The Light of Other Days

Prologue

Bobby could see the Earth, complete and serene, within its cage of silver light.

Fingers of green and blue pushed into the new deserts of Asia and the North American Midwest. Artificial reefs glimmered in the Caribbean, pale blue against the deeper ocean. Great wispy machines laboured over the poles to repair the atmosphere. The air was clear as glass, for now mankind drew its energy from the core of Earth itself.

And Bobby knew that if he chose, with a mere effort of will, he could look back into time.

He could watch cities bloom on Earth’s patient surface, to dwindle and vanish like rusty dew. He could see species shrivel and devolve like leaves curling into their buds. He could watch the slow dance of the continents as Earth gathered its primordial heat back into its iron heart. The present was a glimmering, expanding bubble of life and awareness, with the past locked within, trapped unmoving like an insect in amber.

For a long time, on this rich, growing Earth, embedded in knowledge, an enhanced humankind had been at peace: a peace unimaginable when he was born.

And all of this had derived from the ambition of one man — a venal, flawed man, a man who had never even understood where his dreams would lead.

How remarkable, he thought.

Bobby looked into his past, and into his heart.

Chapter 1 The Casimir engine

A little after dawn, Vitaly Keldysh climbed stiffly into his car, engaged the SmartDrive, and let the car sweep him away from the run-down hotel.

The streets of Leninsk were empty, the road surface cracked, many windows boarded up. He remembered how this place had been at its peak, in the 1970s perhaps: a bustling science city with a population of tens of thousands, with schools, cinemas, a swimming pool, a sports stadium, cafes, restaurants and hotels, even its own TV station. Still, as he passed the main gateway to the north of the city, there was the old blue sign with its white pointing arrow: TO BAIKONUR, still proclaiming that ancient deceptive name. And still, here at the empty heart of Asia, Russian engineers built spaceships and fired them into the sky.

But, he reflected sadly, not for much longer.

The sun rose at last, and banished the stars: all but one, he saw, the brightest of all. It moved with a leisurely but unnatural speed across the southern sky. It was the ruin of the International Space Station: never completed, abandoned in 2010 after the crash of an ageing Space Shuttle. But still the Station drifted around the Earth, an unwelcome guest at a party long over.

The landscape beyond the city was barren. He passed a camel standing patiently at the side of the road, a wizened woman beside it dressed in rags. It was a scene he might have encountered any time in the last thousand years, he thought, as if all the great changes, political and technical and social, that had swept across this land had been for nothing. Which was, perhaps, the reality.

But in the gathering sunlight of this spring dawn, the steppe was green and littered with bright yellow flowers. He wound down his window and tried to detect the meadow fragrance he remembered so well; but his nose, ruined by a lifetime of tobacco, let him down. He felt a stab of sadness, as he always did at this time of year. The grass and flowers would soon be gone; the steppe spring was brief, as tragically brief as life itself.

He reached the range.

It was a place of steel towers pointing to the sky, of enormous concrete mounds. The cosmodrome — far vaster than its western competitors — covered thousands of square kilometres of this empty land. Much of it was abandoned now, of course, and the great gantries were rusting slowly in the dry air, or else had been pulled down for scrap — with or without the consent of the authorities.

But this morning there was much activity around one pad. He could see technicians in their protective suits and orange hats scurrying around the great gantry, like faithful at the feet of some immense god.

A voice floated across the steppe from a speaker tower. Gotovnosty dyesyat minut. Ten minutes and counting.

The walk from the car to the viewing stand, short as it was, tired him greatly. He tried to ignore the hammering of his recalcitrant heart, the prickling of sweat over his neck and brow, his gasping breathlessness, the stiff pain that plagued his arm and neck.

As he took his place those already here greeted him. There were the corpulent, complacent men and women who, in this new Russia, moved seamlessly between legitimate authority and murky underworld; and there were young technicians, like all of the new generations rat-faced with the hunger that had plagued his country since the fall of the Soviet Union.

He accepted their greetings, but was happy to sink into isolated anonymity. The men and women of this hard future cared nothing for him and his memories of a better past.

And nor did they care much for what was about to happen here. All their gossip was of events far away: of Hiram Patterson and his wormholes, his promise to make the Earth itself as transparent as glass.

It was very obvious to Vitaly that he was the oldest person here. The last survivor of the old days, perhaps. That thought gave him a certain sour pleasure.

It was, in fact, almost exactly seventy years since the launch of the first Molniya — “lightning” — in 1965. It might have been seventy days, so vivid were the events in Vitaly’s mind, when the young army of scientists, rocket engineers, technicians, labourers, cooks, carpenters and masons had come to this unpromising steppe and — living in huts and tents, alternately baking and freezing, armed with little but their dedication and Korolev’s genius — had built and launched mankind’s first spaceships.

The design of the Molniya satellites had been utterly ingenious. Korolev’s great boosters were incapable of launching a satellite to geosynchronous orbit, that high radius where the station would hover above a fixed point on Earth’s surface. So Korolev launched his satellites on elliptical eight-hour trajectories. With such orbits, carefully chosen, three Molniyas could provide coverage for most of the Soviet Union. For decades the U.S.S.R. and then Russia had maintained constellations of Molniyas in their eccentric orbits, providing the great, sprawling country with essential social and economic unity.

Vitaly regarded the Molniya comsats as Korolev’s greatest achievement, outshining even the Designer’s accomplishments in launching robots and humans into space, touching Mars and Venus, even — so nearly — beating the Americans to the Moon.

But now, perhaps, the need for those marvellous birds was dying at last.

The great launch tower rolled back, and the last power umbilicals fell away, writhing slowly like fat black snakes. The slim form of the booster itself was revealed, a needle shape with the baroque fluting typical of Korolev’s antique, marvellous, utterly reliable designs. Although the sun was now high in the sky, the rocket was bathed in brilliant artificial light, wreathed in vapour breathed by the mass of cryogenic fuels in its tanks.

Tri. Dva. Odin. Zashiganiye!

Ignition…

As Kate Manzoni approached the OurWorld campus, she wondered if she had contrived to be a little more than fashionably just-late-enough for this spectacular event, so brightly was the Washington State sky painted by Hiram Patterson’s light show.

Small planes criss-crossed the sky, maintaining a layer of (no doubt environmentally friendly) dust on which the lasers painted virtual images of a turning Earth. Every few seconds the globe turned transparent, to reveal the familiar OurWorld corporate logo embedded in its core. It was all utterly tacky, of course, and it only served to obscure the real beauty of the tall, clear night sky.

She opaqued the car’s roof, and found after-images drifting across her vision.

A drone hovered outside the car. It was another Earth globe, slowly spinning, and when it spoke its voice was smooth, utterly synthetic, devoid of emotion. “This way, Ms. Manzoni.”

“Just a moment.” She whispered, “Search Engine. Mirror.”

An image of herself crystallized in the middle of her field of vision, disconcertingly overlaying the spinning drone. She checked her dress front and back, turned on the programmable tattoos that adorned her shoulders, and tucked stray wisps of hair back where they should be. The self-image, synthesized from feeds from the car’s cameras and relayed to her retinal implants, was a little grainy and prone to break up into blocky pixels if she moved too quickly, but that was a limitation of her old-fashioned sense-organ implant technology she was prepared to accept. Better she suffer a little fuzziness than let some hack-handed CNS-augment surgeon open up her skull.

When she was ready she dismissed the image and clambered out of the car, as gracefully as she could manage in her ludicrously tight and impractical dress.

OurWorld’s campus turned out to be a carpet of neat grass quadrangles separating three-story office buildings, fat, top-heavy boxes of blue glass held up by skinny little beams of reinforced concrete. It was ugly and quaint, 1990s corporate chic. The bottom story of each building was an open car lot, in one of which her car had parked itself.

She joined a river of people that flowed into the campus cafeteria, drones bobbing over their heads.

The cafeteria was a showpiece, a spectacular multi-level glass cylinder built around a chunk of bona fide graffiti-laden Berlin Wall. There was, bizarrely, a stream running right through the middle of the hall, with little stone bridges spanning it. Tonight perhaps a thousand guests milled across the glassy floor, groups of them coalescing and dispersing, a cloud of conversation bubbling around them.

Heads turned toward her, some in recognition, and some — male and female alike — with frankly lustful calculation.

She picked out face after face, repeated shocks of recognition startling her. There were presidents, dictators, royalty, powers in industry and finance, and the usual scattering of celebrities from movies and music and the other arts. She didn’t spot President Juarez herself, but several of her cabinet were here. Hiram had gathered quite a crowd for his latest spectacle, she conceded.

Of course she knew she wasn’t here herself solely for her glittering journalistic talent or conversational skills, but for her own combination of beauty and the minor celebrity that had followed her exposure of the Wormwood discovery. But that was an angle she’d been happy to exploit herself ever since her big break.

Drones floated overhead, bearing canapés and drinks. She accepted a cocktail. Some of the drones carried images from one or another of Hiram’s channels. The images were mostly ignored in the excitement, even the most spectacular — here was one, for example, bearing the image of a space rocket on the point of being launched, evidently from some dusty steppe in Asia — but she couldn’t deny that the cumulative effect of all this technology was impressive, as if reinforcing Hiram’s famous boast that OurWorld’s mission was to inform a planet.

She gravitated toward one of the larger knots of people nearby, trying to see who, or what, was the centre of attention. She made out a slim young man with dark hair, a walrus moustache and round glasses, wearing a rather absurd pantomime-soldier uniform of bright lime green with scarlet piping. He seemed to be holding a brass musical instrument, perhaps a euphonium. She recognized him, of course, and as soon as she did so she lost interest. Just a virtual. She began to survey the crowd around him observing their child-like fascination with this simulacrum of a long-dead, saintly celebrity.

One older man was regarding her a little too closely. His eyes were odd, an unnaturally pale grey. She wondered if he had possession of the new breed of retinal implants that were rumoured — by operating at millimetre wavelengths, at which textiles were transparent, and with a little subtle image enhancement — to enable the wearer to see through clothes. He took a tentative step toward her, and orthotic aids, his invisible walking machine, whirred stiffly.

Kate turned away.

“…He’s only a virtual, I’m afraid. Our young sergeant over there, that is. Like his three companions, who are likewise scattered around the room. Even my father’s grasp doesn’t yet extend to resurrecting the dead. But of course you knew that.”

The voice in her ear had made her jump. She turned, and found herself looking into the face of a young man: perhaps twenty-five, jet-black hair, a proud Roman nose, a chin with a cleft to die for. His mixed ancestry told in the pale brown of his skin, the heavy black brows over startling, cloudy blue eyes. But his gaze roamed, restlessly, even in these first few seconds of meeting her, as if he had trouble maintaining eye contact.

He said, “You’re staring at me.”

She came out fighting. “Well, you startled me. Anyhow I know who you are.” This was Bobby Patterson, Hiram’s only son and heir — and a notorious sexual predator. She wondered how many other unaccompanied women this man had targeted tonight.

“And I know you, Ms. Manzoni. Or can I call you Kate?”

“You may as well — I call your father Hiram, as everyone does, though I’ve never met him.”

“Do you want to? I could arrange it.”

“I’m sure you could.”

He studied her a little more closely now, evidently enjoying the gentle verbal duel. “You know, I could have guessed you were a journalist — a writer, anyhow. The way you were watching the people reacting to the virtual, rather than the virtual itself… I saw your pieces on the Wormwood, of course. You made quite a splash.”

“Not as much as the real thing will when it hits the Pacific on May 27, 2534 A.D.”

He smiled, and his teeth were like rows of pearls. “You intrigue me, Kate Manzoni,” he said. “You’re accessing the Search Engine right now, aren’t you? You’re asking it about me.”

“No.” She was annoyed by the suggestion. “I’m a journalist. I don’t need a memory crutch.”

“I do, evidently. I remembered your face, your story, but not your name. Are you offended?”

She bristled. “Why should I be? As a matter of fact -”

“As a matter of fact, I smell a little sexual chemistry in the air. Am I right?”

There was a heavy arm around her shoulder, a powerful scent of cheap cologne. It was Hiram Patterson himself: one of the most famous people on the planet.

Bobby grinned and, gently, pushed his father’s arm away. “Dad, you’re embarrassing me again.”

“Oh, bugger that. Life’s too short, isn’t it?” Hiram’s accent bore strong traces of his origins, the long, nasal vowels of Norfolk, England. He was very like his son, but darker, bald with a fringe of wiry black hair around his head; his eyes were intense blue over that prominent family nose, and he grinned easily, showing teeth stained by nicotine. He looked energetic, younger than his late sixties. “Ms. Manzoni, I’m a great admirer of your work. And may I say you look terrific.”

“Which is why I’m here, no doubt.”

He laughed, pleased. “Well, that too. But I did want to be sure there was one intelligent person in among the air-head politicos and pretty-pretties who crowd out these events. Somebody who would be able to record this moment of history.”

“I’m flattered.”

“No, you’re not,” Hiram said bluntly. “You’re being ironic. You’ve heard the buzz about what I’m going to say tonight. You probably even generated some of it yourself. You think I’m a megalomaniac nutcase.”

“I don’t think I’d say that. What I see is a man with a new gadget. Hiram, do you really believe a gadget can change the world?”

“But gadgets do, you know! Once it was the wheel, agriculture, iron-making — inventions that took thousands of years to spread around the planet. But now it takes a generation or less. Think about the car, the television. When I was a kid computers were giant walk-in wardrobes served by a priesthood with punch cards. Now we all spend half our lives plugged into SoftScreens. And my gadget is going to top them all… Well. You’ll have to decide for yourself.” He studied Kate. “Enjoy tonight. If this young waster hasn’t invited you already, come to dinner, and we’ll show you more, as much as you want to see. I mean it. Talk to one of the drones. Now, do excuse me…” Hiram squeezed her shoulders briefly, then began to make his way through the crowd, smiling and waving and glad-handing as he went.

Kate took a deep breath. “I feel as if a bomb just went off.”

Bobby laughed. “He does have that effect. By the way -”

“What?”

“I was going to ask you anyhow before the old fool jumped in. Come have dinner. And maybe we can have a little fun, get to know each other better…”

As his patter continued, she tuned him out and focused on what she knew about Hiram Patterson and OurWorld.

Hiram Patterson — born Hirdamani Patel — had dragged himself out of impoverished origins in the fen country of eastern England, a land which had now disappeared beneath the encroaching North Sea. He had made his first fortune by using Japanese cloning technologies to manufacture ingredients for traditional medicines once made from the bodies of tigers — whiskers, paws, claws, even bones — and exporting them to Chinese communities around the world. That had gained him notoriety: brickbats for using advanced technology to serve such primitive needs, praise for reducing the pressure on the remaining populations of tigers in India, China, Russia, and Indonesia. (Not that there were any tigers left now anyhow.)

After that Hiram had diversified. He had developed the world’s first successful SoftScreen, a flexible image system based on polymer pixels capable of emitting multi-coloured light. With the success of the SoftScreen Hiram began to grow seriously rich. Soon his corporation, OurWorld, had become a powerhouse in advanced technologies, broadcasting, news, sport and entertainment.

But Britain was declining. As part of unified Europe — deprived of tools of macroeconomic policy like control of exchange and interest rates, and yet unsheltered by the imperfectly integrated greater economy — the British government was unable to arrest a sharp economic collapse. At last, in 2010, social unrest and climate collapse forced Britain out of the European Union, and the United Kingdom fell apart, Scotland going its own separate way. Through all this Hiram had struggled to maintain OurWorld’s fortunes.

Then, in 2019, England, with Wales, ceded Northern Ireland to Eire, packed off the Royals to Australia — where they were still welcome — and had become the fifty-second state of the United States of America. With the benefit of labour mobility, interregional financial transfers and other protective features of the truly unified American economy, England thrived. But it had to thrive without Hiram. As a U.S. citizen, Hiram had quickly taken the opportunity to relocate to the outskirts of Seattle, Washington, and had delighted in establishing a new corporate headquarters here, at what used to be the Microsoft campus. Hiram liked to boast that he would become the Bill Gates of the twenty-first century. And indeed his corporate and personal power had, in the richer soil of the American economy, grown exponentially.

Still, Kate knew, he was only one of a number of powerful players in a crowded and competitive market. She was here tonight because — so went the buzz and as he had just hinted — Hiram was to reveal something new, something that would change all that.

Bobby Patterson, by contrast, had grown up enveloped by Hiram’s power.

Educated at Eton, Cambridge and Harvard, he had taken various positions within his father’s companies, and enjoyed the spectacular life of an international playboy and the world’s most eligible bachelor. As far as Kate knew he had never once demonstrated any spark of initiative of his own, nor any desire to escape his father’s embrace — better yet, to supplant him.

Kate gazed at his perfect face. This is a bird who is happy with his gilded cage, she thought. A spoilt rich kid.

But she felt herself flush under his gaze, and despised her biology.

She hadn’t spoken for some seconds; Bobby was still waiting for her to respond to his dinner invitation.

“I’ll think about it, Bobby.”

He seemed puzzled — as if he’d never received such a hesitant response before. “Is there a problem? If you want I can -”

“Ladies and gentlemen.”

Every head turned; Kate was relieved.

Hiram had mounted a stage at one end of the cafeteria. Behind him, a giant SoftScreen showed a blown-up image of his head and shoulders. He was smiling over them all, like some beneficent god, and drones drifted around his head bearing jewel-like images of the multiple OurWorld channels. “May I say, first of all, thank you all for coming to witness this moment of history, and for your patience. Now the show is about to begin.”

The dandy-like virtual in the lime green soldier suit materialized on the stage beside Hiram, his granny glasses glinting in the lights. He was joined by three others, in pink, blue and scarlet, each carrying a musical instrument — an oboe, a trumpet, a piccolo. There was scattered applause. The four took an easy bow, and stepped lightly to an area at the back of the stage where a drum kit and three electric guitars were waiting for them.

Hiram said easily, “This imagery is being broadcast to us, here in Seattle, from a station near Brisbane, Australia — bounced off various comsats, with a time delay of a few seconds. I don’t mind telling you these boys have made a mountain of money in the last couple of years — their new song Let Me Love You was number one around the world for four weeks over Christmas, and all the profit from that went to charity.”

“New song,” Kate murmured cynically.

Bobby leaned closer. “You don’t like the V-Fabs?”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “The originals broke up sixty-five years ago. Two of them died before I was born. Their guitars and drums are so clunky and old-fashioned compared to the new airware bands, where the music emerges from the performers’ dance… and anyhow all these new songs are just expert-system extrapolated garbage.”

“All part of our — what do you call it in your polemics? — our cultural decay.” he said gently.

“Hell, yes,” she. said, but before his easy grace she felt a little embarrassed by her sourness.

Hiram was still talking. “…not just a stunt. I was born in 1967, during the Summer of Love. Of course some say the sixties were a cultural revolution that led nowhere. Perhaps that’s true — directly. But it, and its music of love and hope, played a great part in shaping me, and others of my generation.”

Bobby caught Kate’s eye. He mimed vomiting with a splayed hand, and she had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing.

“…And at the height of that summer, on 25 June 1967, a global television show was mounted to demonstrate the power of the nascent communications network.” Behind Hiram the V-Fab drummer counted out a beat, and the group started playing, a dirge-like parody of the Marseillaise that gave way to finely sung three part harmony. “This was Britain’s contribution,” Hiram called over the music. “A song about love, sung to two hundred million people around the world. That show was called Our World. Yes, that’s right. That’s where I got the name from. I know it’s a little corny. But as soon as I saw the tapes of that event, at ten years old, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.”

Corny, yes, thought Kate, but undeniably effective; the audience was gazing spellbound at Hiram’s giant image as the music of a summer seven decades gone reverberated around the cafeteria.

“And now,” said Hiram with a showman’s nourish, “I believe I have achieved my life’s goal. I’d suggest holding on to something — even someone else’s hand…”

The floor turned transparent.

Suddenly suspended over empty space, Kate felt herself stagger, her eyes deceived despite the solidity of the floor beneath her feet. There was a gale of nervous laughter, a few screams, the gentle tinkle of dropped glass.

Kate was surprised to find she had grabbed on to Bobby’s arm. She could feel a knot of muscle there. He had covered her hand with his, apparently without calculation.

She let her hand stay where it was. For now.

She seemed to be hovering over a starry sky, as if this cafeteria had been transported into space. But these “stars,” arrayed against a black sky, were gathered and harnessed into a cubical lattice, linked by a subtle tracery of multi-coloured light. Looking into the lattice, the images receding with distance, Kate felt as if she were staring down an infinitely long tunnel.

With the music still playing around him — so artfully, subtly different from the original recording — Hiram said, “You aren’t looking up into the sky, into space. Instead you are looking down, into the deepest structure of matter. This is a crystal of diamond. The white points you see are carbon atoms. The links are the valence forces that join them. I want to emphasize that what you are going to see, though enhanced, is not a simulation. With modern technology-scanning tunnelling microscopes, for instance — we can build up images of matter even at this most fundamental of levels. Everything you see is real. Now — come further.”

Holographic images rose to fill the room, as if the cafeteria and all its occupants were sinking into the lattice, and shrinking the while. Carbon atoms swelled over Kate’s head like pale grey balloons; there were tantalizing hints of structure in their interior. And all around her space sparkled. Points of light winked into existence, only to be snuffed out immediately. It was quite extraordinarily beautiful, like swimming through a firefly cloud.

“You’re looking at space,” said Hiram. “’Empty’ space. This is the stuff that fills the universe. But now we are seeing space at a resolution far finer than the limits of the human eye, a level at which individual electrons are visible — and at this level, quantum effects become important. ‘Empty’ space is actually full, full of fluctuating energy fields. And these fields manifest themselves as particles: photons, electron-positron pairs, quarks… They flash into a brief existence, bankrolled by borrowed mass-energy, then disappear as the law of conservation of energy reasserts itself. We humans see space and energy and matter from far above, like an astronaut flying over an ocean. We are too high to see the waves, the flecks of foam they carry. But they are there.

“And we haven’t reached the end of our journey yet. Hang on to your drinks, folks.”

The scale exploded again. Kate found herself flying into the glassy onion-shell interior of one of the carbon atoms. There was a hard, shining lump at its very centre, a cluster of misshapen spheres. Was it the nucleus? — and were those inner spheres protons and neutrons?

As the nucleus flew at her she heard people cry out. Still clutching Bobby’s arm, she tried not to flinch as she hurtled into one of the nucleons.

And then…

There was no shape here. No form, no definite light, no colour beyond a blood-red crimson. And yet there was motion, a slow, insidious, endless writhing, punctuated by bubbles which rose and burst. It was like the slow boiling of some foul, thick liquid.

Hiram said, “We’ve reached what the physicists call the Planck level. We are twenty order of magnitudes deeper than the virtual-particle level we saw earlier. And at this level, we can’t even be sure about the structure of space itself: topology and geometry break down, and space and time become untangled.”

At this most fundamental of levels, there was no sequence to time, no order to space. The unification of spacetime was ripped apart by the forces of quantum gravity, and space became a seething probabilistic froth, laced by wormholes.

“Yes, wormholes,” Hiram said. “What we’re seeing here are the mouths of wormholes, spontaneously forming, threaded with electric fields. Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. Right? But at this level space is grainy, and we can’t trust it to do its job any more. And so a wormhole mouth can connect any point, in this small region of spacetime, to any other point — anywhere: downtown Seattle, or Brisbane, Australia, or a planet of Alpha Centauri. It’s as if spacetime bridges are spontaneously popping into and out of existence.”

His huge face smiled down at them, reassuring. “I don’t understand this any more than you do,” the image said. “Trust me.”

“My technical people will be on hand later to give you background briefings in as much depth as you can handle.

“What’s more important is what we intend to do with all this. Simply put, we are going to reach into this quantum foam and pluck out the wormhole we want: a wormhole connecting our laboratory, here in Seattle, with an identical facility in Brisbane, Australia. And when we have it stabilized, that wormhole will form a link down which we can send signals — beating light itself.

“And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the basis of a new communications revolution. No more expensive satellites sandblasted by micrometeorites and orbit-decaying out of the sky; no more frustrating time delay; no more horrific charges — the world, our world, will be truly linked at last.”

As the virtuals kept playing there was a hubbub of conversation, even heckling questions. “Impossible!”

“Wormholes are unstable. Everyone knows that.”

“Infalling radiation makes wormholes collapse immediately.”

“You can’t possibly -”

Hiram’s giant face loomed over the seething quantum foam. He snapped his fingers. The quantum foam disappeared, to be replaced by a single artefact, hanging in the darkness below their feet.

There was a soft sigh.

Kate saw a gathering of glowing light points — atoms? The lights made up a geodesic sphere, closed over itself, slowly turning. And within, she saw, there was another sphere, turning in the opposite sense — and within that another sphere, and another, down to the limits of vision. It was like some piece of clockwork, an ornery of atoms. But the whole structure pulsed with a pale blue light, and she sensed a gathering of great energies.

It was, she admitted, truly beautiful.

Hiram said, “This is called a Casimir engine. It is perhaps the most exquisitely constructed machine ever built by man, a machine over which we have laboured for years — and yet it is less than a few hundred atomic diameters wide.

“You can see the shells are constructed of atoms — in fact carbon atoms; the structure is related to the natural stable structures called ‘buckyballs,’ carbon-60. You make the shells by zapping graphite with laser beams. We’ve loaded the engine with electric charge using cages called Penning traps — electromagnetic fields. The structure is held together by powerful magnetic fields. The various shells are maintained, at their closest, just a few electrons’ diameters apart. And in those finest of gaps, a miracle happens…”

Kate, tiring of Hiram’s wordy boasting, quickly consulted the Search Engine. She learned that the “Casimir effect” was related to the virtual particles she had seen sparkling into and out of existence. In the narrow gap between the atomic shells, because of resonance effects, only certain types of particles would be permitted to exist. And so those gaps were emptier than “empty” space, and therefore less energetic.

This negative-energy effect could give rise, among other things, to antigravity.

The structure’s various levels were starting to spin more rapidly. Small clocks appeared around the engine’s image, counting patiently down. from ten to nine, eight, seven. The sense of energy gathering was palpable.

“The concentration of energy in the Casimir gaps is increasing,” Hiram said. “We’re going to inject Casimir effect negative energy into the wormholes of the quantum foam. The antigravity effects will stabilize and enlarge the wormholes.

“We calculate that the probability of finding a wormhole connecting Seattle to Brisbane, to acceptable accuracy, is one in ten million. So it will take us some ten million attempts to locate the wormhole we want. But this is atomic machinery and it works bloody fast; even a hundred million attempts should take less than a second… And the beauty of it is, down at the quantum level, links to any place we want already exist: all we have to do is find them.”

The virtuals’ music was swelling to its concluding chorus. Kate stared as the Frankenstein machine beneath her feet spun madly, glowing palpably with energy.

And the clocks finished their count.

There was a dazzling flash. Some people cried out.

When Kate could see again, the atomic machine, still spinning, was no longer alone. A silvery bead, perfectly spherical, hovered alongside it. A wormhole mouth?

And the music had changed. The V-Fabs had reached the chant-like chorus of their song. But the music was distorted by a much coarser chanting that preceded the high-quality sound by a few seconds.

Aside from the music, the room was utterly silent.

Hiram gasped, as if he had been holding his breath. “That’s it,” he said. “The new signal you hear is the same performance, but now piped here through the wormhole — with no significant time delay. We did it. Tonight, for the first time in history, humanity is sending a signal through a stable wormhole.”

Bobby leaned to Kate and said wryly, “The first time, apart from all the test runs.”

“Really?”

“Of course. You don’t think he was going to leave this to chance, did you? My father is a showman. But you can’t begrudge the man his moment of glory.”

The giant display showed Hiram was grinning. “Ladies and gentlemen — never forget what you’ve seen tonight. This is the start of the true communications revolution.”

The applause started slowly, scattered, but rapidly rising to a thunderous climax.

Kate found it impossible not to join in. I wonder where this will lead, she thought. Surely the possibilities of this new technology — based, after all, on the manipulation of space and time themselves — would not prove limited to simple data transfer. She sensed that nothing would be the same, ever again.

Kate’s eye was caught by a splinter of light, dazzling, somewhere over her head. One of the drones was carrying an image of the rocket ship she’d noticed before. It was climbing into its patch of blue-grey central Asian sky, utterly silently. It looked strangely old-fashioned, an image drifting up from the past rather than the future. Nobody else was watching it, and it held little interest for her. She turned away.

Green-red flame billowed into curving channels of steel and concrete. The light pulsed across the steppe toward Vitaly. It was bright, dazzlingly so, and it banished the dim floods that still lit up the booster stack, even the brilliance of the steppe sun. And, even before the ship had left the ground, the roar reached him, a thunder that shook his chest.

Ignoring the mounting pain in his arm and shoulder, the numbness of his hands and feet, Vitaly stood, opened his cracked lips and added his voice to that divine bellow. He always had been a sentimental old fool at such moments.

But there was much agitation around him. The people here, the rat-hungry, ill-trained technicians and the fat, corrupt managers alike, were turning away from the launch. They were huddling around radio sets and palmtop televisions, jewel-like SoftScreens showing baffling images from America. Vitaly did not know the details, and did not care to know; but it was clear enough that Hiram Patterson had succeeded in his promise, or threat.

Even as it lifted from the ground, his beautiful bird, this last Molniya, was already obsolete.

Vitaly stood straight, determined to watch it as long as he could, until that point of light at the tip of the great smoke pillar melted into space.

…But now the pain in his arm and chest reached a climax, as if some bony hand was clutching there. He gasped. Still he tried to stay on his feet. But now there was a new light, rising all around him, even brighter than the rocket light that bathed the Kazakhstan steppe; and he could stand no longer.

Chapter 2 The mind’s eye

As Kate was driven into the grounds, it struck her as a typical Seattle setting: green hills that lapped right down to the ocean, framed under a grey, lowering autumn sky.

But Hiram’s mansion — a giant geodesic dome, all windows — looked as if it had just landed on the hillside, one of the ugliest, most gaudy buildings Kate had ever seen.

On arrival she handed her coat to a drone. Her identity was scanned — not just a reading of her implants but also, probably, pattern-matching to identify her face, even a non-intrusive DNA sequencing, all done in seconds. Then she was ushered inside by Hiram’s robot servants.

Hiram was working. She wasn’t surprised. The six months since the launch of his wormhole DataPipe technology had been his busiest, and OurWorld’s most successful, ever, according to the analysts. But he’d be back in time for dinner, said the drone.

So she was taken to Bobby.

The room was large, the temperature neutral, the walls as smooth and featureless as an eggshell. The light was low, the sound anechoic, deadened. The only furniture was a number of reclined black-leather couches. Beside each of the couches was a small table with a water spigot and a stand for intravenous feeds

And here was Bobby Patterson, presumably one of the richest, most powerful young men on the planet, lying alone on a couch in the dark, eyes open but unfocused, limbs limp. There was a metal band around his temples.

She sat on a couch beside Bobby and studied him. She could see that he was breathing, slowly, and the intravenous feed he’d fitted to a socket in his arm was gently supplying his neglected body.

He was dressed in loose black shirt and shorts. His body, revealed where the loose clothing lay against his skin, was a slab of muscle. But that didn’t tell much about his lifestyle; such body sculpting could now be achieved easily through hormone treatments and electrical stimulation. He could even do that while he was lying here, she thought, like a coma victim lying in a hospital bed.

There was a trace of drool at the corner of his parted lips. She wiped the drool away with a forefinger, and gently pushed the mouth closed.

“Thank you.”

She turned, startled. Bobby — another Bobby, identically dressed to the first — was standing beside her, grinning. Irritated, she threw a punch at his stomach. Her fist, of course, passed straight through him. He didn’t flinch.

“You can see me, then,” he said.

“I see you.”

“You have retinal and cochlear implants. Yes? This room is designed to produce virtuals compatible with all recent generations of CNS-augment technology. Of course, to me you’re sitting on the back of a mean-looking phytosaur.”

“A what?”

“A Triassic crocodile. Which is beginning to notice you’re there. Welcome, Ms. Manzoni.”

“Kate.”

“Yes. I’m glad you took up my, our, dinner invitation. Although I didn’t expect it would take you six months to respond.”

She shrugged, “Hiram Gets Even Richer really isn’t much of a story.”

“Uhuh. Which implies you’ve now heard something new.” Of course he was right; Kate said nothing. “Or,” he went on, “perhaps you finally succumbed to my charming smile.”

“Perhaps I would if your mouth wasn’t laced with drool.”

Bobby looked down at his own unconscious form. “Vanity? We should care how we look even when we’re exploring a virtual world?” He frowned. “Of course, if you’re right, it’s something for my marketing people to think about.”

“Your marketing people?”

“Sure.” He ‘picked up’ a metal headband from a couch near him; a virtual copy of the object separated from the real thing, which remained on the couch. “This is the Mind’sEye. OurWorld’s newest VR technology. Do you want to try it?”

“Not really.”

He studied her. “You’re hardly a VR virgin, Kate. Your sensory implants are pretty much the minimum required to get around in the modern world.”

“Have you ever tried getting through SeaTac Airport without VR capabilities?”

He laughed. “Actually I’m generally escorted through. I suppose you think it’s all part of a giant corporate conspiracy.”

“Of course it is. The technological invasion of our homes and cars and workplaces long ago reached saturation point. Now they are coming for our bodies.”

“How angry you are.” He held up the headband. It was an oddly recursive moment, she thought absently, a virtual copy of Bobby holding a virtual copy of a virtual generator. “But this is different. Try it. Take a trip with me.”

She hesitated — but then, feeling she was being churlish, she agreed; she was a guest here after all. But she turned down his offer of an intravenous feed. “We’ll just take a look around and come back out before our bodies fall apart. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” he said. “Pick a couch. Just fit the headset over your temples, like this.” Carefully he raised the virtual set over his head. His face, intent, was undeniably beautiful, she thought; he looked like Christ with the crown of thorns.

She lay down on a couch nearby and lifted a Mind’sEye headband onto her own head. It had warmth and elasticity, and when she pulled it down past her hair it seemed to nestle into place.

Her scalp, under the band, prickled. “Ouch.”

Bobby was sitting on his couch. “Infusers. Don’t worry about it. Most of the input is via transcranial magnetic stimulation. When we’ve rebooted you won’t feel a thing…” As he settled she could see his two bodies, of flesh and pixels, briefly overlaid.

The room went dark. For a heartbeat, two, she could see, hear nothing. Her sense of her body faded away, as if her brain were being scooped out of her skull.

With an intangible thud she felt herself fall once more into her body. But now she was standing.

In some kind of mud.

Light and heat burst over her, blue, green, brown. She was on a riverbank, up to her ankles in thick black gumbo.

The sky was a washed-out blue. She was at the edge of a forest, a lush riot of ferns, pines and giant conifers, whose thick dark foliage blocked out much of the light. The heat and humidity were stifling; she could feel sweat soak through her shirt and trousers, plastering her fringe to her forehead. The nearby river was broad, languid, brown with mud.

She climbed a little deeper into the forest, seeking firmer ground. The vegetation was very thick; leaves and shoots slapped at her face and arms. There were insects everywhere, including giant blue dragonflies, and the jungle was alive with noise: chirping, growling, cawing.

The sense of reality was startling, the authenticity far beyond any VR she’d experienced before.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Bobby was standing beside her. He was wearing khaki shorts and shirt and a broad hat, safari style; there was an old-fashioned-looking rifle slung from his shoulder.

“Where are we? I mean…”

“When are we? This is Arizona: the Late Triassic, some two hundred million years ago. More like Africa, yes? This period gave us the Painted Desert strata. We have giant horsetails, ferns, cycads, club mosses… But this is a drab world in some ways. The evolution of the flowers is still far in the future. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

She propped her foot on a log and tried to scrape the gumbo off her legs with her hands. The heat was deeply uncomfortable, and her growing thirst was sharp. Her bare arm was covered by a myriad sweat globules which glimmered authentically, so hot they felt as if they were about to boil.

Bobby pointed upward. “Look.”

It was a bird, flapping inelegantly between the branches of a tree… No, it was too big and ungainly for a bird. Besides, it lacked feathers. Perhaps it was some kind of flying reptile. It moved with a purple, leathery ruse, and Kate shuddered.

“Admit it,” he said. “You’re impressed.”

She moved her arms and legs around, bent this way and that. “My body sense is strong. I can feel my limbs, sense up and down if I tilt. But I assume I’m still lying in my couch, drooling like you were.”

“Yes. The proprioception features of the Mind’sEye are very striking. You aren’t even sweating. Well, probably not; sometimes there’s a little leakage. This is fourth-generation VR technology, counting forward from crude Glasses-and-Gloves, then sense-organ implants — like yours — and cortical implants, which allowed a direct interface between external systems and the human central nervous system.”

“Barbaric,” she snapped.

“Perhaps,” he said gently. “Which brings me to the Mind’sEye. The headbands produce magnetic fields which can stimulate precise areas of the brain. All without the need for physical intervention.

“But it isn’t just the redundancy of implants that’s exciting,” he said smoothly. “It’s the precision and scope of the simulation we can achieve. Right now, for example, a fish-eye map of the scene is being painted directly onto your visual cortex. We stimulate the amygdala and the insula in the temporal lobe to give you a sense of smell. That’s essential for the authenticity of the experience. Scents seem to go straight to the brain’s limbic system, the seat of the emotions. That’s why scents are always so evocative you know? We even deliver mild jolts of pain by lighting up the anterior cingulate cortex — the centre, not of pain itself, but of the conscious awareness of pain. Actually we do a lot of work with the limbic system, to ensure everything you see packs an emotional punch.

“Then there’s proprioception, body sense, which is very complex, involving sensory inputs from the skin, muscles and tendons, visual and motion information from the brain, balance data from the inner ear. It took a lot of brain mapping to get that right. But now we can make you fall, fly, turn somersaults, all without leaving your couch… and we can make you see wonders, like this.”

“You know this stuff well. You’re proud of it, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am. It’s my development.” He blinked, and she became aware that it was the first time he’d looked directly at her for some minutes; even here in this mocked-up Triassic jungle, he made her feel vaguely uneasy — even though she was, on some level, undoubtedly attracted to him.

“Bobby, in what sense is this yours? Did you initiate it? Did you fund it?”

“I’m my father’s son. It’s his corporation I’m working within. But I oversee the Mind’sEye research. I field-test the products.”

“Field-test? You mean you come down here and play hunt-the-dinosaur?”

“I wouldn’t call it playing,” he said mildly. “Let me show you.” He stood, briskly, and pushed on deeper into the jungle.

She struggled to follow. She had no machete, and the branches and thorns were soon cutting through her thin clothes and into her flesh. It stung, but not too much — of course not. It wasn’t real, just some damn adventure game. She plunged after Bobby, fuming inwardly about decadent technology and excess wealth.

They reached the edge of a clearing, an area of fallen, charred trees within which small green shoots were struggling to emerge. Perhaps this had been cleared by lightning.

Bobby held out an arm, keeping her back at the edge of the forest. “Look.”

An animal was grubbing with snout and paws among the dead, charred wood fragments. It must have been two metres long, with a wolf-like head and protruding canine teeth. Despite its lupine appearance, it was grunting like a pig.

“A cynodont,” whispered Bobby, “A protomammal.”

“Our ancestor?”

“No. The true mammals have already branched off. The cynodonts are an evolutionary dead end… Shit.”

Now there was a loud crashing from the undergrowth on the far side of the clearing. It was a Jurassic Park dinosaur, at least two metres tall; it came bounding out of the forest on massive hind legs, huge jaws agape, scales glittering.

The cynodont seemed to freeze, eyes fixed on the predator.

The dino leapt on the back of the cynodont, which was flattened under the weight of its assailant. The two of them rolled, crushing the young trees growing here, the cynodont squealing.

She shrank back into the jungle, clutching Bobby’s arm. She felt the shaking of the ground, the power of the encounter. Impressive, she conceded.

The carnosaur finished up on top. Holding down its prey with the weight of its body, it bent to the protomammal’s neck and, with a single snap, bit through it. The cynodont was still struggling, but white bones showed in its ripped-open neck, and blood gushed. And when the carnosaur burst the stomach of its prey, there was a stink of rotten meat that almost made Kate retch…

Almost, but not quite. Of course not. Just as, if she looked closely, there was a smooth fakeness to the spurting blood of the protomammal, a glistening brightness to the dino’s scales. Every VR was like this: gaudy but limited, even the stench and noise modelled for user comfort, all of it as harmless — and therefore as meaningless — as a theme-park ride.

“I think that’s a dilophosaur,” murmured Bobby. “Fantastic. That’s why I love this period. It’s a kind of junction of life. Everything overlaps here, the old with the new, our ancestors and the first dinosaurs…”

“Yes,” said Kate, recovering, “But it isn’t real.”

He tapped his skull. “It’s like all fiction. You have to suspend your disbelief.”

“But it’s just some magnetic field tickling my lower brain. This isn’t even the genuine Triassic, for God’s sake, just some academic’s bad guesswork — with a little colour thrown in for the virtual tourist.”

He was smiling at her. “You’re always so angry. Your point is?”

She stared at his empty blue eyes. Up to now he had set the agenda. If you want to get any further, she told herself, if you want to get any closer to what you came for, you’ll have to challenge him. “Bobby, right now you’re lying in a darkened room. None of this counts.”

“You sound as if you’re sorry for me.” He seemed curious.

“Your whole life seems to be like this. For all your talk of VR projects and corporate responsibilities, you don’t have any real control over anything, do you? The world you live in is as unreal as any virtual simulation. Think about it: you were actually alone, before I showed up.”

He pondered that. “Perhaps. But you did show up.” He shouldered his rifle. “Come on. Time for dinner with Dad.” He cocked an eyebrow, “Maybe you’ll stick around even when you’ve got whatever it is you want out of us.”

“Bobby.”

But he had already lifted his hands to his headband.

Dinner was difficult.

The three of them sat beneath the domed apex of Hiram’s mansion. Stars and a gaunt crescent Moon showed between gaps in the racing clouds. The sky could not have been more spectacular — but it struck her that thanks to Hiram’s wormhole DataPipes, the sky was soon going to get a lot more dull, as the last of the low orbit comsats were allowed to fall back into the atmosphere.

The food was finely prepared, as she’d expected, and served by silent drone robots. But the courses were fairly plain seafood dishes of the type she could have enjoyed in any of a dozen restaurants in Seattle, the wine a straightforward Californian Chardonnay. There wasn’t a trace here of Hiram’s own complex origins, no originality or expression of personality of any kind.

And meanwhile, Hiram’s focus on her was intense and unrelenting. He peppered her with questions and supplementaries about her background, her family, her career; over and again she found herself saying more than she should.

His hostility, under a veneer of politeness, was unmistakable. He knows what I’m up to, she realized.

Bobby sat quietly, eating little. Though his disconcerting habit of avoiding eye contact lingered, he seemed more aware of her than before. She sensed attraction — that wasn’t so difficult to read — but also a certain fascination. Maybe she’d somehow punctured that complacent, slick hide of his, as she’d hoped to. Or, more likely, she conceded, he was simply puzzled by his own reactions to her.

Or maybe this was all just fantasy on her part, and she ought to keep from meddling in other people’s heads, a habit she so strongly condemned in others. “I don’t get it,” Hiram was saying now. “How can it have taken until 2033 to find the Wormwood, an object four hundred kilometres across? I know it’s out beyond Uranus, but still.”

“It’s extremely dark and slow moving,” said Kate. “It is apparently a comet, but much bigger than any comet known. We don’t know where it came from; perhaps there is a cloud of such objects out there, somewhere beyond Neptune.

“And nobody was especially looking that way anyhow. Even Spaceguard concentrates on near-Earth space, the objects which are likely to hit us in the near future. The Wormwood was found by a network of sky-gazing amateurs.”

“Umm,” said Hiram. “And now it’s on its way here.”

“Yes. In five hundred years.”

Bobby waved a strong, manicured hand. “But that’s so far ahead. There must be contingency plans.”

“What contingency plans? Bobby, the Wormwood is a giant. We don’t know any way to push the damn thing away, even in principle. And when that rock falls, there will be nowhere to hide.”

“We don’t know any way?” Bobby said dryly.

“I mean the astronomers.”

“The way you were talking I’d almost imagined you discovered it yourself.” He was needling her, responding to her earlier probing. “It’s so easy to mix up one’s own achievement with that of the people one relies on, isn’t it?”

Hiram was cackling. “I can tell you kids are getting on just fine. If you care enough to argue… And you, of course, Ms. Manzoni, think the people have a right to know that the world is going to end in five hundred years?”

“Don’t you?”

Bobby said, “And you’ve no concern for the consequences — the suicides, the leap in abortion rates, the abandonment of various environment-conservation projects?”

“I brought the bad news,” she said tensely. “I didn’t bring the Wormwood. Look, if we aren’t informed, we can’t act, for better or ill; we can’t take responsibility for ourselves — in whatever time we have left. Not that our options are promising. Probably the best we can do is send a handful of people off to somewhere safer, the Moon or Mars or an asteroid. Even that isn’t guaranteed to save the species, unless we can establish a breeding population. And,” she said heavily, “those who do escape will no doubt be those who govern us, and their offspring, unless we shake off our electronic anaesthesia.”

Hiram pushed his chair back and roared with laughter. “Electronic anaesthesia. How true that is. As long as I’m selling the anaesthetics, of course.” He looked at her directly. “I like you, Ms. Manzoni.”

Liar. “Thank you.”

“Why are you here?”

There was a long silence. “You invited me.”

“Six months and seven days ago. Why now? Are you working for my rivals?”

“No.” She bristled at that. “I’m a freelance.”

He nodded. “Nevertheless there is something you want here. A story, of course. The Wormwood is already receding into your past, and you need fresh triumphs, a new scoop. That’s what people like you live on. Don’t you, Ms. Manzoni? But what can it be? Nothing personal, surely. There is little about me that is not in the public record.”

She said carefully, “Oh, I dare say there are a few items.” She took a breath. “The truth is I heard you have a new project. A new wormhole application, far beyond the simple DataPipes which -”

“You came here grubbing for facts,” said Hiram.

“Come on, Hiram. The whole world is getting wired up with your wormholes. If I could scoop the rest -”

“But you know nothing.”

She bridled. “I’ll show you what I know. You were born Hirdamani Patel. Before you were born your father’s family was forced to flee Uganda. Ethnic cleansing, right?”

Hiram glared, “This is public knowledge. In Uganda my father was a bank manager. In Norfolk he drove buses, as nobody would recognize his qualifications.”

“You weren’t happy in England,” Kate bulldozed on. “You found yourself unable to overcome barriers of race and class. So you left for America. You dumped your given name, adopted an anglicized version. You have become known as something of a role model for Asians in America. And yet you cut yourself off from your ethnic origins. Each of your wives has been a WASP.”

Bobby looked startled. “’Wives’? Dad.”

“Family is everything to you,” Kate said evenly, compelling their attention. “You’re trying to establish a dynasty, it seems, through Bobby here. Perhaps it’s because you abandoned your own family, your own father, back in England.”

“Ah.” Hiram clapped his hands, forcing a smile. “I wondered how long it would be before Papa Sigmund joined us at the table. So that is your story. Hiram Patterson is building OurWorld because he is guilty about his father!”

Bobby was frowning. “Kate, what new project are you talking about?”

Was it possible Bobby really didn’t know? She held Hiram’s gaze, relishing her sudden power. “Significant enough for him to summon your brother back from France.”

“Brother…”

“Significant enough for him to take on Billybob Meeks as an investment partner. Meeks, the founder of RevelationLand. Have you heard of that, Bobby? The latest mind-sapping, money-drinking perversion of religion to afflict America’s wretched population of the gullible.”

“This is irrelevant,” Hiram snapped. “Yes, I’m working with Meeks. I’ll work with anybody. If people want to buy my VR gear so they can see Jesus and His tap-dancing Apostles, I’ll sell it to them. Who am I to judge? We aren’t all as sanctimonious as you, Ms. Manzoni. We don’t all have that luxury.”

But Bobby was staring at Hiram. “My brother?”

Kate was startled, and ran the conversation through her head again. “Bobby… You didn’t know any of this, did you? Not just about the project, but Hiram’s other wife, his other child.” She looked at Hiram, shocked. “How could anybody keep a secret like that?”

Hiram’s mouth pursed, and his glare at Kate was full of loathing. “A half-brother, Bobby. Just a half-brother.”

Kate said clinically, “His name is David.” She pronounced it the French way: Dah-veed. “His mother was French. He’s thirty-two — seven years older than you, Bobby. He’s a physicist. He’s doing well; he’s been described as the Hawking of his generation. Oh, and he’s Catholic. Devout, apparently.”

Bobby seemed — not angry — even more baffled. He said to Hiram, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Hiram said, “You didn’t need to know.”

“And the new project, whatever it is? Why didn’t you tell me about that?”

Hiram stood up. “Your company has been charming, Ms. Manzoni. The drones will show you out.”

She stood. “You can’t stop me printing what I know.”

“Print what you please. You don’t have anything important.” And, she knew, he was right.

She walked to the door, her euphoria dissipating quickly. I blew it, she told herself. I meant to ingratiate myself with Hiram. Instead I had to have my fun, and make him into an enemy.

She looked back. Bobby was still seated. He was looking at her, those strange church-window eyes open wide. I’ll see you again, she thought. Maybe this wasn’t over yet.

The door began to close. Her last glimpse was of Hiram covering his son’s hand with his own, tenderly.

Chapter 3 The wormworks

Hiram was waiting for David Curzon in the arrivals hall at SeaTac.

Hiram was simply overwhelming. He immediately grabbed David’s shoulders and pulled him close. David could smell powerful cologne, synth-tobacco, a lingering trace of spices. Hiram was nearing seventy, but didn’t show it, no doubt thanks to anti-ageing treatments and subtle cosmetic sculpting. He was tall and dark — where David, taking after his mother, was more stocky, blond, leaning to plump.

And here was that voice David hadn’t heard since he was five years old, the face — blue eyes, strong nose — that had loomed over him like a giant Moon. “My boy. It’s been too long. Come on. We’ve got a hell of a lot to catch up on…”

David had spent most of the flight from England composing himself for this encounter. You are thirty-two years old, he told himself. You have a tenured position at Oxford. Your papers, and your popular book on the exotic mathematics of quantum physics, have been extremely well received. This man may be your father. But he abandoned you, and has no hold over you.

You are an adult now. You have your faith. You have nothing to fear.

But Hiram, as he surely intended, had broken through all David’s defences in the first five seconds of their encounter. David, bewildered, allowed himself to be led away.

Hiram took his son straight to his research facility — the Wormworks, as he called it — out to the north of Seattle itself. The drive, in a SmartDrive Rolls, was fast and scary. Controlled by positioning satellites and intelligent in-car software, the vehicles flowed along the freeways at more than 150 kilometres an hour, mere centimetres between their bumpers; it was all much more aggressive than David was used to in Europe. But the city, what he saw of it, struck him as quite European, a place of fine, well-preserved houses with expansive views of hills and sea, the more modern developments integrated reasonably gracefully with the overall feel of the place. The downtown area seemed to be bustling, as the Christmas buying season descended once more.

He remembered little of the place but childhood fragments: the small boat Hiram used to run out of the Sound, trips above the snow line in winter. He’d been back to America many times before, of course; theoretical physics was an international discipline. But he’d never returned to Seattle — not since the day his mother had so memorably bundled him up and stormed out of Hiram’s home.

Hiram talked continually, peppering his son with questions.

“So you feel settled in England?”

“Well, you know about the climate problems. But even icebound, Oxford is a fine place to live. Especially since they abolished private cars inside the ring road, and.”

“Those stuck-up British toffs don’t pick on you for that French accent?”

“Father, I am French. That’s my identity.”

“But not your citizenship.” Hiram slapped his son’s thigh. “You’re an American. Don’t forget that.” He glanced at David more warily. “And are you still practising?”

David smiled. “You mean, am I still a Catholic? Yes, Father.”

Hiram grunted. “That bloody mother of yours. Biggest mistake I ever made was shackling myself to her without taking account of her religion. And now she’s passed the God virus on to you.”

David felt his nostrils flare. “Your language is offensive.”

“…Yes. I’m sorry. So, England is a good place to be a Catholic nowadays?”

“Since they disestablished the Church, England has acquired one of the healthiest Catholic communities in the world.”

Hiram grunted. “You don’t often hear the words ‘healthy’ and ‘Catholic’ in the same sentence… We’re here.”

They had reached a broad parking lot. The car pulled over. David climbed out after his father. They were close to the ocean here, and David was immediately immersed in chill, salt-laden air.

The lot fringed a large open building, crudely constructed of concrete and corrugated metal, like an aircraft hangar. There was a giant corrugated door at one end, partly open, and robot trucks were hauling cartons into the building from a stack outside.

Hiram led his son to a small, human-sized door cut in one wall; it was dwarfed by the scale of the structure. “Welcome to the centre of the universe.” Hiram looked abashed, suddenly. “Look, I dragged you out here without thinking. I know you’re just off your flight. If you need a break, a shower -”

Hiram seemed full of genuine concern for his welfare, and David couldn’t resist a smile. “Maybe coffee, a little later. Show me your new toy.”

The space within was cold, cavernous. As they walked across the dusty concrete floor their footsteps echoed. The roof was ribbed, and strip lights dangled everywhere, filling the vast volume with a cold, pervasive grey light. There was a sense of hush, of calm; David was reminded more of a cathedral than a technological facility.

At the centre of the building a stack of equipment towered above the handful of technicians working here. David was a theoretician, not an experimentalist, but he recognized the paraphernalia of a high-energy experimental rig. There were subatomic-particle detectors — arrays of crystal blocks stacked high and deep — and boxes of control electronics piled up like white bricks, dwarfed by the detector array itself, but each itself the size of a mobile home.

The technicians weren’t typical of a high-energy physics establishment, however. On average they seemed quite old — perhaps around sixty, given how hard it was to estimate ages these days.

He raised this with Hiram.

“Yeah. OurWorld makes the policy of hiring older workers anyhow. They’re conscientious, generally as smart as they ever were thanks to the brain chemicals they give us now, and grateful for a job. And in this case, most of the people here are victims of the SSC cancellation.”

“The SSC — the Superconducting Super Collider?” A multi-billion-dollar particle-accelerator project that would have been built under a cornfield in Texas, had it not been canned by Congress in the 1990s.

Hiram said, “A whole generation of American particle physicists was hit by that decision. They survived; they found jobs in industry and Wall Street and so forth. Most of them never got over their disappointment, however.”

“But the SSC would have been a mistake. The linear accelerator technology that came along a few years later was far more effective, and cheaper. And besides most fundamental results in particle physics since 2010 or so have come from studies of high-energy cosmological events.”

“It doesn’t matter. Not to these people. The SSC might have been a mistake. But it would have been their mistake. When I traced these guys and offered them a chance to come work in cutting-edge high-energy physics again they jumped at the chance.” He eyed his son. “You know, you’re a smart boy, David.”

“I’m not a boy.”

“You had the kind of education I could never even have dreamed of. But there’s a lot I could teach you even so. Like how to handle people.” He waved a hand at the technicians. “Look at these guys. They’re working for a promise: for dreams of their youth, aspiration, self-fulfilment. If you can find some way to tap into that, you can get people to work like pit ponies, and for pennies.”

David followed him, frowning.

They reached a guardrail, and one grey-haired technician — with a curt, somewhat awed nod at Hiram — handed them hard hats. David fitted his gingerly to his head.

David leaned over the rail. He could smell machine oil, insulation, cleaning solvents. From here he could see that the detector array actually extended some distance below the ground surface. At the centre of the pit was a tight knot of machinery, dark and unfamiliar. A puff of vapour, like wispy steam, billowed from the core of the machinery: cryogenics, perhaps. There was a whirr, somewhere above. David looked up to see a beam crane in action, a long steel beam that extended over the detector array, with a grabbing arm at the end.

Hiram murmured, “Most of this stuff is just detectors of one kind or another, so we can figure out what is going on — particularly when something goes wrong.” He pointed at the knot of machinery at the core of the array. “That is the business end. A cluster of superconducting magnets.”

“Hence the cryogenics.”

“Yes. We make our big electromagnetic fields in there, the fields we use to build our buckyball Casimir engines.” There was pride in his voice — justifiable, thought David. “This was the very site where we opened up that first wormhole, back in the spring. I’m getting a plaque put up, you know, one of those historic markers. Call me immodest. Now we’re using this place to push the technology further, as far and as fast as we can.”

David turned to Hiram. “Why have you brought me out here?”

“…Just the question I was going to ask.”

The third voice, utterly unexpected, clearly startled Hiram.

A figure stepped out of the shadows of the detector stack, and came to stand beside Hiram. For a moment David’s heart pumped, for it might have been Hiram’s twin — or his premature ghost. But at second glance David could detect differences; the second man was considerably younger, less bulky, perhaps a little taller, and his hair was still thick and glossy black.

But those ice blue eyes, so unusual given an Asian descent, were undoubtedly Hiram’s.

“I know you,” David said.

“From tabloid TV?”

David forced a smile. “You’re Bobby.”

“And you must be David, the half-brother I didn’t know I had, until I had to learn it from a journalist.” Bobby was clearly angry, but his self-control was icy.

David realized he had landed in the middle of a complicated family row — worse, it was his family.

Hiram looked from one to the other of his sons. He sighed. “David, maybe it’s time I bought you that coffee.”

The coffee was among the worst David had ever tasted. But the technician who served the three of them hovered at the table until David took his first sip. This is Seattle, David reminded himself; here, quality coffee has been a fetish among the social classes who man installations like this for a generation. He forced a smile. “Marvellous,” he said.

The tech went away beaming.

The facility’s cafeteria was tucked into the corner of the ‘countinghouse,’ the computing center where data from the various experiments run here were analysed. The counting house itself, characteristic of Hiram’s cost conscious operations, was minimal, just a temporary office module with a plastic tile floor, fluorescent ceiling panels, wood-effect plastic workstation partitions. It was jammed with computer terminals, SoftScreens, oscilloscopes and other electronic equipment. Cables and light fibre ducts snaked everywhere, bundles of them taped to the walls and floor and ceiling. There was a complex smell of electrical-equipment ozone, of stale coffee and sweat.

The cafeteria itself had turned out to be a dismal shack with plastic tables and vending machines, all maintained by a battered drone robot. Hiram and his two sons sat around a table, arms folded, avoiding each other’s eyes.

Hiram dug into a pocket and produced a handkerchief sized SoftScreen, smoothed it flat. He said, “I’ll get to the point. On. Replay. Cairo.”

David watched the ’Screen. He saw, through a succession of brief scenes, some kind of medical emergency unfolding in sun-drenched Cairo. Egypt: stretcher-bearers carrying bodies from buildings, a hospital crowded with corpses and despairing relatives and harassed medical staff, mothers clutching the inert bodies of infants, screaming.

“Dear God.”

“God seems to have been looking the other way,” Hiram said grimly. “This happened this morning. Another water war. One of Egypt’s neighbours dumped a toxin in the Nile. First estimates are two thousand dead, ten thousand ill, many more deaths expected.

“Now.” He tapped the little ’Screen. “Look at the picture quality. Some of these images are from handheld cams, some from drones. All taken within ten minutes of the first reported outbreak by a local news agency. And here’s the problem.” Hiram touched the corner of the image with his fingernail. It bore a logo: ENO, the Earth News Online network, one of Hiram’s bitterest rivals in the news-gathering field. Hiram said, “We tried to strike a deal with the local agency, but ENO scooped us.” He looked at his sons. “This happens all the time. In fact, the bigger I get, the more sharp little critters like ENO snap at my heels.

“I keep camera crews and stringers all around the world, at considerable expense. I have local agents on every street corner across the planet. But we can’t be everywhere. And if we aren’t there it can take hours, days even to get a crew in place. In the twenty-four-hour news business, believe me, being a minute late is fatal.”

David frowned. “I don’t understand. You’re talking about competitive advantage? People are dying here, right in front of your eyes.”

“People die all the time,” said Hiram harshly. “People die in wars over resources, like in Cairo here, or over fine religious or ethnic differences, or because some bloody typhoon or flood or drought hits them as the climate goes crazy, or they just plain die. I can’t change that. If I don’t show it, somebody else will. I’m not here to argue morality. What I’m concerned about is the future of my business. And right now I’m losing out. And that’s why I need you. Both of you.”

Bobby said bluntly, “First tell us about our mothers.”

David held his breath.

Hiram gulped his coffee. He said slowly, “All right. But there really isn’t much to tell. Eve — David’s mother — was my first wife.”

“And your first fortune,” David said dryly.

Hiram shrugged. “We used Eve’s inheritance as seedcorn money to start the business. It’s important that you understand, David. I never ripped off your mother. In the early days we were partners. We had a kind of long range business plan. I remember we wrote it out on the back of a menu at our wedding reception… We hit every bloody one of those targets, and more. We multiplied your mothers fortune tenfold. And we had you.”

“But you had an affair, and your marriage broke up,” David said.

Hiram eyed David. “How judgemental you are. Just like your mother.”

“Just tell us, Dad,” Bobby pressed.

Hiram nodded. “Yes, I had an affair. With your mother, Bobby. Heather, she was called. I never meant it to be this way… David, my relationship with Eve had been failing for a long time. That damn religion of hers.”

“So you threw her out.”

“She tried to throw me out — I wanted us to come to a settlement, to be civilized about it. In the end she ran out on me — taking you with her.”

David leaned forward. “But you cut her out of your business interests. A business you had built on her money.”

Hiram shrugged. “I told you I wanted a settlement. She wanted it all. We couldn’t compromise.” His eyes hardened. “I wasn’t about to give up everything I’d built up. Not on the whim of some religion-crazed nut. Even if she was my wife, your mother. When she lost her all-or-nothing suit, she went to France with you, and disappeared off the face of the Earth. Or tried to.” He smiled, “It wasn’t hard to track you down.” Hiram reached for his arm, but David pulled back. “David, you never knew it, but I’ve been there for you. I found ways to, umm, help you out, without your mother knowing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say you owe everything you have to me, but -”

David felt anger blaze. “What makes you think I wanted your help?”

Bobby said, “Where’s your mother now?”

David tried to calm down. “She died. Cancer. It could have been easier for her. We couldn’t afford -”

“She wouldn’t let me help her,” Hiram said. “Even at the end she pushed me away.”

David said, “What do you expect? You took everything she had from her.”

Hiram shook his head. “She took something more important from me. You.”

“And so,” Bobby said coldly, “you focused your ambition on me.”

Hiram shrugged. “What can I say? Bobby, I gave you everything — everything. I’d have given both of you. I prepared you as best I could.”

“Prepared?” David laughed, bemused. “What kind of word is that?”

Hiram thumped the table. “If Joe Kennedy can do it, why not Hiram Patterson? Don’t you see, boys? There’s no limit to what we can achieve, if we work together…”

“You are talking about politics?” David eyed Bobby’s sleek, puzzled face. “Is that what you intend for Bobby? Perhaps the Presidency itself?” He laughed. “You are exactly as I imagined you, Father.”

“And how’s that?”

“Arrogant. Manipulative.”

Hiram was growing angry. “And you are just as I expected. As pompous and pious as your mother.”

Bobby was staring at his father, bemused.

David stood. “Perhaps we have said enough.”

Hiram’s anger dissipated immediately. “No. Wait. I’m sorry. You’re right. I didn’t drag you all the way over here to fight with you. Sit down and hear me out. Please.”

David remained on his feet. “What do you want of me?”

Hiram sat back and studied him. “I want you to build a bigger wormhole for me.”

“How much bigger?”

Hiram took a breath. “Big enough to look through.”

There was a long silence.

David sat down, shaking his head. “That’s -”

“Impossible? I know. But let me tell you anyhow.” Hiram got up and walked around the cluttered cafeteria, gesturing as he talked, animated, excited. “Suppose I could immediately open up a wormhole from my newsroom in Seattle direct to this story event in Cairo — and suppose that wormhole was wide enough to transmit pictures from the event — I could feed images from anywhere in the world straight into the network, with virtually no delay. Right? Think about it. I could fire my stringers and remote crews, reducing my costs to a fraction. I could even set up some kind of automated search facility, continually keeping watch through short-lived wormholes, waiting for the next story to break, wherever and whenever. There’s really no limit.”

Bobby smiled weakly. “Dad, they’d never scoop you again.”

“Bloody right.” Hiram turned to David. “That’s the dream. Now tell me why it’s impossible.”

David frowned. “It’s hard to know where to start. Right now you can establish metastable DataPipes between two fixed points. That’s a considerable achievement in itself. But you need a massive piece of machinery at each end to anchor each wormhole mouth. Correct? Now you want to open up a stable wormhole mouth at the remote end, at your news story’s location, without the benefit of any kind of anchor.”

“Correct.”

“Well, that’s the first thing that’s impossible, as I’m sure your technical people have been telling you.”

“So they have. What else?”

“You want to use these wormholes to transmit visible light photons. Now, quantum-foam wormholes come in at the Planck-Wheeler length, which is ten-to-minus-thirty-five metres. You’ve managed to expand them up through twenty orders of magnitude to make them big enough to pass gamma-ray photons. Very high frequency, very short wavelength.”

“Yeah. We use the gamma rays to carry digitized data streams, which…”

“But the wavelength of your gamma rays is around a million times smaller than visible-light wavelengths. The mouths of your second-generation wormholes would have to be around a micron across at least.” David eyed his father. “I take it you’ve had your engineers trying to achieve exactly that. And it doesn’t work.”

Hiram sighed. “We’ve actually managed to pump in enough Casimir energy to rip open wormholes that wide. But you get some kind of feedback effect which causes the damn things to collapse.”

David nodded. “They call it Wheeler instability. Wormholes aren’t naturally stable. A wormhole mouth’s gravity pulls in photons, accelerates them to high energy, and that energized radiation bombards the throat and causes it to pinch off. It’s the effect you have to counter with Casimir-effect negative energy, to keep open even the smallest wormholes.”

Hiram walked to the window of the little cafeteria. Beyond, David could see the hulking form of the detector complex at the heart of the facility. “I have some good minds here. But these people are experimentalists. All they can do is trap and measure what happens when it all goes wrong. What we need is to beef up the theory, to go beyond the state of the art. Which is where you come in.” He turned. “David, I want you to take a sabbatical from Oxford and come work with me on this.” Hiram put his arm around David’s shoulders; his flesh was strong and warm, its pressure overpowering. “Think of how this could turn out. Maybe you’ll pick up the Nobel Prize in Physics, while simultaneously I’ll eat up ENO and those other yapping dogs who run at my heels. Father and son together. Sons. What do you think?”

David was aware of Bobby’s eyes on him. “I guess -”

Hiram clapped his hands together. “I knew you’d say yes.”

“I haven’t, yet.”

“Okay, okay. But you will. I sense it. You know, it’s just terrific when long-term plans pay off.”

David felt cold. “What long-term plans?”

Talking fast and eagerly, Hiram said, “If you were going to work in physics, I was keen for you to stay in Europe. I researched the field. You majored in mathematics — correct? Then you took your doctorate in a department of applied math and theoretical physics.”

“At Cambridge, yes. Hawking’s department -”

“That’s a typical European route. As a result you’re well versed in up-to-date math. It’s a difference of culture, Americans have led the world in practical physics, but they use math that dates back to World War Two. So if you’re looking for a theoretical breakthrough, don’t ask anyone trained in America.”

“And here I am,” said David coldly. “With my convenient European education.”

Bobby said slowly, “Dad, are you telling us you arranged things so that David got a European physics education, just on the off chance that he’d be useful to you? And all without his knowledge?”

Hiram stood straight. “Not just useful to me. More useful to himself. More useful to the world. More liable to achieve success.” He looked from one to the other of his sons, and placed his hands on their heads, as if blessing them. “Everything I’ve done has been in your best interest. Don’t you see that yet?”

David looked into Bobby’s eyes. Bobby’s gaze slid away, his expression unreadable.

Chapter 4 Wormwood

Extracted from “Wormwood: When Mountains Melt,” by Katherine Manzoni, published by Shiva Press, New York, 2033; also available as Internet floater dataset:

…We face great challenges as a species if we are to survive the next few centuries. It has become clear that the effects of climate change will be much worse than imagined a few decades ago: indeed, predictions of those effects from, say, the 1980s now look foolishly optimistic. We know now that the rapid warming of the last couple of centuries has caused a series of metastable natural systems around the planet to flip to new states. From beneath the thawing permafrost of Siberia, billions of tonnes of methane and other greenhouse gases are already being released. Warming ocean waters are destabilizing more huge methane reservoirs around the continental shelves. Northern Europe is entering a period of extreme cold because of the shutdown of the Gulf Stream. New atmospheric modes — permanent storms — seem to be emerging over the oceans and the great landmasses. The death of the tropical forests is dumping vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The slow melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet seems to be releasing pressure on an archipelago of sunken islands beneath, and volcanic activity is likely, which will in turn lead to a catastrophic additional melting of the sheet. The rise in sea levels is now forecast to be much higher than was imagined a few decades ago. And so on. All of these changes are interlinked. It may be that the spell of climatic stability which the Earth has enjoyed for thousands of years — a stability which allowed human civilization to emerge in the first place — is now coming to an end, perhaps because of our own actions. The worst case is that we are heading for some irreversible climatic breakdown, for example a runaway greenhouse, which would kill us all. But all these problems pale in comparison to what will befall us if the body now known as the Wormwood should impact the Earth — although it is a chill coincidence that the Russian for “Wormwood” is “Chernobyl”…

Much of the speculation about the Wormwood and its likely consequence has been sadly misinformed — indeed, complacent. Let me reiterate some basic facts here.

Fact: the Wormwood is not an asteroid.

The astronomers think the Wormwood might once have been a moon of Neptune or Uranus, or perhaps it was locked in a stable point in Neptune’s orbit, and was then perturbed somehow. But perturbed it was, and now it is on a five-hundred-year collision course with Earth.

Fact: the Wormwood’s impact will not be comparable to the Chicxulub impact which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

That impact was sufficient to cause mass death, and to alter — drastically, and for all time — the course of evolution of life on Earth. But it was caused by an impactor some ten kilometres across. The Wormwood is forty times as large, and its mass is therefore some sixty thousand times as great.

Fact: the Wormwood will not simply cause a mass extinction event, like Chicxulub It will be much worse than that.

The heat pulse will sterilize the land to a depth of fifty metres. Life might survive, but only by being buried deep in caves. We know no way, even in principle, by which a human community could ride out the impact. It may be that viable populations could be established on other worlds: in orbit, on Mars or the Moon. But even in five centuries only a small fraction of the world’s current population could be sheltered off-world.

Thus, Earth cannot be evacuated. When the Wormwood arrives, almost everybody will die.

Fact: the Wormwood cannot be deflected with foreseeable technology.

It is possible we could turn aside small bodies — a few kilometres across, typical of the population of near-Earth asteroids — with such means as emplaced nuclear charges or thermonuclear rockets. The challenge of deflecting the Wormwood is many orders of magnitude greater. Thought experiments on moving such bodies have proposed, for example, using a series of gravitational assists — not available in this case — or using advanced technology such as nanotech von Neumann machines to dismantle and disperse the body. But such technologies are far beyond our current capabilities.

Two years after I exposed the conspiracy to conceal from the general public the existence of the Wormwood, attention is already moving on and we have yet to start work on the great project of our survival.

Indeed, the Wormwood itself is already having advance effects. It is a cruel irony that just as, for the first time in our history, we were beginning to manage our future responsibly and jointly, the prospect of Wormwood Day seems to render such efforts meaningless. Already we’ve seen the abandonment of various voluntary waste-emission guidelines, the closure of nature reserves, an upgraded search for sources of non-renewable fuels, an extinction pulse among endangered species. If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well bum the furniture today.

None of our problems are insoluble, not even the Wormwood. But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history.

Still, my hope centres on humanity and ingenuity. It is significant, I believe, that the Wormwood was discovered not by the professionals, who weren’t looking that way, but by a network of amateur sky watchers, who set up robot telescopes in their backyards, and used shareware routines to scan optical detector images for changing glimmers of light, and refused to accept the cloak of secrecy our government tried to lay over them. It is in groups like this — earnest, intelligent, cooperative, stubborn, refusing to submit to impulses toward suicide or hedonism or selfishness, seeking new solutions to challenge the complacency of the professionals — that our best and brightest hope of surviving the future may lie…

Chapter 5 Virtual heaven

Bobby was late arriving at RevelationLand. Kate was still waiting in the car lot for him as the swarms of ageing adherents started pressing through the gates of Billybob Meeks’ giant cathedral of concrete and glass. This “cathedral” had once been a football stadium; they were forced to sit near the back of one of the stands, their view impeded by pillars. Sellers of hot dogs, peanuts, soft drinks and recreational drugs were working the crowd, and muzak played over the PA. Jerusalem, she recognized: based on Blake’s great poem about the legendary visit of Christ to Britain, now the anthem of the new post-United Kingdom England.

The entire floor of the stadium was mirrored, making it a floor of blue sky littered with fat December clouds. At the centre there was a gigantic throne, covered in stones glimmering green and blue — probably impure quartz, she thought. Water sprayed through the air, and arc lamps created a rainbow which arched spectacularly. More lamps hovered in the air before the throne, held aloft by drone robots, and smaller thrones circled bearing elders, old men and women dressed in white with golden crowns on their skinny heads.

And there were beasts the size of tipper trucks prowling around the field. They were grotesque, every part of their bodies covered with blinking eyes. One of them opened giant wings and flew, eagle-like, a few metres, The beasts roared at the crowd, their calls amplified by a booming PA. The crowd got to its feet and cheered, as if celebrating a touchdown.

Bobby was oddly nervous. He was wearing a tight fitting one-piece suit of bright scarlet, with a colour morphing kerchief draped around his neck. He was a gorgeous twenty-first-century dandy, she thought, as out of place in the drab, elderly multitude around him as a diamond in a child’s seashore pebble collection.

She touched his hand. “Are you okay?”

“I didn’t realize they’d all be so old.”

He was right, of course. The gathering congregation was a powerful illustration of the silvering of America. Many of the crowd, in fact, had cognitive-enhancer studs clearly visible at the backs of their necks, there to combat the onset of age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s by stimulating the production of neurotransmitters and cell adhesion molecules.

“Go to any church in the country and you’ll see the same thing, Bobby. Sadly, people are attracted to religion when they approach death. And now there are more old people — and with the Wormwood coming we all feel the brush of that dark shadow, perhaps. Billybob is just surfing a demographic wave. Anyhow, these people won’t bite.”

“Maybe not. But they smell. Can’t you tell?”

She laughed.

“One should never put on one’s best trousers to go out to battle for freedom and truth.”

“Huh?”

“Henrik Ibsen.”

Now a man stood up on the big central throne. He was short, fat and his face shone with sweat. His amplified voice boomed out: “Welcome to RevelationLand! Do you know why you’re here?” His finger stabbed. “Do you? Do you? Listen to me now: On the Lord’s day I was in the spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, which said: “Write on a scroll what you see…” And he held up a glittering scroll.

Kate leaned toward Bobby. “Meet Billybob Meeks. Prepossessing, isn’t he? Clap along. Protective colouration.”

“What’s going on, Kate?”

“Evidently you’ve never read the Book of Revelation. The Bible’s deranged punch line.” She pointed. “Seven hovering lamps. Twenty-four thrones around the big one. Revelation is riddled with magic numbers — three, seven, twelve. And its description of the end of things is very literal. Although at least Billybob uses the traditional versions, not the modern editions which have been rewritten to show how the Wormwood date of 2534 was there in the text all along…” She sighed. “The astronomers who discovered the Wormwood didn’t do anybody any favours by calling it that. Chapter 8, verse 10: The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water — the name of the star is Wormwood…”

“I don’t understand why you invited me here today. In fact I don’t know how you got a message through to me. After my father threw you out.”

“Hiram isn’t yet omnipotent, Bobby,” she said. “Not even over you. And as to why — look up.”

A drone robot hovered over their heads, labelled with a stark, simple word: GRAINS. It dipped into the crowd, in response to the summons of members of the congregation.

Bobby said, “Grains? The mind accelerator?”

“Yes. Billybob’s specialty. Do you know Blake? To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, / And Eternity in an hour… The pitch is that if you take Grains your perception of time will speed up. Subjectively, you’ll be able to think more thoughts, have more experiences, in the same external time. A longer life available exclusively from Billybob Meeks.”

Bobby nodded. “But what’s wrong with that?”

“Bobby, look around. Old people are frightened of death. That makes them vulnerable to this kind of scam.”

“What scam? Isn’t it true that Grains actually works?”

“After a fashion. The brain’s internal clock actually runs more slowly for older people. And that’s the mechanism Billybob is screwing around with.”

“And the problem is…”

“The side effects. What Grains does is to stimulate the production of dopamine, the brain’s main chemical messenger. Trying to make an old man’s brain run as fast as a child’s.”

“Which is a bad thing,” he said uncertainly. “Right?”

She frowned, baffled by the question; not for the first time she had the feeling that there was something missing about Bobby. “Of course it’s a bad thing. It is malevolent brain-tinkering. Bobby, dopamine is involved in a lot of fundamental brain functions. If dopamine levels are too low you can suffer tremors, an inability to start voluntary movement — Parkinson’s disease, for instance — all the way to catatonia. Too much dopamine and you can suffer from agitation, obsessive-compulsive disorders, uncontrolled speech and movement, addictiveness, euphoria. Billybob’s congregation — I should say his victims — aren’t going to achieve Eternity in their last hour, Billybob is cynically burning out their brains.

“Some of the doctors are putting two and two together. But nobody has been able to prove anything. What I really need is evidence from his own labs that Billybob knows exactly what he is doing. Along with proof of his other scams.”

“Such as?”

“Such as embezzling millions of bucks from insurance companies by selling them phony lists of church members. Such as pocketing a large donation from the Anti-Defamation League. He’s still hustling, even though he’s come a long way from banknote-baptisms.” She glanced at Bobby. “Never heard of that? You palm a bill during a baptism. That way the blessing of God gets diverted to the money rather than the kiddie. Then you send the note out into circulation, and it’s supposed to return to you with interest… and to make especially sure it works, of course, you hand the money over to your preacher. Word is Billybob picked up that endearing habit in Colombia, where he was working as a drug runner.”

Bobby looked shocked. “You don’t have any proof of that.”

“Not yet,” she said grimly. “But I’ll get it.”

“How?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about…”

He looked mildly stunned.

She said, “Sorry. I’m lecturing you, aren’t I?”

“A little.”

“I do that when I’m angry.”

“Kate, you are angry a lot…”

“I feel entitled. I’ve been on this guy’s trail for months.”

A drone robot floated over their heads, bearing sets of virtual Glasses-and-Gloves. “These Glasses-and-Gloves have been devised by RevelationLand Inc., in conjunction with OurWorld Corporation, for the full experience of RevelationLand. Your credit card or personal account will be billed automatically per online minute. These Glasses-and-Gloves…”

Kate reached up and snagged two sets. “Show time.”

Bobby shook his head. “I have implants. I don’t need…”

“Billybob has his own special way of disabling rival technologies.” She lifted the Glasses to her head. “Are you ready?”

“I guess.”

She felt a moist sensation around her eye sockets, as the Glasses extruded membranes to make a light-tight junction with her flesh; it felt like cold wet mouths sucking at her face.

She was instantly suspended in darkness and silence.

Now Bobby materialized beside her, floating in space, holding her hand. His Glasses-and-Gloves were, of course, invisible.

And soon her vision cleared further. People were hovering all around them, off as far as she could see, like a cloud of dust motes. They were all dressed in white robes and holding big, gaudy palm leaves — even to Bobby and herself, she found. And they were shining in the light that streamed from the object that hung before them.

It was a cube; huge, perfect, shining sun-bright, utterly dwarfing the flock of hovering people.

“Wow,” Bobby said again.

“Revelation Chapter Twenty-one,” she murmured. “Welcome to the New Jerusalem.” She tried to throw away her palm leaf, but another simply appeared in her hand. “Just remember,” she said, “the only real thing here is the steady flow of money out of your pockets and into Billybob’s.”

Together, they fell toward the light.

The wall before her was punctured by windows and a line of three arched doorways. She could see a light within, shining even more brightly than the exterior of the building. Scaled against the building’s dimensions, the walls looked as thin as paper.

And still they fell toward the cube, until it loomed before them, gigantic, like some immense ocean liner.

Bobby said, “How big is this thing?”

She murmured, “Saint John tells us it is a cube twelve thousand stadia to each side.”

“And twelve thousand stadia is…”

“About two thousand kilometres. Bobby, this city of God is the size of a small moon. It’s going to take a long time to fall in. And we’ll be charged for every second, of course.”

“In that case I wish I’d had a hot dog. You know, my father mentions you a lot.”

“He’s angry at me.”

“Hiram is, umm, mercurial. I think on some level he found you stimulating.”

“I suppose I should be flattered.”

“He liked the phrase you used. Electronic anaesthesia. I have to admit I didn’t fully understand.”

She frowned at him, as together they drifted toward the pale grey light. “You really have led a sheltered life, haven’t you, Bobby?”

“Most of what you call “brain-tinkering” is beneficial, surely. Like Alzheimer studs.” He eyed her. “Maybe I’m not as out of it as you think I am. A couple of years ago I opened a hospital wing endowed by OurWorld. They were helping obsessive-compulsive sufferers by cutting out a destructive feedback loop between two areas of the brain.”

“The caudate nucleus and the amygdala.” She smiled. “Remarkable how we’ve all become experts in brain anatomy. I’m not saying it’s all harmful. But there is a compulsion to tinker. Addictions are nullified by changes to the brain’s reward circuitry. People prone to rage are pacified by having parts, of their amygdala — essential to emotion — burned out. Workaholics, gamblers, even people habitually in debt are ‘diagnosed’ and ‘cured.’ Even aggression has been linked to a disorder of the cortex.”

“What’s so terrible about all of that?”

“These quacks, these reprogramming doctors, don’t understand the machine they are tinkering with. It’s like trying to figure out the functions of a piece of software by burning out the chips of the computer it’s running on. There are always side-effects. Why do you think it was so easy for Billybob to find a football stadium to take over? Because organized spectator sport has been declining since 2015: the players no longer fought hard enough.”

He smiled. “That doesn’t seem too serious.”

“Then consider this. The quality and quantity of original scientific research has been plummeting for two decades. By ‘curing’ fringe autistics, the doctors have removed the capacity of our brightest people to apply themselves to tough disciplines. And the area of the brain linked to depression, the subgenual cortex, is also associated with creativity — the perception of meaning. Most critics agree that the arts have gone into a reverse. Why do you think your father’s virtual rock bands are so popular, seventy years after the originals were at their peak?”

“But what’s the alternative? If not for reprogramming, the world would be a violent and savage place.”

She squeezed his hand. “It may not be evident to you in your gilded cage, but the world out there still is violent and savage. What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy’s point of view. If we can’t achieve that, than all the reprogramming in the world is futile.”

He said wryly, “You really are an angry person, aren’t you?”

“Angry? At charlatans like Billybob? At latter-day phrenologists and lobotomisers and Nazi doctors who are screwing with our heads, maybe even threatening the future of the species, while the world comes to pieces around us? Of course I’m angry. Aren’t you?”

He returned her gaze, puzzled. “I guess I have to think about it… Hey. We’re accelerating.”

The Holy City loomed before her. The wall was like a great upended plain, with the doors shining rectangular craters before her.

The swarms of people were plunging in separating streams toward the great arched doors, as if being drawn into maelstroms. Bobby and Kate swooped toward the central door. Kate felt an exhilarating headlong rush as the door arch opened wide before her, but there was no genuine sense of motion here. If she thought about it, she could still feel her body, sitting quietly in its stiff-backed stadium seat.

But still, it was some ride.

In a heartbeat they had flown through the doorway, a glowing tunnel of grey-white light, and they were skimming over a surface of shining gold.

Kate glanced around, seeking walls that must be hundreds of kilometres away. But there was unexpected artistry here. The air was misty — there were even clouds above her, scattered thinly, reflecting the shining golden floor — and she couldn’t see beyond a few kilometres of the golden plain.

…And then she looked up, and saw the shining walls of the city rising out of the layer of atmosphere that clung to the floor. The plains and straight line edges merged into a distant square, unexpectedly clear, far above the air.

It was a ceiling over the atmosphere.

“Wow,” she said. “It’s the box the Moon came in.”

Bobby’s hand around hers was warm and soft. “Admit it. You’re impressed.”

“Billybob is still a crook.”

“But an artful crook.”

Now gravity was taking hold. The people around them were descending like so many human snowflakes; and Kate fell with them. She could see a river, bright blue, that cut across the golden plain beneath. Its banks were lined with dense green forest. There were people everywhere, she realized, scattered over the riverbank and the clear areas beyond and near the buildings. And thousands more were falling out of the sky all around her. Surely there were more here than could have been present in the sports stadium; no doubt many of them were virtual projections.

Details seemed to crystallize as she fell: trees and people and even dapples of light on the water of the river. At last the tallest trees were stretching up around her.

With a blur of motion she settled easily to the ground. When she looked into the sky she saw a blizzard of people in their snow-white robes, falling easily, without apparent fear.

There was gold everywhere: underfoot, on the walls of the nearest buildings. She studied the faces nearest her. They seemed excited, happy, anticipating. But the gold filled the air with a yellow light that made the people look as if they were suffering from some mineral deficiency. And no doubt those happy-clappy expressions were virtual fakes painted on bemused faces.

Bobby walked over to a tree. She noticed that his bare feet disappeared a centimeter or two into the grass surface. Bobby said, “The trees have got more than one kind of fruit. Look. Apples, oranges, limes…”

“On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations…”

“I’m impressed by the attention to detail.”

“Don’t be,” She bent down to touch the ground. She could feel no grass blades, no dew, no earth, only a slick plastic smoothness. “Billybob is a showman,” she said. “But he’s a cheap showman.” She straightened up. “This isn’t even a true religion. Billybob has marketeers and business analysts working for him, not nuns. He is preaching a gospel of prosperity, that it’s okay to be greedy and grasping. Talk to your brother about it. This is a commodity fetishism, directly descended from Billybob’s banknote-baptism scam.”

“You sound as if you care about religion.”

“Believe me, I don’t,” she said vehemently. “The human race could get along fine without it. But my beef is with Billybob and his kind. I brought you here to show you how powerful he is, Bobby. We need to stop him.”

“So how am I supposed to help?”

She stepped a little closer to him. “I know what your father is trying to build. An extension of his DataPipe technology. A remote viewer.”

He said nothing.

“I don’t expect you to confirm or deny that. And I’m not going to tell you how I know about it. What I want you to think about is what we could achieve with such a technology.”

He frowned. “Instant access to news stories, wherever they break.”

She waved that away. “Much more than that. Think about it. If you could open up a wormhole to anywhere, then there would be no more barriers. No walls. You could see anybody, at any time. And crooks like Billybob would have nowhere to hide.”

His frown deepened. “You’re talking about spying?”

She laughed. “Oh, come on, Bobby — each of us is under surveillance the whole time anyhow. You’ve been a celebrity since the age of twenty-one; you must know how it feels to be watched.”

“It’s not the same.”

She took his arm. “If Billybob has nothing to hide, he’s nothing to fear,” she said. “Look at it that way.”

“Sometimes you sound like my father,” he said neutrally.

She fell silent, disquieted.

They walked forward with the throng. Now they were nearing a great throne, with seven dancing globes and twenty-four smaller attendant thrones, a scaled-up version of the real-world display Billybob had mounted out in the stadium.

And before the great central throne stood Billybob Meeks.

But this wasn’t the fat, sweating man she had seen out on the sports field. This Billybob was taller, younger, thinner, far better looking, like a young Charlton Heston. Although he must have been at least a kilometre from where she stood, he towered over the congregation. And he seemed to be growing.

He leaned down, hands on hips, his voice like shaped thunder. “The city does not need the sun or the Moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp…” Still Billybob grew, his arms like tree trunks, his face a looming disc that was already above the lower clouds. Kate could see people fleeing from beneath his giant feet, like ants.

And Billybob pointed a mighty finger directly at her, immense grey eyes glaring, the angry furrows on his brow like Martian channels. “Nothing impure will ever come in to it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life. Is your name in that book? Is it? Are you worthy?”

Kate screamed, suddenly overwhelmed. And she was picked up by an invisible hand and dragged into the shining air.

There was a sucking sensation at her eyes and ears. Light, noise, the mundane stink of hot dogs flooded over her.

Bobby was kneeling before her. She could see the marks the Glasses had made around his eyes. “He got to you, didn’t he?”

“Billybob does have a way of punching his message home,” she gasped, still disoriented.

On row after row of the old sports stadium’s battered seats, people were rocking and moaning, tears leaking from the black eye seals of the Glasses. In one area paramedics were working on unconscious people — perhaps victims of faints, epilepsy, even heart attacks, Kate speculated; she had had to sign various release forms when applying for their tickets, and she didn’t imagine the safety of his parishioners was a high priority for Billybob Meeks.

Curiously she studied Bobby, who seemed unperturbed. “But what about you?”

He shrugged. “I’ve played more interesting adventure games.” He looked up at the muddy December sky. “Kate, I know you’re just using me as a way to get to my father. But I like you even so. And maybe tweaking Hiram’s nose would be good for my soul. What do you think?”

She held her breath. She said, “I think that’s about the most human thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“Then let’s do it.”

She forced a smile. She’d got what she wanted.

But the world around her still seemed unreal, compared to the vividness of those final moments inside Billybob’s mind.

She had no doubt that — if the rumours about the capability Hiram was constructing were remotely accurate, and if she could get access to it — she would be able to destroy Billybob Meeks. It would be a great scoop, a personal triumph.

But she knew that some part of her, no matter how far down she buried it, would always regret doing so. Some part of her would always long to be allowed to return to that glowing city of gold, with walls that stretched halfway to the Moon, where shining, smiling people were waiting to welcome her.

Billybob had broken through, his shock tactics had gotten even to her. And that, of course, was the whole point. Why Billybob must be stopped.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

Chapter 6 The billion-dollar pearl

David, with Hiram and Bobby, sat before a giant SoftScreen spread across the Wormworks countinghouse wall. The ’Screen image — returned by a fibreoptic camera that had been snaked into the heart of the Wormworks’ superconducting-magnet nest — was nothing but darkness, marred by an occasional stray pixel, a prickle of colour and light.

A digital counter in a corner display worked its way down toward zero.

Hiram paced impatiently around the cramped, cluttered countinghouse; David’s assistant technicians cowered from him, avoiding his eyes. Hiram snapped, “How do you know the bloody wormhole is even open?”

David suppressed a smile. “You don’t need to whisper.” He pointed to the corner display. Beside the countdown clock was a small numerical caption, a sequence of prime numbers scrolling upward from two to thirty-one, over and over. “That’s the test signal, sent through the wormhole by the Brisbane crew at the normal gamma-ray wavelengths. So we know we managed to find and stabilize a wormhole mouth — without a remote anchor — and the Australians have been able to locate it.”

During his three months’ work here, David had quickly discovered a way to use modulations of exotic-matter pulses to battle the wormholes’ inherent instability. Turning that into practical and repeatable engineering, of course, had been immensely difficult but in the end successful.

“Our placement of the remote mouth isn’t so precise yet. I’m afraid our Australian colleagues have to chase our wormhole mouths through the dust out there. Chasing fizzers over the gibbers, as they put it… But still, now we can open up a wormhole to anywhere. What we don’t know yet is whether we’re going to be able to expand the holes up to visible-light dimensions.”

Bobby was leaning easily against a table, legs crossed, looking fit and relaxed, as if he’d just come off a tennis court — as perhaps he had, mused David. “I think we ought to give David a lot of credit, Dad. After all he has solved half the problem already.”

“Yes,” Hiram said, “but I don’t see anything but gamma rays squirted in by some broken-nosed Aussie. Unless we can find a way to expand these bloody things, we’re wasting my money. And I can’t stomach all this waiting! Why just one test run a day?”

“Because,” said David evenly, “we have to analyse the results from each test, strip down the Casimir gear, reset the control equipment and detectors. We have to understand each failure before we can go ahead toward success.” That is, he added silently, before I can extricate myself from his complex family entanglement and return to the comparative calm of Oxford, funding battles, ferocious academic rivalry and all.

Bobby asked, “What exactly is it we’re looking for? What will a wormhole mouth look like?”

“I can answer that one,” Hiram said, still pacing. “I grew up with enough bad pop-science shows. A wormhole is a shortcut through a fourth dimension. You have to cut a chunk out of our three-dimensional space and join it onto another such chunk, over in Brisbane.”

Bobby raised an eyebrow at David.

David said carefully, “It’s a little more complicated. But he’s more right than wrong. A wormhole mouth is a sphere, floating freely in space. A three-dimensional excision. If we succeed with the expansion, for the first time we’ll be able to see our wormhole mouth with a hand lens, anyhow…” The countdown clock was down to a single digit. David said, “Heads up, everybody. Here we go.”

The ripples of conversation in the room died away, and everyone turned to the digital clock.

The count reached zero.

And nothing happened.

There were events, of course. The track counter racked up a respectable score, showing heavy and energetic particles passing through the detector array, the debris of an exploded wormhole. The array’s pixel elements, each firing individually as a particle passed through them, could later be used to trace the paths of debris fragments in three dimensions — paths which could then be reconstructed and analysed.

Lots of data, lots of good science. But the big wall SoftScreen remained blank. No signal.

David suppressed a sigh. He opened up the logbook and entered details of the run in his round, neat hand; around him his technicians began equipment diagnostics.

Hiram looked into David’s face, at the empty ’Screen, at the technicians. “Is that it? Did it work?”

Bobby touched his father’s shoulder. “Even I can tell it didn’t, Dad.” He pointed to the prime-number test sequence. It had frozen on thirteen. “Unlucky thirteen,” murmured Bobby.

“Is he right? David, did you screw up again?”

“This wasn’t a failure. Just another test. You don’t understand science, Father. Now, when we run the analysis and learn from this…”

“Jesus Christ on a bike! I should have left you rotting in bloody Oxford. Call me when you have something.” Hiram, shaking his head, stalked from the room.

When he left, the feeling of relief in the room was palpable. The technicians-silver-haired particle physicists all, many of them older than Hiram, some of them with distinguished careers beyond OurWorld — started to file out.

When they’d gone, David sat before a SoftScreen to begin his own follow-up work.

He brought up his favoured desktop metaphor. It was like a window into a cluttered study, with books and documents piled in untidy heaps on the floor and shelves and tables, and with complex particle-decay models hanging like mobiles from the ceiling. When he looked around the “room,” the point at the focus of his attention expanded, opening out more detail, the rest of the room blurring to a background wash. He could “pick up” documents and models with a fingertip, rummaging until he found what he wanted, exactly where he’d left it last time.

First he had to check for detector pixel faults. He began passing the vertex detector traces into the analogue signal bus, and pulled out a blow-up overview of various detector slabs. There were always random failures of pixels when some especially powerful particle hit a detector element. But, though some of the detectors had suffered enough radiation damage to require replacement, there was nothing serious for now.

Humming, immersed in the work, he prepared to move on -

“Your user interface is a mess.”

David, startled, turned. Bobby was still here: still leaning, in fact, against his table.

“Sorry,” David said. “I didn’t mean to turn my back.” How odd that he hadn’t even noticed his brother’s continued presence.

Bobby said now, “Most people use the Search Engine.”

“Which is irritatingly slow, prone to misunderstanding and which anyhow masks a Victorian-era hierarchical data-storage system. Filing cabinets. Bobby, I’m too dumb for the Search Engine. I’m just an unevolved ape who likes to use his hands and eyes to find things. This may look a mess, but I know exactly where everything is.”

“But still, you could study this particle-track stuff a lot better as a virtual. Let me set up a trial of my latest Mind’sEye prototype for you. We can reach more areas of the brain, switch more quickly…”

“And all without the need for trepanning.”

Bobby smiled.

“All right,” David said. “I’d appreciate that.”

Bobby’s gaze roamed around the room in that absent, disconcerting way of his. “Is it true? What you told Dad — that this isn’t a failure, but just another step?”

“I can understand Hiram’s impatience. After all he’s paying for all of this.”

“And he’s working under commercial pressure,” Bobby said. “Already some of his competitors are claiming to have DataPipes of comparable quality to Hiram’s. It surely won’t be long before one of them comes up with the idea of a remote viewer — independently, if nobody’s leaked it already.”

“But commercial pressure is irrelevant,” David said testily. “A study like this has to proceed at its own pace. Bobby, I don’t know how much you know about physics.”

“Assume nothing. Once you have a wormhole, what’s so difficult about expanding it?”

“It’s not as if we’re building a bigger and better car. We’re trying to push spacetime into a form it wouldn’t naturally adopt. Look, wormholes are intrinsically unstable. You know that to keep them open at all we have to thread them with exotic matter.”

“Antigravity.”

“Yes. But the tension in the throat of a wormhole is gigantic. We’re constantly balancing one huge pressure against another.” David balled his fists and pressed them against each other, hard. “As long as they are balanced, fine. But the smallest perturbation and you lose everything.” He let one fist slide over the other, breaking the equilibrium he’d established. “And that fundamental instability grows worse with size. What we’re attempting is to monitor conditions inside the wormhole, and adjust the pumping of exotic matter-energy to compensate for fluctuations.” He pressed his fists against each other again; this time, as he jiggled the left back and forth, he compensated with movements of his right, so his knuckles stayed pressed together.

“I get it,” Bobby said. “As if you’re threading the wormhole with software.”

“Or with a smart worm.” David smiled. “Yes. It’s very processor-intensive. And so far, the instabilities have been too rapid and catastrophic to deal with.

“Look at this.” He reached to his desktop and, with the touch of a fingertip, he pulled up a fresh view of a particle cascade. It had a strong purple trunk — the colour showing heavy ionization — with clusters of red jets, wide and narrow, some straight, others curved. He tapped a key, and the spray rotated in three dimensions; the software suppressed foreground elements to allow details of the jet’s inner structure to become visible. The central spray was surrounded by numbers showing energy, momentum and charge readings. “We’re looking at a high-energy, complex event here, Bobby. All this exotic garbage spews out before the wormhole disappears completely.” He sighed. “It’s like trying to figure out how to fix a car by blowing it up and combing through the debris.

“Bobby, I was honest with Father. Every trial is an exploration of another corner of what we call parameter space, as we try different ways of making our wormhole viewers wide and stable. There are no wasted trials; every time we proceed we learn something. In fact many of my tests are negative — I actually design them to fail. A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true. Eventually we’ll get there… or else we’ll prove Hiram’s dream is impossible, with present-day technology.”

“Science demands patience.”

David smiled. “Yes. It always has. But for some it is hard to remain patient, in the face of the black meteor which approaches us all.”

“The Wormwood? But that’s centuries off.”

“But scientists are hardly alone in being affected by the knowledge of its existence. There is an impulse to hurry, to gather as much data and formulate new theories, to learn as much as possible in the time that is left, because we no longer are sure there will be anybody to build on our work, as we’ve always assumed in the past. And so people take shortcuts, the peer review process is under pressure…”

Now a red alert light started flashing high on the countinghouse wall, and technicians began to drift back into the room.

Bobby looked at David quizzically. “You’re setting up to run again? You told Dad you only ran one trial a day.”

David winked. “A little white lie. I find it useful to have a way to get rid of him.”

Bobby laughed.

It turned out there was time to fetch coffee before the new run began. They walked together to the cafeteria.

Bobby is lingering, David thought. As if he wants to be involved. He sensed a need here, a need he didn’t understand — perhaps even envy. Was that possible?

It was a wickedly delicious thought. Perhaps Bobby Patterson, fabulously rich, this latter-day dandy, envies me — his earnest, drone-like brother.

Or perhaps that’s just sibling rivalry on my part.

Walking back, he sought to make conversation.

“So. Were you a grad student, Bobby?”

“Sure. But at HBS.”

“HBS? Oh. Harvard.”

“Business School. Yes.”

“I took some business studies as part of my first degree,” David said. He grimaced. “The courses were intended to ‘equip us for the modern world.’ ” All those two-by-two matrices, the fads for this theory or that, for one management guru or another…”

“Well, business analysis isn’t rocket science, as we used to say,” Bobby murmured evenly. “But nobody at Harvard was a dummy. I won my place there on merit. And the competition there was ferocious.”

“I’m sure it was.” David was puzzled by Bobby’s flat tone of voice, his lack of fire. He probed gently. “I have the impression you feel… underestimated.”

Bobby shrugged. “Perhaps. The VR division of OurWorld is a billion-buck business in its own right. If I fail, Dad’s made it clear he’s not going to bail me out. But even Kate thinks I’m some kind of placeholder.” Bobby grinned. “I’m enjoying trying to convince her otherwise.”

David frowned. Kate?… Ah, the girl reporter Hiram had tried to exclude from his son’s life. Without success, it seemed. Interesting. “Do you want me to keep quiet?”

“What about?”

“Kate. The reporter.”

“There isn’t really anything to keep quiet about.”

“Perhaps. But Father doesn’t approve of her. Have you told him you’re still seeing her?”

“No.”

And this may be the only thing in your young life, David thought, which Hiram doesn’t know about. Well, let’s keep it that way. David felt pleased to have established this small bond between them.

Now the countdown clock neared its conclusion. Once more the wall-mounted SoftScreen showed an inky darkness, broken only by random pixel flashes, and with the numeric monitor in the corner dully repeating its test list of primes. David watched with amusement as Bobby’s lips silently formed the count numbers: Three. Two. One.

And then Bobby’s mouth hung open in shock, a flickering light playing on his face.

David swivelled his gaze to the SoftScreen.

This time there was an image, a disc of light. It was a bizarre, dreamy construct of boxes and strip lights and cables, distorted almost beyond recognition, as if seen through some grotesque fish-eye lens.

David found he was holding his breath. As the image stayed stable for two seconds, three, he deliberately sucked in air.

Bobby asked, “What are we seeing?”

“The wormhole mouth. Or rather, the light it’s pulling in from its surroundings, here, the Wormworks. Look, you can see the electronics stack. But the strong gravity of the mouth is dragging in light from the three-dimensional space all around it. The image is being distorted.”

“Like gravitational lensing.”

He looked at Bobby in surprise. “Exactly that.” He checked the monitors. “We’re already passing our previous best…”

Now the distortion of the image became stronger, as the shapes of equipment and light fixtures were smeared to circles surrounding the view’s central point. Some of the colours seemed to be Doppler-shifting now, a green support strut starting to look blue, the fluorescents’ glare taking on a tinge of violet.

“We’re pushing deeper into the wormhole,” David whispered. “Don’t give up on me now.”

The image fragmented further, its elements crumbling and multiplying in a repeating pattern around the disc shaped image. It was a three-dimensional kaleidoscope, David thought, formed by multiple images of the lab’s illumination. He glanced at counter readouts, which told him that much of the energy of the light falling into the wormhole had been shifted to the ultraviolet and beyond, and the energized radiation was pounding the curved walls of this spacetime tunnel.

But the wormhole was holding.

They were far past the point where all previous experiments had collapsed.

Now the disc image began to shrink as the light, falling from three dimensions onto the wormhole mouth, was compressed by the wormhole’s throat into a narrowing pipe. The scrambled, shrinking puddle of light reached a peak of distortion.

And then the quality of light changed. The multiple image structure became simpler, expanding, seeming to unscramble itself, and David began to pick out elements of a new visual field: a smear of blue that might be sky, a pale white that could be an instrument box.

He said: “Call Hiram.”

Bobby said, “What are we looking at?”

“Just call Father, Bobby.”

Hiram arrived at a run an hour later. “It better be worth it. I broke up an investors’ meeting…”

David, wordlessly, handed him a slab of lead-glass crystal the size and shape of a pack of cards. Hiram turned the slab over, inspecting it.

The upper surface of the slab was ground into a magnifying lens, and when Hiram looked into it, he saw miniaturized electronics: photomultiplier light detectors for receiving signals, a light-emitting diode capable of emitting flashes for testing, a small power supply, miniature electromagnets. And, at the geometric centre of the slab, there was a tiny, perfect sphere, just at the limit of visibility. It looked silvery, reflective, like a pearl; but the quality of light it returned wasn’t quite the hard grey of the countinghouse’s fluorescents.

Hiram turned to David. “What am I looking at?”

David nodded at the big wall SoftScreen. It showed a round blur of light, blue and brown.

A face came looming into the image: a human face, a man somewhere in his forties, perhaps. The image was heavily distorted — it was exactly as if he had pushed his face into a fish-eye lens — but David could make out a knot of curly black hair, leathery sun-beaten skin, white teeth in a broad smile.

“It’s Walter,” Hiram said, wondering. “Our Brisbane station head.” He moved closer to the SoftScreen. “He’s saying something. His lips are moving.” He stood there, mouth moving in sympathy. “I… see… you. I see you. My God.”

Behind Walter, other Aussie technicians could be seen now, heavily distorted shadows, applauding in silence.

David grinned, and submitted to Hiram’s whoops and bear hugs, all the while keeping his eye on the lead-glass slab containing the wormhole mouth, that billion-dollar pearl.

Chapter 7 The wormcam

It was 3 A.M. At the heart of the deserted Wormworks, in a bubble of SoftScreen light, Kate and Bobby sat side by side. Bobby was working through a simple question-and-answer setup session on the SoftScreen. They were expecting a long night; behind them there was a heap of hastily gathered gear, coffee flasks and blankets and foam mattresses.

…There was a creak. Kate jumped and grabbed Bobby’s arm.

Bobby kept working at the program. “Take it easy. Just a little thermal contraction. I told you, I made sure all the surveillance systems have a blind spot right here, right now.”

“I’m not doubting it. It’s just that I’m not used to creeping around in the dark like this.”

“I thought you were the tough reporter.”

“Yes. But what I do is generally legal.”

“Generally!”

“Believe it or not.”

“But this -” He waved a hand toward the hulking, mysterious machinery out in the dark. “ — isn’t even surveillance equipment. It’s just an experimental high energy physics rig. There’s nothing like it in the world; how can there be any legislation to cover its use?”

“That’s specious, Bobby. No judge on the planet would buy that argument.”

“Specious or not, I’m telling you to calm down. I’m trying to concentrate. Mission Control here could be a little more user-friendly. David doesn’t even use voice activation. Maybe all physicists are so conservative — or all Catholics.”

She studied him as he worked steadily at the program. He looked as alive as she’d ever seen him, for once fully engaged in the moment. And yet he seemed completely unperturbed by any moral doubt. He really was a complex person — or rather, she thought sadly, incomplete.

His finger hovered over a start button on the SoftScreen. “Ready. Shall I do it?”

“We’re recording?”

He tapped the SoftScreen. “Everything that comes through that wormhole will be trapped right here.”

“…Okay.”

“Three, two, one.” He hit the key.

The ’Screen turned black.

From the greater darkness around her, she heard a deep bass hum as the giant machinery of the Wormworks came on line, huge forces gathering to rip a hole in spacetime. She thought she could smell ozone, feel a prickle of electricity. But maybe that was imagination.

Setting up this operation had been simplicity itself. While Bobby had worked to obtain clandestine access to the Wormworks equipment, Kate had made her way to Billybob’s mansion, a gaudy baroque palace set in woodland on the fringe of the Mount Rainier National Park. She’d taken sufficient photographs to construct a crude external map of the site, and had made Global Positioning System readings at various reference points. That — and the information Billybob had boastfully given away to style magazines about the lavish interior layout — had been sufficient for her to construct a detailed internal map of the building, complete with a grid of GPS references.

Now, if all went well, those references would be sufficient to establish a wormhole link between Billybob’s inner sanctum and this mocked-up listening post.

…The SoftScreen lit up. Kate leaned forward.

The image was heavily distorted, a circular smear of light, orange and brown and yellow, as if she were looking through a silvered tunnel. There was a sense of movement, patches of light coming and going across the image, but she could make out no detail.

“I can’t see a damn thing,” she said querulously.

Bobby tapped at the SoftScreen. “Patience. Now I have to cut in the deconvolution routines.”

“The what?”

“The wormhole mouth isn’t a camera lens, remember. It’s a little sphere on which light falls from all around, in three dimensions. And that global image is pretty much smeared out by its passage through the wormhole itself. But we can use software routines to unscramble all that. It’s kind of interesting. The software is based on programs the astronomers use to factor out atmospheric distortion, twinkling and blurring and refraction, when they study the stars.”

The image abruptly cleared, and Kate gasped.

They saw a massive desk with a globe-lamp hovering above. There were papers and SoftScreens scattered over the desktop. Behind the desk was an empty chair, casually pushed back. On the walls there were performance graphs and bar charts, what looked like accounting statements.

There was luxury here. The wallpaper looked like handmade English stuff, probably the most expensive in the world. And on the floor, casually thrown there, there was a pair of rhino hides, gaping mouths and glassy eyes staring, horns proud even in death.

And there was a simple animated display, a total counting steadily upward. It was labelled CONVERTS: human souls being counted like a fast-food chain’s sushi burger sales.

The image was far from perfect. It was dark, grainy, sometimes unstable, given to freezing or breaking up into clouds of pixels. But still…

“I can’t believe it,” Kate breathed. “It’s working. It’s as if all the walls in the world just turned to glass. Welcome to the goldfish bowl…”

Bobby worked his SoftScreen, making the reconstructed image pan around. “I thought rhinos were extinct.”

“They are now. Billybob was involved in a consortium which bought out the last breeding pair from a private zoo in France. The geneticists had been trying to get hold of the rhinos to store genetic material, maybe eggs and sperm and even zygotes, in the hope of restoring the species in the future. But Billybob got there first. And so he owns the last rhino skins there will ever be. It was good business, if you look at it that way. These skins command unbelievably high prices now.”

“But illegal.”

“Yes. But nobody is likely to have the guts to pursue a prosecution against someone as powerful as Billybob. After all, come Wormwood Day, all the rhinos will be extinct anyhow; what difference does it make?… Can you zoom with this thing?”

“Metaphorically. I can magnify and enhance selectively.”

“Can we see those papers on the desk?”

With a fingernail Bobby marked out zoom boxes, and the software’s focus progressively moved in on the litter of papers on the desktop. The wormhole mouth seemed to be positioned about a meter from the ground, some two metres from the desk — Kate wondered if it would be visible, a tiny reflective bead hovering in the air — so the papers were foreshortened by perspective. And besides they hadn’t been laid out for convenient reading; some of them were lying face down or were obscured by others. Still, Bobby was able to pick out sections — he inverted the images and corrected for perspective distortion, cleaned them up with intelligent-software enhancement routines — enough for Kate to get a sense of what much of the material was about.

It was mostly routine corporate stuff — chilling evidence of Billybob’s industrial-scale mining of gullible Americans — but nothing illegal. She had Bobby scan on, rooting hastily through the scattered material.

And then, at last, she hit pay dirt.

“Hold it,” she said. “Enhance… Well, well.” It was a report, technical, closely printed, replete with figures, on the adverse effects of dopamine stimulation in elderly subjects. “That’s it,” she breathed. “The smoking gun.” She got up and started to pace the room, unable to contain her restless energy. “What an asshole. Once a drug dealer, always a drug dealer. If we can get an image of Billybob himself reading that, better yet signing it off. Bobby, we need to find him.”

Bobby sighed and sat back. “Then ask David. I can swivel and zoom, but right now I don’t know how to make this WormCam pan.”

“WormCam?” Kate grinned.

“Dad works his marketeers even harder than his engineers. Look, Kate, it’s three-thirty in the morning. Let’s be patient. I have security lockout here until noon tomorrow. Surely we can catch Billybob in his office before then. If not, we can try again another day.”

“Yes.” She nodded, tense. “You’re right. It’s just I’m used to working fast.”

He smiled. “Before some other hot journo muscles in on your scoop?”

“It happens.”

“Hey.” Bobby reached out and cupped her chin in his hands. His dark face was all but invisible in the cavernous gloom of the Wormworks, but his touch was warm, dry, confident. “You don’t have to worry. Just think of it. Right now nobody else on the planet, nobody, has access to WormCam technology. There’s no way Billybob can detect what we’re up to, or anyone else can beat you to the punch. What’s a few hours?”

Her breathing was shallow, her heart pumping; she seemed to sense him before her in the dark, at a level deeper than sight or scent or even touch, as if some deep core inside her was responding to the warm bulk of his body.

She reached up, covered his hand, and kissed it. “You’re right. We have to wait. But I’m burning energy anyhow. So let’s do something constructive with it.”

He seemed to hesitate, as if trying to puzzle out her meaning.

Well, Kate, she told herself, you aren’t like the other girls he’s met in his gilded life. Maybe he needs a little help.

She put her free hand around his neck, pulled him toward her, and felt his mouth on hers. Her tongue, hot and inquisitive, pushed into his mouth, and ran along a ridge of perfect lower teeth; his lips responded eagerly.

At first he was tender, even loving. But, as passion built, she became aware of a change in his posture, his manner. As she responded to his unspoken commands she was aware that she was letting him take control, and — even as he brought her to a deep climax with expert ease — she felt he was distracted, lost in the mysteries of his own strange, wounded mind, engaged with the physical act, and not with her.

He knows how to make love, she thought, maybe better than anybody I know. But he doesn’t know how to love. What a cliché that was. But it was true. And terribly sad.

And, even as his body closed on hers, her fingers, digging into the hair at the back of his neck, found something round and hard under his covering of hair, about the size of a nickel, metallic and cold.

It was a brain stud.

In the spring morning silence of the Wormworks, David sat in the glow of his SoftScreen.

He was looking down at the top of his own head, from a height of two or three metres. It wasn’t a comfortable sight: he looked overweight, and there was a small bald spot at his crown he hadn’t noticed before, a little pink coin in among his uncombed mass of hair.

He raised his hand to find the bald spot.

The image in the ’Screen raised its hand too, like a puppet slaved to his actions. He waved, childishly, and looked up. But of course there was nothing to see, no sign of the tiny rip on spacetime which transmitted these images.

He tapped at the ’Screen, and the viewpoint swivelled, looking straight ahead. Another tap, hesitantly, and it began to move forward, through the Wormworks’ dark halls: at first a little jerkily, then more smoothly. Huge machines, looming and rather sinister, floated past him like blocky clouds.

Eventually, he supposed, commercial versions of this wormhole camera would come with more intuitive controls, a joystick perhaps, levers and knobs to swivel the viewpoint this way and that. But this simple configuration of touch controls on his ’Screen was enough to let him control the viewpoint, allowing him to concentrate on the image itself.

And of course, a corner of his mind reminded him, in actuality the viewpoint wasn’t moving at all: rather, the Casimir engines were creating and collapsing a series of wormholes, Planck lengths apart, strung out in a line the way he wanted to move. The images returned by successive holes arrived sufficiently closely to give him the illusion of movement.

But none of that was important for now, he told himself sternly. For now he only wanted to play.

With a determined slap at the ’Screen he turned the viewpoint and made it fly straight at the Wormworks’ corrugated iron wall. He couldn’t help but wince as that barrier flew at him.

There was an instant of darkness. And then he was through, and immersed suddenly in dazzling sunlight.

He slowed the viewpoint and dropped it to around eye level. He was in the grounds which surrounded the Wormworks: grass, streams, cute little bridges. The sun was low, casting long crisp shadows, and there was a trace of dew that glimmered on the grass.

He let his viewpoint glide forward, at first at walking pace, then a little faster. The grass swept beneath him, and Hiram’s replanted trees blurred past, side by side.

The sense of speed was exhilarating.

He still hadn’t mastered the controls, and from time to time his viewpoint would plunge clumsily through a tree or a rock; moments of darkness, tinged deep brown or grey. But he was getting the hang of it, and the sense of speed and freedom and clarity was sinking. It was like being ten years old again, he thought, senses fresh and sharp, a body so full of energy he was light as a feather.

He came to the plant’s drive. He raised the viewpoint through two or three metres, swept down the drive, and found the freeway. He flew higher and skimmed far above the road, gazing down at the streams of gleaming, beetle-like cars below. The traffic flow, still gathering for the rush hour to come, was dense and fast-moving. He could see patterns in the flow, knots of density that gathered and cleared as the invisible web of software controls optimized the stream of SmartDriven cars.

Suddenly impatient, he rose up further, so that the roadway became a grey ribbon snaking over the land, car windscreens sparkling like a string of diamonds.

He could see the city laid out before him now. The suburbs were a neat rectangular grid laid over the hills, mist-blurred to grey. The tall buildings of downtown thrust upward, a compact fist of concrete and glass and steel.

He rose higher still, swooped through a thin layer of cloud to a brighter sunshine beyond, and then turned again — to see the ocean’s glimmer-stained, far from land, by the ominous dark of yet another incoming storm system. The horizon’s curve became apparent, as land and sea folded over on themselves and Earth became a planet.

David suppressed the urge to whoop. He always had wanted to fly like Superman. This, he thought, is going to sell like hot cakes.

A crescent Moon hung, low and gaunt, in the blue sky. David swivelled the viewpoint until his field of view was centred on that sliver of bony light.

Behind him he could hear a commotion, raised voices, running feet. Perhaps it was a security breach, somewhere in the Wormworks. It was none of his concern.

With determination, he drove the viewpoint forward. The morning blue deepened to violet. Already he could see the first stars.

They slept for a while.

When Kate stirred, she felt cold. She raised her wrist and her tattoo lit up. Six in the morning. In his sleep, Bobby had moved away from her, leaving her uncovered. She pulled at the blanket they were sharing, covering her exposed torso.

The Wormworks, windowless, was as dark and cavernous as when they had arrived. She could see that the WormCam image of Billybob’s study was still as it had been, the desk and rhino skins and the papers. Everything since they had set up the WormCam link had been recorded. With a flicker of excitement she realized she might already have enough material to nail Meeks for good.

“You’re awake.”

She turned her head. There was Bobby’s face, eyes wide open, resting on a folded-up blanket.

He stroked her cheek with the back of one finger. “I think you’ve been crying,” he said.

That startled her. She resisted the temptation to brush his hand away, to hide her face.

He sighed. “You found the implant. So now you’ve screwed a wirehead. Isn’t that your prejudice? You don’t like implants. Maybe you think only criminals and the mentally deficient should undergo brain-function modification.”

“Who put it there?”

“My father. I mean, it was his initiative. When I was a small boy.”

“You remember?”

“I was three or four years old. Yes, I remember. And I remember understanding why he was doing it. Not the technical detail, of course, but the fact that he loved me, and wanted the best for me.” He smiled, self-deprecating. “I’m not quite as perfect as I look. I was somewhat hyperactive, and also slightly dyslexic. The implant fixed those things.”

She reached behind him and explored the profile of his implant. Trying not to make it obvious, she made sure her own wrist tattoo passed over the metal surface. She forced a smile. “You ought to upgrade your hardware.”

He shrugged. “It works well enough.”

“If you’ll let me bring in some microelectronic analysis gear I could run a study of it.”

“What would be the point?”

She took a breath. “So we can find out what it does.”

“I told you what it does.”

“You told me what Hiram told you.”

He propped himself up on his elbows and stared at her. “What are you implying?”

Yes, what, Kate? Are you just sour because he shows no signs of falling in love with you as, obviously, you are falling for this complex, flawed man? “You seem to have — gaps. For instance, don’t you ever wonder about your mother?”

“No,” he said. “Am I supposed to?”

“It’s not a question of being supposed to, Bobby. It’s just what most people do — without being prompted.”

“And you think this has something to do with my implant? Look, I trust my father. I know that everything he’s done has been for my best interest.”

“All right.” She leaned over to kiss him. “It’s not my business. We won’t talk about it again.”

At least, she thought with a guilty frisson, not until I get an analysis of the data I already collected from your head stud, without your knowledge, or your permission. She snuggled closer to him, and draped an arm over his chest, protectively. Maybe it’s me who has the gaps in her soul, she thought.

With shocking suddenness, torchlight burst over them.

Kate hastily grabbed the blanket to her chest, feeling absurdly exposed and vulnerable. The torchlight in her eyes was dazzling, masking the group of people beyond. There were two, three people. They wore dark uniforms.

And there was Hiram’s unmistakable bulk, his hands on his hips, glaring at her.

“You can’t hide from me,” Hiram said easily. He gestured at the WormCam image. “Shut that bloody thing off.”

The image turned to mush as the wormhole link to Billybob’s office was shut down.

“Ms. Manzoni, just by breaking in here you’ve broken a whole hatful of laws. Not to mention attempting to violate the privacy of Billybob Meeks. The police are already on their way. I doubt if I’ll be able to get you imprisoned — though I’ll have a bloody good try — but I can ensure you’ll never work in your field again.”

Kate kept up her defiant glower. But she felt her resolve crumble; she knew Hiram had the power to do just that.

Bobby was lying back, relaxed.

She dug an elbow in his ribs. “I don’t understand you, Bobby. He’s spying on you. Doesn’t that bother you?”

Hiram stood over her. “Why should it bother him?”

Through the dazzle she could see sweat gleaming on his bare scalp, his only sign of anger. “I’m his father. What bothers me is you, Ms. Manzoni. It’s obvious to me you’re poisoning my son’s mind. Just like…” He stopped himself.

Kate glared back. “Like who, Hiram? His mother?” But Bobby’s hand was on her arm.

“Back off Dad. Kate, he was bound to figure this out sometime. Look, both of you, let’s find a win-win solution to this. Isn’t that what you always told me, Dad?” He said impulsively, “Don’t throw Kate out. Give her a job. Here, at OurWorld.”

Hiram and Kate spoke simultaneously. “Are you mad!”

“Bobby, that’s absurd. If you think I’d work for this creep.”

Bobby held his hands up. “Dad, think about it. To exploit the technology you’re going to need the best investigative journalists you can find. Right? Even with the WormCam you can’t dig out a story without leads.”

Hiram snorted. “You’re telling me she is the best?”

Bobby raised his eyebrows. “She’s here, Dad. She found out about the WormCam itself. She even started to use it. And as for you, Kate…”

“Bobby, it will be a cold day in hell…”

“You know about the WormCam. Hiram can’t let you go with that knowledge. So, don’t go. Come work here. You’ll have an edge on every other damn reporter on the planet.” He looked from one to the other. Hiram and Kate glared at each other.

Kate said, “I’d insist on finishing my investigation into Billybob Meeks. I don’t care what links you have with him, Hiram. The man is a sham, potentially murderous and a drug runner. And…”

Hiram laughed. “You’re laying down conditions!”

Bobby said, “Dad, please. Just think about it. For me.”

Hiram loomed over Kate, his face savage. “Perhaps I have to accept this. But you will not take my son away from me. I hope you understand that.” He straightened up, and Kate found herself shivering. “By the way,” Hiram said to Bobby, “you were right.”

“About what?”

“That I love you. That you should trust me. That everything I have done to you has been for the best.”

Kate gasped. “You heard him say that?” But of course he had; Hiram had probably heard everything.

Hiram’s eyes were on Bobby. “You do believe me, don’t you? Don’t you?”

Chapter 8 Scoops

From OurWorld International News Hour, 21 June, 2036:

Kate Manzoni (to camera): …The real possibility, revealed exclusively here, of armed conflict between Scotland and England — and therefore, of course, involving the United States as a whole — is the most significant development in what is becoming the central story of our unfolding century: the battle for water. The figures are stark. Less than one percent of the world’s water supply is suitable and accessible for human use. As cities expand, and less land is left available for farming, the demand for water is increasing sharply. In parts of Asia, the Mideast and Africa, the available surface water is already fully used, and groundwater levels have been falling for decades. Back at the turn of the century ten percent of the world’s population did not have enough water to drink. Now that figure has tripled, and it is expected to reach a startling seventy percent by 2050. We have become used to seeing bloody conflicts over water, for example in China, and over the waters of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges and the Amazon, places where the diminishing resource has to be shared, or where one neighbour is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as having more water than it requires. In this country, there have been calls in Congress for the Administration to put more pressure on the Canadian and Quebecois governments to release more water to the U.S., particularly the desertifying Midwest. Nevertheless the idea that such conflicts could come to the developed Western world — just to repeat our exclusive revelation, that an armed incursion into Scotland to secure water supplies has been seriously considered by the English state government — comes as a shock…

Angel McKie (v/o): It is night, and nothing is stirring.

This small island, set like a jewel in the Philippine Sea, is only a half kilometre across. And yet, until yesterday, more than a thousand people lived here, crammed into ramshackle dwellings which covered these lowlands as far as the high-tide line of the sea. Even yesterday, children played along the beach you can see here. Now nothing is left. Not even the bodies of the children remain.

Hurricane Antony — the latest to be spun off the apparently permanent El Nino storm which continues to wreak havoc around the Pacific Rim — touched here only briefly, but it was long enough to destroy everything these people had built up over generations.

The sun has yet to rise on this devastation. Not even the rescue crews have arrived yet. These pictures are brought to you exclusively by an OurWorld remote news-gathering unit, once again on the scene of breaking news ahead of the rest.

We will return to these scenes when the first aid helicopters arrive — they are due from the mainland any minute now — and in the meantime we can take you to an underwater view of the coral reef here. This was the last remnant of a great community of reefs which lined the Tanon Strait and the southern Negros, most of it long destroyed by dynamite fishing. Now this last survivor, preserved for a generation by devoted experts, has been devastated…

Willoughby Cott (v/o): …now we can see that goal again as we ride on Staedler’s shoulder with OurWorld’s exclusive As-The-Sportsman-Sees-It feature.

You can see the line of defenders ahead of Staedler pushing forward as he approaches, expecting him to make a pass which would leave Cramer off-side. But Staedler instead heads away from the wing into deeper midfield, beats one defender, then a second — the goalkeeper doesn’t know which threat to counter, Staedler or Cramer — and here you can see the gap Staedler spotted, opening up at the near post, and he puts on a burst of acceleration and shoots!

And now, thanks to OurWorld’s exclusive infield imaging technology, we are riding with the ball as it arcs into that top corner, and the Beijing crowd is ecstatic…

Simon Alcala (v/o): …coming up later, we bring you more exclusive behind-the-scenes pictures of Russian Tsarina Irum’s visit to a top Johannesburg boutique and what was Madonna’s daughter having done to her nose in his exclusive Los Angeles cosmetic-surgery clinic?

OurWorld Paparazzi: we take you into the lives of the famous, whether they like it or not!

But first: here’s a General Assembly we’d like to see more of! Lunchtime yesterday, UN Secretary General Halliwell took a break from UNESCO’s World Hydrology Initiative conference in Cuba.

Halliwell thought this rooftop garden was secure. And she was right. Well, almost right. The roof is covered by a one-way mirror — it allows in the sun’s soothing rays, but keeps out prying eyes. That is, everyone’s eyes but ours!

Let’s go on down through the roof now — yes, through the roof — and there she is, certainly a sight for sore eyes as she enjoys the filtered Caribbean sunlight au naturel. Despite the mirrored roof Halliwell is cautious — you can see here she is covering up as a light plane passes overhead — but she should have known she can’t hide from OurWorld!

As you can see Mr. Gravity has been kind to our SecGen; Halliwell is as much a knockout as when she shimmied across the stages of the world all of forty years ago. But the question is, is she still all the original Halliwell, or has she accepted a little help?…

Chapter 9 The agent

When the FBI caught up with Hiram, Kate felt a rush of relief.

She had been happy enough to be scooping the world — but she had been doing that anyhow, with or without WormCams. And she’d become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that such a powerful technology should be exclusively in the hands of a sleazy megalomaniac capitalist like Hiram Patterson.

As it happened, she was in Hiram’s office the day it all came to a head. But it didn’t turn out the way she expected.

Kate paced back and forth. She was arguing with Hiram, as usual.

“For God’s sake, Hiram. How trivial do you want to get?”

Hiram leaned back in his fake-leather chair and gazed out of the window at downtown Seattle, considering his reply.

Once, Kate knew, this had been the presidential suite of one of the city’s better hotels. Though the big picture window remained, Hiram had retained none of the grand trimmings of this room; whatever his faults, Hiram Patterson was not pretentious. The room was now a regular working office, the only furniture the big conference table and its set of upright chairs, a coffee spigot and a water fountain. There was a rumour that Hiram kept a bed here, rolled up in a compartment built into the walls. And yet there was a lack of a human touch, Kate thought. There wasn’t even a single image of a family member — his two sons, for instance.

But maybe he doesn’t need images, Kate thought sourly. Maybe his sons themselves are trophy enough.

“So,” Hiram said slowly, “now you’re appointing yourself my bloody conscience, Ms. Manzoni.”

“Oh, come on, Hiram. It’s not a question of conscience. Look, you have a technological monopoly which is the envy of every other news-gathering organization on the planet. Can’t you see how you’re wasting it? Gossip about Russian royalty and candid-camera shows and on-the-field shots of soccer games… I didn’t come into this business to photograph the tits of the UN Secretary General.”

“Those tits, as you put it,” he said dryly, “attracted a billion people. My prime concern is beating the competition. And I’m doing that.”

“But you’re turning yourself into the ultimate paparazzo. Is that the limit of your vision? You have such — power — to do good.”

He smiled. “Good? What does good have to do with it? I have to give people what they want, Manzoni. If I don’t, some other bastard will. Anyway I don’t see what you’re complaining about. I ran your piece on England invading Scotland. That was genuine hard-core news.”

“But you trivialized it by wrapping it up in tabloid garbage! Just as you trivialize the whole water-war issue. Look, the UN hydrology convention has been a joke.”

“I don’t need another lecture on the issues of the day, Manzoni. You know, you’re so pompous. But you understand so little. Don’t you get it? People don’t want to know about the issues. Because of you and your damn Wormwood, people understand that the issues just don’t matter. It doesn’t matter how we pump water around the planet, or any of the rest of it, because the Wormwood is going to scrape it all away anyhow. All people want is entertainment. Distraction.”

“And that’s the limit of your ambition?”

He shrugged. “What else is there to do?”

She snorted her disgust. “You know, your monopoly won’t last forever. There’s a lot of speculation in the industry and the media about how you’re achieving all your scoops. It can’t be long before somebody figures it out and repeats your research.”

“I have patents.”

“Oh, sure, that will protect you. If you keep this up you’ll have nothing left to hand on to Bobby.”

His eyes narrowed. “Don’t you talk about my son. You know, every day I regret bringing you in here, Manzoni. You’ve brought in some good stories. But you have no sense of balance, no sense at all.”

“Balance? Is that what you call it? Using the WormCam for nothing more than celebrity beaver shots?”

A soft bell tone sounded. Hiram lifted his head to the air. “I said I wasn’t to be interrupted.”

The Search Engine’s inoffensive tones sounded from the air. “I’m afraid I have an override, Mr. Patterson.”

“What kind of override?”

“There’s a Michael Mavens here to see you. You too, Ms. Manzoni.”

“Mavens? I don’t know any…”

“He’s from the FBI, Mr. Patterson. The Federal Bureau of…”

“I know what the FBI is.” Hiram thumped his desk, frustrated. “One bloody thing after another.”

At last, Kate thought.

Hiram glared at her. “Just watch what you say to this arsehole.”

She frowned. “This government-appointed law enforcement arsehole from the FBI, you mean? Even you answer to the law, Hiram. I’ll say what I think best.”

He clenched a fist, seemed ready to say more, then just shook his head. He stalked to his picture window, and the blue light of the sky, filtered through the tinted glass, evoked highlights from his bald pate. “Bloody hell,” he said. “Bloody, bloody hell.”

Michael Mavens, FBI Special Agent, wore the standard issue charcoal-grey suit, collarless shirt and shoelace tie. He was blond, whiplash thin, and he looked as if he had played a lot of squash, no doubt at some ultra-competitive FBI academy.

He seemed remarkably young to Kate: no more than mid- to late twenties. And he was nervous, dragging awkwardly at the chair Hiram offered him, rumbling with his briefcase as he opened it and dug out a SoftScreen.

Kate glanced at Hiram. She saw calculation in his broad, dark face; Hiram had spotted this agent’s surprising discomfort too.

After showing them his badge, Mavens said, “I’m glad to find you both here, Mr. Patterson, Ms. Manzoni. I’m investigating an apparent security breach.”

Hiram went on the attack. “What authorization do you have?”

Mavens hesitated. “Mr. Patterson, I’m hoping we can all be a little more constructive than that.”

“Constructive?” Hiram snapped. “What kind of answer is that? Are you acting without authorization?” He reached for a telephone icon in his desktop.

Mavens said calmly, “I know your secret.”

Hiram’s hand hovered over the glowing symbol, then withdrew.

Mavens smiled. “Search Engine. Security cover FBI level three four, authorization Mavens M. K. Confirm please.”

After a few seconds, the Search Engine reported back, “Cover in place. Special Agent Mavens.”

Mavens nodded. “We can speak openly.”

Kate sat down opposite Mavens, intrigued, puzzled, nervous.

Mavens spread his SoftScreen flat on the desktop. It showed a picture of a big white-capped military helicopter. Mavens said, “Do you recognize this?”

Hiram leaned closer. “It’s a Sikorsky, I think.”

“Actually a VH-3D,” said Mavens.

“It’s Marine One,” said Kate. “The President’s helicopter.”

Mavens eyed her. “That’s right. As I’m sure you both know, the President and her husband have spent the last couple of days in Cuba at the UN hydrology conference. They’ve been using Marine One out there. Yesterday, during a short flight, a brief and private conversation took place between President Juarez and English Prime Minister Huxtable.” He tapped the ’Screen, and it revealed a blocky schematic of the helicopter’s interior. “The Sikorsky is a big bird for such an antique, but it is packed with communication gear. It has only ten seats. Five are taken up by Secret Service agents, a doctor, and military and personal aides to the President.”

Hiram seemed intrigued. “I guess one of those aides has the football.”

Mavens looked pained. “We don’t use a ‘football’ any more, Mr. Patterson. On this occasion the other passengers, in addition to President Juarez herself, were Mr. Juarez, the chief of staff, Prime Minister Huxtable and an English security agent.

“All of these people — and the pilots — have the highest possible security clearances, which in the case of the agents and other staff are checked daily. Mr. Huxtable, of course, despite his old-style title, holds an office equivalent to a state governor. Marine One itself is swept several times a day. Despite your virtual melodramas about spies and double agents, Mr. Patterson, modern anti-surveillance measures are pretty foolproof. And besides, the President and Mr. Huxtable were isolated in side a security curtain even within the Sikorsky. We don’t know of any way those various levels of security can be breached.” He turned his pale brown eyes on Kate. “And yet, apparently, they were.

“Your news report was accurate, Ms. Manzoni. Juarez and Huxtable did hold a conversation about the possibility of a military solution to England’s dispute with Scotland over water supplies.

“But we have testimony from Mr. Huxtable that his speculation about invading Scotland is — was — private and personal. The notion is his, he hadn’t committed it to paper or electronic store, or discussed it with anybody, not his Cabinet, not even his partner. His conversation with President Juarez was actually the first time he’d articulated the idea out loud, to gauge the extent of the President’s support for such a proposal, if formulated.

“And at the time you broke the story, neither the Prime Minister nor the President had discussed this with anybody else.” He glared at Kate, “Ms, Manzoni, you see the situation. The only possible source for your story is the Juarez-Huxtable conversation itself.”

Hiram stood beside Kate. “She’s not going to reveal her sources to a goon like you.”

Mavens rubbed his face and sat back. “I have to tell you, sir, that bugging the Prez is going to land you with a list of federal charges as long as your arm. An interagency team is investigating this matter. And the President is pretty angry herself. OurWorld could be shut down. And you, Ms. Manzoni, will be lucky to evade jail.”

“You’ll have to prove it first,” Hiram blustered. “I can testify that no OurWorld operative has been anywhere near Marine One, to plant a bug or to do anything else. This interagency investigation team you run…”

Mavens coughed. “I don’t run it. I’m part of it. In fact the Bureau chief himself…”

Hiram’s mouth dropped open. “And does he know you’re here? No? Then what are you trying to do here, Mavens? Set me up? Or — blackmail? Is that it?”

Mavens looked increasingly uncomfortable, but he sat still.

Kate touched Hiram’s arm. “I think we’d better hear him out, Hiram.”

Hiram shook her away. He turned to the window, hands caged behind his back, his shoulders working with anger.

Kate leaned toward Mavens. “You said you knew Hiram’s secret. What did you mean?”

And Michael Mavens started talking about wormholes.

The map he produced from his briefcase and spread over the table was hand-drawn on unheaded paper. Evidently, Kate thought, Mavens was straying into speculations he hadn’t wanted to share with his FBI colleagues, or even commit to the dubious security of a SoftScreen.

He said, “This is a map of the route Marine One took yesterday, over the suburbs of Havana. I’ve marked time points with these crosses. You can see that when the key Juarez-Huxtable onboard conversation took place — it only lasted a couple of minutes — the chopper was here.”

Hiram frowned, and tapped a hatched box highlighted on the map, right under the Sikorsky’s position at the start of the conversation. “And what’s this?”

Mavens grinned. “It’s yours, Mr. Patterson. That is an OurWorld DataPipe terminal. A wormhole mouth, linking to your central facility here in Seattle. I believe the DataPipe terminal under Marine One is the mechanism you used to get your information from the story.”

Hiram’s eyes narrowed.

Kate listened, but with growing abstraction, as Mavens speculated — a little wildly — about directional microphones and the amplifying effects of the gravitational fields of wormhole mouths. His theory, as it emerged, was that Hiram must be using the fixed DataPipe anchors to perform his bugging.

It was obvious that Mavens had stumbled on some aspects of the truth, but didn’t yet have it all.

“Bull,” said Hiram evenly. “There are holes in your theory I could fly a 747 through.”

“Such as,” Kate said gently, “OurWorld’s ability to get cameras to places where there is no DataPipe wormhole terminal. Like those hurricane-struck Philippine islands. Or Secretary-General Halliwell’s cleavage.”

Hiram glared at Kate warningly. Shut up.

Mavens looked confused, but dogged. “Mr. Patterson, I’m no physicist. I haven’t yet figured out all the details. But I’m convinced that just as your wormhole technology is your competitive advantage in data transmission, so it must be in your news-gathering operations.”

“Oh, come on, Hiram,” she said. “He has most of it.”

Hiram growled, “Damn it, Manzoni. I told you I wanted plausible deniability at every stage.”

Mavens looked inquiringly at Kate.

She said, “He means, cover for the existence of the WormCams.”

Mavens smiled. “WormCams. I can guess what that means. I knew it.”

Kate went on, “But deniability wasn’t always possible. And not in this case. You knew it, Hiram, before you approved the story. It was just too good a lead to pass on… I think you should tell him what he wants to know.”

Hiram glared at her. “Why the hell should I?”

“Because,” said Mavens, “I think I can help you.”

Mavens stared wide-eyed at David’s first wormhole mouth, already a museum piece, the spacetime pearl still embedded in its glass block. “And you don’t need anchors. You can plant a WormCam eye anywhere, watch anything… And you can pick up sound too?”

“Not yet,” Hiram said. “But the Search Engine is a pretty good lipreader. And we have human experts to back it up. Now, Special Agent. Tell me how you can help me.”

Reluctantly, Mavens set the glass block down on the table. “As Ms. Manzoni deduced, the rest of my team is only a couple of steps behind me. There will probably be a raid on your facilities tomorrow.”

Kate frowned. “Then surely you shouldn’t be here, tipping us off.”

“No, I shouldn’t,” Mavens said seriously. “Look, Mr. Patterson, Ms. Manzoni, I’ll be frank. I’m arrogant enough to believe that on this issue I can see a little more clearly than my superiors, which is why I’m stepping over the mark. Your WormCam technology — even what I was able to deduce about it for myself — is fantastically powerful. And it could do an immense amount of good: bringing criminals to justice, counterespionage, surveillance.”

“If it was in the right hands,” Hiram said heavily.

“If it was in the right hands.”

“And that means yours. The Bureau’s.”

“Not just us. But in the public domain, yes. I can’t agree with your reporting of the Juarez-Huxtable conversation. But your exposure of the fraudulent science behind the Galveston desalination project, for example, was a masterful piece of journalism. By uncovering that particular scam alone you saved the public purse billions of dollars. I’d like to see responsible news-gathering of that kind continue. But I am a servant of the people. And the people — we — need the technology too, Mr. Patterson.”

“To invade citizens’ privacy?” Kate asked.

Mavens shook his head. “Any technology is open to abuse. There would have to be controls. But — you may not believe it, Ms. Manzoni — on the whole we civil servants are pretty clean. And we need all the help we can get. These are increasingly difficult times, as you must know, Ms. Manzoni.”

“The Wormwood.”

“Yes.” He frowned, looking troubled. “People seem reluctant to take responsibility for themselves, let alone for others, their community. A rise in crime is being matched by a rise in apathy about it. Presumably this will only grow worse as the years go by, as the Wormwood grows closer.”

Hiram seemed intrigued. “But what difference does it make if the Wormwood is going to cream us all anyhow? When I was a kid in England, we grew up believing that when the nuclear war broke out we’d have just four minutes’ warning. We used to talk about it. What would you do with your four minutes? I’d have got blind drunk and…”

“We have centuries,” said Mavens. “Not just minutes. We have a duty to keep society functioning as best we can, as long as possible. What else can we do? And sir, meanwhile — as has been true for decades — this country has more enemies than any nation in the world. National security may have a higher priority over issues of individual rights.”

“Tell us what you’re proposing,” Kate said.

Mavens took a deep breath. “I want to try to set up a deal. Mr. Patterson, this is your technology. You’re entitled to profit from it. I’d propose that you’d keep the patents and industry monopoly. But you’d license your technology to the government, to be used in the public interest, under suitably drafted legislation.”

Hiram snapped, “You have no authority to offer such a deal.”

Mavens shrugged. “Of course not. But this is obviously a sensible compromise, a win-win for all concerned — including the people of this country. I think I could sell it to my immediate superior, and then…”

Kate smiled. “You really have risked everything for this, haven’t you? It’s that important?”

“Yes, ma’am, I believe it is.”

Hiram shook his head, wondering. “You bloody kids and your sentimental idealism.”

Mavens was watching him. “So what do you say, Mr. Patterson? You want to help me sell this? Or will you wait for the raid tomorrow?”

Kate said, “They’ll be grateful, Hiram. In public, anyhow. Maybe Marine One will come collect you from the helipad on your lawn so the Prez can pin a medal on your chest. This is a step closer to the centre of power.”

“For me and my sons,” Hiram said.

“Yes.”

“And I’d maintain my commercial monopoly?”

“Yes, sir.”

Abruptly Hiram grinned. His mood immediately switched as he accepted this defeat and started to revise his plans. “Let’s do it, Special Agent.” He reached across the table and shook Mavens’ hand So the secrecy was over; the power the WormCam had granted Hiram would be counterbalanced. Kate felt an immense relief.

But then Hiram turned to Kate, and glared. “This was your foul-up, Manzoni. Your betrayal. I won’t forget it.”

And Kate — startled, disquieted — knew he meant it.

Chapter 10 The guardians

Extracted from National Intelligence Daily, produced by the Central Intelligence Agency, recipients Top Secret Clearance and Higher, 12 December 2036:

…WormCam technology has proven able to penetrate environments where it is impractical or impossible to send human observers, or even robotic roving cameras. For example, WormCam viewpoints have given scientists a completely safe way to inspect the interior of waste repositories in the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where for decades plutonium has been spilling into the soil, air and river. WormCams (operated under strict federal operative supervision) are also being used to inspect deep nuclear waste sites off the coast of Scotland, and to study the cores of the entombed Chernobyl-era reactors which, though long decommissioned, still litter the lands of the old Soviet Union-inspections which have turned up some alarming results (Appendices F-H)… …Scientists are seeking approval to use a WormCam to delve without intrusion into a new giant freshwater lake found frozen deep in the Antarctic ice. Ancient, fragile biota have been entombed in such lakes for millions of years. In complete darkness, in water kept liquid by the pressure of hundreds of metres of ice, the trapped species follow their own evolutionary paths, completely distinct from those of surface forms. The scientific arguments appear strong; perhaps this investigation will prove to be truly non-intrusive, and so spare the ancient, fragile life-forms from immediate destruction even as their habitat is breached as notoriously happened early in the century, when overzealous scientists persuaded international commissions to open up Lake Vostok, the first such frozen world to be discovered. A commission reporting to the President’s Science Advisor is considering whether the matter can be progressed, with results being made available for proper scientific peer review, without making the WormCam’s existence known outside the present restricted circles… …The recent rescue of Australian King Harry and his family from the wreck of their yacht during the Gulf of Carpentaria storms has demonstrated the WormCam’s promise to transform the efficacy of emergency services. Search-and-rescue operations at sea, for instance, should no longer require fleets of helicopters sweeping large areas of grey, stormy water at great risk to the crews involved; SAR operatives working in the safety of land-based monitoring centers will be able to pinpoint accident victims in a few minutes, and immediately focus rescue effort — and unavoidable risk — where it is required… …This fundamentalist Christian sect intended to “commemorate” the two thousandth anniversary (as they had calculated it) of Christ’s assault on the moneylenders in the Temple by setting off an electromagnetic pulse nuclear warhead in the heart of every major financial district on the planet, including New York, London, Frankfurt and Tokyo. Agency analysts concur with the headline writers that, if successful, the attack would have been an electronic Pearl Harbor. The ensuing financial chaos — with bank transfer networks, stock markets, bond markets, trading systems, credit networks, data communication lines all badly disrupted or destroyed — could, according to analysts, have caused a sufficiently powerful shock to the interdependent global financial systems to trigger a worldwide recession. Largely thanks to the use of WormCam intelligence, that disaster has been avoided. With this one success alone, the deployment of the WormCam in the public interest has saved estimated trillions of dollars and spared untold human misery in poverty, even starvation…

Extracted from “Wormint: The Patterson WormCam as a Tool for Precision Personal Intelligence and Other Applications.” by Michael Mavens, FBI; published in Proceedings of Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group (Intelligence Community), Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. 12-14 December, 2036:

WormCams were first introduced on a trial basis to federal agencies under the umbrella of an interagency steering and evaluation group on which I served. The steering group contained representatives from the Food and Drug Administration, the FBI, CIA, the Federal Communications Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and the National Institutes of Health. The power of the technology has quickly become apparent, however, and within six months, before completion of the formal pilot, WormCam capabilities are being rolled out to all the major pillars of our intelligence enterprise, that is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. What does the WormCam mean for us? The WormCam — a surveillance technology which can’t be tapped or jammed — cuts through the surveillance and encryption arms race we have been waging since, conservatively, the 1940s. Essentially the WormCam bridges directly across space to its subject, and is capable of providing images of unquestionable authenticity — images, for example, which could be reproduced in the courtroom. By comparison no photographic image, however relevant, has been admissible as evidence in a U.S. court of law since 2010, such has been the ease of doctoring such images. Domestically WormCams have been used for customs and immigration, food and drug testing and inspection, verification of applications to federal positions, and a variety of other purposes. As regards criminal, justice, though the drafting of a legal framework regarding privacy rights to cover the WormCam’s use in criminal investigations remains pending, FBI and police teams have already been able to score a number of spectacular successes — for example, uncovering the plans of lone anarchist Subiru, F. (incidentally claiming to be a second generation clone of twentieth-century musician Michael Jackson) to blow up the Washington Monument. Let me just remark that in 2035 only an estimated one-third of all felonies was reported and of that third, only a fifth was cleared by arrest and filing of charges. A fifth of a third; that’s around seven percent. The balance of the deterrence equation was tipped toward ineffectiveness. Now, though full figures from the trial period are not yet in, we can already say that apprehension rates will be improved by orders of magnitude. Ladies and gentlemen, it may be that we are approaching an age when, for the first time in human history, it can truly be said that crime does not pay… Now regarding external affairs: in 2035 the gathering and analysis of foreign intelligence cost $75 billion. But much of this intelligence was of little value; our collection systems were electronic suction systems, picking up much chaff along with the wheat. And in an age in which the threats we face — in general emanating from rogue states or terrorist cells — are precision-targeted, it has long been apparent that our intelligence needs to be precision targeted also. Merely mapping an enemy’s military capability, for instance, tells us nothing of his strategic thinking, and still less of his intentions. But many of our opponents are as sophisticated in technology as we are, and it has proven difficult or impossible to penetrate with conventional electronic means to the heart of their operations. The solution to this has been a renewed reliance on human intelligence, the use of human spies. But these, of course, are difficult to place, notoriously unreliable, and highly vulnerable. But now we have the WormCam. A WormCam essentially enables us to locate a remote camera (in technical terms a “viewpoint”) anywhere, without the need for physical intervention. WormCam intelligence. “Wormint,” as the insiders are already calling it — is proving so valuable that WormCam posts have been set up to monitor most of the world’s political leaders, friendly and otherwise, the leaders of sundry religious and fanatic groups, many of the world’s larger corporations, and so on. WormCam technology is intimate and personal. We can watch an opponent in the most private of acts, if necessary. The potential for exposure of illicit activities, even blackmail if we choose, is obvious. But more important is the picture we are now able to build up of an enemy’s intentions. The WormCam gives us information on an opponent’s contacts — for instance weapons suppliers — and we can assess knowledge factors like his religious views, culture, level of education and training, his sources of information, the media outlets he uses. Ladies and gentlemen, in the past the geography of the physical battlefield was our crucial intelligence target. With the WormCam, the geography of our enemy’s mind is opened up… Before I move on to some specific early successes of the WormCam teams, I want to touch on the future. The present technology offers us a WormCam which is capable of high-resolution visual-spectrum imaging. Our scientists are working with the OurWorld people to upgrade this technology to allow the capture of nonvisual-spectrum data — particularly infrared, for night-time working — and sound, by making the WormCam viewpoint sensitive to physical by-products of sound waves, so reducing our present reliance on lipreading. Furthermore, we aim to make the remote viewpoints fully mobile, so we can shadow a target in motion. WormCam viewpoints are in principle detectable and federal/OurWorld tiger teams are investigating hypothetical “anticams,” ways in which an enemy might detect and perhaps blind a WormCam. This might conceivably be done, for instance, by injecting high-energy particles into a viewpoint, causing the wormhole to implode. But we don’t believe that this will be a serious obstacle. Remember, a WormCam placement is not a one-off event, lost on detection. Rather, we can place as many WormCam viewpoints as we like in a given location, whether they are detected or not. And besides, at present U.S. agencies have a monopoly on his technology. Our opponents know we have achieved a remarkable upgrade in our intelligence-gathering capabilities, but they don’t even know how we are doing it. Far from developing capabilities to obstruct a WormCam, they don’t yet know what they are looking for. But, of course, our edge in WormCam technology cannot last forever, nor can the technology remain covert. We must begin to plan for a transformed future in which the WormCam is public knowledge, and our own centers of power and command are as open to our opponents as theirs have become to us…

From OurWorld International News Hour, 28 January, 2037:

Kate Manzoni (to camera): in an eerie rerun of the Watergate scandal of sixty years ago, White House staff reporting to President Maria Juarez have been publicly accused of burgling the campaign headquarters of the Republican Party, thought to be Juarez’s main opponents at the upcoming Presidential election of 2040. The Republicans have claimed that revelations made by Juarez’s people — concerning possible rule-breaking campaign-funding links between the GOP and various high-profile businesspeople — could only be based on information gathered by illegal means, such as a wiretap or a burglary. The White House in response have challenged the Republicans to produce hard evidence of such an intrusion. Which the GOP has so far failed to do…

Chapter 11 The brain stud

As Kate watched, John Collins flew into Moscow Airport.

At the airport Collins met a younger man. The Search Engine quickly pattern-recognized him as Andrei Popov. Popov, a Russian national, had links to armed insurgency groups operating in all five countries bordering the Aral Sea — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Kate was getting closer.

With a growing sense of exhilaration, she flew the WormCam viewpoint alongside Collins and Popov as they travelled 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 labour.

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, colourful, 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 forward, 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.

Afterwards, 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 any more. 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 centres. 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 cars SmartDrove 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, colourless pencil sketch. Now he was immersed in a new world of colour 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 bear-like 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 surprising 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.”

David nodded. “I suppose so. Most science is just grunt work. Repetitive slog; endless testing and checking. And because false hypotheses have to be pruned away, much of the work is actually more destructive than constructive. But, occasionally — only a few times, probably, in the luckiest life — there is a moment of transcendence.”

“Transcendence?”

“Not everybody will put it like that. But it’s how it feels to me.”

“And it doesn’t matter that there might be nobody to read your papers in five hundred years’ time?”

“I’d rather that wasn’t true. Perhaps it won’t be. But the revelation itself is the thing, Bobby. It always was.”

On the ’Screen behind him there was a starburst of pixels, and a low bell-like tone sounded.

David sighed. “But not today, it seems.”

Bobby peered over his brother’s shoulder at the ’Screen, across which numbers were scrolling. “Another instability? It’s like the early days of the wormholes.”

David tapped at a keyboard, setting up another trial. “Well, we are being a little more ambitious. Our WormCams can already reach every part of the Earth, crossing distances of a few thousand kilometres. What I’m attempting now is to extract and stabilize wormholes which span significant intervals in Minkowski spacetime, in fact, tens of light-minutes.”

Bobby held up his hands. “You already lost me. A light-minute is the distance light travels in a minute… right?”

“Yes. For example, the planet Saturn is around a billion and a half kilometres away. And that is about eighty light-minutes.”

“And we want to see Saturn.”

“Of course we do. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a WormCam that could explore deep space? No more ailing probes, no more missions lasting years… But the difficulty is that wormholes spanning such large intervals are extremely rare in the quantum foam’s probabilistic froth. And stabilizing them presents challenges an order of magnitude more difficult than before. But it’s not impossible.”

“Why ‘intervals,’ not distances?”

“Physicist jargon. Sorry. An interval is like a distance, but in spacetime. Which is space plus time. It’s really just Pythagoras’ theorem.” He took a yellow legal notepad and began to scribble. “Suppose you go downtown and walk a few blocks east, a few blocks north. Then you can figure the distance you travelled like this.” He held up the pad:

(distance)² = (east)² + (north)²

“You walked around a right-angled triangle. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of -”

“I know that much.”

“But we physicists think about space and time as a single entity, with time as a fourth coordinate, in addition to the three of space.” He wrote on his pad once more:

(interval)² = (time separation)² — (space separation)²

“This is called the metric for a Minkowski spacetime. And -”

“How can you talk about a separation in time in the same breath as a separation in space?. You measure time in minutes, but space in kilometres.”

David nodded approvingly. “Good question. You have to use units in which time and space are made equivalent.” He studied Bobby, evidently searching for understanding. “Let’s just say that if you measure time in minutes, and space in light-minutes, it works out fine.”

“But there’s something else fishy here. Why is this a minus sign rather than a plus?”

David rubbed his fleshy nose. “A map of spacetime doesn’t work quite like a map of downtown Seattle. The metric is designed so that the path of a photon — a particle travelling at the speed of light — is a null interval. The interval is zero, because the space and time terms cancel out.”

“This is relativity. Something to do with time dilation, and rulers contracting, and -”

“Yes.” David patted Bobby’s shoulder. “Exactly that. This metric is invariant under the Lorentz transformation… Never mind. The point is, Bobby, this is the kind of equation I have to use when I work in a relativistic universe, and certainly if I’m trying to build a wormhole that reaches out to Saturn and beyond.”

Bobby mused over the simple, handwritten equation.

With his own emotional whirlwind still churning around him, he felt a cold logic coursing through him, numbers and equations and images evolving, as if he was suffering from some kind of intellectual synaesthesia. He said slowly, “David, you’re telling me that distances in space and time are somehow equivalent. Right? Your wormholes span intervals of spacetime rather than simply distances. And that means that if you do succeed in stabilizing a wormhole big enough to reach Saturn, across eighty light-minutes -”

“Yes?”

“Then it could reach across eighty minutes. I mean, across time.” He stared at David. “Am I being really dumb?”

David sat in silence for long seconds.

“Good God,” he said slowly. “I didn’t even consider the possibility, I’ve been configuring the wormhole to span a spacelike interval, without even thinking about it.” Feverishly, he began to tap at his SoftScreen. “I can reconfigure it from right here. If I restrict the spacelike interval to a couple of metres, then the rest of the wormhole span is forced to become timelike…”

“What would that mean? David?”

A buzzer rang, painfully loudly, and the Search Engine spoke. “Hiram would like to see you, Bobby.”

Bobby glanced at David, flooded with sudden, absurd fear.

David nodded curtly, already absorbed in the new direction of his work. “I’ll call you later, Bobby. This could be significant. Very significant.”

There was no reason to stay. Bobby walked away into the darkness of the Wormworks.

Hiram paced around his downtown office, visibly angry, fists clenched. Kate was sitting at Hiram’s big conference table, looking small, cowed.

Bobby hesitated at the door, for a few breaths physically unable to force himself into the room, so strong were the emotions churning here. But Kate was looking at him — forcing a smile, in fact.

He walked into the room. He reached the security of a seat, on the opposite side of the table from Kate. Bobby quailed, unable to speak. Hiram glared at him. “You let me down, you little shit.”

Kate snapped, “For Christ’s sake, Hiram.”

“You keep out of this.” Hiram thumped the tabletop, and a SoftScreen in the plastic surface lit up before Bobby. It started to run fragments of a news story: images of Bobby, a younger Hiram, a girl-pretty, timid-looking, dressed in colourless, drab, outdated fashions and a picture of the same woman two decades later, intelligent, tired, handsome. The Earth News Online logo was imprinted on each image.

“They found her, Bobby,” Hiram said. “Thanks to you. Because you couldn’t keep your bloody mouth shut, could you?”

“Found who?”

“Your mother.”

Kate was working the SoftScreen before her, scrolling quickly through the information, “Heather Mays. Is that her name? She married again. She has a daughter, you have a half-sister, Bobby.”

Hiram’s voice was a snarl. “Keep out of this, you, manipulative bitch. Without you none of this would have happened.”

Bobby, striving for control, said, “None of what?”

“Your implant would have stayed doing what it was doing. Keeping you steady and happy. Christ, I wish somebody had put a thing like that in my head when I was your age. Would have saved me a hell of a lot of trouble. And you wouldn’t have shot off your mouth in front of Dan Schirra.”

“Schirra? From ENO?”

“Except he didn’t call himself that, when he met you last week. What did he do, get you drunk and maudlin, blubbing about your evil father, your long-lost mother?”

“I remember,” Bobby said. “He calls himself Mervyn. Mervyn Costa. I’ve known him a long time.”

“Of course you have. He’s been cultivating you, on behalf of ENO, to get to me. You didn’t know who he was, but you kept your reserve — before, when you had the implant to help you keep a clear head. And now this. It’s open season on Hiram Patterson. And it’s all your bloody fault, Manzoni.”

Kate was still scrolling through the news piece and its hyperlinks. “I didn’t screw and dump this woman two decades ago.” She tapped at her SoftScreen, and an area of the table before Hiram lit up. “Schirra has corroborative evidence. Look.”

Bobby looked over his father’s shoulder. The Screen showed Hiram sitting at a table — this table, Bobby realized with a jolt, this room — and he was working his way through a mound of papers, amending and signing. The image was grainy, unsteady, but clear enough. Hiram came to a particular document, shook his head as if in disgust, and hastily signed it, turning it face down on a pile to his right.

After that the image reran in slo-mo, and the viewpoint zoomed in on the document. After some focusing and image enhancement, it was possible to read some of the text.

“You see?” Kate said. “Hiram, they caught you signing an update of the payoff agreement you made with Heather more than twenty years ago.”

Hiram looked at Bobby, almost pleading. “It was over long ago. We came to a settlement. I helped her develop her career. She makes documentary features. She’s been successful.”

“She was a brood mare, Bobby,” Kate said coldly. “He’s kept up his payments to keep her quiet. And to make sure she never tried to get near to you.”

Hiram prowled around the room, hammering at the walls, glaring at the ceiling. “I have this suite swept three times a day. How did they get those images? Those incompetent arseholes in Building Security have screwed up again.”

“Come on, Hiram,” Kate said evenly, evidently enjoying herself. “Think about it. There’s no way ENO could bug your headquarters. Any more than you could bug theirs.”

“But I wouldn’t need to bug them,” Hiram said slowly. “I have the WormCam… Oh.”

“Well done.” Kate grinned. “You figured it out. ENO must have a WormCam as well. It’s the only way they could have achieved this scoop. You lost your monopoly, Hiram. And the first thing they did with their WormCam was turn it on you.” She threw back her head and laughed out loud.

“My God.” Bobby said. “What a disaster.”

“Oh, garbage,” she snapped. “Come on, Bobby. Pretty soon the whole world will know the WormCam exists; it won’t be possible to keep a lid on it any longer. It has to be a good thing if the WormCam is prized out of the hands of this sick duopoly, the federal government and Hiram Patterson, for God’s sake.”

Hiram said coldly, “If Earth News have WormCam technology, it’s obvious who gave it to them.”

Kate looked puzzled. “Are you implying that…”

“Who else?”

“I’m a journalist,” Kate flared. “I’m no spy. The hell with you, Hiram. It’s obvious what happened. ENO just figured out that you must have found a way to adapt your wormholes as remote viewers. With that basic insight they duplicated your researches. It wouldn’t be hard; most of the information is in the public domain. Hiram, your hold on the WormCam was always fragile. It only took one person to figure it out independently.”

But Hiram didn’t seem to be hearing her. “I forgave you, took you in. You took my money. You betrayed my trust. You damaged my son’s mind and poisoned him against me.”

Kate stood and faced Hiram. “If you really believe that, you’re more twisted than I thought you were.”

The Search Engine called softly, “Excuse me, Hiram. Michael Mavens is here, asking to see you. Special Agent Mavens of…”

“Tell him to wait.”

“I’m afraid that isn’t an option, Hiram. And I have a call from David. He says it’s urgent.”

Bobby looked from one face to the other, frightened, bewildered, as his life came to pieces around him.

Mavens took a seat and opened a briefcase.

Hiram snapped, “What do you want, Mavens? I didn’t expect to see you again. I thought the deal we signed was comprehensive.”

“I thought so too, Mr. Patterson.” Mavens looked genuinely disappointed. “But the problem is, you didn’t stick to it. OurWorld as a corporation. One employee specifically. And that’s why I’m here. When I heard this case had turned up, I asked if I could become involved. I suppose I have a special interest.”

Hiram said heavily, “What case?”

Mavens picked up what looked like a charge sheet from his briefcase. “The bottom line is that a charge of trade-secret misappropriation, under the 1996 Economic Espionage Act, has been brought against OurWorld: by IBM, specifically by the director of their Thomas J. Watson research laboratory. Mr. Patterson, we believe the WormCam has been used to gain illegal access to IBM proprietary research results. Something called a synaesthesia-suppression software suite, associated with virtual-reality technology.” He looked up. “Does that make sense?”

Hiram looked at Bobby.

Bobby sat transfixed, overwhelmed by conflicting emotions, with no real idea how he should react, what he should say.

Kate said, “You have a suspect, don’t you, Special Agent?”

The FBI man eyed her steadily, sadly. “I think you already know the answer to that question, Ms. Manzoni.”

Kate appeared confused.

Bobby snapped, “You mean Kate? That’s ridiculous.”

Hiram thumped a fist into a palm. “I knew it. I knew she was trouble. But I didn’t think she’d go this far.”

Mavens sighed. “I’m afraid there’s a very clear evidentiary trail leading to you, Ms. Manzoni.”

Kate flared. “If it’s there, it was planted.”

Mavens said, “You’ll be placed under arrest. I hope there won’t be any trouble. If you’ll sit quietly, the Search Engine will read you your rights.”

Kate looked startled as a voice — inaudible to the rest of them — began to sound in her ears.

Hiram was at Bobby’s side. “Take it easy, son. We’ll get through his shit together. What were you trying to do, Manzoni? Find another way to get to Bobby? Is that what it was all about?” Hiram’s face was a grim mask, empty of emotion: there was no trace of anger, pity, relief — or triumph.

And the door was flung open. David stood there, grinning, his bear-like bulk filling the frame; he held a rolled-up SoftScreen in one hand. “I did it,” he said. “By God, I did it… What’s happening here?”

Mavens said, “Doctor Curzon, it may be better if -”

“It doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re doing, it doesn’t matter. Not compared to this.” He spread his SoftScreen on the tabletop. “As soon as I got it I came straight here. Look at this.”

The SoftScreen showed what looked superficially like a rainbow, reduced to black and white and grey, uneven bands of light that arced, distorted, across a black background.

“Of course it’s somewhat grainy,” David said. “But still, this picture is equivalent to the quality of images returned by NASA’s first flyby probes back in the 1970s.”

“That’s Saturn,” Mavens said, wondering. “The planet Saturn.”

“Yes. We’re looking at the rings.” David grinned. “I established a WormCam viewpoint all of a billion and a half kilometres away. Quite a thing, isn’t it? If you look closely you can even see a couple of the moons, here in the plane of the rings.”

Hiram laughed out loud and hugged David’s bulk. “My God, that’s bloody terrific.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. But that’s not important. Not any more.”

“Not important? Are you kidding?”

Feverishly David began to tap at his SoftScreen; the image of Saturn’s rings dissolved. “I can reconfigure it from here. It’s as easy as that. It was Bobby who gave me the clue. I just hadn’t thought out of the box as he did. If I restrict the spacelike interval to a couple of metres, then the rest of the wormhole span becomes timelike…”

Bobby leaned forward to see. The ’Screen now showed an equally grainy image of a much more mundane scene. Bobby recognized it immediately: it was David’s work cubicle in the Wormworks. David was sitting there, his back to the viewpoint, and Bobby was standing at his side, looking over his shoulder.

“As easily as that,” David said again, his voice small, awed. “Of course we’ll have to run repeatable trials, properly timed.”

Hiram said, “That’s just the Wormworks. So what?”

“You don’t understand. This new wormhole has the same, umm, length as the other.”

“The one that reached to Saturn.”

“Yes. But instead of spanning eighty light-minutes -”

Mavens finished it for him. “I get it. This wormhole spans eighty minutes.”

“Yes,” David said. “Eighty minutes into the past. Look, Father. You’re seeing me and Bobby, just before you summoned him away.”

Hiram’s mouth had dropped open.

Bobby felt as if the world was swimming around him, changing, configuring into some strange, unknowable pattern, as if another chip in his head had been switched off. He looked at Kate, who seemed diminished, terrified, lost in shock.

But Hiram, his troubles dismissed, grasped the implications immediately. He glared into the air. “I wonder how many of them are watching us right now?”

Mavens said, “Who?”

“In the future. Don’t you see? If he’s right this is a turning point in history, this moment, right here and right now, the invention of this, this past viewer. Probably the air around us is fizzing with WormCam viewpoints, sent back by future historians. Biographers. Hagiographers.” He lifted up his head and bared his teeth. “Are you watching me? Are you? Do you remember my name? I’m Hiram Patterson! Hah! See what I did, you arseholes!”

And in the corridors of the future, innumerable watchers met his challenging gaze.