been rises in petty-crime rates all over the country. Otherwise law-abiding people seemed suddenly struck by a desire to perform small illegal acts — littering, jaywalking — as if to prove they were still free, despite the authorities’ assumed scrutiny. And local cops were learning to be tolerant of this.
It was just a token, of liberties defended. But Bobby supposed it was healthy.
He reached the main street. Animated images on tabloid vending machines urged him to download their latest news, for just ten dollars a shot. He eyed the seductive headlines. There was some serious news, local, national and international — it seemed that the town was getting over an outbreak of cholera, related to stress on the water supply, and was having some trouble assimilating its quota of sea-level-rise relocates from Galveston Island — but the serious stuff was mostly swamped by tabloid trivia.
A local member of Congress had been forced out of office by a WormCam exposure of sexual peccadilloes. She had been caught pressuring a high-school football hero, sent to Washington as a reward for his sporting achievements, into another form of athletics… But the boy had been over the age of consent; as far as Bobby was concerned the Representative’s main crime, in this dawning age of the WormCam, was stupidity.
Well, she wasn’t the only one. It was said that twenty percent of members of Congress, and almost a third of the Senate, had announced they would not be seeking re-election, or would retire early, or had just resigned outright. Some commentators estimated that fully half of all America’s elected officials might be forced out of office before the WormCam became embedded in the national, and individual, consciousness.
Some said this was a good thing. that people were being frightened into decency. Others pointed out that most humans had moments they would prefer not to share with the rest of mankind. Perhaps in a couple of electoral cycles the only survivors among those in office, or prepared to run for office, would be the pathologically dull with no personal lives to speak of at all.
No doubt the truth, as usual, would be somewhere between the extremes.
There was still some coverage of last week’s big story: the attempt by unscrupulous White House aides to discredit a potential opponent of President Juarez at the next election campaign. They had WormCammed him sitting on the john with his trousers down his ankles, picking his nose and extracting fluff from his navel.
But this had rebounded on the voyeurs, and had done no damage to Governor Beauchamp at all. After all, everybody had to use the john; and probably nobody, no matter how obscure, did so now without wondering if there was a WormCam viewpoint looking down (or, worse, up) at her.
Even Bobby had taken to using the lavatory in the dark. It wasn’t easy, even with the new easy-use touch-textured plumbing that was rapidly becoming commonplace. And he sometimes wondered if there was anybody in the developed world who still had sex with the lights on…
He doubted that even the supermarket-tabloid vendors would persist with such paparazzi exposure as the shock value wore off. It was telling that these images, which would have been shockingly revealing just a few months ago, now blared multi-coloured in the middle of the afternoon from stands in the main street of this Mormon community, unregarded by almost everyone, young and old, children and churchgoers alike.
It seemed to Bobby that the WormCam was forcing the human race to shed a few taboos, to grow up a little.
He walked on.
The Mayses’ home was easy to find. Before this otherwise nondescript house, in a nondescript residential street, here in the middle of classic small-town America, he found the decades-old symbol of fame or notoriety: a dozen or so news crews, gathered before the white painted picket fence that bordered the garden. Instant access WormCam technology or not, it was going to take a long time before the news-watching public was weaned off the interpretative presence of a reporter interposing herself before some breaking news story.
Bobby’s arrival, of course, was a news event in itself. Now the journalists came running toward him, drone cameras bobbing above them like angular, metallic balloons, snapping questions. Bobby, this way please… Bobby… Bobby, is it true this is the first time you’ve seen your mother since you were three years old?… Is it true your father doesn’t want you here, or was that scene in the OurWorld boardroom just a setup for the WormCams?… Bobby… Bobby…
Bobby smiled, as evenly as he could manage. The reporters didn’t try to follow him as he opened the small gate and walked through the fence. After all, there was no need; no doubt a thousand WormCam viewpoints were trailing him even now.
He knew there was no point asking for respect for his privacy. There was no choice, it seemed, but to endure. But he felt that unseen gaze, like a tangible pressure on the back of his neck.
And the eeriest thought of all was that among this cluster
ing invisible crowd there might be watchers from the unimaginable future, peering back along the tunnels of time to this moment. What if he himself, a future Bobby, was among them?…
But he must live the rest of his life, despite this assumed scrutiny.
He rapped on the door and waited, with gathering nervousness. No WormCam, he supposed, could watch the way his heart was pumping; but surety the watching millions could see the set of his jaw, the drops of perspiration he could feel on his brow despite the cold.
The door opened.
•
It had taken some persuading for Bobby to get Hiram to give his blessing to this meeting.
Hiram had been seated alone at his big mahogany effect desk, before a mound of papers and SoftScreens. He sat hunched over, defensively. He had developed a habit of glancing around, flicking his gaze through the air, searching for WormCam viewpoints like a mouse in fear of a predator.
“I want to see her,” Bobby had said. “Heather Mays. My mother. I want to go meet her.”
Hiram looked as exhausted and uncertain as at any time Bobby could remember. “It would be a mistake. What good would it do you?”
Bobby hesitated. “I don’t know. I don’t know how it feels to have a mother.”
“She isn’t your mother. Not in any real sense. She doesn’t know you, and you don’t know her.”
“I feel as if I do. I see her on every tabloid show…”
“Then you know she has a new family. A new life that has nothing to do with you.” Hiram eyed him. “And you know about the suicide.”
Bobby frowned. “Her husband.”
“He committed suicide, because of the media intrusion. All because your girlfriend gave away the WormCam to the sleaziest journalistic reptiles on the planet. She’s responsible.”
“Dad.”
“Yes, yes, I know. We had this argument already.”
Hiram got out of his chair, walked to the window, and massaged the back of his neck. “Christ, I’m tired. Look, Bobby, any time you feel like coming back to work, I could bloody well use some help.”
The Light of Other Days Page 13