brief word to the Search Engine, requesting guidance — David donned his own Mind’sEye and slid into another time.
…He walked into daylight But this crowded street, lined by great, boxy multi-storey apartment blocks, was dark. Hemmed in by the peculiar topography of the site — the famous seven hills — Romans, already a million strong, had built up.
In many ways, the city had a remarkably modern feel. But this was not the twenty-first century: he was glimpsing this swarming, vibrant capital on a bright Italian summer afternoon just five years after the cruel death of Christ Himself. There were no motor vehicles, of course, and few animal-drawn carts or carriages. The most common form of transport, other than by foot, was by hired litter or sedan chair. Even so, the streets were so crowded that even foot traffic could circulate at little more than a crawl.
There was a crush of humanity — citizens, soldiers, paupers and slaves — all around them. David and Heather towered over most of these people; and besides, walking on the modern ground surface, they were hovering above the cobbled floor of the ancient city. The poor and the slaves looked stunted, some visibly ravaged by malnourishment and disease, even rat-like, as they crowded around the public water fountains. But many of the citizens — some in brilliant-white gold-stitched togas, benefiting from generations of affluence funded by the expanding Empire — were as tall and well fed as David, and, in suitable clothes, would surely not have looked out of place in the streets of any city of the twenty-first century.
But David could not get used to the way the swarming crowds simply pushed
They came now to a more open place. This was the Forum Romanum: a finely paved rectangular court surrounded by grand, two-story public buildings, fronted by rows of narrow marble columns. A line of triumphal columns, each capped by gold-leafed statues, strode boldly down the centre of the court, and farther ahead, beyond a clutter of characteristically Roman red-tiled, sloping roofs, he could see the curving bulk of the Colosseum.
In one corner he noticed a group of citizens, grandly dressed — Senators, perhaps — arguing vehemently, tapping at tablets, oblivious of the beauty and marvel around them. They were proof that this city was no museum, but very obviously the operational capital of a huge, complex and well-run empire — the Washington of its day — and its very mundanity was exhilarating, so different from the seamless, shining, depopulated reconstructions of the old, pre-WormCam museums, movies and books.
But this Imperial city, already ancient, had just a few centuries more to survive. The great aqueducts would fall, the public fountains fail; and for a thousand years afterwards the Romans would be reduced to drawing their water by hand from the Tiber.
There was a tap on his shoulder.
David turned, startled. A man stood there, dressed in a drab, charcoal-grey suit and tie, utterly out of place here. He had short-cropped blond hair, and he was holding up a badge. And, like David and Heather, he was floating a few metres above the ground of Imperial Rome.
It was FBI Special Agent Michael Mavens.
“You,” David said. “What do you want with us? Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage to my family, Special Agent?”
“I never intended any damage, sir.”
“And now.”
“And now I need your help.”
Suppressing a sigh, David lifted his hands to his Mind’sEye headband. He could feel the indefinable tingle that came with the breaking of the equipment’s transceiver link to his cortex.
Suddenly he was immersed in the hot Roman night.
And around him the Forum Romanum was reduced. Great chunks of marble rubble littered the floor, their surfaces brown, decaying in the foul air of the city. Of the great buildings, only a handful of columns and crosspieces survived, poking out of the ground like exposed bones, and sickly urban-poisoned grass grew through cracks in the flags.
Bizarrely, amid the gaudy twenty-first-century tourists, grey-suited Mavens looked even more out of place than in ancient Rome.
Michael Mavens turned and studied Heather. Her eyes, dilated widely, sparkled with the unmistakable pearly glint of viewpoints, cast by the miniature WormCam generators implanted in her retinas. David took her hand. She squeezed gently.
Mavens caught David’s eye. He nodded, understanding. But he pressed: “We need to talk, sir. It’s important.”
“My brother?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. Will you accompany us back to our hotel? It isn’t far.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
So David walked from the ruined Forum Romanum, gently guiding Heather around the fallen masonry. Heather turned her head like a camera stand, still immersed in the bright glories of a city long dead, and spacetime distortion shone in her eyes.
They reached the hotel.
Heather had barely spoken since the Forum Romanum. She allowed David to kiss her on the cheek before she went to her room. There she lay down in the dark, facing the ceiling, her wormhole eyes sparkling.
David realized, uneasily, that he had absolutely no idea what she was looking at.
When he returned to his own room, Mavens was waiting. David prepared them drinks from the minibar: a single malt for himself, a bourbon for the agent.
Mavens made small talk. “You know, Hiram Patterson’s reach is awesome. In your bathroom just now I used a WormCam mirror to pick the spinach out of my teeth. My wife has a wormhole NannyCam at home. My brother and his wife are using a WormCam monitor to keep track of their thirteen-year-old daughter, who’s a little wild, in their opinion… And so on. To think of it: the miracle technology of the age, and we use it in such trivial ways.”
David said briskly, “As long as he continues to sell it, Hiram doesn’t care what we do with it. Why don’t you tell me why you’ve come so far to see me, Special Agent Mavens?”
Mavens dug into a pocket of his crumpled jacket, and pulled out a thumbnail-sized data disk; he turned it like a coin, and David saw hologram shimmers in its surface. Mavens placed the disk carefully on the small polished table beside his drink. “I’m looking for Kate Manzoni,” he said. “And Bobby Patterson, and Mary Mays. I drove them into hiding. I want to bring them back. Help them rebuild their lives.”
“What can I do?” David asked sourly. “After all, you have the resources of the FBI behind you.”
“Not for this. To tell the truth the Agency has given up on the three of them. I haven’t.”
“Why? You want to punish them some more?”
“Not at all,” Mavens said uncomfortably. “Manzoni’s was the first high-profile case which hinged on WormCam evidence. And we got it wrong.” He smiled, looking tired. “I’ve been checking. That’s the wonderful thing about the WormCam, isn’t it? It’s the world’s greatest second-guess machine.
“You see, it’s now possible to read many types of information through the WormCam: particularly, the contents of computer memories and storage devices. I checked through the equipment Kate Manzoni was using at the time of her alleged crime. And, eventually, I found that what Manzoni claimed had been true all along.”
“Which is?”
“That Hiram Patterson was responsible for the crime — though it would be difficult to pin it on him, even using the WormCam. And he framed Manzoni.” He shook his head. “I knew and admired Kate Manzoni’s journalism long before the case came up. The way she exposed the Wormwood cover-up.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” David said levelly. “You were only doing your job.”
Mavens said harshly, “It’s a job I screwed up. Not the first. But those who were harmed — Bobby and Kate — have dropped out of sight. And they aren’t the only ones.”
“Hiding from the WormCam,” David said.
“Of course. It’s changing everybody…”
It was true. In the new openness, businesses boomed. Crime seemed to have dropped to an irreducible minimum, a bump driven by mental disorder. Politicians had, cautiously, found ways to operate in the new glass-walled world, with their every move open to scrutiny by a concerned and online citizenry, now and in the future. Beyond the triviality of time tourism, a new true history, cleansed of myths and lies — and no less wonderful for that — was entering the consciousness of the species; nations and religions and corporations seemed almost to have worked through their round of apologies to each other and to the people. The surviving religions, refounded and cleansed, purged of corruption and greed, were re-emerging into the light, and — it seemed to David — were beginning to address their true mission, which was humanity’s search for the transcendent.
From the highest to the lowest. Even manners had changed. People seemed to be becoming a little more tolerant of one another, able to accept each other’s differences and faults — because each person knew he or she was under scrutiny too.
Mavens was saying, “You know, it’s as if we have all been standing in spotlights on a darkened stage. Now the theatre lights are up, and we can see all the way to the wings — like it or not. I guess you’ve heard of MAS? — Mutually Assured Surveillance — a consequence of the fact that everybody carries a WormCam; everybody is watching everybody else. Suddenly our nation is full of courteous, wary, watchful citizens. But it can be harmful. Some people seem to be becoming surveillance obsessives, unwilling to do anything that will mark them out as different from the norm. It’s like living in a village dominated by prying gossips…”
“But surely the WormCam has been, on balance, a force for good. Open Skies, for instance.”
Open Skies had been President Eisenhower’s old dream of international transparency. Even before the WormCam there had been an implementation of something like that vision, with aerial reconnaissance, surveillance satellites, weapons inspectors. But it was always limited: inspectors could be thrown out, missile silos camouflaged by tarpaulins.
“But now,” said Mavens, “in this wonderful WormCam world, we’re watching them, and we know they are watching us. And nothing can be hidden. Arms reduction treaties can be verified; a number of armed conflicts have been frozen into impasse, both sides knowing what the other is about to do. Not only that, the citizens are watching as well. All over the planet…”
Dictatorial and repressive regimes, exposed to the light, were crumbling. Though some totalitarian governments had sought to use the new technology as an instrument of oppression, the (deliberate) flooding of those countries by the democracies with WormCams had resulted in openness and accountability. This was an extension of past work done by groups like the Witness Program, who for decades had supplied video equipment to human-rights groups:
“Believe me,” Mavens said, “the U.S. is getting off lightly. The worst scandal we suffered recently was the exposure of the Wormwood bunkers.” A pathetic, half-hearted exercise, a handful of hollowed-out mountains and converted mines, meant as a refuge for the rich and powerful — or at least their children — on Wormwood Day. The existence of such facilities had long been suspected; when they were exposed, their futility as refuges was quickly demonstrated by the scientists, and their builders mocked into harmlessness. Mavens said, “If you think about it, there was usually a lot more scandal than
“Do you believe it?”
