The Light of Other Days

Mavens grinned sourly. “Not for a second. I have the feeling that wherever we’re going, wherever the WormCam is taking us, it’s somewhere much stranger.”

“Perhaps,” David said. “I suppose we’ve lived through one of those perspective-changing moments: the last generation was the first to see the Earth whole from space; ours has been the first to see all of true history — and the truth about ourselves. You know, I should be able to deal with all this.” David forced a smile. “Take it from a Catholic, Special Agent Mavens. I grew up encouraged to believe I was already under the scrutiny of a kind of WormCam… but that ’Cam was the all-seeing eye of God. We must learn to live without subterfuge and shame. Yes, it’s hard for us — hard for me. But thanks to the WormCam, it seems to me everyone is becoming a little more sane.”

And it was remarkable that all of this had flowed from the introduction of a gadget which Hiram, its driving force, had thought was no more than a smarter TV camera. But now Hiram, in deep hiding, was, in the manner of such entrepreneurs all the way back to Frankenstein, in danger of being destroyed by his machine.

“Maybe in a generation or two this will leave us cleansed,” Mavens said. “But not everybody can stand being exposed. The suicide rate remains high — you’d be surprised if you knew how high. And there are many people, like Bobby, disappearing off the registers — poll returns, censuses. Some even dig traceable implants out of their arms. We can see them, of course, but we can’t give them a name.” He eyed David. “This is the kind of group we believe Bobby and the others have joined. They call themselves Refugees. And those are the kind of people we have to trace if we want to pick up Bobby.”

David frowned. “He has made his choice. He may be happy.”

“He’s on the run. He has no choices right now.”

“If you find him, you’ll find Kate too. And she will face her sentence.”

Mavens shook his head. “I can guarantee that won’t happen. I told you, I’ve evidence she’s innocent. I’m already preparing material for a fresh appeal.”

He picked up the data disk and tapped it on the table. “So,” he said. “You want to give your brother a lifeline?”

“What is it you want me to do?”

“We can track people with the WormCam simply by following them,” Mavens said. “It isn’t easy, and it’s labor-intensive, but it’s possible. But eyeball-tracking can be fooled. Nor can a WormCam trace reliably be keyed to any external indicator, even an implant. Implants can be dug out, transferred, reprogrammed, destroyed. So an FBI research lab has been working on a better method.”

“Based on?”

“DNA. We believe it will be possible to begin from any analysable organic fragment — a flake of skin or a nail clipping, enough to record the DNA fingerprint — and then track back the fragment until it, umm, rejoins the individual in question. And then, using the DNA key, we can track the subject back and forward in time as far as we like.

“This disk contains trace software. What we need from you is to tie it to an operational WormCam. You guys at OurWorld — you specifically. Dr. Curzon — are still ahead of the game with this stuff.

“We think it might be possible ultimately to establish a global DNA-sequence database — children would be sequenced and registered as they are born — and use it as the basis of a general search procedure, without relying on holding a physical fragment…”

“And then,” David said slowly, “you will be able to sit in FBI Headquarters, and your wormhole spies will scour the planet until they find anyone you seek — even in complete darkness. It will be the final death of privacy. Correct?”

“Oh, come on, Dr. Curzon,” Mavens pressed. “What is privacy? Look around you. Already the kids are screwing in the street. In another ten years you’ll have to explain what privacy used to mean. These kids are different. The sociologists say it. You can see it. They are growing up used to openness, in the light, and they talk to each other the whole time. Have you heard of the Arenas? — gigantic, ongoing discussions transmitted via WormCam links, unmoderated, international, sometimes involving thousands. And hardly anybody involved over the age of twenty-five. They’re starting to figure things out for themselves, with hardly any reference to the world we built. By comparison, we’re screwed up, right?”

David, reluctantly, found he agreed. And it wouldn’t stop here. Perhaps it was going to be necessary for the damaged elder generations, including himself, to clear their way off the stage, taking with them their hangups and taboos, before the young could inherit this new world, which only they truly understood.

“Maybe,” Mavens growled when David voiced that thought. “But I ain’t ready to quit just yet. And in the meantime.”

“In the meantime, I might find my brother.”

Mavens studied his glass. “Look, it’s nothing to do with me. But — Heather is a wormhead, isn’t she?”

A wormhead was the ultimate result of WormCam addiction. Since taking her retinal implants. Heather had spent her life in a virtual dream. Of course she was able to tune her WormCam eyes to view the present — or at least the very recent past — as if her eyes were still the organic original. But, David knew, she barely ever chose to.

Habitually she wandered through a world illuminated by the lost glow of the deep past. Sometimes she would walk with her own younger self, even looking out through her own eyes, reliving past events over and over. David was sure she was with Mary almost all the time — the infant in her arms, the little girl running to her — unable, and anyhow unwilling, to change a single detail.

If Heather’s condition was nothing to do with Mavens, it was little enough to do with David. Perhaps his impulse for protecting her had been his own brush with the seduction of the past.

“There are some commentators,” David said slowly, “who say this is the future for all of us. Wormholes in our eyes, our ears. We will learn a new perception, in which the layers of the past are as visible to us as the present. It will be a new way of thinking, of living in the universe. But for now.”

“For now,” Mavens said gently, “Heather needs help.”

“Yes. She took the loss of her daughter pretty hard.”

“Then do something about it. Help me. Look — this DNA trace isn’t just a bugging device.” Mavens leaned forward. “Think what else you could do with it. Disease eradication, for instance. You could track a spreading plague back through time along its vectors, airborne or waterborne or whatever, replacing what can be months of painstaking and dangerous detective work with a moment’s glance… The Centers for Disease Control are already looking at that. And what about history? You could track an individual right back to the womb. It wouldn’t take much of an extension to the software to transfer the trace to the DNA of either parent. And to their parents before them. You could follow family trees back into time. And you could work the other way, start with any historical character and trace all their living descendants… You’re a scientist, David. The WormCam has already turned science and history on their heads — right? Think where you could go with this.”

He held the disk out before him, before David’s face, holding it between thumb and forefinger, like, David thought, a Communion host.

Chapter 24 Watching Bobby

Her name was Mac Wilson. Her intent was clear, like a piece of crystal.

That was true from the moment her adopted daughter, Barbara, was convicted of the murder of her adopted son, Mian, and sentenced to follow her father — Mae’s husband, Phil — to a room where she would be delivered a lethal injection.

The fact of it was that she’d gotten used to the idea that her husband had been a monster who had abused and killed the boy in their care. Over the years she’d learned to blame Phil, even learned to hate his shade — and, clinging to that, found a little peace.

And she still had Barbara, out there somewhere, a fragment left over from the wreck of her life, proof that some good had come of it all.

But now, because of the WormCam, that wasn’t an option any more. It hadn’t been Phil after all — but Barbara. It just wasn’t acceptable. The monster hadn’t been the one who had lied to her all these years, but one she had nurtured, grown, made.

And she, Mae, wasn’t a victim of deception, but, somehow, an agent of the whole disaster.

Of course to expose Barbara had been just. Of course it was true. Of course it was a great wrong that had been done to Phil, to all of them, in his wrongful conviction, a wrong now put right, at least partially, thanks to the WormCam.

But it wasn’t justice or truth or tightness that Mae wanted. Nobody did. Why couldn’t these people who so loved the WormCam see that? All Mae wanted was consolation.

Her intent was clear from the start, then. It was to find somebody new to hate.

She could never hate Barbara, of course, despite what she’d done. She was still Barbara, bound to Mae as if by a steel cable.

So Mae’s focus shifted, as she deepened and developed her thinking.

At first she had fixed her attention on FBI Agent Mavens, the man who might have found the truth in the first place, in the old pre-WormCam days. But that wasn’t appropriate, of course; he had been, literally, an agent, dumbly pursuing his job with whatever technology had been available to him.

The technology itself, then — the ubiquitous WormCam? But to hate a mere piece of machinery was shallow, unsatisfying.

She couldn’t hate things. She had to hate people.

Hiram Patterson, of course.

He had blighted the human race with his monstrous truth machine, for no purpose she could detect other than profit.

As if incidentally, the machine had even destroyed the religion that had once brought her comfort.

Hiram Patterson.

•

It took David three days’ intensive work at the Wormworks to link the federal lab’s trace software to an operational wormhole.

Then he went to Bobby’s apartment. He searched it until he found, clinging to a cushion, a single hair from Bobby’s head. He had its DNA sequenced at another of Hiram’s facilities.

The first image, bright and clear in his SoftScreen, was of the hair itself, lying unremarked on its cushion.

David began to track back in time. He had devised a way to make the viewpoint effectively fast-rewind into the past-in reality a succession of fresh wormholes was being established, back along the world-line of DNA molecules from the hair.

He accelerated, days and nights passing in a blur of grey. Still the hair and the cushion sat unchanging at the centre of the image.

There was a flurry of motion.

He backed up, re-established the image, and allowed it to run forward at normal pace.

The date was more than three years in the past. He saw Bobby, Kate, Mary. They were standing, talking earnestly. Mary was half-concealed by a SmartShroud. They were preparing their disappearance, he realized swiftly; already, by this point, they had all three left the lives of David and Heather.

The test was over. The trace worked. He could track forward, approaching the present, until he located Bobby and the others… But perhaps that was best left to Special Agent Mavens.

His test concluded, he prepared to shut down the WormCam — then, on a whim, David arranged the WormCam image so that it centred on Bobby’s face, as if an invisible camera had hovered there, just before his eyes, through the entirety of his young life.

And David began to scan back.