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…

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.