But that was little comfort for those who feared that their perceived need for curtailage — a defined space within which they could achieve solitude, anonymity, reserve and intimacy with loved ones — might no longer be met.
And now, as the WormCam’s history-view facilities deepened, even the past was no refuge.
Many people had been hurt, in one way or another, by the revelation of the truth. Many of them blamed not the truth, or themselves, but the WormCam, and those who had inflicted it on the world.
Hiram himself remained the most obvious target.
At first, Bobby suspected, he had almost enjoyed his notoriety. Any celebrity was good for business. But the hail of threats and assassination and sabotage attempts had worn him down. There were even libel actions, as people claimed Hiram must somehow be fabricating what the WormCam was showing about themselves, their loved ones, their enemies, or their heroes.
Hiram had taken to living in the light. His West Coast mansion was drenched in light from floods powered by multiple generators. He even slept in brilliant illumination. No security system was foolproof, but at least Hiram could ensure that anybody who got through would be visible to the WormCams of the future.
So Hiram lived, skewered by pitiless light, alone, scrutinized, loathed.
•
The gruesome procedure resumed.
Manning consulted his notebook. “Let me set out some of the facts: incontrovertible historical truths, all properly observed and notarized. First, Kingsley’s affair with Ms. Morris wasn’t his first in his time with you. He had a short, apparently unsatisfactory fling with another woman beginning a month after he met you. And another six months later.”
“No.”
“In all, he seems to have had six consummated relationships with other women before you challenged him over Jodie.” He smiled. “If it’s any consolation he’s also cheated on other partners, before and since. He seems to be something of a serial adulterer.”
“This is ridiculous. I’d have known.”
“But you’re also human. I can show you incidents where evidence of Kingsley’s unfaithfulness was clearly available to you, yet you turned aside, rationalizing it away without even being aware of what you were doing. Confabulation.”
She said coldly, “I’ve told you how it was. Kingsley started to cheat on me because the miscarriage screwed up our relationship.”
“Ah, the miscarriage: the great causal event in your life. But I’m afraid it wasn’t like that at all. Kingsley’s behaviour patterns were well established long before he met you, and were barely altered by the miscarriage incident. You’ve also said that you believe the miscarriage gave you a spur to working harder at developing your own career.”
“Yes. That’s obvious.”
“This is a little more difficult to establish, but again I can demonstrate to you that the upward trajectory of your career began some months before the miscarriage. Again, you were doing it anyhow; the miscarriage didn’t really change anything.” He studied her. “Kate, you’ve constructed a kind of story around the miscarriage. You’ve wanted to believe that it was significant beyond itself. The miscarriage was a horrible trial for you to endure. But it actually changed very little… I sense you don’t believe me.”
She said nothing.
Manning steepled his fingers and put them to his chin. “I think you’ve been both right and wrong about yourself. I think that the miscarriage you suffered did change your life. But not in the rather superficial way you think it did. It didn’t make you work harder, or cause cracks in your relationship with Kingsley. But the loss of your child did wound you deeply. And I think you’re now driven by a fear that it might happen again.”
“A fear?”
“Please believe I’m not judging you. I’m merely trying to explain. Your compensatory activity is your work. Perhaps this deeper fear has driven you to greater achievement, greater success. But you’ve also become obsessive. It has only been your work that has distracted you from what you see as a terrible darkness at the centre of your being. And so you’re driven to ever greater lengths.”
“Right. And that’s why I used Hiram’s wormholes to spy on his competitors.” She shook her head. “How much do they pay you for this stuff, Doctor?”
Manning paced slowly before his SoftScreen. “Kate, you’re one of the first human beings to endure this — umm, this truth shock — but you won’t be the last. We are all going to have to learn to live without the comforting lies we whisper to ourselves in the darkness of our minds.”
“I’m capable of forming relationships: even long lasting, stable ones. How does that square with your portrait of me as a shock trauma victim?”
Manning frowned, as if puzzled by the question. “You mean Mr. Patterson? But there’s no contradiction there.” He walked over to Bobby and, with a murmured apology, studied him. “In many ways, Bobby Patterson is one of the most child-like adults I have ever encountered. He is therefore an exact fit for the, umm, the child-shaped hole at the centre of your personality.” He turned to Kate. “You see?”
She stared at him, her colour high.
Chapter 16
The water war
Heather sat at her home SoftScreen. She entered fresh search parameters. COUNTRY: Uzbekistan. TOWN: Nukus…
She wasn’t surprised to see an attractive turquoise blockout appear before her. Nukus was, after all, a war zone.
But that wouldn’t stop Heather for long. She had found reason in her time to find ways past censoring software before. And having access to a WormCam of her own was a powerful motivation. Smiling, she went to work.
•
When — after much public pressure — the first enterprising companies started offering WormCam access to private citizens via the Internet, Heather Mays was quick to subscribe.
She could even work from home. From a straightforward menu she selected a location to view. This could be anywhere in the world, specified by geographical coordinates or postal address as precisely as she could narrow it down. The mediating software would convert her request to latitude-longitude coordinates, and would offer her further options. The idea was to narrow her selection down until she had reached a specification of a room-sized volume, somewhere on or near the surface of the Earth, where a wormhole mouth would be established.
There was also a randomizing feature if she had no preference: for instance, if she wanted to view some remote picture-postcard coral atoll, but didn’t care which. She could even — at additional cost — select intermediate views, so for example she could view a street and select a house to call at.”
When she’d made her choice, a wormhole would be opened up between the supplier’s central server location and the site of her choice. Images from the WormCam would then be sent direct to her home terminal. She could even guide the viewpoint, within a limited volume.
The WormCam’s commercial interface made it feel like a toy, and every image was indelibly marked by intrusive OurWorld logos and ads. But Heather knew that intrinsically the WormCam was much more powerful than it appeared, in this first public incarnation.
When she’d first mastered the system, she was inordinately pleased, and called Mary to come see. “Look,” she said, pointing. The ’Cam image was of a nondescript house, in evening summer sunlight; the image frame was plastered with annoying ad logos. “That’s the house where I was born, in Boise, Idaho. In that very room, in fact.”
Mary shrugged. “Are you going to give me a turn?”
“Sure. In fact I got it for you, in part. Your homework assignments.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Listen, this isn’t a toy.” Abruptly the ’Screen filled up with a soothing-colour blockout.
Mary frowned. “What’s wrong?… Oh. I get it. It comes with a nanny filter. So we’re still only seeing what they will allow us to see.”
The idea was that the WormCams couldn’t be used voyeuristically, to spy on people in their homes or other priva
te places, or to breach corporate confidentiality, or to view government buildings, military establishments, police stations and other sensitive places. The nanny software was also supposed to monitor patterns of usage and, in case of morbid or excessive behaviour, to break the service and offer counselling, either by expert system or a human agent.
And, for now, only the remote-viewing facilities of the WormCam had been made available. Past-viewing was considered, by a whole slew of experts, to be much too dangerous to be put in the hands of the public — in fact, it was argued, it would be dangerous even to make the existence of the past-viewer facility widely known.
But, of course, all this cotton-wool wrapping would only be as effective as the ingenuity of the human designers behind it. And already, fuelled by Internet rumour and industry leaks and speculation, clamour was rising for much wider public access to the WormCam’s full power: to the past-viewers themselves.
Heather sensed that this new technology was by its very nature going to be difficult to contain…
But that wasn’t something she was about to share with her fifteen-year-old daughter.
Heather cleared down the wormhole and prepared to start a new search. “I need to work. Go. You can play later. One hour only.”
With a look of contempt, Mary walked out, and Heather returned her attention to Uzbekistan.
•
Anna Petersen, USN — heroine of a 24-by-7 WormCam docu-soap — had been heavily involved in the U.S.-led UN intervention in the water war raging in the Aral Sea area. A precision war was being fought by the Allies against the principal aggressor, Uzbekistan: an aggression which had threatened Western interests in oil and sulphur deposits and various mineral production sites, including a major copper source. Bright and technical, Anna had mostly worked on command, control and communications operations.
WormCam technology was changing the nature of warfare, as it had much else. WormCams had already largely replaced the complex of surveillance technology — satellites, monitoring aircraft and land-based stations — which had governed battlefields for decades. If there had been eyes capable of seeing, every major target in Uzbekistan would have sparkled with evanescent wormhole mouths. Precision-guided bombs, cruise missiles and other weapons, many of them no larger than birds, had rained down on Uzbek air-defence centers, military command and control facilities, on bunkers concealing troops and tanks, on hydroelectric plants and natural gas pipelines, and on targets in the cities, such as Samarkand, Andizhan, Namangan and the capital Tashkent.
The precision was unprecedented — and, for the first time in such operations, success could be verified.
Of course, for now, the Allied troops had the upper hand in WormCam deployment. But future wars would have to be fought under the assumption that both sides had perfect and up-to-date information on the strategy, resources and deployment of the other. Heather supposed it was too much to hope that such a change in the nature of war might lead to its cessation altogether. But at least it was giving the warriors pause for thought, and might lead to less meaningless waste.
Anyhow this war — Anna’s war, the cold battle of information and technology — was the war which the American public had witnessed, partly thanks to the WormCam viewpoint Heather herself had operated, flying alongside Petersen’s shapely shoulder as she moved from one clinical, bloodless scenario to another.
But there had been rumours — mostly circulating in the corners of the Internet that still remained uncontrolled — of another, more primitive war proceeding on the ground, as troops went in to secure the gains made by the air strikes.
Then a report had been released by an English news channel of a prison camp in the field, where UN captives, including Americans, were being held by the Uzbeks. There were also rumours that female prisoners, including Allied troops, had been taken to rape camps and forced brothels, deeper in the countryside.
Revealing all of this clearly served the purposes of the governments behind the anti-Uzbek alliance. The Juarez Administration’s spin doctors weren’t above highlighting the distressing idea of wholesome Anna from Iowa in the hands of swarthy Uzbek molesters.
To Heather this was evidence of a dirty, ground-level conflict far removed from the clean video game in which Anna Petersen had colluded. Heather’s hackles had risen at the idea that she might be playing a part in some vast propaganda machine. But when she sought permission from her employer, Earth News Online, to seek out the truth of the war, she was refused; access to the corporate WormCam facility would be withdrawn if she attempted it.
While she was in the Hiram’s-ex-wife spotlight she had to keep her head down.
But then the glaring focus public attention moved on from the Mayses — and she was able to afford her own WormCam access. She quit from ENO, took a new bill-paying job on a WormCam biography of Abraham Lincoln, and went to work.
It took her a couple of days to find what she was looking for.
She followed Uzbek prisoners being loaded onto an open UN truck and driven away through the rain. They passed through the town of Nukus, controlled by Allied troops, and on into the country beyond.
Here, she found, the Allied troops had established a prison camp of their own.
It was an abandoned iron-mining complex. The prisoners were held in metal cages, stacked up in an ore loader, just a meter high. The prisoners were unable to straighten their legs or backs. They were held without sanitation, adequate food, exercise or access to the Red Cross or its Muslim equivalent Merhamet. Filth dripped from cages above through the grates to those below.
She estimated there must be at least a thousand men here. They were given only a cup of weak soup a day, Hepatitis was epidemic, and other diseases were spreading.
Every other day, prisoners were selected, apparently at random, and taken out for beatings. Three or four soldiers would surround each prisoner, and would beat him with iron bars, wooden two-by-fours, truncheons, After a time the beating would stop. Any prisoner who could walk would be thrown back for further treatment, and the beating continued. They would be carried back to their cages by other prisoners.
That was the general pattern. There were some particular incidents, inflicted on the prisoners almost in a spirit of experimentation by the guards; a prisoner was not allowed to defecate; a prisoner was forced to eat sand; another was forced to swallow his own faeces.
Six people died while Heather monitored the camp. The deaths were as a result of the beatings, exposure or disease. Occasionally a prisoner would be shot, for example when attempting to escape or fight back. One prisoner was actually released, apparently to take the news of the determination of these blue-helmeted troops to his comrades.
Heather noticed that the guards were careful to use only captured weaponry, as if they were determined to leave no unambiguous trace of their activities. Evidently, she thought, the power of the WormCam had not yet impinged on the imaginations of these soldiers; they weren’t yet used to the idea that they could be watched, any place, any time, even retrospectively from the future.
It was almost impossible to watch these bloody deeds, which would have been invisible, to the public anyhow, only a few months before.
This would be dynamite up the ass of President Juarez, who in Heather’s opinion had already proven herself to be the worst sleazebag to pollute the White House since the turn of the century (which was saying something) — and not to mention, as the first female President, a major embarrassment to half the population.
And maybe — Heather allowed herself to hope — the mass consciousness would stir once more when people saw war as it truly was, in all its bloody glory, as they had briefly glimpsed it when Vietnam had become the first television war, and before the commanders had re-established control over media coverage.
She even cradled hopes that the approach of the Wormwood would change the way people felt about each other. If everything was to end just a handful of generations away, what did ancient enmities matter? And was the purpo
se of the remaining time, the remaining days of human existence, to inflict pain and suffering on others?…
There would still be just wars, surely. But it would no longer be possible to dehumanize and demonize an opponent — not when anybody could tap a SoftScreen and see for themselves the citizens of whichever nation was considered the enemy — and there could be no more warmongering lies, about the capability, intent and resolve of an opponent. If the culture of secrecy was finally broken, no government would get away with acts like this, ever again.
Or maybe she was just being an idealist.
She pressed on, determined, motivated. But no matter how hard she tried to be objective she found these scenes unbearably harrowing: the sight of naked, wretched men, writhing in agony at the feet of blue-helmet soldiers with clean, hard American faces.
•
She took a break. She slept a while, bathed, then prepared herself a meal (breakfast, at three in the afternoon).
She knew she wasn’t the only citizen putting the new facilities to use like this.
All around the country, she’d heard, truth squads were forming up, using WormCam and Internet. Some of the squads were no more than neighbourhood watch schemes. But one organization, called Copwatch, was disseminating instructions on how to shadow police at work in order to provide a “fair witness” to a cop’s every activity. Already, it was said, this new accountability was having a marked effect on the quality of policing; thuggish and corrupt officers — thankfully rare anyhow — were being exposed almost immediately.
The Light of Other Days Page 17