2089. Miles M Hudson
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had only been to the basement a few times; he would look out of place if anyone saw him down there. The audiopt surveillance would see his every move, but he knew to avoid looking at anything that might give away his secret purpose.
He had an idea where to place his bombs – around the main server area – but needed to get there without meeting anyone. His rucksack only held imitation explosives this time round. If nobody came down and found them in a day, then he could be confident the real explosions would not hurt anyone, but just destroy the infonetwork, and hence the audiopt surveillance.
Jack placed four packages in the corners of the server hall, hid the rucksack under the stairs and stole back up them to head to work as normal.
As he came up towards the first floor, Jack saw a dark ponytail. Its owner was leaning on the tall window’s shiny handrail staring out at the scrubby brown landscape. He had tried to be quiet on the stairs and she didn’t appear to have heard him. However, there was no way he could get past without her seeing him. Jack decided quickly that to descend again and cross the basement to the other staircase would look very suspicious, should anyone watch his audiopt feeds.
‘Hi Aluen,’ he said brightly.
She turned. ‘Oh, Jack. Good to see you. Where have you been?’
She had immediately thwarted his plan to engage her in innocuous conversation. Without looking, he put out a hand to lean on the wall, misjudged the distance and toppled slightly.
‘Oh, um, trying to find my infotech. You haven’t seen her, have you? Nobody down in the basement at all.’
Aluen shook her head. ‘Sorry, no. But actually, glad I caught you.’
Jack leaned further against the wall for support. Was Aluen responsible for monitoring him, as well as her own village of Newnham? Had she come to the stairwell simply to intercept him?
She stared at him for a moment and then continued, ‘Have you got a minute to help me with a case?’ Jack didn’t reply but stared back. ‘I’m not at all sure what’s going on with it. A second pair of eyes would be really helpful.’ She smiled at him.
After a moment, Jack stood more upright and said, ‘You know I’m not allowed to decide on matters in another Kangaroo. I won’t know the current mores in your village.’ What was legal or not in Newnham could vary weekly, as the population decided.
‘Yes, yes, it’s not that. I don’t need an opinion on whether to send it. At least, not exactly. The feeds just have me really confused. Come and take a look.’ She grabbed his hand and pulled Jack up the last stair and into her huge workspace.
When her bank of screens had all come back on, they showed the audiopt feeds that his sifter colleague was following to produce her weekly KangaReview. The rolling timestamp on the screen told Jack that this event had happened the previous evening.
The infoservers pre-sifted all the audiopt feeds. Any events that the computer algorithms identified as potentially breaking the Second Covenant of Jerusalem — that ‘Everyone will act for the benefit of all’ — were fed to the sifters to be examined for confirmation, or denial, of the existence of a crime.
The screen Aluen pointed to showed an image of a child in a bedroom. There was scrolling text at the bottom of the screen to tell the sifter what the algorithms had concluded as the possible problem. In this case, the text was slightly larger than usual and in a shrieking blood red: ‘Potential child abuse,’ it warned.
The audiopt feed clip was seen through the eyes of the child’s father. He entered the room in which the boy was screaming in bed. Jack guessed at four years old and then Aluen clicked for the boy’s feeds to be shown on the adjacent screen. This confirmed the boy’s identity and that he was in fact five years and two months old.
The boy saw his father come in, and his crying caught in the boy’s throat for a second. His eyes were fixed on the approaching parent, and he started screaming again, a little louder and with genuine fear in the cries. It was a disturbing scene. Without a pause in his movements, the father struck the boy on the arm. It was a hard slap, after which he picked up his son, and they hugged each other. The boy continued to cry, but it subsided with each lungful of air until the boy was silent, and the father put him back down under the bed covers. Neither adult nor child said any coherent words during the brief clip.
Jack scowled. The conclusion to the clip was contradictory. The computer had suggested this father might be beating his child, and that was clearly what Jack had seen, but they hugged at the end as if nothing had happened between them. The final view through the father’s eyes saw his son contented and ready to sleep.
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
‘Yes, there is something not quite right. It looks obvious, but… that hug. The boy’s not subdued by his abuser, he seems genuinely thankful to have been hit.’
‘Exactly. Am I missing something?’
Jack leant over to the controller and moved the feeds backwards and forwards several times. The pre-sifting software was good, but it could not comprehend the nuances of human behaviour. A human sifter was always needed to give the final judgement about what should be included in the KangaReview.
There was one brief moment, lasting less than a fifth of a second, where the father’s eyes moved from the boy’s face to look at the arm he would then hit. The room was quite dark and, in slow motion, there were only three frames of the man’s vision that were looking at the arm. However, in those frames, it was absolutely clear that a large house spider was crawling on the son. Jack called up the boy’s feeds from the minutes before what the computer had supplied. Playing this through showed the youngster looking at his own forearm and seeing the creature there. It was clear that he then froze in fear, but called out the one word ‘spider’ loudly and repeatedly before breaking into the screams of terror. Aluen had initially only been supplied with the feeds from the moment the boy started screaming.
‘I remember something my mentor told me,’ Jack said. ‘We are the arbiters of history in this world. Others could also find out the truth, but nobody ever bothers to look. Right or wrong, our submissions to Kangaroo have become the origination upon which everybody’s worldview is formulated.’ He ran the fingers of both hands through his wiry black hair and looked at Aluen.
She turned her head and stared at him. ‘What?’
‘Do you really believe we have the right to spy on people all the time?’
Aluen scrunched her eyebrows. ‘It’s our job.’ Her tone became sardonic as she mimicked his language: ‘If “we are the arbiters of history in this world”, then we need to see everything, in order to make sure we tell the true story.’
Jack realised he had said too much. He took a half step backwards. Had he given himself away? Would she report him?
But Aluen had already turned back to her work. ‘Thanks for helping.’ She clicked on the button on the screen’s toolbar marked ‘Nothing to report’. Both screens changed image to show two new suggested issues with scrolling text explaining the algorithm’s thinking in each case.
Jack moved to go back to his workspace. As he looked out of the window on the staircase, he mouthed silently, ‘Soon, I’ll put a stop to all this.’ He thought about the homemade bombs hidden in the cellar of his house, waiting to be used, and felt a small surge of satisfaction. Soon.
Chapter Two
Marmaran Truva held the small, white coffee cup to his nose and sniffed briefly. Vicky Truva thought the coffee smelt good, which would be a surprise to her father. He had had to teach the cafe staff in Kangaroo Hall how to make coffee properly, and even then the outcome was seldom palatable to him.
The coffee that now struggled to grow in English greenhouses was a poor substitute for the tropical varieties historically used to make Turkish coffee. Although neither Vicky nor her father had ever actually been to the country of their