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.
Then a report had been released by an English news channel of a prison camp in the field, where UN captives, including Americans, were being held by the Uzbeks. There were also rumors that female prisoners, including Allied troops, had been taken to rape camps and forced brothels, deeper in the countryside.
Revealing all of this clearly served the purposes of the governments behind the anti-Uzbek alliance. The Juarez Administration's spin doctors weren't above highlighting the distressing idea of wholesome Anna from Iowa in the hands of swarthy Uzbek molesters.
To Heather this was evidence of a dirty, ground-level conflict far removed from the clean video game in which Anna Petersen had colluded. Heather's hackles had risen at the idea that she might be playing a part in some vast propaganda machine. But when she sought permission from her employer, Earth News Online, to seek out the truth of the war, she was refused; access to the corporate WormCam facility would be withdrawn if she attempted it.
While she was in the Hiram's-ex-wife spotlight she had to keep her head down.
But then the glaring focus public attention moved on from the Mayses—and she was able to afford her own WormCam access. She quit from ENO, took a new bill-paying job on a WormCam biography of Abraham Lincoln, and went to work.
It took her a couple of days to find what she was looking for.
She followed Uzbek prisoners being loaded onto an open UN truck and driven away through the rain. They passed through the town of Nukus, controlled by Allied troops, and on into the country beyond.
Here, she found, the Allied troops had established a prison camp of their own.
It was an abandoned iron-mining complex. The prisoners were held in metal cages, stacked up in an ore loader, just a meter high. The prisoners were unable to straighten their legs or backs. They were held without sanitation, adequate food, exercise or access to the Red Cross or its Muslim equivalent Merhamet. Filth dripped from cages above through the grates to those below.
She estimated there must be at least a thousand men here. They were given only a cup of weak soup a day, Hepatitis was epidemic, and other diseases were spreading.
Every other day, prisoners were selected, apparently at random, and taken out for beatings. Three or four soldiers would surround each prisoner, and would beat him with iron bars, wooden two-by-fours, truncheons, After a time the beating would stop. Any prisoner who could walk would be thrown back for further treatment, and the beating continued. They would be carried back to their cages by other prisoners.
That was the general pattern. There were some particular incidents, inflicted on the prisoners almost in a spirit of experimentation by the guards; a prisoner was not allowed to defecate; a prisoner was forced to eat sand; another was forced to swallow his own feces.
Six people died while Heather monitored the camp. The deaths were as a result of the bearings, exposure or disease. Occasionally a prisoner would be shot, for example when attempting to escape or fight back. One prisoner was actually released, apparently to take the news of the determination of these blue-helmeted troops to his comrades.
Heather noticed that the guards were careful to use only captured weaponry, as if they were determined to leave no unambiguous trace of their activities. Evidently, she thought, the power of the WormCam had not yet impinged on the imaginations of these soldiers; they weren't yet used to the idea that they could be watched, any place, any time, even retrospectively from the future.
It was almost impossible to watch these bloody deeds, which would have been invisible, to the public anyhow, only a few months before.
This would be dynamite up the ass of President Juarez, who in Heather's opinion had already proven herself to be the worst sleazebag to pollute the White House since the turn of the century (which was saying something)—and not to mention, as the first female President, a major embarrassment to half the population.
And maybe—Heather allowed herself to hope—the mass consciousness would stir once more when people saw war as it truly was, in all its bloody glory, as they had briefly glimpsed it when Vietnam had become the first television war, and before the commanders had reestablished control over media coverage.
She even cradled hopes that the approach of the Wormwood would change the way people felt about each other. If everything was to end just a handful of generations away, what did ancient enmities matter? And was the purpose of the remaining time, the remaining days of human existence, to inflict pain and suffering on others?...
There would still be just wars, surely. But it would no longer be possible to dehumanize and demonize an opponent—not when anybody could tap a SoftScreen and see for themselves the citizens of whichever nation was considered the enemy—and there could be no more warmongering lies, about the capability, intent and resolve of an opponent. If the culture of secrecy was finally broken, no government would get away with acts like this, ever again.
Or maybe she was just being an idealist.
She pressed on, determined, motivated. But no matter how hard she tried to be objective she found these scenes unbearably harrowing: the sight of naked, wretched men, writhing in agony at the feet of blue-helmet soldiers with clean, hard American faces.
She took a break. She slept a while, bathed, then prepared herself a meal (breakfast, at three in the afternoon).
She knew she wasn't the only citizen putting the new facilities to use like this.
All around the country, she'd heard, truth squads were forming up, using WormCam and Internet. Some of the squads were no more than neighborhood watch schemes. But one organization, called Copwatch, was disseminating instructions on how to shadow police at work in order to provide a "fair witness" to a cop's every activity. Already, it was said, this new accountability was having a marked effect on the quality of policing; thuggish and corrupt officers—thankfully rare anyhow—were being exposed almost immediately.
Consumer groups had suddenly gained power, and were daily exposing scams and con artists. In most states, detailed breakdowns of campaign finance information were being posted, in some cases for the first time. There was a lot of focus on the Pentagon's more obscure activities and its dark budget. And so on.
Heather relished the idea of concerned private citizens, armed with WormCam and suspicion, clustering around the corrupt and criminal like white blood cells. In her mind there was a simple causal chain lying behind fundamental liberties: increased openness ensured accountability, which in turn maintained freedom. And now a technological miracle—or accident—seemed to be delivering the most profound tool for open disclosure imaginable into the hands of private citizens.
Jefferson and Franklin would probably have loved it—even if it would have meant the sacrifice of their own privacy...
There was noise in her study. A muffled giggling.
Heather, barefoot, crept to the half-open door. Mary and a friend were sitting at Heather's desk. "Look at that jerk," Mary was saying. "His hand keeps slipping off the end."
Heather recognized the friend, Sasha, from the class above Mary's at high school, was known among the local parents' mafia as a Bad Influence. The air was thick with the smoke from a joint—presumably one of Heather's own store.
The WormCam image was of a teenage boy. Heather recognized him, too, as one of the boys from school—Jack? Jacques? He was in his bedroom. His pants were around his ankles, and before a SoftScreen, with more enthusiasm than competence, he was masturbating.
She said quietly, "Congratulations.
So you hacked your way through the nanny."
Both Mary and Sasha jumped, startled. Sasha waved futilely at the cloud of marijuana smoke.
Mary turned back to the 'Screen. "Why not? You did."
"I did it for a valid reason."
"So it's all right for you but not for me. You're such a hypocrite, Mom."
Sasha stood up. "I'm out of here."
"Yes, you are," Heather snapped after her retreating back. "Mary, is this you? Spying on your neighbors like some sleazy voyeur?"
"What else is there to do? Admit it, Mom. You're getting a little moist yourself."
"Get out of here."
Mary's laugh turned to a theatric sneer, and she walked out.
Heather, shaken, sat before the 'Screen and studied the boy. The SoftScreen he was staring at showed another WormCam view. There was a girl in the image, naked, also masturbating, but smiling, mouthing words at the boy.
Heather wondered how many more watchers this couple had. Maybe they hadn't thought of that. A WormCam couldn't be tapped, but it was difficult to remember that the WormCam meant global access for everybody—anybody could be watching these kids at play.
She was prepared to bet that in these first months, ninety-nine percent of WormCam use would be for this kind of crude voyeurism. Maybe it was like the sudden accessibility of porn made possible by the Internet at home, without the need to enter some sleazy store. Everybody always wanted to be a voyeur anyhow—so the argument went—and now we can do it without risk of being caught.
At least that was how it felt; the truth was that anybody could be watching the watchers too. Just as anybody could have watched Mary and Sasha, two cute teenage girls getting pleasurably horny. And maybe there was even a community who might derive some pleasure from watching her, a dry-as-a stick middle-aged woman gazing analytically at this foolish stuff.
Maybe, some of the commentators said, it was the chance of voyeurism that was driving the early sales of this home WormCam access, and even its technological development—just as porn providers had pushed the early development of Internet facilities. Heather would have liked to believe her fellow humans were a little deeper than that. But maybe, once again, she was just being an idealist.
And after all, not all the voyeurism was for titillation. Every day there were news lines about people who had, for one reason or another, spied on those close to them, and discovered secrets and betrayals and creeping foulness, causing a rush of divorces, domestic violence, suicides, minor wars between friends, spouses, siblings, children and their parents: a lot of crap to be worked out of a lot of relationships, she supposed, before everybody grew up a little and got used to the idea of glass-wall openness.
She noticed that the boy had a spectacular Cassini spaceprobe image of Saturn's rings on his bedroom wall. Of course he was ignoring it; he was much more interested in his dick. Heather remembered how her own mother—God, nearly fifty years back—would tell her of the kind of future she had grown up with, in more expansive, optimistic years. By the year 2025, her mother used to say, nuclear-powered spacecraft would be plying between the colonized planets, bearing water and precious minerals mined from asteroids. Perhaps the first interstellar probe would already have been launched. And so on.
Perhaps teenagers in that world might have been distracted from each others' body parts—at least some of the time!—by the spectacle of the explorers in Mars's Valles Marineris, or Mercury's great Caloris basin, or the shifting ice fields of Europa.
But, she thought, in our world we're still stuck here on Earth, and even the future seems to end in a black hurtling wall of rock, and all we want to do is spy on each other.
She shut down the wormhole link and added new security protocols to her terminal. It wouldn't keep Mary out forever, but it would slow her down a little.
That done—exhausted, depressed—she returned to work.
Chapter 17—THE DEBUNK MACHINE
David and Heather sat before a flickering SoftScreen, their faces illuminated by the harsh sunlight of a day long gone.
...He was a private, a soldier of the first Maryland Infantry. He was one of a line which stretched into the distance, muskets raised. A drumbeat was audible, steady and ominous. They hadn't yet learned his name.
His face was begrimed, smeared by sweat, his uniform filthy, rain-stained and heavily patched. He was becoming visibly more nervous as he approached the front.
Smoke covered the lines in the distance. But already David and Heather could hear the crackle of small arms, the booming of cannon.
Their soldier passed a field hospital now, tents set up at the center of a muddy field. There were rows of unmoving bodies, uncovered, lying outside the nearest tent, and—somehow more horrific—a pile of severed arms and legs, some still bearing scraps of cloth. Two men were feeding the limbs into a brazier. The cries of the wounded within the tents were scratchy, remote, agonizing.
The soldier dug into his jacket and produced a pack of playing cards, battered and bound up with string, and a photograph.
David, working the WormCam controls, froze the image, and zoomed in on the little photograph, much thumbed, its image a crude black-and-white graininess. "It's a woman," he said slowly. "And that looks like a donkey. And... Oh."
Heather was smiling. "He's afraid. He thinks he might not live through the day. He doesn't want that stuff sent home with his personal effects."
David resumed the sequence. The soldier dropped his possessions into the mud and ground them in with his heel.
Heather said, "Listen. What's he singing?"
David adjusted the volume and frequency filters. The private's accent was remarkably broad, but the words were recognizable: ...Into the ward of the clean whitewashed halls / Where the dead slept and the dying lay / Wounded by bayonets, sabers and balls / Somebody's darling was borne one day...
A mounted officer came by behind the line, his black, sweating horse visibly nervous. Close up. Dress, there... Close up. His accent was stiff, alien to David's ear—
There was an explosion, flying earth. The bodies of soldiers seemed simply to burst, into large, bloody fragments.
David recoiled. It had been a shell. Suddenly, startlingly quickly, war was here.
The noise level rose abruptly: there was cheering, swearing, a rattle of rifle-muskets and pistols. The private raised his musket, fired rapidly, and dug another cartridge from his belt. He bit into it, exposing the powder and ball, and particles of black powder clung to his lips.
Heather murmured, "They say the powder tasted like pepper."
Another shell landed near the wheel of an artillery piece. A horse close to the gun seemed to explode, bloody scraps flying. A man walking alongside fell, and he looked down in apparent surprise at the stump which now terminated his leg.
All around the private now there was horror: smoke, fire, mutilated bodies, many men littered on the ground, writhing. But he seemed to be growing more calm. He continued to advance.
David said, "I don't understand. He's in the middle of a mass slaughter. Wouldn't it be rational to retreat, to hide?"
Heather said, "He may not even understand what the war is about. Soldiers often don't. Right now, he's responsible for himself; his destiny is in his own hands. Perhaps he feels relief that the moment has come. And he has his reputation, esteem from his buddies."
"It's a form of madness," David said.
"Of course it is..."
They didn't hear the musket ball coming.
It passed through one eye socket and out the back of the private's head, taking a palm-sized chunk of skull with it. David could see matter within, red and gray.
The private stood there a few seconds more, still bearing his weapon, but his body was shaking, his legs convulsing. Then he fell in a heap.
Another soldier dropped his musket and got to his knees beside him. He lifted the private's head, gently, and seemed to be trying to tuck his brain back into his shattered skull—
David t
apped his control. The SoftScreen went blank. He ripped his headphones from his ears.
For a moment he sat still, letting the images and sounds of the gruesome Civil War battlefield fade from his head, to be replaced by the composed scientific calm of the Wormworks, the subdued murmur of the researchers. In rows of similar cubicles all around them, people toiled at dim WormCam images: tapping at SoftScreens, listening to the mutter of ancient voices in headphones, making notes on yellow legal pads. Most had gained admittance by submitting research proposals which were screened by a committee David had established, and then selected by lottery. Others had been brought in as guests of Hiram's, like Heather and her daughter. They were journalists, researchers, academics seeking to resolve historical disputes and special-interest types—including a few conspiracy theorists—with points to prove.
Somewhere, somebody was softly whistling a nursery rhyme. The melody made an odd counterpoint to the horrors still rattling around David's head—but he knew the significance immediately. One of the more enthusiastic researchers here had been determined to uncover the simple tune said to have formed the basis of Edward Elgar's 1899 Enigma Variations. Many candidates had been proposed, from Negro spirituals and forgotten music-hall hits to "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Now, though, it sounded as if the researcher had uncovered the truth, and David let his mind supply the words to the gentle melody: Mary Had a Little Lamb...
The researchers had been drawn here because OurWorld was still far ahead of the competition in the power of its WormCam technology. The depth of the past accessible to modern scrutiny was increasing all the time; some researchers had already reached as far back as three centuries. But for now—for better or worse—the use of the powerful past-viewer WormCams remained tightly controlled, offered only in facilities like this, where its users were screened and prioritized and monitored, their results edited carefully and given interpretative glosses before public release.