‘Ah, the miscarriage: the great causal event in your life. But I’m afraid it wasn’t like that at all. Kingsley’s behavior 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 center 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 childlike adults I have ever encountered. He is therefore an exact fit for the, umm, the childshaped hole at the center of your personality.’ He turned to Kate. ‘You see?’
She stared at him, her color 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-color 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 private 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 behavior, to break the service and offer counseling, 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, fueled by Internet rumor and industry leaks and speculation, clamor 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-defense 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 rumors-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.