‘THE DEATH OF a suspect in custody,’ says Inspector Neith of the Witness, ‘is a very serious matter. There is no one at the Witness Programme who does not feel a sense of personal failure this morning.’

She is looking straight into the camera and her sincerity is palpable. A dozen different mood assessment softwares examine the muscles around her mouth and eyes. Her microexpressions verify her words. As a matter of course, the more sophisticated algorithms check for the telltale marks of Botox and of bioelectric stimulators that might allow her to fake that painful honesty, but no one really expects to find anything, and no one does.

Polling data streams across the screen: 89 per cent believe the Witness was not at fault. Of the remainder of the population, the overwhelming majority believes that any culpability will turn out to be negligent rather than designed. Neith’s own figures are even better: she has been called in to investigate the matter precisely because her personal probity is the highest ever measured. All but the most corrosively paranoid of the focus groups accept her good faith.

It is a very good showing, even granting that the Witness has consistently high approval anyway. All the same, the discussion of Diana Hunter continues in the Public Sphere – as it should – until it is eclipsed by the next of the killings.

*

Ninety minutes before, Mielikki Neith stares into her morning mirror, feeling the vertiginous uncertainty that sometimes comes with viewing one’s own image, the inability to understand the meaning of her reflected face. She repeats her name, quite softly but with growing emphasis, hearing the noise and yet unable to connect it with the self she feels. Not that she is anyone else: not that any other collection of syllables or features would be better. It is the intermediation of physicality and naming, of being represented in biology or language, that doesn’t sit with her in this disconnected instant. She knows it is simply a lingering trace of the dream state, but that does not alter her conviction – inappropriately cellular, felt in blood and bone – that something is wrong.

She is correct. In a few moments she will start work, and the day will set her inevitably on the path to the involuted Alkahest. She is just hours from her first meeting with weird, cartilaginous Lönnrot, just over a week from her loss of faith in everything she has believed in her life. As she steps out of her slippers and begins to wash, finding in the animal business of grooming the growing understanding of her body and its place in the process that is her, she is stepping not only on to the cracked white shower tray but also on to that road, the one that conducts her without let or hindrance to a point of crisis: to endings and apocatastasis. She apprehends this now with knowledge she has, from her limited vantage point inside the flow of events, not yet gleaned – but that knowledge is so significant that its echo reaches her even here, gathered in the slipstream of the Chamber of Isis and the most complex and saintly murder in the history of crime. Neith’s consciousness is etiolated this morning because it touches itself irregularly along its own extension in time, a contact that makes her almost – but, crucially, not quite – prescient. Instead of foresight, the Inspector gets a migraine, and in that small difference she sets her feet on the pattern that must eventually lead her to all the things I have already mentioned, but most fatefully – fatally – to me.

*

I can see my mind on the screen

The Inspector awoke this morning, as she does almost every day, to the sound of technological obsolescence. Her residence, provided by the System to employees of her grade, is an airy one-bedroom flat in a period building in Piccadilly Circus. The ancient neon light directly outside her window is faulty and makes a noise when it switches on: the death rattle of twentieth-century advertising. She has complained about it, but does not anticipate any change in her circumstance. Machines these days are somewhat perfected; a visible glitch in a high profile space such as this has been found to project a reassuring fallibility and evoke a sense of wellbeing which endures for several days. It conveys the continuing humanness of a nation under digitally mediated governance. The figures are unambiguous.

She listens now, in the quiet aftermath of her public statements, to the hum of the light at full function. When she goes close to the window, she is sure she can feel the hairs on her arms plucked by a static charge, but knows this for a psychosomatic illusion. She turns back to her desk, palms to forehead, then cheeks, and down the line of the nose. Broadcast lights make her eyes itch in their sockets.

Here, then, is her new case, MNEITH-GNOMON-10559. The name looks like nonsense until you know the framework into which it fits. Framing is everything, in filing as in investigative work. First of all, the label acknowledges that it is her case by logging it under her name. The actual ID number is the last part, ‘10559’, but human beings give things names rather than numbers and this way the Witness can control what that name is, avoiding the inadvertent compromise of operations. The specific term, in this case ‘GNOMON’, is randomly assigned from a list. ‘THE HUNTER CASE’ would be less cumbersome, but there might be another case involving another Hunter, and it would not be appropriate to conflate them. ‘GNOMON’ is there to avoid any kind of confusion: an incontrovertible statement of identity. Beyond that, it apparently means an early geometer’s tool for marking right angles, a set square made of metal. By extension it means something perpendicular to everything else, such as the upright part of a sundial. She finds the name itchily à propos, a handful of sand in her cognitive shoe. The Hunter case does stick out. She said that in the interview earlier, but only the channel known as TLDR is actually hosting the whole segment and so far no one has accessed the file. TLDR is basically an archive, paid for by donations from high net worth individuals who believe in archiving.

She reviews the case preamble: Hunter, awake and obdurate, a cranky old lady with round cheeks and a bad attitude that must have been fashionable when she was in her twenties.

‘Do you wish at this time to undergo a verbal interview which may obviate the need for a direct investigation?’

‘I do not.’

‘Do you wish at this time to make a statement?’

‘I’ll state that I do not submit to this voluntarily. I consider it a baseless intrusion, and very rude.’

‘We are committed to affording you the maximum of dignity and care during your time with us. All staff will treat you with the utmost courtesy within the boundaries of their assigned tasks.’

She sighs. ‘Then please record that I am a woman in the prime of life, whose powers are severely limited by authorities perishing with thirst, and now demanding that I make a gift to them of the waters of memory.’

‘Noted,’ the technician says, bland in the face of unexpected poetry. The Inspector can hear something in his voice, a mild frustration with this uppity biddy whose interrogation will surely yield nothing more than the misanthropy of the hermetic old.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Hunter agrees. ‘Everything is.’

The medical staff come in then, and Hunter goes limp and makes them lift her on to the gurney: old-fashioned passive resistance, pointlessly antagonistic. Once, she screams, and they almost drop her. That makes the restraint team visibly unhappy, and she laughs at them. Her teeth are very white against her skin.

Finally they get her into the chair and the needle goes into the back of her hand. Hunter scowls, then settles back as if getting comfortable for a very boring and time-consuming argument she has determined she must have.

The Inspector touches the terminals, jolts as the dead woman’s mind settles over her own: Diana Hunter, deceased. What is the flavour of her life? Sixty-one years of age, divorced, no children. Educated at Madrigal Academy and then Bristol University. By profession an administrator, and then later a writer of obscurantist magical realist novels, she was apparently once celebrated, then reclusive, then forgotten. Most successful book: The Mad Cartographer’s Garden, in which the reader is invited to untangle not only the puzzle that confronts the protagonists but also a separate one allegedly hidden in the text like a sort of enormous crossword clue; most famous arguably the last, titled Quaerendo Invenietis, which received only a very limited publication and became an urban legend of sorts, with the usual associated curiosities. Quaerendo contains secret truths that are downright dangerous to the mind, or an actual working spell, or the soul of an angel, or Hunter’s own, and the act of reading it in the right place at the right time will bring about the end of the world, or possibly the beginning, or will unleash ancient gods from their prison. First year university students in the humanities pore over the accessible fragments and consider they are touching some fatal cosmic revelation. Copies of the book, of which only one hundred were printed, are now almost impossibly expensive, and Hunter somehow contrived to extract from each purchaser a commitment not to scan any part of what they had, with the result that even now there is no online edition, and indeed no verifiable text at all.

It all added up to a remarkable frenzy of excitement and localised notoriety, then went quiet when the book, read by various people in various times and places, failed to end the onward march of time or drive anyone mad. In other words, the Inspector is inclined to believe, Hunter was a purveyor of educated and ultimately meaningless literary flimflam who got bored of the joke and retired. Since then, her only contribution to the body of English literature has been a series of rambling and condemnatory letters to the local paper. If she was, in fact, a dangerous terrorist, her cover was as fully realised and performed as any in the long and unglamorous history of subversion. More likely she was the lonely algorithmic victim of a perfect storm – and yet despite its improbability, the notion that she may somehow have been more than she appeared is ineradicable.

Neith begins again.

I can see my mind on the screen

Hunter’s first thought during the examination is like the barb on a fishhook, and Neith instinctively loathes it. These eight unremarkable words cause her to tighten her jaw as if expecting a blow. The phrase is, to be sure, unusually clear and strong, quite ready to be vocalised. One must assume that Hunter was deliberately recording a message, in which case: to whom? To Neith, as the investigating officer? Or to an imagined historian? Why does the tone, the clean, discursive flavour of Hunter’s mind, trouble that part of the Inspector that is devoted to a professional mistrust of appearances?

Perhaps it is suspicious for its very competence. There’s no note of Hunter having the kind of training that would allow her to be so coherent. Her record should be a ragged but truthful account of her self: less a cut-glass cross section than a jellied scoop lifted from a bowl. It was a minimum-priority interview until Hunter died, a low-to-no-likelihood examination based on a direct tip-off using the precise form of words given in the Security Evidence Act, and some ancillary factors to score a level of certainty just barely topping the margin of error. There are twenty or thirty such each month: full investigations carried out on the precautionary principle, no more troubling to the subjects than a visit to the dentist, and certainly resulting in no criminal cases. Statistically, those emerging from these exams are happier, more organised and more productive. It’s partly a direct consequence, the neuromedical aftercare being somewhat like a tune-up, but mostly it is a psychological blip. Everyone lives with secrets, even now – tacit self-accusations, fears of weakness and inadequacy. These fortunate suspects are weighed in the balance and found worthy. The process is so universally beneficial that the Inspector has occasionally wondered if she should ask for a reading herself.

Yet there is something in Hunter’s mental voice that should not be there, even if the precise nature of its wrongness eludes the Inspector for now: something dyssynchronous that is written in signs whose general meaning she understands, but which remains maddeningly unfocused, as one might grasp that a red triangle is a warning without seeing what is written within.

The fuzziness of human communication is one of the reasons for Inspector Neith’s profession under the System. Statistical analysis and even soft logic can only take machine learning so far into the quirked and sideways landscape of human irrationality. What a given thing means may vary not only between two individuals but from moment to moment. Even actual symbols symbolise more than one thing – the giant neon sign outside her window, which blesses London’s Piccadilly Circus with a nostalgic wash of faulty electrics, comes from a time when profit was uncomplicated and goods were rivalrous and excludable. It was made by hand in 1961 and features the name of a company, Real Life, which sold building supplies of a sort now made obsolete by more advanced construction techniques. The majority of things then traded in London could be held or touched or otherwise understood by a human being with only her senses, and because of this it is a banner of perceived normality in an era when none of these things is any longer true.

To someone like Diana Hunter, this means that the System, too, is based on illusions. To Neith, it means that however rational a mode of living may be, humans still need to project unpredictable comforts on to the sharp edges of what actually exists. The very best analytical software may struggle with such a bewilderment.

Mielikki Neith is an enthusiastic proponent of both the System and the Witness. The first is a government of the people, by the people, without intervention or representation beyond what is absolutely necessary: a democracy in the most literal sense, an ongoing plebiscite-society. The second is the institution for which Britain perhaps above all other nations has always searched, the perfect police force. Over five hundred million cameras, microphones and other sensors taking information from everywhere, not one instant of it accessed initially by any human being. Instead, the impartial, self-teaching algorithms of the Witness review and classify it and do nothing unless public safety requires it. The Witness is not prurient. The machine cannot be bribed to hand over images of actresses in their baths to tabloid journalists. It cannot be hacked, cracked, disabled or distorted. It sees, it understands, and very occasionally it acts, but otherwise it is resolutely invisible.

In the gaps where the cameras cannot scan or where the human animal is yet too wild and strange, there are the Inspectors, prosecutorial ombudsmen to the surveillance state, reviewing and considering any case that passes a given threshold of intervention. The majority of the Inspectors’ cases concern acts of carefully considered violence, international organised crime and instances of domestic or international terrorism. Some few crimes of passion still occur, but hardly require deep scrutiny, and most are headed off early and pre-emptively when tremors of dysfunction give them away. The Witness does not ignore a rising tide, a pattern of behaviour. It does not take refuge behind the lace curtain of non-interference in personal business. No one now shall live in fear of those they also love. Everyone is equally seen.

That’s how the System works and what it means. All citizens understand its worth, and everyone contributes their time and attention to the law, to governance, to the daily work of creating a free and fair society – and everyone benefits. It is a nation which is also a community, and in that – in its steady and equitable prosperity, in its scrupulous justice, and above all in its ability to deliver security of the self to citizens at a level unprecedented in history – it claims the Inspector’s allegiance with an absolute certitude. Her understanding of the world is perfectly extended into her profession and her life.

Speaking of her profession: Neith finds a comfortable position in her chair. She taps gently with one knuckle, glances – as she always does – at the identifying tag at the top of the screen: NEITH, M., DETECTIVE INSPECTOR (GRADE A). She has no idea what possessed her mother to give her a Finnish name, except perhaps a deep and abiding admiration for the champion of cross-country skiing who carried it to two Winter Olympic seasons and came away with nine gold medals. The more important part is DETECTIVE, which means she has a professional heritage to draw on as well as a personal one, an identity as strong and old as the Real Life sign’s bright promise of middle-class housing, good schools and a sheepdog. She went to the new Metropolitan Witness Academy in Hoxton, qualified for the fast track and was coached through three years on the beat. She was peed on by drunks, wept on by widows, whistled at by builders. She graduated to Serious Crimes, arrested drug importers and corrupt bankers, and caught the eye of the System and the nation when she scooped a minor clue from the wastebasket and followed it all the way to what became known as the Cartier Smash and Grab. On the same day Neith picked up the thread, a high-technology criminal gang based in France ram-raided a jewellery vault and tried to fly back across the Channel using microlight aircraft. With Neith’s information in its electronic hand, the System’s active countermeasures aspect was able to penetrate their navigation software and land the gang at a military airfield for convenient arrest. Only one member escaped the net: a secure intrusion specialist and counter-surveillance expert known internationally as the Waxman, who had chosen a separate exit strategy, and took refuge in the embassy of a friendly foreign power. The incompleteness has always annoyed her, and the Waxman, with nothing else to do, occasionally sends her taunting messages.

After the Smash and Grab arrests, though, she rose on and up to the core of the justice apparat. She is no paper pusher, no careerist. Neith will over time be promoted to high office by the Witness for one good reason: she is proper police.

In her hands now are the terminals for the Witness interface, the primary tools of her trade. As always, they strike her as very male, very sexualised. Each one is around ten centimetres long, grey-black, with a silver half-dome at one end. She unbuttons her shirt. The left terminal monitors her own vital signs, and goes against the chest, over the heart. The right one she will place against her temple. There are various reasons for this design, but she believes that in the end they are made this way so that an Inspector at work resembles however distantly the protagonist of a black-and-white crime flick using a two-part telephone.

For shorter recordings and less complex emotional and cognitive states, the machine can simply impose the flow of a recorded mind over its user’s in real time, which is quick and effective but leads to a kind of double vision that many people – the Inspector included – find somewhat nauseating. In any situation which requires the investigator to get to know their subject, or where nuance might be important, it’s more usual to shunt the whole file, in compressed form, into local storage in the brain. Neith imagines its subsequent unfolding to resemble a jasmine flower tea opening in hot water, or a kind of retrograde origami in which the foreign mind resumes its original shape to whatever degree it can inside its new physical environment. The origami method affords a far greater intimacy with the subject – which of course is useful in important cases like this one – but can compromise your sleep as the file unwinds. There’s no danger of the memory taking over the investigator’s, any more than you can drive to Brighton in the back half of an automobile. It’s a set of experiences, not a viral person, though that does not stop London’s film industry from depicting any number of lurid scenarios premised on the idea, ranging from sinister to comedic, but tending in most cases to an element of the erotic.

It’s not the prospect of accidentally becoming someone else that causes her to hesitate, if only for an instant. Rather, it is the desire to keep her own brain in the best possible order, just as she tries to eat right and sleep sufficiently. The Witness, as a matter of course, monitors the behaviour of anyone frequently using memory uploads, and does not allow anything to go wrong. Having a perfect older brother checking in on you from time to time makes things like that considerably less nerve-wracking – and unlike an actual brother, the Witness does not intrude. It is just always there. That being so, the Inspector feels no serious concern in selecting the more intimate option. She takes Diana Hunter into her head, knowing that the Witness will protect her.

The Witness is perfect because it can see everything, and that perception does not stop at the skull. In those rare cases where it is necessary, the Witness can enter the brain of a subject by surgical intervention and read the truth directly from the source. It is the key reason Inspectors exist. The machine can perform the function, but it is not actually alive. It is not appropriate that something dead have governance of something living. In the end, there must be oversight not because the Witness makes mistakes, but because the watcher must itself be watched, and be seen to be watched. The System exists for the people, not the other way around, and in the end it is the people who are empowered – and required – by the machine to take any and all of the hard decisions that arise.

When the whole thing has poured into her mind and settled there, she uses the machine to start the file again, and – as always when she lifts the second terminal to her head – thinks of Humphrey Bogart.

*

I can see my mind on the screen

Actually, there’s more than one screen. I’m surrounded by them. Each wall of this room is a screen, and the technicians can subdivide them all so that they display different images. I can see my mind all around me, on all the screens. I’m looking down along the line of my body – in general I hate this position because it gives me an almost endless collection of chins – at the screen beyond my feet, which is presently the least busy of them all. These words are in the middle, between an ECG trace and something that looks like a sonogram.

One of the technicians nods. ‘It is,’ he says. ‘It’s a sonogram of your brain.’ I think he’s simplifying for me. His voice sounds like the one adults use when they’re talking to small children about complex, grown-up things. I suspect it’s something more like an MRI, but miniaturised and implanted inside my skull. Just because I am strapped to the chair does not mean that I am stupid.

All that comes up on the screen, too, of course, and he looks apologetic. It occurs to me that he is probably a nice enough guy under other circumstances – he’s even a little bit attractive, if you like floppy Brideshead hair and that awfully self-conscious congeniality – but I hate him and I want to hurt him. He thinks he’s being kind, but actually he’s just salving his guilt.

He reads that last bit and he flinches and turns away. I feel instantly embarrassed but I also think: Fuck you. It’s weird having your surface thoughts broadcast like this. Weird and horrible, but also a little bit liberating. If someone is rude enough to intrude on the ticking of your brain, to peel back your polite silences and your social graces and poke the fleshy grey stuff in search of secrets, they can just deal with what they find there. All the same, I’m glad I’m not thinking about sex.

Now I’m thinking about sex. On the far right we’re watching my memory of my last orgasm. Since this is a purely visual feed we’re seeing the ceiling of my bedroom lurch left and right.

This is not okay. I do not consent. I do not consider the intrusion legitimate, and I do not accept the argument that it is in the interest of the nation as a whole, nor that if it were in the nation’s interest that would make what is happening to me acceptable. Just because something is done according to the law does not mean that it is lawful. Law is made in the image of an ideal. One can make a law that does not reflect that image, and that law may be a law without being lawful. I consider what is happening here a grotesque violation. If I get the chance, I will hurt you for doing what you are doing, hurt you badly. This is my head and you should not be in it.

The technician who tried to tell me about the brain scan reads that and he stops trying to be Mr Nice. I’ve given him an excuse to think of me as an enemy. Beneath the floppy hair, he has a fat face and he sweats too much. In fact he stinks. I can see hair in his nose. I’m reasonably sure he’s an ungenerous lover. I hope his wife is unfaithful to him with derelicts, and that she brings home diseases for which there are no names. I hope his dog dies. I know he has a dog because I can see the hair on his trouser cuff. And I recognise the mud. The precise constitution of that mud is a signature, the clay and red earth and the hint of gravel occurs in three places in London, but in only one of them will you find the seeds that cling to his sock. Like Sherlock Holmes I can read the evidence and infer from the reality of the present the map of the past, and now I know where he walks his dog.

(I don’t really.)

It’s mud, you moron. But for a moment there he was scared, and that’s a win. I’ll take it. You hear me, you miserable bastard? I beat you. From this table. To which I am tied. That’s how pathetic you are. You are small and pathetic and gullible and you are beneath my notice. Which will not stop me from doing terrible things to you.

(I actually will.)

Now one of his colleagues is reading over his shoulder and reminding him that this is why the protocol says not to talk to the subject. I go back to looking at pictures of my own head.

On the left there’s a feed from my optic nerve. It’s like being in a hall of mirrors because I see the image of what I’m looking at and the screen displays the image of the image and then the image of the image of the image and then a second technician puts his fingers in front of my face.

‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘You’ll get feedback.’

‘What happens then?’ I ask him.

‘Your head explodes.’

I can tell it’s an old joke. He’s reassuring himself as much as anything. He’s saying that because my head won’t explode, because there’s no risk of that, what they’re doing isn’t like torture. It’s just a perfectly simple evidential procedure. It’s sanctioned by the court. There’s nothing immoral or even very unpleasant about it. It’s okay.

It is not okay. It is invasion. It is torture, and you are torturers. You, who are reading this, seeing it, feeling it. These feelings are not yours. They belong to me. Get out of my head. My head, the head of this woman in this room, not yours, wherever you are.

They get tired of reading my objections and my threats, so they give me a paralytic and blindfold me. Now I’m just talking to myself in the dark. They can still read what I’m thinking, but now that I can’t see the reaction it’s a lot less satisfying thinking bad thoughts at them. And I can’t tell: perhaps they’ve also shut down the feed from my speech centres and I’m just wittering away to myself. That would be annoying. I dislike futility and helplessness.

This partial sensory deprivation is alarming because it’s quite nice. You’d think it would be frightening, and of course it is – that, I don’t mind so much – but it’s also soothing and that, I distrust intensely. I only have smell, touch and sound to work with, and as I lie here I get a sense of the ebb and flow of the room. I start to recognise the wash of air that accompanies a particular set of footsteps, the tinge of sweat and cologne that means the first technician or the second or someone new. The regularity, that intimacy, is settling some little evolutionary rodent circuit lodged somewhere in the engine room of my brain. I can’t help it: I’m relaxing into the situation. Under other circumstances I’d even be worried that I might say something inappropriate or self-incriminatory, but that’s not really an issue. In twenty minutes or so they’re going to read my entire mind to protect the security of the state. They will hollow me out like a pumpkin and leave me with a pumpkin smile: a wide, idiot, toothless grin. They’ll go home and tell their friends they did a good job. They’ll greet their partners, their spouses, their kids, and if they let on in the small hours of the dark that they’re not without qualms, they’ll say in the same breath that they know it’s necessary. Their partners and their spouses will tell them they are brave, because they accept the sleepless nights of troubled conscience so that everyone else can be safe. No doubt that’s how it always goes with torturers.

‘Justice has been perfected and the Witness is everywhere.’ That’s the pitch. And it works. We are all transparent to one another. There are no secrets, can be no secrets. Must be no secrets. So I will be read, as a page is read. If I have nothing to hide – if the System has made a mistake, which it almost never does – I have nothing to fear. That motto is written in Latin over the door, and above it is the odd little colophon of an axe wrapped in sticks that has been the symbol of magistrates since Imperial Rome at least. The modern phrase is attributed to William Hague, who was a great Conservative politician decades gone – a real champion of rights and right thinking – although I happen to know it was also a favoured maxim of Joseph Goebbels. Protection is the first duty of government. I hear they still drink a toast to him – Hague, that is, not Goebbels – in the Admin Tower, once a year at Christmas. The first watcher, the godfather of the Witness.

The touch of the machine they will use to open my brain is so fine it can probe ricepaper without cutting it. They may already have begun, and I wouldn’t know. It’s a medical technology, a very sophisticated and important one. In fact, many people emerge from this room – from these rooms, because there are many of them – healthier than when they arrived. Unsuspected blood clots can be dealt with, cancers purged, sorrows averted. If the pages of my mind are innocent, there will be no consequence to this encounter beyond a few lost hours. When my mother was a child, they still had to serve jury duty: days of unproductive dithering over matters of fact and intent which are now closed questions. May we be preserved from that! The Witness sees, the machine divines, the evidence is inside us. It is a far more complete justice than anything you can do with he-said-she-said. It just is. And beyond that it makes you healthy, so it’s really win–win.

In my case, as in almost all of them, the Witness is actually quite correct. I am a traitor to the System, to the society we have constructed around it. I have hidden from the Witness, which is in itself antisocial and grounds for closer examination. I have used paper and ink to send private messages, bartered to conceal my transactions, done favours and had them returned in order to avoid listing my transactions on an accessible database. I have taught these skills: writing, hiding, haggling, the ad hoc measurement of value. I have proselytised about their use, advocated opacity. Shame on me.

To make it worse, I have erected analogue communications devices – wires strung taut across narrow alleys with cups at either end; pigeon coops; listening tubes. I have embraced the process of divestment to such an extent that in fact there are no modern machines at all in my house. No touchscreen. No computer. Not even a washing machine. Sadly, washing machines these days are as wired as everything else. They are set up to tell you how to save money and water and electricity. More recently they started measuring water quality. Of course, they package those data anonymously and send them to the central hub for analysis. By doing that the System can manage water flow and know about any dangerous impurities before they jeopardise the public health. When my father was a child, he got blisters on his tongue from drinking water with aluminium in it – an error at a local water plant. That can’t happen now, and indeed there are biosensors in the pipes that pick up various waterborne infections and trigger alerts. But nothing is free: the reality is that anonymisation is no more effective than one of those hilarious nose-moustache-and-spectacle sets that are a staple of office parties. With the right parsing, your washing machine can know all sorts of things about you that are private. It can tell from your clothes whether you drink too much, whether you have eczema, whether you use drugs. Whether you are pregnant. A new model has come on the market with an olfactory sensor patterned on the nose of a particular breed of pig: it can tell whether you have an early stage cancer and refer you to a doctor. That is a little miraculous and wonderful, isn’t it? If only the information didn’t also automatically go to your local health trust so that they can manage their year-on-year needs more accurately. If only they didn’t market their needs list to health insurers. If only everything wasn’t quite so obsessively joined up.

I had all those tools once: the car that drove itself, the office chair that warned me when I was sitting badly. And then bit by bit I got rid of them. It was not a grand decision, just a slow shift I didn’t understand until it was done. I got tired of voices in my head and eyes peering over my shoulder. Now nothing I own talks to anything else, and I have hooks in the hallway where people can hang up their wearable devices when they arrive. The whole house works as a Faraday cage. I put the wire in myself, so I know it’s properly done. The Witness is the sun, and my home is made of shadows – or perhaps of shade.

Instead of electronics, I have books: books in their thousands stacked all over the house. There’s almost no flat surface that is not covered in books. Last year there was an embarrassing incident when a double tower of translated South American fiction tumbled over and buried me in my bed.

I allow people to borrow books and I keep no records of the loans. Do you know, in fourteen years I have never once had a book stolen? How remarkable, that people will behave so well without being indexed. It’s not scalable, apparently; not realistic in the wider world. Above a certain threshold, it’s no longer a personal trust governed by the rules of friendship, but a tragedy of the commons, and people just steal. That’s always been the problem, I’m told: we need a better sort of human being, not a more just law. We need to change the way people think.

Not that I’m against indices, per se. From time to time my library grows when someone brings me a cardboard box from an attic or a cellar, and then I write all the details of each book on a little card and I put them away each in its proper place. Sometimes I run classes for children, teaching them how to read books which cannot speak to them, how to close the covers and lie down when they are tired because the pages will not detect their fatigue or tell the house to extinguish the lights so that they know they should sleep. Sometimes I let my small students stay up with a torch, and read under the duvet, though I am careful to be sure they do not know this is by my permission. They rustle and hide and derive great pleasure from flouting my law. I teach them reading and disrespect for authority, and I consider my work well done.

Yes, I know, I am a witch and I traffic in dark magic. I warp the fragile grey matter of vulnerable infants.

Speaking of which: in a few moments the technicians will put tendrils of metal into my brain. This sounds enormously sinister, but of course it’s not. The filaments are barely more than a few atoms wide, stiffened by a magnetic field until they can slide and squiggle between cells and along blood vessels like little furry mice seeking their mother’s tit. They will snuggle against the different parts of me and listen. They will hear the signals in my head through chitosan minichips, the same ones that are used to repair trauma victims and connect pilots with their planes. They will learn the language of my neurons, although more properly it should be called a dialect, because it turns out that in general when you and I each see the colour blue, we do indeed see much the same thing, to the endless disappointment of philosophers. Would you believe, though, that men and women process depth perception differently? So that if a man reviews my experience, he will likely get nauseous. Good riddance, of course, but still: I find that intriguing.

They will test and tweak and then they will read the pages of my brain. The whole process will take a little over half a day, they tell me. It is unknown for it to last longer than that. We are not deep enough, not dense enough, to contain more information than that. Perhaps there should be a unit of identity against time. How many human-hours will this take? And by the answer you could know how real I am.

Somewhere in the harvest, they will find what they are looking for. I am said to possess a list of reactionaries and bad elements, and I suppose in a way I do, I just don’t think of it as a list. I call it my life. It is everyone I know who is like me, who chooses not to participate in the network of binding plebiscites and bank loans and credit cards and locatively discursive spimes. They are the small remnant or rebirth of a culture of analogue people who do not entirely believe that this version of life is perfect, who feel constrained rather than liberated by the world which has emerged as much from our heedlessness as from any decision. A very few of them actually protest and engage in civil disobedience. They carry protest cards which give a contact number for a lawyer, and they skirt the edges of the law. And I’m sure, in among them, there are some petty criminals: counterfeiters and rumrunners and such. I don’t ask when I’m sharing candles and early Penguin editions how the members of my book group make their money. Mystery allows for dreams and uncertainty for romance, forgetfulness opens the door for forgiveness and even redemption. In my house the hearth is unbroken by the endless torrent of the outer world. It is, like marriage or liberty, not a thing but an action: a process we must create rather than a rock on which we may stand.

That’s why I’m in here.

Someone who talks like that, according to the System, may represent a potential security risk to the wider nation, a refusenik culture which, if significant numbers were to follow its lead, would imply the end of the Witness and the System, the end of the benign, stable, all-seeing state we all inhabit. There is no present risk of that actually happening: they are – we are – cracks in the wall, and maintenance is one of the ten commandments of good engineering. By the time the cracks widen and there is water flowing through them, the wall will already be beyond repair.

The point is that in twelve hours the System will have the names and the faces of everyone I know, direct from my head. After that my part will be over. The machine will make any necessary adjustments for my well-being: deal with physical deformities to the brain matter, ensure there is no bleeding or swelling that might endanger me, take preventative and curative measures against sociopathy, psychosis, depression, aggressive social narcissism, sadism, masochism, low self-esteem, undiagnosed neuroatypicality, attention deficit, in other words all the known issues of our complex biological processing, even unto the insidious and alienating cognitive dissonance and maladjustment syndrome. (You really have to watch for that one. Almost anyone can have it.)

Or you could say that in twelve hours I will have betrayed everyone I love into the hands of these my torturers, and we will all of us emerge perfected and adjusted and happy and enslaved. We will be remade in the image of a creation I once believed was the only way to avoid horror, but which by a ridiculous string of errors and confusions of the mind is now a horror in itself.

I will probably thank the myrmidons as I leave. When I understand how important it is for me to say goodbye to what I was, it will please me to see the children burn my books as a token gesture of my return to society – and they will do it gladly, after their own therapeutic interventions. I could reacquire them all, later, of course, but it seems that the determinedly miserabilist slant of my non-fiction reading may lose its appeal.

They take off the blindfold. Some of the processes require visual stimuli. I look at the room, at the screens all around me, at my self everted on them like a rat on a middle school laboratory counter.

The pain management technician says: ‘Three, two, one, and mark,’ and I realise, as I am going under, that he is the same man who was present for the birth of my daughter.

I think: You shall not have my mind.

It comes up on the screen, in sans serif font.

*

The Inspector puts the terminals on their stand and, after a moment of silent hiatus, works through a ritual resembling a compulsive disorder of the mind. Over her desk there is a single printed sheet of paper whose contents she changes every so often to avoid memorising them. Last month, the text was Victorian and resonant:

The metre was uneven, the sense and lexicon demanding. That is part of the point: focusing on the poem entails a full engagement of the mind with the text and the moment. A waking engagement, critical and jaggedly real. The new verse is more mannered and less to her liking, which makes it perhaps more suited to the task:

Careful that she is reading word by word from the sheet, she finishes the poem, then picks up an old crank-handled lantern from beside her terminal and winds vigorously. A meagre light spills from the cracked Fresnel lens and paints the outline of the fracture on the wall behind the desk.

Neith nods in satisfaction: good. The text is static, the lantern works. She passes to the final stage, tossing a single grubby tennis ball into the air, and when – as they always do – it comes back down, catching it.

These three tests are intended for those learning to recognise and even control the direction of their dreams. Text is unstable in the envisioned unconscious, and either cannot be read or changes itself between breaths. Mechanical objects and light switches tend not to work, and physical laws – such as gravity – are undependable. For Neith, who routinely views considerable quantities of the recorded experience of other minds, the tests are both a practical reality check and an aid to being comfortable and familiar in her own skin at the end of the working day. She runs them directly after a session and at random through her waking life. It has to be a habit to work: if you only do it when you think you may be dreaming, you won’t do it when you are dreaming but believe that you are not. It’s easy enough to recognise the sleeping mind when you find yourself in flight after a champagne dinner with Claude Rains – although Neith does not often dream of flying, which bothers her because Freud insisted such dreams were about sex – but much harder when the deviation is more subtle or more plausible: unknown and undefinable flavours of fruit, vanishingly small worlds stacked with coincidence to the point of inevitability, the power to read menus in other languages or arm-wrestle a man twice your mass. The dream state is wily, and it learns as you do.

She waits a while longer, until she has completely reassociated with her surroundings. There are approved exercises for this which involve visualising your awareness as an elastic dough and extending it into every extremity one by one. Neith finds them childish as well as somewhat ineffectual. Glancing at the poem one more time, she decides that she has done enough to be sure of her body and goes to make coffee, which is the unofficial punctuation of her rite. She walks to the galley kitchen, dials water from the hot tap. The sink tells her – as it always does – that the water is coming out at 96 degrees Celsius, a temperature that is ideal for making coffee but dangerous to human skin.

She queries the Witness, and finds that none of the interview technicians in the Hunter matter has ever attended a birth. For that matter, indeed, Hunter had no children. Neith sighs at this evidence of stubborn mendacity. In a few moments, the old woman will be transparent. In the absence of a strategic goal, it takes a particularly tragic sort of refusenik to hold out right down to the wire.

Lifting the coffee grounds to her nose, Neith inhales, and winces. She cannot afford the brand she really likes because it is frankly luxurious, so she buys the cheapest she can stand. It is counter-intuitively called Truth. On the packaging is a picture of the company’s owner, a very handsome retired footballer from Benin. Benin coffee is usually very good, but Truth is not. She has been trying to acquire a taste for it, and while she still hates it, she now misses it as well when she can’t get it. It is the worst of possible outcomes, one she hopes very much is temporary.

on the