“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.

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.