First Seven Days

1.

This is a test. Hello, Hello. Hello. You are listening to a recording. How about that? I am recording onto a Lanier LCR5D Desktop Cassette Voice Recorder that belonged to my father, who worked as a court reporter in his twenties. There is a house one of my relatives owns, which he used to live in but has never sold or rented out, and which various generations and distant arms of my family have used as a permanent storage facility for furniture and items they no longer have room for, but don’t want to take to the tip. I found the Lanier there, next to his steno machine. I hoped I would. It has an epidermis of dust and a metal foot pedal, and has been for some time an unavailable and obsolete piece of equipment. It is, however, the only piece of equipment I can find that records onto tape. Tape is an easily destroyed medium which is impossible to play back without possessing a similarly long-discontinued device, and this will hopefully give me greater control over where the contents of this recording are distributed. I am hoping this means not into the hands of the John Steeds, but just in case it does, I will not be using anyone’s real names.

2.

The Lanier works fine, you will be relieved to hear. So I will begin without further ado. This is the personal account of the right-hand man to the leader of the ‘E-Gunpowder Plot’, as it was dubbed by some. We ourselves had no name for the operation. It was simply the course of action that Emperor Angel, the ringleader, deemed as necessary in order to plunge the country back into the Dark Ages. If, that is, you believe that the period before the Voyeur System constituted Dark Ages. Some people do. Some people believe that the world was literally in the dark prior to the invention of the light bulb and, similarly, that the world was practically, to all intents an purposes, in the dark before the invention of the Voyeur System. The reason I am recording this tape, however, is that I believe those people are far, far fewer in number than those who realise - maybe only deep down, beneath a great crust of apathy - that we should not live in a world where nothing is private. That living under a constant eye - even an eye whose possessor changes on a monthly basis - is living under tyranny.
I am recording this tape for them, perhaps in the hope that they will find some inspiration in our attempts and learn from our mistakes. I will explain as much as I can of how we came so close to dismantling the Voyeur System from within, of how we evaded detection for so long, what elements leant to our successes and what elements also led to our ultimate failure.
With regards to our failure, I am not ashamed or downtrodden. Most attempts to change things for the better are doomed. I will quote a character from a book I have been reading - it is the autobiography of Dale Cooper. Dale’s dad tells his son that “we all fail, and that we would again and again, and that was just the way it was.”
Some will reject that. Some are determined to succeed. But I think failure is more important than success. Successful people don’t know what they’re missing. The only reason they’re constantly succeeding is that they’re trying to do all the wrong things. Mostly, they’re trying to do what has already proven to be achievable. So no, I am not at all bitter that we failed. I look forward to failing again. I believe a person is no more than a ridiculously complex machine with a few ridiculously simple functions. One is to attempt the impossible. Another is to cause trouble. A third to slip on a metaphorical banana skin. There is no point in railing against this last function. It’s what we were built to do and sometimes, without realising it, this is exactly the function we are carrying out and all our movements and carefully thought out plans are necessary stages leading up to this. That is why we do it so often, and why we enjoy it so much when we see others at it.
This is the reason for the codenames I have chosen, unromantic as they are.
I am also recording this with some kind of posterity in mind. I aim to bury copies of this tape in protective boxes for future generations. I don’t know how I will do this yet - not without my current Voyeur noticing - but I will do my best to figure something out. For the benefit of those future generations I will attempt to explain everything that may date or be written out of history. I am not particularly technologically complement, but a rudimentary description will, I hope, suffice.
I said earlier that I am - or was - the right-hand man to Emperor Angel, but you will have noticed from my voice I am a woman. Well done on that. You’ve narrowed down your list of suspects to half the population. I confess I have no idea how to distort my voice when recording onto tape, so I don’t believe I can hide that fact any more than I could from the long list of perfect strangers who have seen me unclothed, seen my 34A cups and rampant crop of pubic hair. Excuse me, my voice is dry.

3.

I have a cup of coffee, which I will sip throughout the course of the recording. I first want to try to document why it was I was convinced by Emperor Angel’s plan, so here I go.
When Emperor Angel first outlined her plan to me, lavishly and enthusiastically - licking every word - from the nest of jumpers and coats that buried a chair in the corner of my shatteringly untidy room, something long ago locked away came to the fore of my mind, and when she had finished speaking - without waiting, and as opposed to asking all the obvious questions (“Are you serious?” “How do you know all this?” “What use could I be?”) I began to uncover and unravel and untangle this strange something right there in the room. I told her -
I’ve got this memory, I said - something my dad might have told me when I was younger, concerning a visit to the hairdressers when he first moved to London. He’d got his appointment in the morning, thinking he could slot it in neatly before work - half hour to get his hair done (it was just a cut and blow dry) jump on the bus and in High Holburn by 25 past, giving him five minutes to scuttle down Chancery Lane at pace, suit and tie, with his hair finally neat and not raucous - all the better to fit in down there in the law district. He got to the hairdressers on time - there was only one stylist there and she seemed to be putting the finishing touches to the customer before him. Snip here. Snip there. Taking her time. Musing.
Somehow, this touching up took her five minutes beyond my dad’s (if was my dad - as I say, can’t remember who told me) appointment, but that wasn’t much matter. He could be five minutes late, if the haircut was good enough. Or maybe it wouldn’t take half an hour after all. He didn’t want anything fancy. Just make it neat, trim, slick, short, whatever.
There’s some wrangling at the till for a while. Previous customer, a genial Scotsman, is looking to buy some product. He discusses with the stylist what might be best. Items are taken off shelves, passed back and forth across the counter, then replaced. This takes them to ten minutes beyond the start of the appointment. The stylist flashes a quick sign and a whisper at my dad (let’s assume it was my dad after all) indicating that she won’t be much longer. It’s OK - even if he does turn up late, he can invent a decent story about the appointment, about it somehow stretching out farcically over an hour. Again, if the haircut’s good, if it impresses.
Credit card is passed over. PIN entered - these were the days when you had a personal number that you committed to memory and that allowed you to use your card wherever - so, potentially, a trusted associate or loved one could use your card if you told them the number. (Emperor Angel nods vigorously, because she is old enough to remember these days). The man enters his PIN, the sale is confirmed, the machine that holds his card in its teeth makes happy noises and everything is done. This is the point where he should leave, but instead, he checks his receipt (receipts, in those days, were a paper record of the transaction, mainly for the customer’s benefit). Something is wrong. Something is quite wrong. He queries it with the hairdresser.
My dad is trying his utmost not to look uncomfortable and impatient, but his watch hand is slowly arcing towards the quarter to mark. Maybe it’s time to go? But the hairdresser quickly sets the Scotsman up on the phone - he’s phoning his card company to discuss what is wrong with the transaction - in those days you could talk to a real person at the other end. The hairdresser then ushers my dad into a seat, wraps the black cape round his neck and asks him what he’d like. He produces a picture from a catalogue, hurriedly cut out and scratched where it’s been folded in the middle. He starts to describe what it is about the style he likes, but the hairdresser is eager to get started - to not delay any further - yes, yes, she says, and starts hacking away at his hair.
His hair, I should mention, is not really just in need of a trim. It’s been allowed to grow quite long. So once the hairdresser has cut off a few choice clumps, it is decidedly, remarkably uneven. Understand this: he can now no longer get out of the chair. He would look ridiculous. Better to not turn up at all than to wander into work so sheared. Of course, then, this is when the Scotsman calls the hairdresser back over and has further words with her. They both catch my dad’s mask of anxiety in the mirror - he is trying his best to keep it down, but like a fist pressing through a plastic bag, its shape is increasingly apparent. Without having to confer, the hairdresser and the Scotsman agree to let my dad in on exactly what has happened and why it is more important than his getting to work on time.
What has happened is this: the machine has charged the Scotsman £8,900 instead of the £89 that makes up the cost of his meticulous haircut plus his bag of hair products. He has to be at the airport very soon, to leave the country, and cannot very well do so without knowing that he’s going to get the nine-ish grand back. He doesn’t look, speak or dress like the grotesquely affluent type - £9k is a lot of money to him. The hairdresser understand this too and is eager to show that she will go to every effort to make sure the business is sorted out
Horror of horrors, now he has entered his PIN number - neither of them noticed the number was wrong, if indeed it was, when the machine asked for it - his card company say that they cannot cancel the exchange and that he will have to secure a refund from the hairdresser. But this hairdresser is just the woman who works there in the morning - she doesn’t own the salon. That guy won’t get there until eleven, by which time the Scotsman needs to be in the departure lounge.
My dad is sitting there in no fit state to hotfoot it to the office, bound by the black cape, in a comfy chair, as the gap closes between the minute hand and the hour mark, while the hairdresser disappears to look for someone - who knows who? While she is gone, the genial Scotsman tries to joke about the situation and apologises - I should mention, because it’s important, that both hairdresser and Scotsman have already apologised at least once - and my dad tries to smile and play along and imagine how he will put the story to his new bosses, to his friends, to his daughter however many years down the line that might be - I believe it was my dad (as I told Emperor Angel the story, I felt more and more certain of it). The Scotsman explains, again, very reasonably and with much joviality, that he simply can’t leave without making sure he’s going to get the money back. He tries to elaborate, but there’s really not much to be said at all. Either the machine did something wrong, he said, or, I don’t know, she … or he made a mistake.
The ‘she…or he’ refers to the hairdresser - it is evident the Scotsman is doubtful as to the purity of the woman’s sex. Does he think she’s a transsexual, or just a transvestite? My dad doesn’t know - and he is too busy nodding and agreeing and smiling and tipping his head this way and that to think about it much. His brain is being shaken about, after all, and he’s now electric with anxiety. His explanation will have to not just be convincing and entertaining, but very witty - he will have to remember the Scotman’s ‘he or she’ line, perhaps place it in a better context (timing is everything) and - I don’t know - exaggerate the amounts involved maybe.
The hairdresser comes back in with someone - likely a friend from a nearby shop - whose sole function, it eventually transpires, seems to be to help them arrive at a decision on what to do next. He doesn’t know what to do with the machine, but he chimes with good-humoured sympathy when he sees the receipt. The Scotsman again explains his predicament. The hairdresser again explains her predicament. The newcomer is very understanding, and sees that this is not something easily resolved.
And then it hits my dad, this feeling - this is the point he usually came to, whenever he told this story - and I heard him tell it numerous times to visitors, to siblings, to relatives returning from adventures in space - it hits him that here is mankind at its most ideal. No one seems to be too angry. Everyone understands everyone else, and is managing their own fluster dutifully. No one has even done anything wrong, or so it would seem, and so dad chose to believe. Yet they were in an impossible situation, an unhappy situation, a terrible situation, which was also having a knock-on effect on him. What had happened? Utopia had gone rotten. Why? All because of the card machine.
Here, my dad would smirk, sometimes snort - the recollection amused him so much. One machine, with one moderately simple function (it didn’t even have to calculate the amount) had screwed up the morning for all three of them. And taken a chunk out of a fourth participant’s schedule as well.

I trailed off here, having reached what I felt was the point in the story. Emperor Angel shuffled in her throne of synthetic wool and considered it deeply, tasting it, tasting it, swilling it round in her skull. For all her blistering enthusiasm - for all the great vigour and bright-eyed good grace with which she approached everything, with which she armed herself against all obstacles - I could see that she didn’t really know what to make of my babble.
“So you believe the problem lies in the machine itself rather than the government?” she said.
I told her that I believed the point of the anecdote was that machines were not to be trusted. And yes, I said, I am aware that machines only do what they are made to do, that flaws are faults of design or user, but nevertheless, we should never trust them.
“You mean we should never have trusted them,” said Emperor Angel. “I believe it’s too late to advise against that course of action now, sunbeam.”
She was right, of course. And it seems churlish to blame machines as if they are some kind of alien. I do not wish to set our group up as modern day Spinning Jenny wreckers, nor Emperor Angel as the new Captain Swing. I do not hate machines. If anything, I love and rely on machines more than you do. Certainly you who may be reading this in the far future.
But I will say this: it is our love affair with machines that has got us into this mess and has got us into so many messes in the pass. I don’t think we can help loving and relying on machines as soon as they come into being - our system of government is, after all, a kind of clapped out old machine. It is simply that every now and then there must be an overhaul, because we have got ourselves into a mess. Out with the old and in with the new.
Why are we so in love with machines? Because we are machines ourselves.

This was and is how I understand the situation. Like Emperor Angel, I do not like the Voyeur system, but at the time my motivation was more the destruction of the machine that lay at its heart. The machine that gave your life up to the eyes of a stranger every month. This is the violation, as I saw it then. A person’s private activities are something they choose to share with a specific and slight number of people. I have heard the argument against this. Shrike would often voice it. It goes something like: that we were all exhibitionists anyway. That with the Internet age and the explosion of publishing, both traditional and electronic, that documented our lives in detail, we were clearly no longer a society that cherished privacy. This this is still the age of Celebrity after all - and a Celebrity is someone whose life is public. And we all want to be celebrities. Celebrities are out gods. I have read all that, don’t you worry. And also about the booming crime levels - both underclass crime and corporate crime. So I know how it seemed to some a natural step, and a useful one, to move to the Voyeur System, whereby no one escapes scrutiny. I understand the thinking that says this puts our destiny in the our own hands - that because your scrutiner is another Ordinary Person we are only being watched by ourselves, that the practical implications are simply to give us an angel on our shoulder.
But, frankly, this is all the thinking of apologists, originated by People Who Don’t Know They’re Born, who were so far removed from everyday struggles that it was left entirely to their selective imaginations, who perhaps never imagined in the first place that they themselves would be scrutinised just as much as the common-as-mucks they envisaged when they used the phrase Ordinary Person. I am not touting myself as a champion of the silent majority, but trying to appeal to the shared experience of all humans. We are not an Us. The only truly common experience is knowing that no one else is like ourselves. There is no one we can trust to watch over us who does not become an Other.
Also, I think guilt may be a kind of pleasure. Replacing our own private guilt with the scorn of a perfect stranger has made our lives less pleasurable. And this is what the machine does, and does so coldly, without shame. It is like that PIN machine in the hair salon - its idle stupidity injects misery and anxiety into our lives. I don’t harbour much animosity towards the people behind this. I simply see it as our having slipped again on a banana skin again.
I mean honestly.

4.

I think I have to rewind to the start. I have to start at the start, maybe even before the start. It is hard to know how to introduce someone like Emperor Angel into a story. I had only met her that night but I had been watching her for days. That month, you see, I was her Voyeur. I was not a very good Voyeur - I don’t believe many people are. The strictures are too demanding - who really has an hour a day to waste watching someone else’s life? I mean, we’re all boring. And yeah, sure, in theory, you’ve an hour, but in practice, there’s always something you’ve got to do that’s more important - it’s not like anything much will happen to you. I mean, your Voyeur is likely just as lazy. I don’t know - maybe I tell a lie. Maybe if you don’t at least keep half up to speed with your Voyeur duties, your own Voyeur will report you. I put in half an hour some nights, less so as the month went by and it became apparent that my Voyee for that month was far too boring to ever step out of line. Most of them don’t even have a very active sex life - there’s a joke, isn’t there, that when they switched from polling people directly to polling their Voyeurs, the amount of sex the population were having plummeted. Ho ho.
On a more serious note, I did always wonder whether or not people masturbated any less once that system came into play, once they knew that someone somewhere could be rerunning the recording and watching them do it. I was one of those, incidentally, who slowed the tape down to watch people doing it. Again, I think everyone did. Everyone I knew did. We’re not perverted. We are simply interested in each others’ bodies. The workings, you know? The legs like pistons, the steam of our breath. We wonder how much that thing on the screen is like us. We are amazed by the uncanny similarity - as amazed as we by the differences.
Then again, I never spent too long on it, firstly because my Voyees were mostly ugly - and this is because most people whom we don’t know are ugly until we get to know them - and secondly because there’s always the threat, isn’t there, that your own Voyeur is watching you watching your Voyee having sex or masturbating. I saw that myself. I had one Voyee who was tossing off while watching his Voyee toss off. Both men. You’d think it would happen more often, but no, just once. I stopped the chain there - I could’ve lowered my trousers and kept it going, but I stopped it there.
I am straying. This happens when you dictate something orally. You don’t know what order to put things in and you have to go back to retrieve relevant details. For instance, now I am trying to find the start, but I don’t know how far to go back. Emperor Angel was my Voyee. I was her Voyeur. For that month. We were a few days in when she called.
I work - that is, I worked - as a

5.

I forgot to rewind the tape and now I don’t want to record that last part again so I will just go on as if nothing had happened. I was about to discuss where I used to work, but I cannot, as this would be precious information for eavesdroppers and it is of no use to anyone anyway. I did not do a job that said anything much about me. If you were to draw a psychological diagram of the right-hand man to Emperor Angel, you would not put her in the kind of job I had. I took the first job offered to me that I could afford to live on. I discovered that people do not fall into interesting jobs accidentally anymore. I wonder if they ever did. I have read the numerous biographies of people who became what they were by accident, by not knowing what else to be. I suppose, statistically, for every lucky accident there has to be so many that are damp squibs. Hey ho. What can you do?
Where I worked is not so important as how I travelled to work. It was by bus. Every day, there and back. I remember very clearly some of the shops I would go past, and in particular the umbrella repair shop with its yellowing signage - Umbrellas recovered, renovated, repaired, sticks repolished, riding crops and whips, life preservers, dagger canes, swordsticks. I would spend most of the journey staring at my Glassmap. I had all the settings turned on - so I could see where I am going, the name of the street I am, the approximate time until arrival, the E.T.A, the time I left, the overall journey time so far, where I would be if I had attempted to walk the same route, where I would be if I had attempted to drive, and numerous other settings. It was comforting to know these things, though I was aware, even then, that I surely felt no more comfortable than before the Glassmap was made affordable. I was also aware that most people who rode the bys did not have their Glassmaps on constantly. I might see the occasional one flicker into life for a few moments, maybe even carefully studied for a protracted period. But either most commuters I rode with were the devil-may-care sort or - and this is where my thinking led me - I was in need of a great deal more comfort than them.
I comforted myself back then with thes thoughts: people stumble about everywhere, doing their best to look like they know what they’re doing, but actually, no one is entirely sure. It’s just a great game to play, for the duration of our adult lives. We impersonate someone who knows what they’re doing, where they’re going and what they want, and can sum it up for you over a light lunch. We make plans, I think, not so much because we intend to see them through to completion, but for the pleasure of pretending we will. Just as it was once exciting to look at the stars and see yourself roaring past them in a rocket to lands unknown, so it is exciting to make a plan and imagine yourself following it. We dream of being heroic adventurers. We dream also of being organised.
I would arrive back home, glad of having my Glassmap to assure me that busing was faster than walking and driving, warmer than cycling and cheaper than the tube, and I would switch on my Vee22. If by some miracle you are listening to this tape in some future epoch I will explain what one of these is. The Vee22 is the home computer designed specifically for fulfilling your Voyeur duties. The screen is small, about the size of a letter. When you boot it up it immediately asks for your ID and password, the latter of which must be changed weekly, at DNA stations. It will then patch you into the security network, but only allow you access to the footage of your Voyee. Every camera and knife-eye detects your identity from a distance, so long as you are carrying your ID, and builds a map of your progress through the day. Your Voyeur can then follow this map, only needing to switch cameras when they have the option of multiple points of view.
Emperor Angel was one of the most interesting Voyees I had been landed with. She didn’t appear to have a job at all, and spent a lot of time doing nothing but walking. She didn’t use a Glassmap or any other navigation apparatus, but never appeared to be lost. She was interested in things that did not seem particularly interesting to me. For instance, the canal tunnel that stretched from Maida Vale to the top of Lisson Grove. Twice I saw her watch a boat go in at one end and then race it to the other, where she watched it emerge with a look of childish excitement on her face. I did not like this. I didn’t believe anyone had the right to find such things a source of amusement.
This was hypocritical of me. I have found that I am just as excited by simple devices and mechanisms. I simply work harder against the feeling. I believe there was a simple message encoded into me at some point instructing that I only express surprise at what is truly new, not stuff that’s been around for hundreds of years.
I would later hear Emperor Angel’s explanation.
“Don’t try so hard to remember,” she said. “The more you forget, the more there is to find anew.”
I replied that I could think of more productive ways to spend my time than wandering around rapt with fascination at everything, econ it.
“Wandering around rapt with fascination is precisely what our brains were made for and precisely why we’re where we are today, and not somewhere else,” she said.
Not true at all, I said. People have to work econ hard, prioritise, shut out all the interesting noise and knuckle down if they want to get anything done. We’d still be in caves if no one had knuckled down.
Sure you’ve got to knuckle down, Emperor Angel said, but first comes the wandering around rapt with fascination, which is more natural to us. The knuckling down is the point where we tamper with nature, which is also natural, because we are fascinated with our limits.
This the only real explanation she gave me for what happened three or four days into my surveillance of her. The central heating had just come on at work and made me sleepy as a baby bear. As was a common occurrance back then, a beautiful oriental girl sat next to me on the bus. This one had tousled hair, a delicate scarf and an expansive fake fur collar which I longed to bury myself in. Exhausted as I was, I arrived home in a mode of greater anxiety than I was used to, such that even my Glassmap failed to comfort me. There was scaffolding up near where I lived and I stopped to watch the builders for a while. I liked to watch them flirt with danger. My favourite trick was when they took down the scaffolding and threw the assembly bolts into a plastic bin on top of a parked vehicle from several floors up. Most of the time the rain of bolts went in, but sometimes they missed or hit the side, spinning onto the road.
Sometimes they were bright purple.
Once in my flat, which was freezing, I switched on my Vee22, and began to scroll at speed through Emperor Angel’s day. She went through her usual routines. She read newspapers. She went to the British Library, and spent some hours on a computer. I sped through most of it, drinking coffee and eating a Danish cinammon swirl that remained from a twinpack I’d bought that morning. As I recall, it was a little crusty.
As the time on the Vee22 screen raced to catch up with the time on my watch, I realised the setting had become familiar to me. Emperor Angel had strolled into New Canterbury - where I lived. I don’t believe there is much danger in admitting this. As the footage was speeded up, it took me some time to realise that she was routinely stopping to check a piece of paper, and had even brought a Glassmap with her, though with only the most fundamental settings switched on. The route she took was almost the same as my bus’s. I wondered if I had passed her at some point. Would I see myself in the surveillance footage?
She continued, drawing closer and closer to my block of flats. I slowed it down a little. She arrived at the very doorway I had only minutes ago entered, and instead of going straight past it, she stopped, checked her paper one last time and went through. My Voyee, in the very same building as me? This happened routinely to people - it was not unheard of for your Voyee to be someone you know, perhaps your neighbour.
I sped it up again to see where she went next, but it stopped dead as she mounted the stairs. My first thought was that my Vee22 had crashed, but even as I moved to reset it I noticed the time in the corner. The image jerked - Emperor Angel now half way up the first flight of stairs. I checked the time against my watch and found them to match more or less exactly. The footage had stopped because it had caught up with the present and was now downloading directly from the security network. Surveillance had to be a minimum of fifteen seconds behind realtime, or else it stuttered and upset the computer.
At this point I reprimanded myself for being too interested and went to start preparing dinner. You can see where this is going, can’t you? It wasn’t long at all before I heard a knock on the door.

6.

Second day of recording.

So my Voyee had come to visit me. You can only imagine how I felt! Nobody wants to come face to face with the person they have been dutifully spying on, watching dress and undress for the last half week! How would I feel if I met one of my Voyeurs? Of course, I would soon find out, but at that point my answer would have been that I’d punch them in the gut. I quickly found out, however, that Emperor Angel is not someone who takes offence very easily. She is the kind of person who would cheerfully weather a slew of insults and behave thereafter as if her mind had been somewhere else entirely. She knew when she rapped on my door that I was her Voyeur, and yet she said nothing about it, aside from when she first greeted me.
“Hi. So you’re my angel,” she said, standing on top of half a dozen letters to myself and past occupiers that had not been removed from the doormat for several days.
I admitted I was.
Emperor Angel was delighted. She did a little dance - a flourish with her feet - and asked if she could come in. I said of course, and explained, somewhat awkwardly, that I had just begun to make dinner and would she like any. Absolutely, she said (Emperor Angel was also not the kind of person to let awkward situations sour good hospitality). I went to confirm what I already suspected - that my cupboards were filled with incompatible ingredients, and nothing of bulk except old potatoes with roots growing out of their eyes and an onion the size of a baby’s head. I cut the roots off clumsily and wrapped the potatoes in tin foil, dashed oil all over them and stuck them in the oven. So much for hospitality.
I can remember this clearly, though there is no need to. On any given day, this is likely what would be in my in my cupboards. Organisation was not a game I played very well. This is still the case. If only you could see me now, you would not believe that I had been involved in the nearest this country has come to revolution since the middle ages. You would think - more than rightly - that I would have serious trouble organising a picnic for androids.

Emperor Angel would not strike you as the woman to lead a revolution either. She was no cut-throat, nor was she particularly tall. I would not rate her vocabulary as more than above average. She does not, to my knowledge, have ancestors who commanded legions, nor has she any managerial experience. She was strikingly beautiful, I think. Shrike evidently did not agree with me on this. He said she was plain looking, but added that at least she wasn’t a ‘double-bagger’. A double-bagger is a person who requires two paper bags over their head in case the first one slips off. So there, perhaps, is the key to Emperor Angel’s revolutionary capability - she was not a double bagger.

To my surprise, when I returned to the living room with drinks (we had an exchange of calls from kitchen to doormat and back to establish which were preferred) she immediately began to describe the plan to me, before anything else. At that stage it was only a basic outline, and very much the result of imagination more than research, but since it was not something I myself had contemplated, it seemed to me to be simultaneously ingenious and ludicrous.
First we would go in search of my Voyeur and find them the same way Emperor Angel had located me. Then in search of my Voyeur’s Voyeur. Then my Voyeur’s Voyeur’s Voyeur. Eventually, Emperor Angel reasoned, we would come full circle, to her own Voyee. The central computer - the one that decided each month who would watch who - guarded only against a small number of outcomes, the most important of which being that no one is given themselves to watch. There was a fair chance, Emperor Angel said, that small numbers of people effectively formed circles of Voyeurism, that before the month was out, we could have rounded up a full circle. This group would then be utterly free from observation. Nobody would track us. We would have until the end of the month to achieve our goal.
Our goal? The vandalisation, the destruction, the irrecoverable toppling of the central computer that stored the biometrical information of the entire populous and arranged the security footage for Voyeurs consumption. This would give us ample opportunity, as well as the necessary reputation, said Emperor Angel, to whip up a revolutionary force and stage at least a partial coup d’etat, establishing a new government that, while not necessarily perfect, would never dare set up such a system again.

Why did Emperor Angel want to do such a thing? She did not seem to bear any ill will to anyone. She was evidently not overly distressed about being watched over by perfect strangers. She was perfectly happy, as happy as anyone can be, I believe, in a I can only put it down to her programming. Yes. She is another complex machine, trying to perform its simple function. This is not how right hand men are given to talk about their leaders, I grant you, but why shouldn’t I add a little unexpected spice to my role. Why, if I were completely predictable they’d have caught me by now. They’d have caught all of us.

7.

I should mention that my flat is mess. I was waiting for someone to invent a machine that would tidy it up. Some say that we only come to rely on machines once they are built - that without them, we would be getting along just as well. Not true at all. I could not, and cannot keep anywhere tidy without the aid of a machine, a machine, I might add, that has yet to be invented. There is the vacuum cleaner, of course, and there are very simple things like drawer tidies, and some can afford maids. But none of them are ultimately useful if you are a frugal person who finds it hard to keep her clothes, accessories and general adopted properties from spreading all over the floor like a heap of docile kittycats.
Emperor Angel did not mind standing on the letters, or indeed having to pluck one from the sole of her shoe, nor did she seem uncomfortable snuggling down in a chair that was not so much a chair at all as a chair-shaped pile of used clothes, even though there were knickers among the clothes.
After she had outline her plan, and after my long and drawn out reaction, which though it was made with sincerity, did altogether jar with my own reliance on devices and contraptions, we got down to the kind of business that we really should have begun on, if we really did exist for all the reasons philosophers suggest.
I asked her her name, and she told me. I asked her who she was, and she replied that I should know, since I was her Voyeur for this month. Our conversation was punctatued by screams and roars from the building site. Didn't put her off. I told her all I knew was that she didn’t seem to do an awful lot with her day. She said that this was exactly how she hoped to appear, since it would be troublesome to her if her Voyeurs knew too much about what she was up to. Slightly frustrated by now, I demanded to know how she had tracked me down. Again, I don’t believe that I am revealing too much when I say that Emperor Angel has friends in high places. Perhaps not so much high places as canny places. She knows people who, as part of performing their function to either attempt the impossible, cause trouble or slip on a banana skin, have access to secret realms of electronic information.
If you are of the future, do not be surprised that crime still goes on. Who ever thought an intense surveillance network would do anything to combat crime?

As it turns out, Emperor Angel had already a complete list of people who formed the circle. That is why she had chosen this month to strike, and no other. She had got onto her contact, as she always did, using a thieves’ cant - a code - to disguise the intent of her emails, which I could, of course, had looked into, if I had been bothered. This month the results had come back: seven, including her. With the cooperation of only six others, she would break free of the surveillance network until the end of the month. The plan could be carried out.
It wasn’t just the numbers that worked to her advantage, although she had been waiting years for such a magically tiny number as seven, in a country of tens of millions, and was also (she later informed me) only one of a great number of potential revolutionaries who hoped to carry out the plan, once they were given a manageable circle.
What was I saying? Of course. It wasn’t just the numbers.

8.

I was dying for a drink there. I probably can’t go on for much more tonight. My eyes are bleary and the whining of the tape is beginning to tear at my ears. But I will begin on the track I aim to pursue tomorrow.
No, as luck would have it, every other member of the seven, with the exception of myself, was of considerable use, in one way or another. I will describe them each in turn. Again, it is a risky gambit giving away so much detail, but the odds of the John Steeds piecing together all this information must be weighed against the usefulness of the same information in inspiring others to take action. I also wish to paint as accurate a picture of what happened as possible, although that is nearly impossible. So, here I go then.
Actually, I will leave that part to tomorrow. I was about to start with Shrike, as I have already mentioned him, but it makes sense to go in roughly chronological order I will describe each member of the seven in the order that we encountered them. Next on our list was, of course, my own Voyeur, who I had said I wanted so much to punch in the gut.

9.

Good evening again, tape recorder, and my audience, be they John Steeds, revolutionaries or men and women of the future. I was about to talk about the next conspirator on our list - the next to be recruited.‘Tuesday’ is the name I will give him, and there is no one who was less deserving of a punch in the gut, or for whom a punch in the gut would be less helpful. Had he seen me naked? Upon meeting him, I found myself heavily doubting it, and even if he had (I mulled) I doubt he got any kind of pleasure out of it. It is difficult to imagine Tuesday getting pleasure out of anything at all.
To continue as a narrative, or as much I am able:
As soon as we had finished our rumbledethumps (which she proclaimed Immensely Filling) Emperor Angel wanted to set off immediately, insisting time was of the essence and that we should try to snare a third conspirator by midnight. I protested - I had dozens of dead shirts to iron and nothing to wear to work on Monday. Pish, said Emperor Angel, you’ll possess a look of rumpled dignity and/or rampallion charm in an unironed shirt, with bra lace peeking through. Still I argued, and was able to buy myself enough time to dress in fresh clothes - the very last scraps that hung from my skeletal wardrobe - and to wash up, thank god, and to provision myself with warm outer layers and a hip flask before I was dragged through the door of my own house and into the supercold night.

Tuesday was a skilled programmer who worked in a spacious office of his own on one of the highest floors of a starscraper. He did not do much work. He was skilled and clever enough to make half an hour of machine-gun touch-typing look like a full day’s tirelessly enthusiastic and strenuous effort. And yet he was tired and bored. He spent most of his working day staring out the window, he said, counting yellow cars and watching people stopping to talk in the street, morosely second-guessing the banality of their chitchat. From his terminal, with his considerable talent and experience, he could roam cyberspace like a miniature god, rendezvous with allies and colleagues in the Far East and the Further West, construct incredible projects to revolutionise his industry and plot and plan his own entrepreneurial schemes that would eventually free him from service to a company altogether, if only he could see them through to their finish. It did not make him feel big and powerful, but small and useless.
Emperor Angel commented that living most of the day in a great big office, with your own holographic faxmatic-strollphone combo, complete atmospheric control, panoramic-postcard-sky-projecting adjustable windows, a buffed oak desk and a regularly hoovered carpet would make her feel giddy with luxury and thus it was no surprise that Tuesday never got any work done.
Tuesday, however, without any sign of envy or aggression, explained that he was not giddy with luxury. He simply felt like a balled up woodlouse rattling around inside a great engine. There’s nothing great or fulfilling about revolutionising an industry, he said - industries are revolutionised all the time. The pace just goes on increasing. Soon there will be a revolution in some industry every 0.3 seconds, more than there are infants born across the globe. He was at the controls of a staggering and complex machine whose only purpose was to keep itself fat and alive in the face of inevitable doom and decay (this doubled up as his view of what a person essentially was - so close and yet so far from my own definition).

He also mentioned that the single most depressing thing for him was that he couldn’t recall the last time he had high-fived someone, or the feeling accompanying that. Forget sex, he said. Forget sweaty orgasms. If there is a God (there isn’t) and if he has granted us a special and rare gift designed to reveal to us, momentarily, the meaning of life (why would he?) then it is the high-five. The moment when two people simultaneously arrive at the conclusion that they have achieved the impossible.

Tuesday’s home was just as messy as mine, though he possessed less clothes and evidently more crockery. There was also something about it that made me think of a sunken ship, antique possessions mercilessly scattered by the plunge and left to rot for decades. He walked around in a pair of pyjama bottoms and did not bother to throw anything on before he opened the door to us. We quickly introduced ourselves - Tuesday didn’t seem to recognise me as his Voyee, though he shot me an apologetic look - and Emperor Angel immediately commented that he needed a smoking jack or dressing gown. Tuesday said he didn’t see the point in smoking or dressing.
Oh, Emperor Angel said, I could have sworn I caught a whiff of burnt sulphur for a moment there.
Whereupon Tuesday showed us a small blot of reddened skin just to the left of the knuckle on his little finger and explained that he had just that moment succeeded in lighting a match with one hand, although burning himself in the process. The matches were just for lighting the gas hob.
I would like to say that Emperor Angel humoured him, or feigned interest in this odd pastime in order to win Tuesday’s trust, but I believe the truth is that she was suddenly utterly enraptured with the idea of striking a match with just one hand. She said so, and she does not often lie. Tuesday commented that it was pretty much the only useful thing they teach you in the Korean army, Emperor Angel laughed out loud and they spent a happy fifteen minutes finger-wrestling with the little sticks, both scorching their skin twice and dropping the lit matches on the carpet, then stamping them out in a panic.

And yet I wasn’t even allowed to iron my dead shirts, econ it!

While they were thus occupied, I, playing the dumb partner in the cop duo, patrolled Tuesday’s bookshelf, which was also his mantelpiece, and found mostly short, despairing books by Eastern European authors, and the kind of philosophy that compares life to Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill for all eternity. My fingernails still smelled strongly of onion, which I found pleasant. There was, notably, not one guide to being happy or enriching your life on Tuesday’s shelf, which is what I would have expected to find. Tuesday is not one of those miserabilists who believes there is some trick to it that he hasn’t yet figured out, some little secret key to a mini-hearth fire in everybody’s winter. He thought that life was simply a drag, and that all that stands in the way of the rest of us believing this is differing degrees of fanatical delusion.
Strangely enough, he did not think of Emperor Angel, with her unfathomable, unchartable positivity and relish, as an idiot, willing or not. This surprised and bemused me for so long that I eventually had to come out and ask him about it.
He said: “You don’t get that level of exuberance from someone who believes happiness can be won or achieved.”
“You think Emperor Angel accepts that there is only misery, failure and boredom in the world?” I asked, sarcastically.
“More, far more, than I ever could.”

I have given up on Tuesday.

And yet, for all his darknesses, he was not a pessimist and was easily won over to Emperor Angel’s plan, once she had been settled in by a drink (malt whiskey) and given an open forum among the city of encrusted dishes and upturned ramekins. Though at the time Tuesday’s mood did not seem to alter at all with his learning of the plot, the prospect of destroying the Voyeur System, he told me later, made his flint of a heart give a little spark every time he thought of it, which was the most exciting feeling he had experienced in as long as he could remember.

10.

Needed a pick-me-up. Perhaps I should stop commenting on my between-take activities? Perhaps, but no, I rather like it this way. Perhaps I find this too relaxing for my own good. If so, well, there we are. There we are.
You may be thinking that I have missed a part. Where, you may ask, is the part where Emperor Angel uses her considerable, nay mythic, oratorial skills to seduce this citizen, this hard-slogging, hard-busing Glassmap devotee, to beckon her invitingly over to the side of conspiracy, corruption and high treason? Friends, I have not missed it out. While my pacing may be off, what I describe is more or less exactly how it happened. I was never planning to revolt before and yet as soon as the opportunity was put before me, I went along. In part, I suppose the enormity of the plot had not sunk in yet. More importantly, however - and this is very imporant, you students of our time - I believe it simply made no difference to me in the long run. With my eternally unchanging One Simple Function of ultimately slipping on a banana skin what harm could aiding and abetting Emperor Angel do? None whatsoever. So I was towed along.
Yes, and Tuesday, for his part, found a fire threatening to light itself in his cold heart for the first time in who knows how long, so how could he refuse? Emperor Angel’s not being a double-bagger was so far working wonders. At this rate she could have whipped up an army of untidy flat-dwelling malcontents in no time. Why stop there?
Because it had taken us some time to reach Tuesday’s place, and looking at the address of the next on our list, Emperor Angel decided that it was unlikely - certainly not worth our effort - that we would be able to encroach upon his property and tangle him up in our scheme with what hours the struggling evening had left.
“The best place to set off from,” she said, “tomorrow morning, I mean, will be my place. Tomorrow is a Saturday. Unless either of you have plans, it would be very useful if you could accompany me. Especially you, Tuesday. He’ll recognise you instantly. Now, I know in the case we have just experienced there was no real advantage to having Thursday with me, but you are, I’m sure, an exceptional case, and I feel with equal certainty that your own Voyee will be a little harder to win round, a little more of a devil.”
Thursday voiced hesitance, as did I. We both, at that point, began to suspect the two imperfect strangers we had come up against. For my part, were Emperor Angel and Tuesday in on this together? For Tuesday’s part, were Emperor Angel and Thursday in on it together? You can never be too careful in London. On the other hand, this was not the hokey cokey. You do not have one foot in and one foot out when it comes to revolution - even the most naive revolutionary is instantly aware of that. With somewhat suspicious glances therefore - I tapping my fangs together and Tuesday rubbing his hands as if seeking to buff his knuckles - we agreed with Emperor Angel’s plan and left Tuesday’s shambolic abode - and yes, left sticky whisky glasses still twinkling on the arms of sunken chairs.
Now, before I move on to Shrike, I should probably explain a little, though not too much, about Emperor Angel’s home. Or perhaps I shouldn’t? I am undecided. Emperor Angel neither lived in squalor, nor luxury. There was, if you can believe this, absolutely nothing within her home that leant me any more clues about her, anything beyond what she had already divulged. If she had photographs of loved ones or riotous memories, they were locked safely in drawers. Her clothes were not strewn, but neither were they arranged neatly in a wardrobe - they were drying on various airers and radiators. I was relieved to see knickers on one particular radiator, since it made for a fair exhange. Her house was uncomfortably warm at first, but she apologised for this, and adjusted the heating accordingly. There was a little make-up, and a paperweight made from a giant marble, on top of her bureau. The bureau itself was open, and stuffed with envelopes of different sizes, but nothing lay half-written or screwed up. She used a mixture of fountain pens and biros. Her plates were all clean and edged with gold plate. She had no microwave, but she did have a drinks cabinet, which smelled of forests. In it, the bottles of liquor shone like the many eyes of a scorpion. She had bookshelves which were relatively full, though not creaking, with musty volumes, but she confessed to having read very little. She said that some of them - the Alistair MacLeans, for instance - were ones she had got into collecting. First editions. This was not something she considered a hobby, however, she said - it was just something she’d somehow got caught up in, and treated herself to once in a while.
Like Tuesday and myself, it was apparent that she lived alone. She possessed a double bed, and suggested that we play a game in order to decide which two of us would share it. Tuesday offered to take the sofa, but Emperor Angel was keen that the game be played. She produced a selection from the bottom of the wardrobe, one of which was - I’m not kidding - chess. Tuesday and I immediately pretended not to have seen it, and concentrated on the others, most of which were board games. Tuesday fell to examining the statistics on the back of the boxes to find out which estimated the shortest playing time. He said he didn’t really feel like a game and repeated his offer to take the sofa.
“I’ve an idea,” said Emperor Angel. “How about Nim?”
She explained to us what Nim was - a game played sometimes with cards, but equally with any group of objects, in which players take turns to remove the objects from distinct heaps. Depending on whether the game is played normally, or as a misere game, the last player to pick up an object wins or loses. She demonstrated it for us a few times with pencils.
“Apparently it’s possibly to mathematically solve the game so that you can win every time,” she observed. “I’m no mathematician, but let’s see if I can’t try this method. As such, we will play six games, two against each other person. If I win all four of mine, I will sleep in the double bed. In order for each of you to win a place, you must win only two.”
She lost. Tuesday and I were to share the bed. Believe me, I would not be averse to turning this story into a romance at this point, if that were the way it happened, but Tuesday is a man who lives under a constant proclaimation of doom, and he lay, for as long as I was awake, staring up at the ceiling with fearful eyes. He only protruded from beneath the covers from the chin upward, so that he looked like the head of a guillotined nobleman, settled to rest at the bottom of its basket. Even in the dark, I could tell that under the duvet, his fingers were knitted together across his ribs.
For my part, I was ill at ease in such a large bed, with the room temperature by now very amenable. I listened to the bedside clock for about an hour.

Moving on now to matters of more interest:
Emperor Angel’s prediction about Shrike was bang on. If I am allowed to put it that way. Bang on. She had been extremely lucky so far, of course. Both myself and Tuesday lived on our own, him supported by a generous salary, myself by a meagre one. We were not unknown to people, though Tuesday was reclusive and I largely ignored, and we could safely move and meet for months without those we knew suspecting us of maleficeance.
Shrike was not such a case at all, I regret to say. He is a family man, and remains to this day more allied to his family than the cause. Good for him, I say. Good for us too, for the kind of love Shrike administers over those closest to him is constrictive at best, tyrannical at worst. He lived in the suburbs, outside London - oh, I’d say near Colchester, although I was not really paying attention to the roadsigns when Emperor Angel drove us there.

She drives like a maniac! Take that down in your copybooks now. Emperor Angel drives like she’s playing a racing game.

I will now rain further free hints and clues for the benefit of the John Steeds. I cannot say whether Shrike or Tuesday earned more money, but it is certain that, while Tuesday’s either went unspent or was lost on unknown activities, every spare penny of Shrike’s went on providing himself and his family with the His hall floor - I kid you not - was marble. In a place where you might expect a hatstand, there was a Roman-style, alabaster-white bust. I do not know whether or not much of this was inherited. You could hear a dishwasher, and a TV of some heft.
When he opened the door to us, he was wearing shorts, and his oddly developed leg muscles (‘The vastus medialis was particularly promiment’, Emperor Angel later whispered to me) informed us straight away that he was a keen cyclist. He immediately recognized Tuesday, and went on the defensive.
“Ah, the lazy boy,” he said. “How did you find me and what’s the meaning of all this?”
He had evidently not watched the footage of Tuesday from yesterday evening, when Emperor Angel and I arrived on the scene.
“May we come in?” Emperor Angel asked, for we were all still standing around on his drive in an icy wind.
Shrike said, with similar coldness, that he’d prefer it if we explained our business first. Emperor Angel absorbed this new challenge thoughtfully, sucking her lips. She said that well, as he could obviously tell, it was matters related to his Voyeur duties. She gambled on a Shrike’s fastidiousness, which, at first sight, she had accurately detected. Shrike would, of course, run over all the possibilities of what this ambiguous business might be, and encounter the possibility that he, Shrike, had been failing to fulfil a duty some way. Impossible! And yet -
“OK, you can come in for a few moments, if this is all genuine and above board. Please use the bootscraper before you do, however.”
We did so, though our boots were not dirty. Tuesday spent a particularly long time nuzzling his heels before we all bustled into Shrike’s hall. Untethering her scarf from her neck, Emperor Angel made long, drawn out, admiring remarks about the property, seasoned with the knowledgable asides of an architectural enthusiast. Shrike was anything but impressed. He valued himself, we would come to learn, as an immensely practical man who only knew what he did because it directly concerned the financial wellbeing of himself and his family. He seemed to resent what knowledge he possessed as a necessary but cumbersome burden, and considered any knowledge beyond that to be a show of pretentiousness, an affectation.
Emperor Angel realised her mistake and rapidly came to the point. With the same great gusto, she told Shrike everything she had told Tuesday and I with regards to the plan. People of the future - you would not believe this account for a moment if the whole bunch were rounded up as easily as thus far, so well done to Shrike for aiding my credibility. He is a firm (by which I mean stubborn) man, who considered himself hardworking, and, despite all appearances, somewhat downtrodden and cheated. He saw no contradiction between this deep-seated belief and the extravagance of his property. Such expense is indeed grotesque, and has always seemed grotesque to me, but then, that is the point in it. Nobody would buy marble floors for their hallways if it was perfectly sensible to do so.
Contradictory, then. Shrike saw vulgar signs of good fortune only in other people. His first reaction was no surprise to any of us, even then.
“No, I'm sorry. I don't want anything to do with it, and I'd rather you left now. In fact, I have half a mind to call the John Steeds.”
Who says you can’t judge a book by its cover?
“Take my card in case you change my mind,” said Emperor Angel.
She withdrew the object in question from her raincoat, and I strained to examine it in the instance it was tersely received. Aside from the font’s being mock-handwritten, all loops and squiggles, I could make nothing out.
What Emperor Angel did next I do attribute to cunning, though it seems to me the kind of cunning you might expect a parent to apply to their child. Saturday, who is more a student of history and literature than I am, has heard me remark as such - he offered that view that this sort of cunning was the most successful kind, and had been used with great effect by everyone from Perseus to Richard II, from Bismarck to Bugs Bunny.
“I see you bi-cycle into work,” she said, reinvolving herself her scarf and motioning towards Shrike’s vastus medialis. "I know many a taxi driver who should like to have severe words with you."
Shrike nodded impatiently, muttering yes, yes, yes, and encouraged her to take the few final steps she needed to take before he could shut his front door. The three of us stood there a while, crunching the gravel with our heels and breathing trestles of mist. Tuesday declared Shrike a miserable bastard. Emperor Angel concurred, merrily, and led us back to the road.

The next day was Sunday. We had already recruited our fifth conspirator by then, but more on that later. More importantly, Shrike called round on Emperor Angel’s house. She had expected him to stew for up to a week, but his patience was not quite that robust.
“Don’t think for one minute I’ve come to join your crackpot gang,” he said, storming in. “I am in a hurry and I don’t have much time.”
Emperor Angel asked him to what, then, do we owe the pleasure of his visit. “I want you - this is very important - I want you to tell your taxi drivers next time you see them that they are misguided.”
Misguided how?
Shrike went on to explain, at length, the numerous benefits of cycling, both in terms of the inner city traffic, personal health, public health and personal finance. He had brought with him a Datacall and used it to speedily summarise various average and annual costs related to vehicle maintenance and fuel, the increasing lardiness of Londoners (based also on his own lengthy observations and anecdotal evidence) and the rate at which the sky over the city was turning black.
If Shrike had been an absolutely typical banker-husband-father, who drove a Beamer or Merc or Rover, then Emperor Angel’s ploy would undoubtedly not have succeeded. But an essential component of the machinery that leads to much slipping on banana skins is the belief - harboured by one and all, I suspect, though some are more secretive than others - that we are doing something extremely worthwhile at great expense to ourselves. Something that deserves a reward for the sheer sacrifice involved. In Shrike’s case, this component stood out. I would say it even jarred a little with his ruthless self-image. Maybe it embarrassed him? Was cycling, perhaps, rather too flashy, a little daredevil, perhaps even dangerous for a man with a family to support?
It is difficult to say for sure, but then, so much, I find, is difficult to say for sure and I can only give what account I have to hand, and that is this one. I need a coffee.

(Crackling/inaudible on the tape)

11.

By the way, if you think that I will develop these characters any further, that I will perform some kind of psychological alchemy and reveal that there is more to Tuesday than candid moroseness and more to Shrike than bludgeoning conservatism, then you will be disappointed. This is all you will get because this is all I know of them and, I daresay, all there is to them.
Let me be clear on this: I am not denying that a person is an amazingly complex machine. Nor would I attest to anyone’s predictability. I simply donot believe that there is a more fantastical or reasonable creature sitting inside, that what we see is some kind of egg waiting to hatch. I don’t believe in that stuff. What you see is what you get. WYSIWIG. I suppose you could say that I don’t believe in the soul, but such a suggestion would be both ungenerous and mawkish. Get thee hence et cetera.
It is important to note (we would never have succeeded if this were not true) that Shrike fundamentally hates the Voyeur system too. I don’t think this was particularly lucky - most people with a sense of dignity hate the Voyeur System. I have already said that Shrike was a hard worker who considered himself terminally underpaid - how does such a man feel knowing that he is being routinely examined by people who are probably less deserving, less long-suffering than he? An undercurrent of outrage ran right through him.
So getting him to agree in principle with our aims was never, in fact, that difficult. What was difficult with Shrike was getting him to focus, making sure he took more unction with that than with any of the other things that soured him. That included, of course, most of us.
Shrike was not much of a gamester, but there was one game he seemed to like better than anything, and that was Join The Dots. He played this game with everything that made him rancorous. Everything that ever displeased him, that struck him as unjust, immoral, unnecessary or downright evil he seemed to perceive as a dot that could be joined to the next one via a simple line of logic. And when all the dots were joined, what do you think they spelt out?
The word: CONSPIRACY.
Thus, there were constant battles with Shrike from the moment he unwittingly agreed to go along with the plan, for he was utterly unable to understand why the rest of us should be going along with it. Each of us represented in some way something he despised or found wasteful. Since we were part of the same substructure, the same underlying framework as everything else that plagued him and insulted his sense of decency, he thought of us as biting the hand that fed us, as putting down our own monster. Don’t ask me to repeat the logic that, for him, connected a depressive programmer, a city tour guide and all the rest of us with a state-implemented surveillance system. I can only say that it was as firm and unshakeable as an old thread of spider web.
Shrike stayed on, always insisting that he was not a party to the proceedings, taking no pleasure at all (according to his demeanour) in correcting us on finer points and speculating on the impossibility of certain methods. He did develop what I would describe as a mixture of affection and respect for Emperor Angel, who worked so tirelessly towards the cause, and that, ultimately, was enough.