The Light of Other Days

“I don’t know, Dad,” Bobby said evenly. He felt calm, controlled; Hiram’s bluster, obviously manipulative, was unable to reach him. “I don’t know what I believe any more.”

“Why discuss it? Why don’t you use the WormCam to go check up on me?”

“I don’t intend to spy on you.”

Hiram stared at his son. “If you’re trying to find my conscience, you’re going to have to dig deeper than that. Anyhow it’s only reprogramming. Hell, they should lock her up and wipe the key. Reprogramming is nothing.”

Bobby shook his head. “Not to Kate. She’s fought against the methodology for years. She has a real dread of it, Dad.”

“Oh, bull. You were reprogrammed. And it didn’t hurt you.”

“I don’t know if it did or not.” Bobby stood now, and faced his father. He felt his own anger rising. “I felt different when the implant was turned off. I was angry, terrified, confused. I didn’t even know how I was supposed to feel.”

“You sound like her,” Hiram shouted. “She’s reprogrammed you with her words and her pussy more than I ever could with a bit of silicon. Don’t you see that? Ah, Christ. The one good thing the bloody implant did do to you was make you too dumb to see what’s happening to you…” He fell silent, and averted his eyes.

Bobby said coldly, “You’d better tell me what you meant by that.”

Hiram turned, anger, impatience, even something like guilt appearing to struggle for dominance within him. “Think about it. Your brother is a brilliant physicist. I don’t use the word lightly; he may be nominated for a Nobel Prize. And as for me.” He raised his hands. “I built up all this, from scratch. No dummy could have achieved that. But you…”

“Are you saying that’s because of the implant?”

“I knew there was a risk. Creativity is linked to depression. Great achievement is often linked to an obsessive personality. Blah, blah. But you don’t need bloody brains to become the President of the United States. Isn’t that right? Isn’t it?” And he reached for Bobby’s cheek, as if to pinch it, like a child’s.

Bobby flinched back. “I remember a hundred, a thousand times as a child when you said that to me. I never knew what you meant before.”

“Come on, Bobby.”

“You did it, didn’t you? You set Kate up. You know she’s innocent. And you’re prepared to let them screw around with her brain. Just as you screwed around with mine.”

Hiram stood there for a moment, then dropped his arms. “Bugger it. Go back to her if you want, bury yourself in her quim. In the end you always come running back, you little shit. I’ve got work to do.” And he sat at his desk, tapped the surface to open up his SoftScreens, and soon the glow of scrolling digits lit up his face, as if Bobby had ceased to exist.

•

After she was released, Bobby took her home.

As soon as they arrived she stalked around the apartment, closing curtains compulsively, shutting out the bright noon sunlight, trailing rooms of darkness.

She pulled off the clothes that she had worn since leaving the courtroom and consigned them to the garbage. He lay in bed listening to her shower, in pitch darkness, for long minutes. Then she slid beneath the duvet. She was cold, shivering in fact, her hair not quite dry. She had been showering in cold water. He didn’t question that; he just held her until his warmth had permeated her.

At last she said, in a whisper, “You need to buy thicker curtains.”

“Darkness can’t hide you from a WormCam.”

“I know that,” she said. “And I know that even now they are listening to every word we say. But we don’t have to make it easy for them. I can’t bear it. Hiram beat me, Bobby. And now he’s going to destroy me.”

Just as, he thought, Hiram destroyed me.

He said, “At least your sentence isn’t custodial; at least we have each other.”

She balled her fist and punched his chest, hard enough to hurt. “That’s the whole point. Don’t you see? You won’t have me. Because by the time they’ve finished, there won’t be a me any more. Whatever I will have become, I’ll be — different.”

He covered her fist with his hand until he felt her fingers uncurl. “It’s just reprogramming.”

“They said I must suffer from Syndrome E. Spasms of over-activity in my orbito-frontal and medial prefrontal lobes. Excessive traffic from the cortex prevents emotions rising to my consciousness. And that’s how I can commit a crime, directed at the father of my lover, without conscience or remorse or self-disgust.”

“Kate.”

“And then I’m to be conditioned against the use of the WormCam. Convicted felons like me, you see, aren’t to be allowed access to the technology. They will lay down false memory traces in my amygdala, the seat of my emotions. I’ll have a phobia, unbeatable, about even considering the use of a WormCam, or viewing its results.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

She propped herself up on her elbows. Her shadowed face loomed before him, her eye sockets smooth-rimmed wells of darkness. “How can you defend them? You, of all people.”

“I’m not defending anybody. Anyhow, I don’t believe there’s a them. Everybody involved has just been doing her job: the FBI, the courts.”

“And Hiram?”

He didn’t try to answer. He said, “All I want to do is hold you.”

She sighed, and laid her head down on his chest; it felt heavy, her cheek warm against his flesh.

He hesitated. “Anyhow, I know what the real problem is…”

He could feel her frowning.

“It’s me. Isn’t it? You don’t want a switch in your head, because that’s what I had when you found me. You have a dread of becoming like me, like I was. On some level.” He forced it out. “On some level, you despise me.”

She pulled herself back from him. “All you’re thinking about is yourself. But I’m the one who’s about to have her brains removed by an ice-cream scoop.” She got out of bed, walked out of the room, and shut the door with cold control, leaving him in darkness.

•

He slept awhile.

When he woke, he went to find her. The living room was still dark, the curtains closed and lights off. But he could tell she was here.

“Lights on.”

Light, garish and bright, flooded the room.

Kate was sitting on a sofa, fully dressed. She was facing a table, on which sat a bottle of some clear fluid, and another bottle, smaller. Barbiturates and alcohol. Both bottles were unopened, their seals intact. The liquor was an expensive absinthe.

She said, “I always did have good taste.”

“Kate.”

Her eyes were watering in the light, her pupils huge, making her seem child-like. “Funny, isn’t it? I must have covered a dozen suicides, more attempted. I know there are quicker ways than this. I could slit my wrists, or even my neck. I could even blow out my brains, before they get screwed up. This will be slower. Probably more painful. But it’s easy. You see? You sip and swallow, sip and swallow.” She laughed, coldly. “You even get drunk in the process.”

“You don’t want to do this.”

“No. You’re right. I don’t want to do it. Which is why I need you to help me.”

For answer he picked up the liquor and hurled it across the room. It smashed against a wall, creating a spectacular, expensive splash stain on the plaster there.

Kate sighed. “That’s not the only bottle in the world. I’ll do it eventually. I’d rather die than let them screw with my brain.”

“There must be another way. I’ll go back to Hiram, and tell him.”

“Tell him what? That if he doesn’t ’fess up I’m going to destroy myself? He’ll laugh at you, Bobby. He wants me destroyed, one way or the other.”

He paced the room, growing desperate. “Then let’s get out of here!”

She sighed. “They can watch us leave this room, follow us anywhere. We could go to the Moon and never be free.”

The voice seemed to come out of thin air. “If you believe that, you may as well give up now.”

Kate gasped; Bobby jumped and whirled. It had been the voice of a woman, or a girl — a familiar voice. But the room seemed empty.

Bobby said slowly, “Mary?”

Bobby saw her face first, floating in the air, as she began to peel back a hood. Then, as she started to move against the background, the perfection of her SmartShroud concealment began to break down, and he could make out her outline; a shadowed limb here, a vague discoloured blur where her torso must be, the whole overlaid by an odd, eye-deceiving fish-eye effect, like the earliest WormCam images. He noted, absently, that she seemed clean, healthy, even well fed.

“How did you get in here?”

She grinned. “If you come with me, Kate, I’ll show you.”

Kate said slowly, “Come with you? Where?”

“And why?” Bobby asked.

“’Why’ is obvious, Bobby,” Mary said, an echo of her adolescent prickle returning. “Because, as Kate keeps saying, if she doesn’t get out of here the man is going to stir her brains with a spoon.”

Bobby said reasonably, “Wherever she goes she can be traced.”

“Right,” Mary said heavily. “The WormCam. But you haven’t been able to trace me since I left home three months ago. You didn’t see me coming. You didn’t know I was in the apartment until I revealed myself. Look, the WormCam is a terrific tool. But it isn’t a magic wand. People are paralysed by it. They’ve stopped thinking. Even if Santa Claus can see you, what is he going to do? By the time he arrives you can be long gone.”

Bobby frowned. “Santa Claus?”

Kate said slowly, “Santa can see you all the time. On Christmas Eve, he can look back over the whole year and see if you’ve been naughty or nice.”

Mary grinned. “Santa must have had the first WormCam of all. Right? Merry Christmas.”

“I always thought that was a sinister myth,” Kate said. “But you can only keep away from Santa if you can see him coming.”

Mary smiled. “That’s easy.” She raised her arm, pulled back her SmartShroud sleeve and revealed what looked like a fat wristwatch. It was compact, scuffed, and had the look of something out