It was almost impossible to watch these bloody deeds, which would have been invisible, to the public anyhow, only a few months before.

This would be dynamite up the ass of President Juarez, who in Heather’s opinion had already proven herself to be the worst sleazebag to pollute the White House since the turn of the century (which was saying something) — and not to mention, as the first female President, a major embarrassment to half the population.

And maybe — Heather allowed herself to hope — the mass consciousness would stir once more when people saw war as it truly was, in all its bloody glory, as they had briefly glimpsed it when Vietnam had become the first television war, and before the commanders had re-established control over media coverage.

She even cradled hopes that the approach of the Wormwood would change the way people felt about each other. If everything was to end just a handful of generations away, what did ancient enmities matter? And was the purpose of the remaining time, the remaining days of human existence, to inflict pain and suffering on others?…

There would still be just wars, surely. But it would no longer be possible to dehumanize and demonize an opponent — not when anybody could tap a SoftScreen and see for themselves the citizens of whichever nation was considered the enemy — and there could be no more warmongering lies, about the capability, intent and resolve of an opponent. If the culture of secrecy was finally broken, no government would get away with acts like this, ever again.

Or maybe she was just being an idealist.

She pressed on, determined, motivated. But no matter how hard she tried to be objective she found these scenes unbearably harrowing: the sight of naked, wretched men, writhing in agony at the feet of blue-helmet soldiers with clean, hard American faces.

She took a break. She slept a while, bathed, then prepared herself a meal (breakfast, at three in the afternoon).

She knew she wasn’t the only citizen putting the new facilities to use like this.

All around the country, she’d heard, truth squads were forming up, using WormCam and Internet. Some of the squads were no more than neighbourhood watch schemes. But one organization, called Copwatch, was disseminating instructions on how to shadow police at work in order to provide a “fair witness” to a cop’s every activity. Already, it was said, this new accountability was having a marked effect on the quality of policing; thuggish and corrupt officers — thankfully rare anyhow — were being exposed almost immediately.

Consumer groups had suddenly gained power, and were daily exposing scams and con artists. In most states, detailed breakdowns of campaign finance information were being posted, in some cases for the first time. There was a lot of focus on the Pentagon’s more obscure activities and its dark budget. And so on.

Heather relished the idea of concerned private citizens, armed with WormCam and suspicion, clustering around the corrupt and criminal like white blood cells. In her mind there was a simple causal chain lying behind fundamental liberties: increased openness ensured accountability, which in turn maintained freedom. And now a technological miracle — or accident — seemed to be delivering the most profound tool for open disclosure imaginable into the hands of private citizens.

Jefferson and Franklin would probably have loved it — even if it would have meant the sacrifice of their own privacy…

There was noise in her study. A muffled giggling.

Heather, barefoot, crept to the half-open door. Mary and a friend were sitting at Heather’s desk. “Look at that jerk,” Mary was saying. “His hand keeps slipping off the end.”

Heather recognized the friend, Sasha, from the class above Mary’s at high school, was known among the local parents’ mafia as a Bad Influence. The air was thick with the smoke from a joint — presumably one of Heather’s own store.

The WormCam image was of a teenage boy. Heather recognized him, too, as one of the boys from school — Jack? Jacques? He was in his bedroom. His pants were around his ankles, and before a SoftScreen, with more enthusiasm than competence, he was masturbating.

She said quietly, “Congratulations. So you hacked your way through the nanny.”

Both Mary and Sasha jumped, startled. Sasha waved futilely at the cloud of marijuana smoke.

Mary turned back to the ’Screen. “Why not? You did.”

“I did it for a valid reason.”

“So it’s all right for you but not for me. You’re such a hypocrite, Mom.”

Sasha stood up. “I’m out of here.”

“Yes, you are,” Heather snapped after her retreating back. “Mary, is this you? Spying on your neighbours like some sleazy voyeur?”

“What else is there to do? Admit it, Mom. You’re getting a little moist yourself.”

“Get out of here.”

Mary’s laugh turned to a theatric sneer, and she walked out.

Heather, shaken, sat before the ’Screen and studied the boy. The SoftScreen he was staring at showed another WormCam view. There was a girl in the image, naked, also masturbating, but smiling, mouthing words at the boy.

Heather wondered how many more watchers this couple had. Maybe they hadn’t thought of that. A WormCam couldn’t be tapped, but it was difficult to remember that the WormCam meant global access for everybody — anybody could be watching these kids at play.

She was prepared to bet that in these first months, ninety-nine percent of WormCam use would be for this kind of crude voyeurism. Maybe it was like the sudden accessibility of porn made possible by the Internet at home, without the need to enter some sleazy store. Everybody always wanted to be a voyeur anyhow — so the argument went — and now we can do it without risk of being caught.

At least that was how it felt; the truth was that anybody could be watching the watchers too. Just as anybody could have watched Mary and Sasha, two cute teenage girls getting pleasurably horny. And maybe there was even a community who might derive some pleasure from watching her, a dry-as-a stick middle-aged woman gazing analytically at this foolish stuff.

Maybe, some of the commentators said, it was the chance of voyeurism that was driving the early sales of this home WormCam access, and even its technological development — just as porn providers had pushed the early development of Internet facilities. Heather would have liked to believe her fellow humans were a little deeper than that. But maybe, once again, she was just being an idealist.

And after all, not all the voyeurism was for titillation. Every day there were news lines about people who had, for one reason or another, spied on those close to them, and discovered secrets and betrayals and creeping foulness, causing a rush of divorces, domestic violence, suicides, minor wars between friends, spouses, siblings, children and their parents: a lot of crap to be worked out of a lot of relationships, she supposed, before everybody grew up a little and got used to the idea of glass-wall openness.

She noticed that the boy had a spectacular Cassini spaceprobe image of Saturn’s rings on his bedroom wall. Of course he was ignoring it; he was much more interested in his dick. Heather remembered how her own mother — God, nearly fifty years back — would tell her of the kind of future she had grown up with, in more expansive, optimistic years. By the year 2025, her mother used to say, nuclear-powered spacecraft would be plying between the colonized planets, bearing water and precious minerals mined from asteroids. Perhaps the first interstellar probe would already have been launched. And so on.

Perhaps teenagers in that world might have been distracted from each others’ body parts — at least some of the time! — by the spectacle of the explorers in Mars’s Valles Marineris, or Mercury’s great Caloris basin, or the shifting ice fields of Europa.