“Yeah, yeah.”

“Listen, this isn’t a toy.” Abruptly the ’Screen filled up with a soothing-colour blockout.

Mary frowned. “What’s wrong?… Oh. I get it. It comes with a nanny filter. So we’re still only seeing what they will allow us to see.”

The idea was that the WormCams couldn’t be used voyeuristically, to spy on people in their homes or other private places, or to breach corporate confidentiality, or to view government buildings, military establishments, police stations and other sensitive places. The nanny software was also supposed to monitor patterns of usage and, in case of morbid or excessive behaviour, to break the service and offer counselling, either by expert system or a human agent.

And, for now, only the remote-viewing facilities of the WormCam had been made available. Past-viewing was considered, by a whole slew of experts, to be much too dangerous to be put in the hands of the public — in fact, it was argued, it would be dangerous even to make the existence of the past-viewer facility widely known.

But, of course, all this cotton-wool wrapping would only be as effective as the ingenuity of the human designers behind it. And already, fuelled by Internet rumour and industry leaks and speculation, clamour was rising for much wider public access to the WormCam’s full power: to the past-viewers themselves.

Heather sensed that this new technology was by its very nature going to be difficult to contain…

But that wasn’t something she was about to share with her fifteen-year-old daughter.

Heather cleared down the wormhole and prepared to start a new search. “I need to work. Go. You can play later. One hour only.”

With a look of contempt, Mary walked out, and Heather returned her attention to Uzbekistan.

Anna Petersen, USN — heroine of a 24-by-7 WormCam docu-soap — had been heavily involved in the U.S.-led UN intervention in the water war raging in the Aral Sea area. A precision war was being fought by the Allies against the principal aggressor, Uzbekistan: an aggression which had threatened Western interests in oil and sulphur deposits and various mineral production sites, including a major copper source. Bright and technical, Anna had mostly worked on command, control and communications operations.

WormCam technology was changing the nature of warfare, as it had much else. WormCams had already largely replaced the complex of surveillance technology — satellites, monitoring aircraft and land-based stations — which had governed battlefields for decades. If there had been eyes capable of seeing, every major target in Uzbekistan would have sparkled with evanescent wormhole mouths. Precision-guided bombs, cruise missiles and other weapons, many of them no larger than birds, had rained down on Uzbek air-defence centers, military command and control facilities, on bunkers concealing troops and tanks, on hydroelectric plants and natural gas pipelines, and on targets in the cities, such as Samarkand, Andizhan, Namangan and the capital Tashkent.

The precision was unprecedented — and, for the first time in such operations, success could be verified.

Of course, for now, the Allied troops had the upper hand in WormCam deployment. But future wars would have to be fought under the assumption that both sides had perfect and up-to-date information on the strategy, resources and deployment of the other. Heather supposed it was too much to hope that such a change in the nature of war might lead to its cessation altogether. But at least it was giving the warriors pause for thought, and might lead to less meaningless waste.

Anyhow this war — Anna’s war, the cold battle of information and technology — was the war which the American public had witnessed, partly thanks to the WormCam viewpoint Heather herself had operated, flying alongside Petersen’s shapely shoulder as she moved from one clinical, bloodless scenario to another.

But there had been rumours — mostly circulating in the corners of the Internet that still remained uncontrolled — of another, more primitive war proceeding on the ground, as troops went in to secure the gains made by the air strikes.

Then a report had been released by an English news channel of a prison camp in the field, where UN captives, including Americans, were being held by the Uzbeks. There were also rumours that female prisoners, including Allied troops, had been taken to rape camps and forced brothels, deeper in the countryside.

Revealing all of this clearly served the purposes of the governments behind the anti-Uzbek alliance. The Juarez Administration’s spin doctors weren’t above highlighting the distressing idea of wholesome Anna from Iowa in the hands of swarthy Uzbek molesters.

To Heather this was evidence of a dirty, ground-level conflict far removed from the clean video game in which Anna Petersen had colluded. Heather’s hackles had risen at the idea that she might be playing a part in some vast propaganda machine. But when she sought permission from her employer, Earth News Online, to seek out the truth of the war, she was refused; access to the corporate WormCam facility would be withdrawn if she attempted it.

While she was in the Hiram’s-ex-wife spotlight she had to keep her head down.

But then the glaring focus public attention moved on from the Mayses — and she was able to afford her own WormCam access. She quit from ENO, took a new bill-paying job on a WormCam biography of Abraham Lincoln, and went to work.

It took her a couple of days to find what she was looking for.

She followed Uzbek prisoners being loaded onto an open UN truck and driven away through the rain. They passed through the town of Nukus, controlled by Allied troops, and on into the country beyond.

Here, she found, the Allied troops had established a prison camp of their own.

It was an abandoned iron-mining complex. The prisoners were held in metal cages, stacked up in an ore loader, just a meter high. The prisoners were unable to straighten their legs or backs. They were held without sanitation, adequate food, exercise or access to the Red Cross or its Muslim equivalent Merhamet. Filth dripped from cages above through the grates to those below.

She estimated there must be at least a thousand men here. They were given only a cup of weak soup a day, Hepatitis was epidemic, and other diseases were spreading.

Every other day, prisoners were selected, apparently at random, and taken out for beatings. Three or four soldiers would surround each prisoner, and would beat him with iron bars, wooden two-by-fours, truncheons, After a time the beating would stop. Any prisoner who could walk would be thrown back for further treatment, and the beating continued. They would be carried back to their cages by other prisoners.

That was the general pattern. There were some particular incidents, inflicted on the prisoners almost in a spirit of experimentation by the guards; a prisoner was not allowed to defecate; a prisoner was forced to eat sand; another was forced to swallow his own faeces.

Six people died while Heather monitored the camp. The deaths were as a result of the beatings, exposure or disease. Occasionally a prisoner would be shot, for example when attempting to escape or fight back. One prisoner was actually released, apparently to take the news of the determination of these blue-helmeted troops to his comrades.

Heather noticed that the guards were careful to use only captured weaponry, as if they were determined to leave no unambiguous trace of their activities. Evidently, she thought, the power of the WormCam had not yet impinged on the imaginations of these soldiers; they weren’t yet used to the idea that they could be watched, any place, any time, even retrospectively from the future.