The Inspector takes a moment to read her own press. This is not unhealthy or even vain, but an exercise in reflection. She needs to know how she is seen, because these assessments will affect her interactions with the wider public and in turn her own perception of those with whom she interacts. In general it seems that the polis approves of her selection for this task and anticipates a speedy resolution of the case. There is some suggestion that she may be too close to the Witness and that she should be assisted or overseen, and a vanishingly small percentage argue that an independent investigator or even a judge should have been retained. On the whole, though, it seems that she has the trust of her ultimate employers.
She reads through the week’s general voter briefing: funding requests for different departments, project approvals, import and export quotas. Only one contentious issue is under consideration – the Monitoring Bill – and it is one on which Neith feels quite strongly. This robustness is something she has in common with the rest of the population, though not everyone’s opinion is in line with hers. Democracy in action is very annoying.
Several months ago, taking into account the likely advances in technology over the next decade, the System posed the question of whether it was appropriate to install a permanent remote access in the skull of a recidivist or compulsive criminal. This has now culminated in a draft bill being put before the polity.
The points against permanent implanted monitoring are compelling: it is a considerable conceptual and legal step to go from external surveillance to the direct constant observation of the brain; it pre-empts a future crime rather than preventing crime in progress, and this involves an element of prejudging the subject; once deployed in this way the technology will inevitably spread to other uses, and the consequences of those should also be considered; and finally and most significantly, such a device entails the possibility of real-time correction of recidivist brain function, and this being arguably a form of mind control is ethically repellent to many. There is an instinctual argument, with respectable intellectual backing, that the System and the Witness should monitor the external world only, and the boundary of the body should be respected until there is a specific reason to do otherwise – as in a non-consensual interview – and even then such interference should be as brief as possible, and proportionate.
On the other hand, the technology has the potential to allow those with, for example, certain forms of severe mental illness to re-enter society in the certain knowledge that they will not hurt anyone, which could be immensely therapeutic.
There is a moral dimension, too, which the Inspector finds compelling. As a matter of societal identity, the System is supposed to provide the best combination of personal security and personal freedom, and there is an argument that this achieves that by allowing the constitutionally violent access to the world without compromising the safety of the majority.
Overall, sensible liberal opinion favours a compromise: a starkly limited programme in which the technology is used voluntarily, in combination with robust technical and legal safeguards against inappropriate pseudo-medical alteration of the subject’s thinking. The Inspector mistrusts the idea in concept, but respects the medical use-case. In the end, she also suspects that general adoption of implant technology of some sort is a societal and commercial inevitability. The advantages of having permanent access to the System are many, and public morality follows the trend of public desire. Still, due scrutiny is healthy.
She registers her position – firmly against widespread use but in favour of a medical test programme – and signs off. Full polling will take a week or more, and votes can be changed until the deadline to allow for evolutions in personal perspective during the ongoing debate, but presently it seems she is in the majority, with low level support for the absolute negative position and perhaps one third of those who have already expressed an opinion being in favour of full deployment without restriction.
There, that’s done. Her private obligation to the nation is discharged, leaving only her professional one to go. She looks at the time, and tuts: democracy can be long-winded. If she doesn’t hurry, she will be late for Hunter’s corpse.
*
The Inspector, arriving for her appointment a little while later, stares down at Hunter’s body, and carefully does not impute to it any kind of agency. Corpses are natural and inevitable citizens of the uncanny valley, the place where what is not alive too closely follows the pattern of what is. The body is not lying there, it has been laid out. The eyes do not stare, the hands do not grasp. This thing is no longer a thing which acts. A corpse is not haunted or residually inhabited save by the implications of the living. All the same, it once was alive, and in its inertness is a kind of malediction, or prophecy.
Neith glances around: she is not fond of hospitals. The implication of accident, of sickness derived from random chance, does not sit well with her. Still less does she like these refrigerated basement rooms for the victims of untimely death. However fine the modern design of the building, every occupied tray here must count as a failure of the System to protect and secure.
She hears footsteps and turns. She has met the coroner before but can never remember her name without checking and is worried that it’s starting to seem rude. She rummages inside her own head, wondering whether her memory is adversely affected by prolonged exposure to recorded other minds. Medical opinion is vague and experimentation is not recommended.
The coroner arrives. Neith realises she has at some point toggled off the Witness’s personal telemetry, so the woman’s name is not being displayed. No matter, she knows it. Lisa? Lucy? Lara? Trisa. Trisa, from St Albans, paternal grandmother born in Okinawa, mother once sang solo at the Albert Hall. Likes dancing but not alone, doesn’t drink, plays piano. Trisa Hinde. Hinde wears a badge with a rainbow on it. A few decades ago this would have meant something about her sexual orientation, but now it’s a polite signal to Neith and anyone else Hinde interacts with that she is not neurotypical. Her brain touches a particular peak of the modern medical taxonomy that includes some autisms and various perceptual and processing functions such as synaesthesia, and structural (rather than acquired) hypervigilance. It is not actually a spectrum in the linear sense, more a graph on several axes. In Hinde’s case it means that she has a superb set of tools for the consideration, recall and analysis of her sense data – making her an excellent medical examiner – but she has no mind’s eye in which to conjure counterfactuals or even remembered scenes, and dislikes having to reach for what is implicit in the way others cringe at emery boards or biting into a block of ice. That disparity of experience is one reason she likes dancing: her understanding of social and sexual cues inherent in physical activity is aligned with everyone else’s and infinitely less annoying than having to make everyone else explain their subtext.
When Hinde is not dancing, the badge alerts people to the context of their interaction. This is not mandated or even recommended by the System. It’s just an outgrowth of everyone being able to query things about one another through a data connection: rather than make people go through the business of getting offended and then doing a search on her, and then being embarrassed for not realising or remembering that her consciousness is a bit different from theirs, Hinde chooses – as many or most people in her situation now do – to identify her status in advance. There are many advantages to the end of privacy, and one of them is the obsolescence of social awkwardness. The Inspector finds this outcome both efficient and laudable.
‘Exhaustion,’ Hinde says shortly. ‘The proximate cause is stroke, but the body was worn out, as if she’d been running for days. I mean running to the point of crisis, not jogging. The brain most especially.’ She pauses for a moment.
The Inspector returns to the corpse. Indicating the head with a diffuse gesture, she asks: ‘No tumours, then?’ She had entertained a brief hope for a gross physical cause. An abnormal brain might account for that unwelcome clarity in Hunter’s mind, the uncomfortable sureness o
f her recorded inner voice. It might also hamper the interrogation – might have made it impossible for the woman herself to facilitate it, might indeed have bent her mood and made her irrationally hostile to the very idea – and could also have killed her under stress. A neat solution, but Hinde is already shaking her head.
‘And no lesions?’
‘No.’
‘A medical error,’ Neith supposes.
Hinde doesn’t respond straight away because this is only implicitly a question. Her face takes on an uncomfortable look as she tries to work out how to respond. Neith, embarrassed to approximately the same degree that she would be if she had loudly broken wind, changes her wording. ‘Was it an accident? Malpractice?’
‘Could have been. Could have been deliberate. She died because she was overtaxed for a prolonged period. Was that scientifically knowable? Yes. Was it culpably so? Unclear. I gather they were in new territory. Perhaps they shouldn’t have been. It’s possible that she went from nominal to flatline very fast. It can happen that way. Did they take steps to measure her risk? Was that risk proportional to the need? Or, theoretically, was it intended that she not survive? Those are interesting – but not medical – questions.’ Hinde shrugs: therefore not her problem. Then she glances between the corpse and the Inspector.
‘She looks like you,’ Hinde observes.
The Inspector considers the woman on the table, thirty years her senior, dark brown skin fading around wrinkles, and very clearly deceased. Hinde has put her back together with great sympathy, but the evidence of keyhole neurosurgery and various stents, shunts and insertions is not erased. The coroner’s own investigations are concealed for the most part by a modest green blanket. Still, there might be something there. Same hairline, perhaps, but different hair. Generous mouths but differently quirked – or rather, Hunter’s mouth is quirked, suggesting that she smiled often and the dead muscles are tugging her lips even now into the posture most often adopted in life.
‘Not much in the face,’ Hinde says, following the line of her gaze. ‘Body shape. Skeletal structure. Rib curvature and disposition of the hips.’ She pauses. ‘Perhaps it’s not obvious from outside.’
Neith agrees that it isn’t, and changes the subject. ‘If you had been in charge of the procedure,’ she proposes, ‘what steps would you have taken to avoid this outcome?’
Hinde peers at her. ‘I’m a coroner,’ she says, as if talking to a child. ‘By the time I receive a patient, this outcome is a given.’
They stand across the body, mutually perplexed.
*
It does not require a sophisticated analysis of those first thoughts on the recording to recognise that Diana Hunter was opposed to the Witness, and indeed to the society that hinges upon it. The philosophical argument the System advances in its own favour – safety and empowerment in exchange for total personal transparency – did not persuade her. Quite apparently, she saw an irreducible virtue in the right to be unobserved. Such people exist, of course, and even choose to remain in the United Kingdom under the System, citing whatever exigencies they feel tie them to the place. For the most part they are unproblematic. They protest, they vote, and they create these small local networks, which inevitably leak information from every angle and keep no secrets of any concern. The true refusenik problem – the use of analogue and concealed methods of imparting information between motivated paramilitaries – is quite another thing, and almost unheard of.
The Inspector considers. For now, her task is to know the woman. Who was Diana Hunter? If you had asked her that question, what would she have said?
I am a woman in the prime of life, yes, and the rest, which had the feel of a quotation, but perhaps true all the same. What else?
But before all that – before whatever is contained in the record of the interrogation which ended in her death – Diana Hunter lived. She ate, she drank, she slept. She knew people and every day she woke to the same view, whether it was a good one or not. She had habits and dislikes and a history, and all these things made her what she was.
Neith clips a roaming data connection to her glasses so that she won’t miss anything important, then goes down the stairs to the street.
*
London in winter, so overexposed as to be almost monochrome. Neith walks into a perfect blindness, searing light reflected on frost, in window glass, and the pearlescent paint of cars. The sun is so low that it seems to shine horizontally along Piccadilly, making the street into a tunnel of white. Commuters stripped of their faces, their clothes thick with strange retinal artefacts as her pupils contract to their minimum dilation, flow past her in endless anonymous succession, competing for walking space with tourists seemingly no more tangible than the pattern of waves scudding across a river bottom. She looks back along her route, and sees a shining avenue slashed with impenetrable lines of darkness, a throng of golden statues walking. Then she turns a corner into shadow and as her vision adjusts, revealing a violent surge of colour and detail: red leaves and blue sky, grey stone and green paint, human visages in various states of animated discourse or silent contemplation. Rickshaws, these days driven remotely by some taxi company’s mainframe, dither by the side of the road as they wait for a fare. The newer ones have rain canopies that can extend all the way over to protect passengers from London’s modern flash flooding. As always, they remind her of a school of nervous fish feeding on a reef.
The Inspector glances up again at the city’s new architecture, the steel spirals and glass spires of Lubetkin and his followers made plausible by modern construction techniques, rises out of the red brick neo-Gothic arcades, a dream future emerging from a coal and furnace past.
She waits for one of the new trams, and heads south.
*
London has very few bad areas left, but the house she is looking for is on the border of one of them: an ugly valley of brutalist estate buildings stained like decaying molars and arranged around central courtyards only ever destined to be battlefields. The overarching problem with them is not, to Neith’s eye, how they were laid out, but what they were intended to do: they are boxes for the storage of surplus persons. The message of uselessness in the stones is not hard to unpack, and the inhabitants read it as soon as they saw where they were put. From there, the project ground itself down into a slurry of low expectations and simmering rage. The old century produced a lot of these slow-cooking anger farms, and the heat they have built up is soaked into the earth and the people so deep that even the System cannot immediately take it away. Detractors – like the subject of this present investigation – point to this as evidence that the System is not all it’s cracked up to be, but Neith can read history too, and would like them to name a society that has done as well with what it inherited from the past. Certainly the remedy is not the previous, nominally representative iterations of democracy, which spawned this mess in the first place.
The house stands over the valley but looks away from it. The Inspector steps down on to the pavement and watches the tram disappear. Wayward instinct prompts her for a moment to run after it, to get back on board and take the journey to the end. A moving tram is a bubble in space, profoundly separated from everything else. Time passes inside at a fractionally different rate, and no physical interaction is possible between passengers and people on the outside. A line of tram tracks is the intrusion into everyday space of another physical realm – albeit one so comfortably mundane that few people realise what they are seeing. Terminus stations, like airports, are the junction, the place where a temporary reality fades into the continuing consensus one – as well as being where the rails run out – so they are transitional to the power of two: liminally liminal. In such an enfolded location, surely, there must be clues to almost any mystery, spat out on to the littoral plain of human passage.
Neith snorts, recognising the wayward flowstate – the dialogue between fugue and logic which is part of her professional armament.
She looks around, orients herself to the c
ameras on the facades and street lights, looks for blind spots – created or unanticipated – looks for the places she would sit if she were a child playing hide and seek, for the low wall where teen girls judge competitions of young male bravado. She looks for fast food wrappers and plastic bottles, for cigarette butts and needles and discarded phones, for anything that tells a story. It won’t be the story she wants, but all stories touch somewhere. All stories are one story, in the end.
She feels a flicker of attention. Her eyes skitter across the landscape, chasing something almost certainly inside her head. What has her subconscious picked up on, in that brief reverie, that is trying to elbow its way into her thoughts? (Speed limit sign. Newsagent. Community centre, run down and covered in graffiti tags. Rubbish bin, overfull.) Investigation is a webwork rather than a line. A crowd rather than a single individual. (Parked cars. Parked bikes. Vandalised public access terminal. Blood on the pavement: a nosebleed, a fist fight, certainly nothing serious.) What thread is she looking at that, viewed from another angle, might be a net? And a net to do what? To catch whom?
She wanders to and fro, picking and turning over like a well-dressed rag lady. She wonders if Hunter did this. She was aware of her environment. She cared about it. She was the centre of something here, so yes, she must have. She walked these paving stones, saw these things: Hunter, who wrote angry letters and disliked the spontaneous nighttime gatherings of bored local youth on the benches opposite her house. The same Hunter who loaned those same disaffected kids books and probably made them meals. Is that a contradiction? Or a deception? Or is it just people? People are inconstant.