Hiram looked mournful. “Just don’t forget where your true family is, son.”

A girl stood at the door; slim, no taller than his shoulder, dressed in a harsh electric blue shift with a glaring Pink Lincoln design. She scowled at Bobby.

“I know who you are,” he said. “You’re Mary.” Heather’s daughter by her second marriage. Another half-sibling he’d only just found out about. She looked younger than her fifteen years. Her hair was cut brutally short, and a soft-tattoo morphed on her cheek. She was pretty, with high cheekbones and warm eyes; but her face was pursed into a frown that looked habitual.

He forced a smile. “Your mother is…”

“Expecting you. I know.” She looked past him at the clutch of reporters. “You’d better come in.”

He wondered if he should say something about her father, express sympathy. But he couldn’t find the words, and her face was hard and blank, and the moment passed.

He stepped past her into the house. He was in a narrow hallway cluttered with winter shoes and coats; he glimpsed a warm-looking kitchen, a lounge with big SoftScreens draped over the walls, what looked like a home study.

Mary poked his arm. “Watch this.” She stepped forward, faced the reporters and lifted her shift up over her head. She was wearing panties, but her small breasts were bare. She pulled the shift down, and slammed shut the door. He could see spots of colour on her cheeks. Anger, embarrassment?

“Why did you do that?”

“They look at me the whole time anyway.” And she turned on her heel and ran upstairs, her shoes clattering on bare wooden boards, leaving him stranded in the hallway.

“…Sorry about that. She isn’t adjusting too well.”

And here, at last, was Heather, walking slowly up the hallway to him.

She was smaller than he had expected. She looked slim, even wiry, if a little round-shouldered. Her face might once have shared Mary’s elfin look — but now those cheekbones were prominent under sun-aged skin, and her brown eyes, sunk deep in pools of wrinkles, were tired. Her hair, streaked with grey, was pulled back into a tight bob.

She was looking up at him, quizzically. “Are you okay?”

Bobby, for a few heartbeats, didn’t trust himself to speak. “…Yes. I’m just not sure what to call you.”

She smiled. “How about ‘Heather’ ? This is complicated enough already.”

And, without warning, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his chest.

He had tried to rehearse for this moment, tried to imagine how he would handle the storm of emotion he had expected. But now the moment was here, what he felt was…

Empty.

And all the while he was aware, achingly aware, of a million eyes on him, on every gesture and expression he made.

She pulled away from him. “I haven’t seen you since you were five years old, and it has to be like this. Well, I think we’ve put on enough of a show.”

She led him into the room he had tentatively identified as a study. On a worktable there was a giant SoftScreen of the finely grained type employed by artists and graphic designers. The walls were covered with lists, images of people, places, scraps of yellow paper covered with spidery, incomprehensible writing. There were scripts and reference books open on every surface, including the floor. Heather, brusquely, picked a mass of papers up off a swivel chair and dumped it on the floor. He accepted the implicit invitation by sitting down.

She smiled at him, “When you were a little boy you liked tea.”

“I did?”

“You’d drink nothing else. Not even soda. So, you’d like some?”

He made to refuse. But she had probably bought some specially. And this is your mother, asshole. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

She went to the kitchen, returned with a steaming mug of what proved to be jasmine tea. She leaned close to give it to him. “You can’t fool me,” she whispered. “But thanks for indulging me.”

Awkward silence; he sipped his tea.

He indicated the big SoftScreen, the nest of paper. “You’re a filmmaker. Right?”

She sighed. “I used to be. Documentaries. I regard myself as an investigative journalist.” She smiled. “I won awards. You should be proud. Not that anybody cares about that side of my life any more, compared to the fact that I once slept with the great Hiram Patterson.”

He said, “You’re still working? Even though.”

“Even though my life has turned to shit? I’m trying to. What else should I do? I don’t want to be defined by Hiram. Not that it’s easy. Everything has changed so fast.”

“The WormCam?”

“What else?… Nobody wants thought-through pieces any more. And drama has been completely wiped out. We’re all fascinated by this new power we have to watch each other. So there’s no work in anything but docusoaps: following real people going through their real lives — with their consent and approval, of course. Ironic considering my own position, don’t you think? Look.” She brought up an image on the SoftScreen, a smiling young woman in uniform. “Anna Petersen. Fresh out of the Navy college at Annapolis.”

He smiled. “Anna from Annapolis?”

“You can see why she was chosen. We have rotating teams to track Anna twenty-four hours a day. We’ll follow her career through her first postings, her triumphs and disasters, her loves and losses. The word is she’s to be sent with the task force to the Aral Sea water-war flashpoints, so we’re expecting some good material. Of course the Navy knows we’re tracking Anna.” She looked up into the empty air. “Don’t you, guys? So maybe it isn’t a surprise she got an assignment like that, and no doubt we’ll be getting plenty of mom-friendly, feel-good wartime footage.”

“You’re cynical.”

“Well, I hope not. But it isn’t easy. The WormCam is making a mess of my career. Oh, for now there is a demand for interpretation-analysts, editors, commentators. But even that is going to disappear when the great unwashed masses out there can point their own WormCams at whoever they want.”

“You think that’s going to happen?”

She snorted. “Oh, of course it is. We’ve been here before, with personal computers. It’s just a question of how fast. Driven by competitive pressure and social forces, the WormCams are going to get cheaper and more powerful and more widely available, until everybody has one.”

And perhaps — Bobby thought uneasily, thinking of David’s time-viewing experiments — more powerful than you know.

“…Tell me about you and Hiram.”

She smiled, looking tired. “Are you sure you want that? Here, on planet Candid Camera?”

“Please.”

“What did Hiram say to you about me?”

Slowly, stumbling occasionally, he repeated Hiram’s account.

She nodded. “Then that’s what happened.” And she held his gaze, for long seconds. “Listen to me. I’m more than an appendage of Hiram, some sort of annex to your life. And so is Mary. We’re people, Bobby. Did you know I lost a child, Mary, a little brother?”

“…No. Hiram didn’t tell me.”

“I’m sure he didn’t. Because it had nothing to do with him. Thank God nobody can watch that.”

Not yet, Bobby thought darkly.

“…I want you to understand this, Bobby.” She looked into the air. “I want everyone to understand. My life is being destroyed, piece by piece, by being watched. When I lost my boy, I hid. I locked the doors, closed the curtains, even hid under the bed. At least there were moments when I could be private. Not now. Now, it’s as if every wall of my house has been turned into a one-way mirror. Can you imagine how that feels?”

“I think so,” he said gently.

“In a few days the attention focus is going to move on, to burn somebody else. But I’ll never know when some obsessive, somewhere in the world, will be peering into my bedroom, still curious even years from now. And even if the WormCam disappeared tomorrow, it could never bring Desmond back.