Stephen Baxter - Cops with WormCams

'The Light of Other Days' features a new technology enabling the user to see anybody, anywhere - and at any time in the past. Any criminal knows some cop in the future might be watching them some day.

From OurWorld International NewsMakers Online, 22 September, 2037:

Carl Couzens (Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation): You know, those people from OurWorld should be proud.

Ever since the first WormCam gear was delivered to the Bureau offices, there has been a line to use it a half-mile long. Of course sometimes even the WormCam isn't conclusive. We're still struggling with Kate Manzoni's case, for instance. But, yes, we've been successful, incredibly so. And that's satisfying, believe me.

We stopped a serial killer in Atlanta, for instance. One of the smartest guys I ever came up against. I truly believe that without the WormCam it would have taken us years more to catch him, if ever, and he would surely have gotten to hundreds more victims. Turned out he was choosing his victims based on phone directory matches to digits from the number pi.

Maybe the future isn't so rosy for us, though. When you think about it, every step of our criminal system is going to be transformed by the WormCam. Already law enforcement agencies like ourselves are using it as a powerful new investigative arm.

Then you have to look at the courts. Our whole adversarial judicial process is built around the premise that arguments have to be contested, evidence questioned, until a judge and jury can reach a view beyond reasonable doubt. But now the WormCam will let us reach a point beyond any doubt very quickly, in most cases. Who need armies of forensics experts now?

And the lawyers will be out of a job too. The only questions to be contested will concern motive, responsibility, sanity. Even the jails are seeing WormCam changes. We're filling 'em up as never before.

Our priority is still crime detection and prevention, using the WormCams' real-time facilities. But once the past-viewing facilities became available we started to go through outstanding and unresolved cases. At first it seemed we'd been given an incredible power, to cut through all the deduction and bullshit we have to go through to get to the truth. Now we can just dial up the WormCam and see a crime as it took place.

You understand that WormCam evidence still isn't admissible in the courts - though that's only a matter of time. But what we see shows us the truth, of course, and usually indicates ways we can turn up evidence the courts will recognise. Of course that will get harder in the future, as the bad guys get used to the idea that some cop in the future might be watching them some day.

Interviewer: So you think the WormCam has been a force for good. Not all the press response has been favourable.

Couzens: Oh, come on. Most of the hostility has come from sleazebags with something to hide. When the real-time viewing capability became public knowledge, a lot of people immediately cleaned up their acts. But you can't wipe out the past. And now with the WormCam we can see that past.

Interviewer: And you caught a lot of those sleazebags, as you put it.

Couzens: Sure. I guess the world is being cleaned up, and that has to be a good thing. But we also turned up a lot of murky nonsense. I tell you, if I have to watch another fat fifty-year-old businessman groping some girl half his age as if she was a rubber doll, I'll heave. Call me innocent, but I never knew so many people have so much sex, of one kind or another, all the time. It sure makes you look at people differently. Like we're a bunch of apes, shaved and straightened up a little.

Interviewer: Maybe it will be a good thing if we all lose a few taboos.

Couzens: Well, maybe. I just wish it was a little more, umm, aesthetic. And there's more of it to come. You people seem to extend the reach of the WormCams deeper into the past every day. I suppose the revelations will go on until we can see back before the birth of anyone alive now.

And then we'll start rewriting the history books.