Gnomon Read online

  In the gaps where the cameras cannot scan or where the human animal is yet too wild and strange, there are the Inspectors, prosecutorial ombudsmen to the surveillance state, reviewing and considering any case that passes a given threshold of intervention. The majority of the Inspectors’ cases concern acts of carefully considered violence, international organised crime and instances of domestic or international terrorism. Some few crimes of passion still occur, but hardly require deep scrutiny, and most are headed off early and pre-emptively when tremors of dysfunction give them away. The Witness does not ignore a rising tide, a pattern of behaviour. It does not take refuge behind the lace curtain of non-interference in personal business. No one now shall live in fear of those they also love. Everyone is equally seen.

  That’s how the System works and what it means. All citizens understand its worth, and everyone contributes their time and attention to the law, to governance, to the daily work of creating a free and fair society – and everyone benefits. It is a nation which is also a community, and in that – in its steady and equitable prosperity, in its scrupulous justice, and above all in its ability to deliver security of the self to citizens at a level unprecedented in history – it claims the Inspector’s allegiance with an absolute certitude. Her understanding of the world is perfectly extended into her profession and her life.

  Speaking of her profession: Neith finds a comfortable position in her chair. She taps gently with one knuckle, glances – as she always does – at the identifying tag at the top of the screen: NEITH, M., DETECTIVE INSPECTOR (GRADE A). She has no idea what possessed her mother to give her a Finnish name, except perhaps a deep and abiding admiration for the champion of cross-country skiing who carried it to two Winter Olympic seasons and came away with nine gold medals. The more important part is DETECTIVE, which means she has a professional heritage to draw on as well as a personal one, an identity as strong and old as the Real Life sign’s bright promise of middle-class housing, good schools and a sheepdog. She went to the new Metropolitan Witness Academy in Hoxton, qualified for the fast track and was coached through three years on the beat. She was peed on by drunks, wept on by widows, whistled at by builders. She graduated to Serious Crimes, arrested drug importers and corrupt bankers, and caught the eye of the System and the nation when she scooped a minor clue from the wastebasket and followed it all the way to what became known as the Cartier Smash and Grab. On the same day Neith picked up the thread, a high-technology criminal gang based in France ram-raided a jewellery vault and tried to fly back across the Channel using microlight aircraft. With Neith’s information in its electronic hand, the System’s active countermeasures aspect was able to penetrate their navigation software and land the gang at a military airfield for convenient arrest. Only one member escaped the net: a secure intrusion specialist and counter-surveillance expert known internationally as the Waxman, who had chosen a separate exit strategy, and took refuge in the embassy of a friendly foreign power. The incompleteness has always annoyed her, and the Waxman, with nothing else to do, occasionally sends her taunting messages.

  After the Smash and Grab arrests, though, she rose on and up to the core of the justice apparat. She is no paper pusher, no careerist. Neith will over time be promoted to high office by the Witness for one good reason: she is proper police.

  In her hands now are the terminals for the Witness interface, the primary tools of her trade. As always, they strike her as very male, very sexualised. Each one is around ten centimetres long, grey-black, with a silver half-dome at one end. She unbuttons her shirt. The left terminal monitors her own vital signs, and goes against the chest, over the heart. The right one she will place against her temple. There are various reasons for this design, but she believes that in the end they are made this way so that an Inspector at work resembles however distantly the protagonist of a black-and-white crime flick using a two-part telephone.

  For shorter recordings and less complex emotional and cognitive states, the machine can simply impose the flow of a recorded mind over its user’s in real time, which is quick and effective but leads to a kind of double vision that many people – the Inspector included – find somewhat nauseating. In any situation which requires the investigator to get to know their subject, or where nuance might be important, it’s more usual to shunt the whole file, in compressed form, into local storage in the brain. Neith imagines its subsequent unfolding to resemble a jasmine flower tea opening in hot water, or a kind of retrograde origami in which the foreign mind resumes its original shape to whatever degree it can inside its new physical environment. The origami method affords a far greater intimacy with the subject – which of course is useful in important cases like this one – but can compromise your sleep as the file unwinds. There’s no danger of the memory taking over the investigator’s, any more than you can drive to Brighton in the back half of an automobile. It’s a set of experiences, not a viral person, though that does not stop London’s film industry from depicting any number of lurid scenarios premised on the idea, ranging from sinister to comedic, but tending in most cases to an element of the erotic.

  It’s not the prospect of accidentally becoming someone else that causes her to hesitate, if only for an instant. Rather, it is the desire to keep her own brain in the best possible order, just as she tries to eat right and sleep sufficiently. The Witness, as a matter of course, monitors the behaviour of anyone frequently using memory uploads, and does not allow anything to go wrong. Having a perfect older brother checking in on you from time to time makes things like that considerably less nerve-wracking – and unlike an actual brother, the Witness does not intrude. It is just always there. That being so, the Inspector feels no serious concern in selecting the more intimate option. She takes Diana Hunter into her head, knowing that the Witness will protect her.

  The Witness is perfect because it can see everything, and that perception does not stop at the skull. In those rare cases where it is necessary, the Witness can enter the brain of a subject by surgical intervention and read the truth directly from the source. It is the key reason Inspectors exist. The machine can perform the function, but it is not actually alive. It is not appropriate that something dead have governance of something living. In the end, there must be oversight not because the Witness makes mistakes, but because the watcher must itself be watched, and be seen to be watched. The System exists for the people, not the other way around, and in the end it is the people who are empowered – and required – by the machine to take any and all of the hard decisions that arise.

  When the whole thing has poured into her mind and settled there, she uses the machine to start the file again, and – as always when she lifts the second terminal to her head – thinks of Humphrey Bogart.

  *

  I can see my mind on the screen

  Actually, there’s more than one screen. I’m surrounded by them. Each wall of this room is a screen, and the technicians can subdivide them all so that they display different images. I can see my mind all around me, on all the screens. I’m looking down along the line of my body – in general I hate this position because it gives me an almost endless collection of chins – at the screen beyond my feet, which is presently the least busy of them all. These words are in the middle, between an ECG trace and something that looks like a sonogram.

  One of the technicians nods. ‘It is,’ he says. ‘It’s a sonogram of your brain.’ I think he’s simplifying for me. His voice sounds like the one adults use when they’re talking to small children about complex, grown-up things. I suspect it’s something more like an MRI, but miniaturised and implanted inside my skull. Just because I am strapped to the chair does not mean that I am stupid.

  All that comes up on the screen, too, of course, and he looks apologetic. It occurs to me that he is probably a nice enough guy under other circumstances – he’s even a little bit attractive, if you like floppy Brideshead hair and that awfully self-conscious congeniality – but I hate him and I want to hurt him. He thinks he’s
being kind, but actually he’s just salving his guilt.

  He reads that last bit and he flinches and turns away. I feel instantly embarrassed but I also think: Fuck you. It’s weird having your surface thoughts broadcast like this. Weird and horrible, but also a little bit liberating. If someone is rude enough to intrude on the ticking of your brain, to peel back your polite silences and your social graces and poke the fleshy grey stuff in search of secrets, they can just deal with what they find there. All the same, I’m glad I’m not thinking about sex.

  Now I’m thinking about sex. On the far right we’re watching my memory of my last orgasm. Since this is a purely visual feed we’re seeing the ceiling of my bedroom lurch left and right.

  This is not okay. I do not consent. I do not consider the intrusion legitimate, and I do not accept the argument that it is in the interest of the nation as a whole, nor that if it were in the nation’s interest that would make what is happening to me acceptable. Just because something is done according to the law does not mean that it is lawful. Law is made in the image of an ideal. One can make a law that does not reflect that image, and that law may be a law without being lawful. I consider what is happening here a grotesque violation. If I get the chance, I will hurt you for doing what you are doing, hurt you badly. This is my head and you should not be in it.

  The technician who tried to tell me about the brain scan reads that and he stops trying to be Mr Nice. I’ve given him an excuse to think of me as an enemy. Beneath the floppy hair, he has a fat face and he sweats too much. In fact he stinks. I can see hair in his nose. I’m reasonably sure he’s an ungenerous lover. I hope his wife is unfaithful to him with derelicts, and that she brings home diseases for which there are no names. I hope his dog dies. I know he has a dog because I can see the hair on his trouser cuff. And I recognise the mud. The precise constitution of that mud is a signature, the clay and red earth and the hint of gravel occurs in three places in London, but in only one of them will you find the seeds that cling to his sock. Like Sherlock Holmes I can read the evidence and infer from the reality of the present the map of the past, and now I know where he walks his dog.

  (I don’t really.)

  It’s mud, you moron. But for a moment there he was scared, and that’s a win. I’ll take it. You hear me, you miserable bastard? I beat you. From this table. To which I am tied. That’s how pathetic you are. You are small and pathetic and gullible and you are beneath my notice. Which will not stop me from doing terrible things to you.

  (I actually will.)

  Now one of his colleagues is reading over his shoulder and reminding him that this is why the protocol says not to talk to the subject. I go back to looking at pictures of my own head.

  On the left there’s a feed from my optic nerve. It’s like being in a hall of mirrors because I see the image of what I’m looking at and the screen displays the image of the image and then the image of the image of the image and then a second technician puts his fingers in front of my face.

  ‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘You’ll get feedback.’

  ‘What happens then?’ I ask him.

  ‘Your head explodes.’

  I can tell it’s an old joke. He’s reassuring himself as much as anything. He’s saying that because my head won’t explode, because there’s no risk of that, what they’re doing isn’t like torture. It’s just a perfectly simple evidential procedure. It’s sanctioned by the court. There’s nothing immoral or even very unpleasant about it. It’s okay.

  It is not okay. It is invasion. It is torture, and you are torturers. You, who are reading this, seeing it, feeling it. These feelings are not yours. They belong to me. Get out of my head. My head, the head of this woman in this room, not yours, wherever you are.

  They get tired of reading my objections and my threats, so they give me a paralytic and blindfold me. Now I’m just talking to myself in the dark. They can still read what I’m thinking, but now that I can’t see the reaction it’s a lot less satisfying thinking bad thoughts at them. And I can’t tell: perhaps they’ve also shut down the feed from my speech centres and I’m just wittering away to myself. That would be annoying. I dislike futility and helplessness.

  This partial sensory deprivation is alarming because it’s quite nice. You’d think it would be frightening, and of course it is – that, I don’t mind so much – but it’s also soothing and that, I distrust intensely. I only have smell, touch and sound to work with, and as I lie here I get a sense of the ebb and flow of the room. I start to recognise the wash of air that accompanies a particular set of footsteps, the tinge of sweat and cologne that means the first technician or the second or someone new. The regularity, that intimacy, is settling some little evolutionary rodent circuit lodged somewhere in the engine room of my brain. I can’t help it: I’m relaxing into the situation. Under other circumstances I’d even be worried that I might say something inappropriate or self-incriminatory, but that’s not really an issue. In twenty minutes or so they’re going to read my entire mind to protect the security of the state. They will hollow me out like a pumpkin and leave me with a pumpkin smile: a wide, idiot, toothless grin. They’ll go home and tell their friends they did a good job. They’ll greet their partners, their spouses, their kids, and if they let on in the small hours of the dark that they’re not without qualms, they’ll say in the same breath that they know it’s necessary. Their partners and their spouses will tell them they are brave, because they accept the sleepless nights of troubled conscience so that everyone else can be safe. No doubt that’s how it always goes with torturers.

  ‘Justice has been perfected and the Witness is everywhere.’ That’s the pitch. And it works. We are all transparent to one another. There are no secrets, can be no secrets. Must be no secrets. So I will be read, as a page is read. If I have nothing to hide – if the System has made a mistake, which it almost never does – I have nothing to fear. That motto is written in Latin over the door, and above it is the odd little colophon of an axe wrapped in sticks that has been the symbol of magistrates since Imperial Rome at least. The modern phrase is attributed to William Hague, who was a great Conservative politician decades gone – a real champion of rights and right thinking – although I happen to know it was also a favoured maxim of Joseph Goebbels. Protection is the first duty of government. I hear they still drink a toast to him – Hague, that is, not Goebbels – in the Admin Tower, once a year at Christmas. The first watcher, the godfather of the Witness.

  The touch of the machine they will use to open my brain is so fine it can probe ricepaper without cutting it. They may already have begun, and I wouldn’t know. It’s a medical technology, a very sophisticated and important one. In fact, many people emerge from this room – from these rooms, because there are many of them – healthier than when they arrived. Unsuspected blood clots can be dealt with, cancers purged, sorrows averted. If the pages of my mind are innocent, there will be no consequence to this encounter beyond a few lost hours. When my mother was a child, they still had to serve jury duty: days of unproductive dithering over matters of fact and intent which are now closed questions. May we be preserved from that! The Witness sees, the machine divines, the evidence is inside us. It is a far more complete justice than anything you can do with he-said-she-said. It just is. And beyond that it makes you healthy, so it’s really win–win.

  In my case, as in almost all of them, the Witness is actually quite correct. I am a traitor to the System, to the society we have constructed around it. I have hidden from the Witness, which is in itself antisocial and grounds for closer examination. I have used paper and ink to send private messages, bartered to conceal my transactions, done favours and had them returned in order to avoid listing my transactions on an accessible database. I have taught these skills: writing, hiding, haggling, the ad hoc measurement of value. I have proselytised about their use, advocated opacity. Shame on me.

  To make it worse, I have erected analogue communications devices – wires strung taut across narrow alleys
with cups at either end; pigeon coops; listening tubes. I have embraced the process of divestment to such an extent that in fact there are no modern machines at all in my house. No touchscreen. No computer. Not even a washing machine. Sadly, washing machines these days are as wired as everything else. They are set up to tell you how to save money and water and electricity. More recently they started measuring water quality. Of course, they package those data anonymously and send them to the central hub for analysis. By doing that the System can manage water flow and know about any dangerous impurities before they jeopardise the public health. When my father was a child, he got blisters on his tongue from drinking water with aluminium in it – an error at a local water plant. That can’t happen now, and indeed there are biosensors in the pipes that pick up various waterborne infections and trigger alerts. But nothing is free: the reality is that anonymisation is no more effective than one of those hilarious nose-moustache-and-spectacle sets that are a staple of office parties. With the right parsing, your washing machine can know all sorts of things about you that are private. It can tell from your clothes whether you drink too much, whether you have eczema, whether you use drugs. Whether you are pregnant. A new model has come on the market with an olfactory sensor patterned on the nose of a particular breed of pig: it can tell whether you have an early stage cancer and refer you to a doctor. That is a little miraculous and wonderful, isn’t it? If only the information didn’t also automatically go to your local health trust so that they can manage their year-on-year needs more accurately. If only they didn’t market their needs list to health insurers. If only everything wasn’t quite so obsessively joined up.