Eva shook her head. Alison’s mood swings were disconcerting.

“I don’t know why. He seems lacking in confidence.”

“Too bloody true. I’ll tell you what, one good fuck would sort him out. I’ll tell you what else, I’m not going to be the one to provide it.”

She glared across the room. “What about you, Katie? Would you do it? That would put a smile on both of your faces, wouldn’t it?”

“This conversation diminishes us all, Alison. Please go back to your room until you’re feeling better.”

Eva and Alison stared in shock at Katie’s response, but she remained glued to the screen.

Alison breathed in deeply, trying to regain her composure. “I was talking about Nicolas. He’s got a massive inferiority complex. He also thinks he’s the most important person in here. In the world.”

“That sounds like a contradiction,” Eva said hesitantly. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to speak to Alison when she was behaving like this.

Alison gave a bitter laugh. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? It’s a classic pattern for loonies. Most of the people in here are the same. You certainly are.”

Eva kept silent.

“Look at you with your delusions of grandeur, the way you believe you should have got that promotion, and yet you also think that you’re stupid and of no consequence. You’ve got no friends, and yet you know you deserve lots-”

“Alison.” Katie spoke again without looking up from the screen. Alison paused, brushed lank hair away from her eyes, but then continued.

“Nicolas. He told me something once, about how he started a pension when he began work. Doesn’t that tell you something about the man? What sort of twenty-year-old is bothered about a pension?” She laughed again. “Anyway, he got back the details telling him what he could expect when he retired. Gave him his projected earnings based on the job they thought he’d be doing then, taking into account his intelligence and personality quotient and so on. He wasn’t happy. He thought he’d be doing far better.”

Eva nodded. “I can see that being upsetting. Nobody likes to be told they are a loser, especially at that age.”

“That’s not all. It wasn’t a huge step from there to finding his life expectancy. You know what it was? Sixty-eight. You know what that means?”

Eva was uncomfortable on the hard plastic chair. She got up and and sat down next to Alison, accidentally knocking over a half-full cup of coffee someone had abandoned by the leg of the chair. Eva swore as brown liquid splashed across the vinyl floor.

“Leave it,” said Alison. “Listen. Nicolas was told that he would die at sixty-eight. Well below the average. That means low social class.” She gave a bitter laugh. “It will be even lower now. Knock another ten years off for being in here.”

Eva waved dismissively.

“So what? It’s only an average. It’s not a prediction.”

“It’s still a judgment. And a pretty accurate one nowadays. It changes day by day. Hour by hour. Minute by minute. Haven’t you ever called up your details on a screen? Watched those numbers after the decimal point whizz up and down? Picked up a gin and tonic and watched your life expectancy drop by a few seconds? Hah!”

She smiled entirely without humor.

“You know what, Nicolas is addicted to that stuff. He got his family tree from the Mormons’ database. Ran a simulated medical history on it back two hundred years. He figured out the likelihood of him dying of everything from AIDS to Huntington’s chorea. How about that for a pleasant way to spend the evening? Watch him at three o’clock in the afternoon. That’s a laugh.”

She shook her head and smiled.

“It’s all there, mapped, mirrored, and striped by data-banks the world over. Everything about you, and me, and Nicolas. They know us better than we know ourselves. They send us ads for products we didn’t even know existed. The drinking water tastes funny one day and two years later you find out by chance that you’d been dosed with the cure for an incipient embolism you had no idea ever existed.”

“Yeah?” Eva laughed bitterly. “Tell me about it. You know how I got here.”

Alison sighed angrily. “No, you still don’t get it. We talk about Social Care and we think of them watching our every move. And then we think about the Watcher, and we think that it’s like Social Care except more so, but that’s wrong. We fall into the trap of thinking that it’s simply something that watches us get undressed before we get in the bath, or listens in when you call your mother, but it’s worse than that. It’s looking right inside you. It sees every heartbeat, it knows your every thought; it knows you better than you know yourself.”

Her pupils dilated as she spoke. It was as if a tap had been turned in her heart, and all the feelings and emotions were flooding slowly upward, gurgling and lapping up inside her body to fill her up to the brim.

“No wonder poor Nicolas is the way he is,” she said softly. “He only has to look at a girl and he knows that the Watcher is there, analyzing his every thought and guilty emotion. He’s a twenty-seven-year-old man with a thirteen-year-old boy inside him who has never had the chance to grow up.”

Katie had flicked the viewing screen off. She moved up silently behind the pair of them.

“We shouldn’t be talking about this in here,” Katie said suddenly in Eva’s ear.

“Ah, who cares, Katie? This room is pretty secure; they don’t monitor the Center like they do outside. Anyway, the plan probably hasn’t got that much chance of working, has it? Not when the Watcher can read our every thought.”

“No, it can’t,” stuttered Katie. She paused a moment, then, “Anyway, the plan will work.”

“If you say so,” Alison said. She stood up quickly. “I’m going back to my room.” She stalked away.

Katie glanced at Eva, then ran after her friend. Eva was left alone in the lounge. The grey mist outside turned to gentle rain and Eva stared out at the blurred green limes.

“Look over in the corner, Eva,” said the voice. “Look over behind the viewing screen.”

“Hello again, voice,” said Eva. “What do you want now?”

“I told you. Look behind the viewing screen. Didn’t you notice it when you came in?”

Eva got up and walked across the room, the plastic soles of her sneakers sticky against the vinyl floor. Behind the viewing screen was an old intercom. A small white rectangular box with a grille facing. Two grubby white wires trailed down the wall to vanish into the floor.

“It heard you,” said the voice. “It could hear you speaking.”

“It’s just an old box, left over from when they first built this place. It isn’t connected to anything.”

“How do you know? If I were the Watcher, I would be listening to all the old equipment. My ears would be pressed to every forgotten intercom, every CCTV camera, every pneumatic tube.”

“Every pneumatic tube? You’re making this up as you go along.”

“And you are arguing with me now. You’re not trying to pretend that I don’t exist anymore. Eva, be careful. You’re not escaping; you’re being led into a trap. The Watcher is cleverer than you. Cleverer than both of us.”

There was a huge rattle outside the room. The skies had finally opened fully and were emptying their load in vast grey sheets of rain that splashed and sluiced down the glass. Eva looked out of the window onto nothing but shades of grey. A gust of wind sent a grey wave bursting across the panes.

“Who are you?” she called above the noise of the rain. “How do you know all this? How are we going to be trapped?”

Her shouting alerted Peter, one of the orderlies, who appeared in the doorway to the lounge wearing a gentle smile. He relaxed a little when he saw who it was.

“Easy now, Eva. What’s the matter?” he said in his surprisingly soft voice.

Eva suddenly realized she had been shouting. She looked down at the floor, flustered and embarrassed.