Hiram had been seated alone at his big mahogany effect desk, before a mound of papers and SoftScreens. He sat hunched over, defensively. He had developed a habit of glancing around, flicking his gaze through the air, searching for WormCam viewpoints like a mouse in fear of a predator.

“I want to see her,” Bobby had said. “Heather Mays. My mother. I want to go meet her.”

Hiram looked as exhausted and uncertain as at any time Bobby could remember. “It would be a mistake. What good would it do you?”

Bobby hesitated. “I don’t know. I don’t know how it feels to have a mother.”

“She isn’t your mother. Not in any real sense. She doesn’t know you, and you don’t know her.”

“I feel as if I do. I see her on every tabloid show…”

“Then you know she has a new family. A new life that has nothing to do with you.” Hiram eyed him. “And you know about the suicide.”

Bobby frowned. “Her husband.”

“He committed suicide, because of the media intrusion. All because your girlfriend gave away the WormCam to the sleaziest journalistic reptiles on the planet. She’s responsible.”

“Dad.”

“Yes, yes, I know. We had this argument already.”

Hiram got out of his chair, walked to the window, and massaged the back of his neck. “Christ, I’m tired. Look, Bobby, any time you feel like coming back to work, I could bloody well use some help.”

“I don’t think I’m ready right now.”

“Everything’s gone to hell since the WormCam was released. All the extra security is a pain in the arse…”

Bobby knew that was true. Reaction to the existence of the WormCam, almost all of it hostile, had come from a whole spectrum of protest groups — from venerable campaigners like the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, all the way to attempted attacks on this corporate HQ, the Wormworks, and even Hiram’s home. An awful lot of people, on both sides of the law, felt they had been hurt by the WormCam’s relentless exposure of the truth. Many of them seemed to need somebody to blame for their travails — and who better than Hiram?

“We’re losing a lot of good people, Bobby. Many of them haven’t the guts to stick with me now I’ve become public enemy number one, the man who destroyed privacy. I can’t say I blame them. It’s not their fight.

“And even those who’ve stayed around can’t keep their hands off the WormCams. The illicit use has been incredible. And you can guess what for: spying on their neighbours, on their wives, their workmates. We’ve had endless rows, fistfights and one attempted shooting, as people find out what their friends really think of them, what they do to them behind their backs… And now you can see into the past, it’s impossible to hide. It’s addictive. And I suppose it’s a taster of what we have to expect when the past-view WormCam gets out to the general public. We’re going to ship millions of units, that’s for sure. But for now it’s a pain in the arse; I’ve had to ban illicit use and lock down the terminals…” He eyed his son. “Look, there’s a lot to do. And the world isn’t going to wait until your precious soul is healed.”

“I thought business is going well, even though we lost the monopoly on the WormCam.”

“We’re still ahead of the game.” Hiram’s voice was getting stronger, his phrasing more fluent, Bobby noticed; he was speaking to the invisible audience he assumed was watching him, even now. “Now we can disclose the existence of the WormCam, there is a whole host of new applications we can roll out. Videophones, for instance: a direct-line wormhole pair between sender and receiver; we can see a top-end market opening up immediately, with mass-market models to follow. Of course that will have an impact on the DataPipe business, but there will still be a need for tracking and identification technology… but that’s not where my problems lie. Bobby, we have an AGM next week. I have to face my shareholders.”

“They aren’t going to give you a rough ride. The financials are superb.”

“It’s not that.” He glanced around the room warily. “How can I put this? Before the WormCam, business was a closed game. Nobody knew my cards — my competitors, my employees, even my investors and shareholders if I wanted it that way. And that gave me a lot of leverage, for bluff, counterbluff.”

“Lying?”

“Never that,” Hiram said firmly, as Bobby knew he had to. “It’s a question of posture. I could minimize my weaknesses, advertise my strengths, surprise the competition with a new strategy, whatever. But now the rules have changed. Now the game is more like chess — and I cut my teeth playing poker. Now — for a price — any shareholder or competitor, or regulator come to that, can check up on any aspect of my operation. They can see all my cards, even before I play them. And it’s not a comfortable feeling.”

“You can do the same to your competitors,” Bobby said. “I’ve read plenty of articles which say that the new open-book management will be a good thing. If you’re open to inspection, even by your employees, you’re accountable. And it’s more likely valid criticism is going to reach you, and you’ll make fewer mistakes…”

The economists argued that openness brought many benefits to business. Without any one party holding a monopoly of information there was a better chance of closing a given deal: with information on true costs available to everybody, only a reasonable level of profit-taking was acceptable. Better information flows led to more perfect competition; monopolies and cartels and other manipulators of the market were finding it impossible to sustain their activities. With open and accountable cash flows, criminals and terrorists weren’t able to squirrel away unrecorded cash. And so on.

“Jesus,” Hiram growled. “When I hear guff like that, I wish I sold management textbooks. I’d be making a killing right now.” He waved his hand at the downtown buildings beyond the window. “But out there it’s no business-school discussion group.

“It’s like what happened to the copyright laws with the advent of the Internet. You remember that?… No, you’re too young. The Global Information Infrastructure — the thing that was supposed to replace the Berne copyright convention — collapsed back in the nought-noughts. Suddenly the Internet was awash with unedited garbage. Every damn publishing house was forced out of business, and all the authors went back to being computer programmers, all because suddenly somebody was giving away for free the stuff they used to sell to earn a crust.

“Now we’re going through the same thing all over again. You have a powerful technology which is leading to an information revolution, a new openness. But that conflicts with the interests of the people who originated or added value to that information in the first place. I can only make a profit on what OurWorld creates, and that largely derives from ownership of ideas. But laws of intellectual ownership are soon going to become unenforceable.”

“Dad, it’s the same for everybody.”

Hiram snorted. “Maybe. But not everybody is going to prosper. There are revolutions and power struggles going on in every boardroom in this city. I know, I’ve watched most of them. Just as they have watched mine. What I’m telling you is that I’m in a whole new world here. And I need you with me.”

“Dad, I have to get my head straight.”

“Forget Heather. I’m trying to warn you that you’ll get hurt.”

Bobby shook his head. “If you were me, wouldn’t you want to meet her? Wouldn’t you be curious?”

“No,” he said bluntly. “I never went back to Uganda to find my father’s family. I never regretted it. Not once. What good would it have done? I had my own life to build. The past is the past; it doesn’t do any bloody good to examine it too closely.” He looked into the air, challengingly. “And all you leeches who are working on more exposés of Hiram Patterson can write that down too.”

Bobby stood up. “Well, if it hurts too much, I can just turn the switch you put in my head, can’t I?”