At last, Kingsley stormed out of the apartment. Kate slammed the door shut behind him. She stood rigid for a moment, staring at the closed door, before burying her face in her hands.

Manning reached over and tapped the ’Screen. The image froze on a close-up of Kate’s face, hidden by her hands, tears visibly leaking between her fingers, her hair a tangle around her forehead, the whole surrounded by a faint fish-eye-distortion halo.

Manning said, “I believe this incident is the key to your story, Kate. The story of your life, of who you are.”

The real Kate, bleak and subdued, stared at her younger self woodenly. “I was framed,” she said evenly. “Over the IBM espionage. It was subtle, beyond the reach even of the WormCam. But it’s nevertheless true. And that’s what we should be focusing on. Not this barroom psychoanalysis.”

Manning drew back. “That’s as may be. But evidentiary issues are beyond my competence. The judge has asked me to come up with a framework for your state of mind at the time of the crime itself. Motive and intent: a deeper truth than even the WormCam can offer us. And,” he said with a trace of steel, “let’s remind ourselves that you don’t have any choice but to cooperate.”

“But that doesn’t alter my opinion,” she said.

“What opinion?”

“That, like every shrink I’ve ever met, you are one inhuman asshole.” The attorney touched Kate’s arm, but Kate shook her off.

Manning’s eyes glittered, hard behind his spectacles; Bobby realized Manning was going to enjoy exerting power over this willful woman.

Manning turned to his SoftScreen and ran through the brief breakup scene again. “Let me recall what you told me about this period in your life. You’d been living with Kingsley Roman for some three years when you decided to try for a baby. You suffered a late miscarriage.”

“I’m sure you enjoyed watching that,” Kate said bleakly.

“Please,” Manning said, pained. “You seem to have decided, with Kingsley, that you would try again.”

“We never decided that. We didn’t discuss it in that way.”

Manning blinked owlishly at a notepad. “But you did. February 24, 2032, is the clearest example. I can show you if you like.” He looked up at her over his glasses. “Don’t be alarmed if your memory differs from the WormCam record. It’s common. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s normal. Confabulation, remember. Shall I go on?

“Despite your stated decision, you don’t conceive. In fact you return to the regular use of contraceptives, so that conception is impossible anyhow. Six months after the miscarriage, Kingsley begins his affair with a colleague at his place of work. A woman called Jodie Morris. And a few months after that, he is careless enough to let you find out about it.” He studied her again. “Do you remember what you told me about that?”

Kate said reluctantly, “I told you the truth. I think Kingsley decided, on some level, that the baby was my fault. And so he started looking around. And besides, after the miscarriage, work was starting to take off for me. The Wormwood… I think Kingsley was jealous.”

“And so he started to seek the attention he craved from somebody else.”

“Something like that. When I found out, I threw him out.”

“He claims he left.”

“Then he’s a lying asshole.”

“But we just saw the incident,” Manning said gently. “I didn’t see any evidence of clear decision-making, of unilateral action by either of you.”

“It doesn’t matter what the WormCam shows. I know what is true.”

Manning nodded. “I’m not denying that you’re telling us the truth as you see it, Kate.” He smiled at her, owlish, looming. “You aren’t lying. That isn’t the problem at all. Don’t you see?”

Kate gazed at her caged hands.

They took a break. Bobby wasn’t allowed to be with her.

Kate’s treatment was one of many experiments being run as the politicians, legal experts, pressure groups and concerned citizens worked feverishly to find a way to accommodate the WormCam’s eerie historical reach — still not widely known to the public — into something resembling the existing due process of the law, and, even more challenging, into natural justice.

In essence it had suddenly become radically easier to establish physical truth.

The conduct of court cases seemed likely to be transformed radically. Trials would surely become much less adversarial, fairer, much less dependent on the demeanor of a suspect in court or the quality of her representatives. When the WormCam was available at federal, state and county levels, some commentators were anticipating savings of billions of dollars annually: there would be shorter trials, more plea bargains, more civil settlements.

And major trials in future would perhaps focus on what remained beyond the bare facts: motive and intent — hence the assignment of a psychologist like Manning to Kate’s case.

Meanwhile, as WormCammed law enforcers went to diligent work over unresolved cases, a huge logjam of new cases was heading for the courts. Some Congressmen had proposed that to maximize the clear-up rate a general amnesty should be declared for crimes of lesser severity committed up to the last full calendar year before the WormCam’s invention — an amnesty, that is, in return for waiving of Fifth Amendment protection in the relevant case. In fact, evidence gathering was made so much more powerful, thanks to the WormCam, that Fifth Amendment rights had become moot anyhow. But this was proving highly contentious. Most Americans did not appear to feel comfortable with losing Fifth protection.

Challenges to privacy were even more contentious — made so by the fact that even now there was no accepted definition of privacy rights, even within America. Privacy was not mentioned in the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights spoke of a right against intrusion by the state — but it left a great deal of room for manoeuvre by those in authority who wished to investigate citizens, and besides offered citizens virtually no protection against other bodies, such as corporations or the press or even other citizens. From a welter of scattershot laws at state and federal levels, as well as a mass of cases in common law to provide precedent, a certain common acceptance of the meaning of privacy had slowly emerged: for instance a right to be “let alone,” to be free from unreasonable interference from outside forces.

But all of this was challenged by the WormCam.

Legal safeguards surrounding WormCam use were being promoted, by law-enforcement and investigation agencies like the FBI and the police, as a compensating balance to the loss of privacy and other rights. For example WormCam records intended for legal purposes would have to be collected in controlled circumstances — probably by trained observers, and notarized formally. That wasn’t likely to prove a problem, as any WormCam observation could always be repeated as many times as required simply by setting up a new wormhole link to the incident in question.

There were even suggestions that people should be prepared to submit to a form of “documented life.” This would effectively grant the authorities legal access to any incident in an individual’s past without the need for formal procedures in advance — and it would also be a strong shield against false accusation and identity theft.

But despite protests from campaigners against the erosion of rights, everybody seemed to accept that as far as its use in criminal investigation and prosecution was concerned, the WormCam was here to stay; it was simply too powerful to ignore.

Some philosophers argued that this was no bad thing. After all, humans had evolved to live in small groups in which everybody knew everybody else, and strangers were rarely encountered; it was only recently, in evolutionary terms, that people had been forced to live in larger communities like cities, crammed together with friends and strangers alike. The WormCam was bringing a return to older ways of living, of thinking about other people and interacting with them.