Kate was getting closer.
With a growing sense of exhilaration, she flew the WormCam viewpoint alongside Collins and Popov as they traveled across Moscow—by bus, by subway, in cars and by foot, even through a snowstorm. She glimpsed the Kremlin and the old, ugly KGB building, as if this was some virtual tourist adventure.
But the poverty of the place was striking. Despite his choice of profession, Collins was an archetypal American abroad; Kate saw his mounting frustration with mobile phone dropouts, his amazement at seeing subway ticket vendors using abacuses to compute change, his disgust at the filth he encountered in public toilets, his disbelieving impatience when he tried to call up the Search Engine and received no reply.
She felt a profound relief when Collins reached a small suburban Moscow airport and boarded a light plane, and she was able to initiate the system she thought of as the autopilot.
Here in the gloom of the Wormworks, sitting before a SoftScreen, she was flying the viewpoint using a joystick and some intelligent supporting software. Ingenious though the system was, ghosting a person's movements through a foreign city was intense, unforgiving work; a single slip of concentration could unravel hours of labor.
But WormCam tracking technology had advanced to the point where she could hook the remote viewpoint to various electronic signatures—for instance of Collins' aircraft. So now her WormCam viewpoint hovered, all but invisible, in the airplane cabin—still at Collins' shoulder—as the plane lofted into the deepening Russian twilight, tracking her quarry without her intervention.
It ought to get easier. The Wormworks teams were working on ways of having a viewpoint track an individual person without the need for human guidance... All that for the future.
She pushed back her chair, stood up and stretched. She was more tired than she'd realized; she couldn't remember when she'd last taken a break. Absently she scanned the continuing WormCam images. Night was falling over central Asia, and through the plane's small windows she could see how the landscape was scarred, swaths of it brown wasteland, still uninhabitable four decades after the fall of the Soviet Union with its ugly contempt for the landscape and its people—
There was a hand on her shoulder, strong thumbs massaging a knot of muscles there. She was startled, but the touch was familiar, and she couldn't help but relax into it
Bobby kissed the crown of her head. "I knew I'd find you here. Do you know what time it is?"
She glanced at a clock on the SoftScreen. "Late afternoon?"
He laughed. "Yes, Moscow time. But this is Seattle, Washington, western hemisphere, and on this side of the planet it's just after 10 A.M. You worked through the night. Again. I have the feeling you're avoiding me."
She said testily, "Bobby, you don't understand. I'm tracking this guy. It's a twenty-four-hour job. Collins is a CIA operative who seems to be opening up lines of communication between our government and various shadowy insurrectionists in the Aral Sea area. There's something going on out there the Administration doesn't want to tell us about."
"But," Bobby said with mock solemnity, "the WormCam sees all." He was wearing casual ski country gear, bright, colorful, thermal-adaptive, very expensive; in the warmth of this corner of the Wormworks, she could see how its artificial pores had opened up, revealing a faint brown sheen of tanned flesh. He leaned toward the SoftScreen, studied the image and her scribbled notes. "How long will Collins' flight take?"
"Hard to say. Hours."
He straightened up. "Then take some time off. Your target is stuck in that plane until it lands, or crashes, and the WormCam can happily track him by itself. And besides he's asleep."
"But he's with Popov. If he wakes up..."
"Then the recording systems will pick up whatever he says and does. Come on. Give yourself a break. And me."
...But I don't want to be with you, Bobby, she thought. Because there are things I'd rather not discuss.
And yet...
And yet, she was still drawn to him, despite what she now knew about him.
You're getting too complicated, Kate. Too introverted. A break from this cold, lifeless place will indeed do you good.
Making an effort to smile, she took his hand.
It was a fine, still day, a welcome interval between the storm systems that now habitually battered the Pacific coast.
Cradling beakers of latte, they walked through the garden areas Hiram had built around his Wormworks. There were low earthworks, ponds, bridges over streams, and unfeasibly large and old trees, all of it imported and installed in typical Hiram fashion, thought Kate, at great expense and with little discrimination or taste. But the sky was a clear, brilliant blue, the winter sun actually delivered a little heat to her face, and the two of them were leaving a trail of dark footsteps in the thick silver layer of lingering dew.
They found a bench. It was temperature-smart and had heated itself sufficiently to dry off the dew. They sat down, sipping coffee.
"I still think you've been hiding from me," Bobby said mildly. She saw that his retinal implants had polarized in the sunlight, turning silvery, insectile. "It's the WormCam, isn't it? All the ethical implications you find so disturbing."
With an eagerness that shamed her, she jumped on that lead. "Of course it's disturbing. A technology of such power."
"But you were there when we came to our agreement with the FBI. An agreement that put the WormCam in the hands of the people."
"Oh, Bobby... The people don't even know the damn thing exists, let alone that government agencies are using it against them. Look at all the tax defaulters that suddenly got caught, the parents cheating on child support, the Brady Law checks on gun buyers, the serial sex offenders."
"But that's all for the good. Isn't it? What are you saying—that you don't trust the government? This isn't the twentieth century."
She grunted. "Remember what Jefferson said: 'Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories.'"
"...And what about the Republican burglary? How can that be in the people's interest?"
"You can't know for sure that the White House used the WormCam for that."
"How else?"
Kate shook her head. "I wanted Hiram to let me dig into that. He threw me off the case immediately. We've made a Faustian bargain, Bobby. Those guys in the Administration and the government agencies aren't necessarily crooks, but they're only human. And by giving them such a powerful and secret weapon. Bobby, I wouldn't trust myself with such power. The Republican spying incident is just the start of the Orwellian nightmare we're about to endure.
"And as for Hiram, have you any idea how Hiram treats his employees, here at OurWorld? Job applicants go through screening all the way to a DNA sequence. He profiles all his employees by searching credit databases, police records, even federal records. He already had a hundred ways to measure productivity and performance, and check up on his people. Now he has the WormCam, Hiram can keep us under surveillance twenty-four hours a day if he chooses. And there's not a damn thing any of us can do about it. There have been a whole string of court cases that establish that employees don't have constitutional protection against intrusive surveillance by their bosses."
"But he needs all that to keep the people working," Bobby said dryly. "Since you broke the Wormwood, absenteeism has rocketed, and the use of alcohol and other drugs at work, and..."
"This has nothing to do with the Wormwood," she said severely. "This is a question of basic rights. Bobby, don't you get it? OurWorld is a vision of the future for all of us, if monsters like Hiram get to keep the WormCam. And that's why it's important the technology is disseminated, as far and as fast as possible. Reciprocity: at least we'd be able to watch them watching us..." She searched his insectile, silvery gaze.
He said evenly, "Thanks for the lecture. And is that why you're dumping me?"
She looked away.
"It's nothing to do with the WormCam, is it?" He leaned fo
rward, challenging her. "There's something you don't want to tell me. You've been this way for days. Weeks, even. What is it, Kate? Don't be afraid of hurting me. You won't."
Probably not, she thought. And that, poor, dear Bobby, is the whole trouble.
She turned to face him. "Bobby, the stud. The implant Hiram put in your head when you were a boy."
"Yes?"
"I found out what it's for. What it's really for."
The moment stretched, and she felt the sunlight prickle on her face, laden with UV even so early in the year. "Tell me," he said quietly.
The Search Engine's specialist routines had explained it all to her succinctly. It was a classic piece of early twenty-first-century neurobiological mind-tinkering.
And it had nothing to do with any dyslexia or hyperactivity, as Hiram had claimed.
First, Hiram had suppressed the neural stimulation of areas in the temporal lobe of Bobby's brain that were related to feelings of spiritual transcendence and mystical presence. And his doctors tinkered with parts of the caudate region, trying to ensure that Bobby did not suffer from symptoms relating to obsessive-compulsive disorder which led some people to a need for excessive security, order, predictability and ritual, a need in some circumstances satisfied by the membership of religious communities.
Hiram had evidently intended to shield Bobby from the religious impulses that had so distracted his brother. Bobby's world was to be mundane, earthy, bereft of the transcendent and the numinous. And he wouldn't even know what he was missing. It was, Kate thought sourly, a Godectomy.
Hiram's implant also tinkered with the elaborate interplay of hormones, neurotransmitters and brain regions which were stimulated when Bobby made love. For example, the implant suppressed the opiate-like hormone oxytocin, produced by the hypothalamus, which flooded the brain during orgasm, producing the warm, floating, bonding feelings that followed such acts.
Thanks to a series of high-profile liaisons—which Hiram had discreetly set up and encouraged and even publicized—Bobby had become something of a sexual athlete, and he derived great physical pleasure from the act itself. But his father had made him incapable of love and so, Hiram seemed to have planned, free of loyalties to anyone but his father.
There was more. For instance, a link to the deep portion of Bobby's brain called the amygdala may have been an attempt to control his propensity for anger. A mysterious manipulation of Bobby's orbito-frontal cortex might even have been a bid to reduce his free will. And so on.
Hiram had reacted to his disappointment with David by making Bobby a perfect son: that is, perfectly suited to Hiram's goals. But by doing this Hiram had robbed his son of much that made him human.
Until Kate Manzoni found the switch in his head. She took Bobby back to the small apartment she'd rented in downtown Seattle. There they made love, for the first time in weeks.
Afterward, Bobby lay in her arms, hot, his skin moist under hers where they touched: as close as he could be, yet still remote. It was like trying to love a stranger. But at least, now, she understood why. She reached up and touched the back of his head, the hard edges of the implant under his skin. "You're sure you want to do this?"
He hesitated. "What troubles me is that I don't know how I'll be feeling afterwards... Will I still be me?"
She whispered in his ear. "You'll feel alive. You'll feel human."
He held his breath, then said, so quietly she could barely make it out: "Do it."
She turned her head. "Search Engine."
"Yes, Kate."
"Turn it off."
...and for Bobby, still warm with the afterglow of orgasm, it was as if the woman in his arms had suddenly turned three-dimensional, solid and whole, had come to life. Everything he could see, feel, smell—the warm ash scent of her hair, the exquisite line of her cheek where the low light caught it, the seamless smoothness of her belly—it was all just as it had been before. But it was as if he had reached through that surface texture into the warmth of Kate herself. He saw her eyes, watchful, full of concern—concern for him, he realized with a fresh jolt. He wasn't alone anymore. And, before now, he hadn't even known he had been.
He wanted to immerse himself in her oceanic warmth. She touched his cheek. He could see that her fingers came away wet.
And now he could feel the great shuddering sobs that racked his body, an uncontrollable storm of weeping. Love and pain coursed through him, exquisite, hot, unbearable.
Chapter 12—SPACETIME
The inner chaos didn't subside.
He tried to distract himself. He resumed activities he had relished before. But even the most extravagant virtual adventure seemed shallow, obviously artificial, predictable, unengaging.
He seemed to need people, even though he shied away from those close to him, he was a moth fearing the candle flame, he thought, unable to bear the brightness of the emotions involved. So he accepted invitations he wouldn't otherwise have considered, talked to people he had never needed before.
Work helped, with its constant and routine demands for his attention, its relentless logic of meetings and schedules and resource allocation.
And it was a busy time. The new Mind'sEye VR headbands were moving out of the testing labs and approaching production status. His teams of technicians had, suddenly, resolved a last technical glitch: a tendency for the headbands to cause synaesthesia in their users, a muddling of the sensory inputs caused by cross talk between the brain's centers. It was a cause for long celebration. They knew that IBM's renowned Watson research lab had been working on exactly the same problem; whoever cracked the synaesthesia issue first would be the first to reach the market, and would have a clear competitive edge for a long time to come. It now looked as if OurWorld had won that particular race.
So work was absorbing. But he couldn't work twenty-four hours a day, and he couldn't sleep the rest of the time away. And when he was awake, his mind, unleashed for the first time, was rampaging out of control.
As his car's SmartDrive him to the Wormworks, he cowered in fear from the high-speed traffic. An unremarkable tabloid news item—about vicious killings and rapes in the burgeoning Aral Sea water war—moved him to harsh tears. A Puget Sound sunset, glimpsed through a broken layer of fluffy black clouds, filled him with awe simply at being alive.
When he met his father, fear, loathing, love, admiration tore at him—all overlying a deeper, unbreakable bond.
But he could face Hiram. Kate was different. The surging need he felt—to cherish her, possess her, somehow consume her—was completely overwhelming. In her company he became inarticulate, as out of control of his mind as much as his body.
Somehow she knew how he was feeling; and, quietly, she left him alone. He knew she would be there for him when he was ready to face her, and resume their relationship.
But at least with Hiram and Kate he could figure out why he felt the way he did, trace a causal relationship, put tentative labels to the violent emotions that rocked him. The worst of all were the mood swings he seemed to suffer without discernible cause.
He would wake up crying without reason. Or, in the middle of a mundane day, he would find himself filled with an indescribable joy, as if everything suddenly made sense.
His life before seemed remote, textureless, like a flat, colorless pencil sketch. Now he was immersed in a new world of color and texture and light and feeling, where the simplest things—the curl of an early spring leaf, the glimmer of sunlight on water, the smooth curve of Kate's cheek—could be suffused by a beauty he had never known existed.
And Bobby—the fragile ego that rode on the surface of this dark inner ocean—would have to learn to live with the new, complex, baffling person he had suddenly become.
That was why he had come to seek out his brother. He took great comfort from David's stolid, patient presence: this bearlike figure with his bushy blond hair, hunched over his SoftScreens, immersed in his work, satisfied with its logic and internal consistency, scribbling notes with a surpr
ising delicacy. David's personality was as massive and solid as his body; beside him Bobby felt evanescent, a wisp, yet subtly calmed.
One unseasonably cold afternoon they sat cradling coffees, waiting for the results of another routine trial run: a new wormhole plucked out of the quantum foam, extending further than any had before.
"I can understand a theorist wanting to study the limits of the wormhole technology," Bobby said. "Pushing the envelope as far as you can. But we made the big breakthrough already. Surely what's important now is the application."
"Of course," David said mildly. "In fact the application is everything. Hiram has a goal of turning wormhole generation from a high-energy physics stunt, affordable only by governments and large corporations, into something much smaller, easily manufactured, miniaturized."
"Like computers," Bobby said.
"Exactly. It wasn't until miniaturization and the development of the PC that computers were able to saturate the world: finding new applications, creating new markets—transforming our lives, in fact.
"Hiram knows we won't keep our monopoly forever. Sooner or later somebody else is going to come up with an independent WormCam design. Maybe a better one. And miniaturization and cost reduction are sure to follow."
"And the future for OurWorld," said Bobby, "is surely to be the market leader, all those little wormhole generators."
"That's Hiram's strategy," David said. "He has a vision of the WormCam replacing every other data-gathering instrument: cameras, microphones, science sensors, even medical probes. Although I can't say I'm looking forward to a wormhole endoscopy...
"But I told you I studied a little business myself, Bobby. Mass-produced WormCams will be a commodity, and we will be able to compete only on price. But I believe that with our technical lead Hiram can open up much greater opportunities for himself with differentiation: by coming up with applications which nobody else in the market can offer. And that's what I'm interested in exploring." He grinned. "At least, that's what I tell Hiram his money is being spent on down here."
Bobby studied him, trying to focus on his brother, on Hiram, the WormCam, trying to understand. "You just want to know, don't you? That's the bottom line for you."