A Philosophical Investigation

3

Jake’s hotel, at least the exterior, reminded her of a detention centre she had once visited in Los Angeles. Outside, there was only a doorman and a taxi-rank to remind you that it was a hotel at all. She would not have been surprised to see a machine-gun nest on top of the knot of the bowtie-shaped building.

She went into the bar and sat up at the counter, ordering a whisky sour and twenty Nicofree, and munching a handful of pistachio nuts while the pale-faced barman unwrapped the cigarettes for her. He lit her silently and then set about mixing her drink.

Jake glanced over her shoulder and checked the room, careful not to make eye-contact with any of the lonelyhearts business travellers who, seeing an attractive single woman, might think they could get lucky with her.

Like the interior of an expensive German car, the hotel bar had a relentless, almost Spartan modernity about it. Charcoal-grey carpet covered the floor and the walls up to the sills of the toughened tinted windows. The black leather seats might have met with a chiropractor’s approval but were hardly relaxing to sit in. The handsome, polished walnut counter displayed a variety of small screens informing guests, at the flick of a cue-button, of everything from the bar-tariff to the evening’s programme of films on cable in the hotel bedrooms.

Jake turned back to face the sharpshooter’s array of bottles behind the bar and fetched her drink off the counter, trying to ignore the hopeful who was already standing next to her in his smooth Italian suit.

‘Is anyone sitting here?’ he asked, in halting German.

‘Nobody but the Lord,’ she replied with greater fluency. She fixed the man with a smug beatific smile of the kind she had seen deployed by the most sickly sweet televangelists.

‘Tell me, friend,’ she asked him quickly. ‘Are you saved?’

The man hesitated, his confidence fading fast in the face of this apparent display of religious zeal.

‘Er, no...’

Jake smiled to herself as she reviewed his likely thought processes. How lucky could a man get with a woman who seemed interested only in the state of his immortal soul?

‘Some other time perhaps,’ said the man, retreating.

‘There’s always time for Jesus,’ Jake remarked, her eyes widening like a madwoman’s. But he was gone.

Jake sipped her drink and laughed. The missionary routine: it never failed. She was an old hand at drinking alone in bars. Unwanted male approaches (and for Jake, all male approaches were unwelcome) seemed no more of an irritation than mosquitoes for some hardened South American explorer: easily swatted and, after a while, you got used to them. She knew that she could have avoided them altogether if she had only frequented lesbian bars. If only things had been that simple.

‘Can I buy you a drink?’ He was an American and naturally assumed that the whole world could speak English.

Jake, who spoke good German, flirted with the idea of pretending to speak not a word of English and then rejected it: she knew that when a man wanted to get into a girl’s pants, conversation could count for very little.

‘I don’t know whether you can or you can’t,’ she said dully.

‘What?’ said the man, wincing.

Jake took a square look at him. Short-haired, fresh-faced, he seemed to be not much older than his collar-size. If he had appeared a little more intelligent, she told herself, she might have fucked him.

‘Yes, it is hot.’

The young American smiled bitterly. ‘What is your problem?’

‘Right now it’s that aftershave, sonny.’ Jake shifted on her stool. ‘Run along before it affects my contact lenses.’

The American’s face took on a nasty look. His lips pursed several times before he thought of something to say back to her.

‘Ball breaker,’ he snarled and then stalked away.

Jake snorted with contempt, although she knew that was what she was: that and a bit more. She could almost have been lesbian except that she hadn’t much liked it when she tried it. Faith, a lesbian friend at Cambridge, had once told her that Jake’s sexuality reminded her of something Jeremy Bentham had said about John Stuart Mill: he rather hated the ruling few than loved the suffering many. It wasn’t, Faith had said, that Jake loved women but that she hated men.

Her hatred of men was every bit as intense as aversions to heights, open spaces, and spiders were for other people; and it had been learned in much the same way as a rat is conditioned to press a lever in order to avoid an electric shock.

The instrument of her own aversive conditioning, a term with which she became familiar when she studied natural sciences at Cambridge, was less direct than electricity, and left no visible scar tissue; but the particular stimulus produced an effect that was just as painful as anything that might have been inflicted with a couple of strategically-placed electrodes; and while the injuries may have been invisible, they felt just as permanent as if they had been burnt into her naked flesh.

An ungrateful child was no match for the venom in the cerebro-spinal needle of a father’s hatred.

She finished her drink and ordered another. The barman mixed it quickly as if he had learned his trade in the pits at the Indianapolis 500. But there was nothing wrong with the way it tasted and Jake nodded appreciatively at him.

She glanced at her wristwatch. Before she went to bed she ought to read the information file Gilmour had given to her. There wasn’t much to stay in the bar for. Easy to see why Frankfurt was host to so many international trade fairs and conferences, she thought. It was the kind of city with absolutely no distractions: no nightlife, no scenery to speak of, no historical buildings, no theatres, no decent cinemas. About the most interesting place she had seen was Frankfurt airport. She finished her drink, signed the bill and then went out to the lobby.

The lift arrived in a rush of air and Jake stepped in. She told the computer the floor number and watched the doors close. They were not quite quick enough to prevent the young American who had talked to her at the bar from squeezing his way into Jake’s lift at the last second.

‘You should be more friendly,’ he said, and touched her breast.

Jake smiled, the better to catch him off his guard. She was still smiling as she raked his shin with the side of her shoe. The man yelled and clutched instinctively at his injured leg. Which left him leaning nicely into the smart uppercut that was already rising like a piston towards the point of his chin. It was all over in a few seconds. The lift door was opening at Jake’s floor and she was rubbing her knuckles and stepping over the American’s supine body.

‘Ground floor,’ she said to the computer and walked onto the landing, the lift doors closing silently behind her. The hotel corridor was as long as an autobahn. She hoped to be back in her room before the man recovered himself and made it back up from the lobby. Outside the door of her room she stopped and fumbled in her bag for her key. Then she remembered there was no key. The door was voice-print activated.

‘Jakowicz,’ she said, and the door sprang open.

Halogen light escaping from the four enormous glass parapets which dominated the top of the hotel’s two wings poured through the embrasure-sized window like a cinema projection. Jake lit a cigarette, nicotine free, but the smoke felt good in her lungs, and picked up her PC and inserted Gilmour’s information disk.

When she had read the menu she pressed the ‘Return’ key as instructed.

Jake read this first section of the information program, yawned and then went to the window of her hotel room. In the distance she could see the Main River which was the same washed-out colour of grey as the sky. A barge the size of a high street hooted as it made its slow, smooth way across the riverscape. She didn’t care for Frankfurt anymore than she cared to spend her evening reading about crime prevention strategies. The truth was that Jake had little faith in any of these. She saw it all as a great waste of money when criminal investigation was still comparatively under-resourced.

Thoroughly distracted now, she turned the Nicamvideo set on and flicked through the 42 cable-channels. Her German was good but there were no programmes that seemed to make it worth the trouble of listening. Briefly she found herself detained with a sex film in which a couple were taking a bath together. The girl reminded her of Grace Miles: a strong, athletic-looking black woman with large breasts and a behind like a well-stuffed haversack. But when she started to suck the man’s cock with all the languorous concentration of a child eating an ice-cream, Jake wrinkled her lip with distaste and turned the set off.

Could they actually imagine that a woman enjoyed doing that kind of thing? She shrugged. Perhaps they just didn’t care.

She lit another Nicofree and returned reluctantly to her PC to read the rest of the information disk.

a. Failure of prevention strategies for violent crime.

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, British society sought to control whole groups, populations and environments. The emphasis was not so much on community control as on control of communities. Technology and resources were directed towards surveillance, prevention and control, rather than ‘tracking’ the individual adjudicated offender. The thinking was to manipulate the external environment to prevent the initial infraction. The community continued to be involved but the reality was rather less comfortable. Fortress-living, armed guards patrolling schools and airports were simultaneously solutions and problems: problems in that they were helping to create the urban nightmares which caused people to revolt against their physical environments.

With the failure of schemes which aimed to ameliorate the environment, the accent returned to tracking the individual offender. The adoption in 1997, following mass-immigration to the EC of Hong Kong Chinese refugees, of an EC national identity card scheme enjoyed considerable success. This was made even more effective when the ID card was able to include DNA-Profiling. As a result, and for the first time ever, the machinery was now in place which enabled Government to track the individual before he offended at all.

b. Social and philosophical background.

The 1990s witnessed the discrediting of socially and economically fatalistic theories of why people commit violent crime. Attending only to the exterior causes of crime diminished any sense of personal responsibility. Today society no longer takes exclusive blame for how a person became a criminal any more than the individual himself: a combination of social and individual factors is seen as a better way to account for every kind of criminal behaviour.

Determinism is not considered to constitute a menace to freedom in the new century. A pragmatic assumption of order made for the sake of advancing scientific enquiry can hardly be questioned. This reverses an earlier trend in the social sciences which mistakenly sought to protect freedoms by confining determinism to the physical world, thus effectively ‘outlawing’ all attempts at establishing some kind of ‘biological determinism’.

Modern social science does not consider predictability and generalisation to be dangerous. Indeed, any advance in social science without first establishing certain notions about human behaviour would not have been possible. To claim infinite adaptability for human behaviour is no longer valid. Thus the concept that violent criminality has no real roots in us, being an external socially-produced phenomenon, is now wholly discredited.

The last ten years has seen enormous advances made in the science of somatogenics, and in particular the aetiology of most mental disorders (with the exception of conversion disorders, such as neurosis). It is now accepted that most mental illness has some organic cause. There has occurred a similar revolution in what is known about organic pathology and its relation to violent crime.

Neurological research has centred on sexual dimorphism, that is, the difference between male and female brains. Leading this field was Professor Burgess Phelan of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology in the University of Cambridge, and director of the Laboratory of Neuro-Endocrinology at the London Brain Research Institute.

Phelan’s work followed the discovery, by a UCLA scientist, in the preoptic area of the male rat, of what became known as the Sexually Dimorphic Nucleus (SDN). This area, which helped direct sexual behaviour, was five times larger in male rats than in females. Yet another area of the rat brain that showed difference in size according to sex was the Ventro Medial Nucleus (VMN), associated with both eating and aggression. It was discovered that amputation or even a small lesion of a rat’s VMN made the male rat extraordinarily aggressive. But a similar lesion in the VMN of the female rat did not affect it at all.

Using surgical brain atlases and the brains of volunteer male convicts, Burgess Phelan discovered an SDN and a VMN in the human brain. That like rats, the human male’s SDN was several times larger than a female’s. He also discovered that in human males, the VMN acted as an inhibitor to male aggression; that if the SDN was removed, the man was not aggressive at all; but that otherwise the absence or amputation of the VMN made the male, like the rat, more aggressive. Equally, aggression in human females, with smaller SDNs, was not affected by the absence or amputation of the VMN.

The results of Phelan’s research were taken up by Professor David Gleitmann, of the Department of Forensic Neuro-endocrinology at the London Brain Research Institute. He discovered that some violent criminals had no VMN at all; that they were VMN-negative.

Originally this important discovery was made surgically. However, a breakthrough in the technology of Proton Emission Tomography, the so-called PET scan, enabled Gleitmann to take detailed colour photographs of the brain inside living human skulls. With these pictures Gleitmann was able to establish, within a matter of a few minutes, the presence or absence of a VMN and, as a corollary, latent criminality.

Professor Gleitmann’s research has so far revealed that violent criminality in the VMN-negative subject may always remain merely latent. Current scientific investigation centres on the possibility that many men who are VMN-negative somehow manage to stabilise their own levels of aggression by producing an increased quantity of oestrogen.

In 2005, the average cost in the EC of a murder investigation was an EC$ 750,000. The same year there were some 3500 homicides, representing an investigative cost to the Community of EC$ 2.6 billion. In an attempt to try and reduce this staggering cost it was decided by the Europarliament to adopt Professor Gleitmann’s research within the context of an experimental program to be undertaken in one member country. Because of its higher than average record of violent crime, the UK was chosen and in 2011 the experiment began in the shape of the Lombroso Program.

Using a specially designed computer and a number of scanning centres in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, and Glasgow, men submit themselves to an examination. Those few who are discovered to be VMN-negative are guaranteed confidentiality in that only the computer is aware of their real identities. Codenames are issued by the computer, prior to the men being invited to attend a personal counselling session where the implications of the result are explained by a fully-qualified therapist. The accent is on help. Treatment is offered in the form of somatic therapies (most commonly oestrogen and/or psychiatric drugs). It is explained that the VMN-negative’s confidentiality will only be broken by the Lombroso computer if the respondent’s name occurs within the course of a police investigation into a violent crime.

So far over 4 million men have been scanned. Of these 0.003 per cent (120 men) have been revealed as VMN-negative. Of these, 30 per cent (36 men) were in prison or had some kind of a criminal record. At the time of writing, the Program has been instrumental in the apprehension of 10 violent criminals.

While the test is not mandatory, a number of factors have helped to persuade many men to take a test. In the first year of the Program there were small cash incentives which operated in the same way as giving blood. The Central Office of Information ran a series of television commercials to encourage men to be ‘good citizens’ and have themselves tested: these helped to dispel some of the myths and negative images which inevitably became attached to the Program. It wasn’t long, however, before employers in the public sector began to insist on tests for all their employees. And these were swiftly followed by health and insurance companies. It is generally held that the only barrier to testing more men has been the limited capacity of the Program facilities themselves.

For Jake it did not make agreeable reading. It was full of phrases which seemed almost to indicate a certain sympathy for these men who had the potential to become violent killers. A sympathy which as a law-enforcement officer she found irritating, and which as a woman and potential victim of violent crime she found outrageous.

When she had finished with the information disk, Jake hauled it out of her PC and, finding that the bedside table, which looked as if it had been constructed from three of Harry Lauder’s walking sticks, was too small for anything other than the baton-shaped lamp resting on it, she threw them both onto the bed with a snort of contempt.

She sat down in front of the window.

So what, if someone decided to kill a few potential psychos? It would save her the time and trouble of catching them. Not to mention the lives of all the innocent women they might eventually kill. Women like Mary Woolnoth. Jake could just picture herself facing the mother of one such victim and saying that her daughter’s murderer was only assessing his condition from what the information disk had referred to as R. D. Laing’s perspective — as a ‘voyage of self-discovery’.

‘Well that’s all right then, Chief Inspector Jakowicz. For a moment there I was really worried that my girl was raped and murdered for no good reason.’

She laughed out loud. It made, she thought, quite a change for someone to concentrate on killing men. Jake was struck by the irony of what she, the expert on serial gynocide, was expected to do. Briefly she entertained herself with visions of the stupid scared bastards accompanying each other home at night. Perhaps she might even issue a warning for men to stay indoors after dark. That would certainly put a severe dent in the well-polished bodywork of the collective male ego. Despite the Minister’s implied threat to her, something told Jake that she might actually enjoy this case.

At first I was a little shocked.

I wandered out of the Brain Research Institute in Victoria Street, having swallowed the two Valium which the counsellor had given me, as well as having agreed to the course of oestrogen tablets and psychotherapy that he had recommended, and went into the Chestnut Tree Café across the road. There I numbly took stock of my new situation in the world.

I remember being so dazed at what had happened that I completely forgot to imagine myself carrying out any mindless acts of violence against the other people in the café. Instead I drank several cups of coffee, ate a plate of cholesterol-free bacon-sandwiches and toyed glumly with the novelty of my new Lombroso-given name.

Situations can be described but not given names. Names are like points; propositions like arrows — they have sense. Maybe we’ll come back to the name. Let’s deal with the situation first.

I left the café and telephoned my own analyst to make an appointment for the next day. When I was back in my flat in Docklands, I stood beside the window for a while, as I often do, and watched the progress of the Thames down Greenwich reach, past the Isle of Dogs. Reality often disappoints and, under the brown fog of a winter noon, the city seemed somehow much less real than of old. And had done so for some time now.

What on earth did people do before there was Reality Approximation? What was there for those who found no substitute for sense to seize and clutch and penetrate? It was only my RA exoskeleton that enabled me to enjoy a world of colour and sensation — a world that resembles the real world, and more. This is the normal way in which I relax after a hard day. It’s no more addictive or a waste of time than television. I can occupy myself with an approximately real experience, often of my own devising, for hours at a time. Usually, I am climbing into the RA equipment the minute I come through the door, but on this occasion I didn’t feel like it at all. It was as much as I could do not to go into the bathroom and slash my wrists.

Can you blame me? From good citizen to social pariah in the space of a single afternoon? I ought to have seen the funny side, I suppose: me, the right-winger, always banging on about law and order, forever raising my voice against the abolitionists who would punish a murderer with nothing worse than a couple of years in a nice warm prison. Me, suddenly catapulted onto the other side of the jurisprudential fence. What a supreme irony. The sheer injustice of it. After all, I voted for them specifically because of their law-enforcement programme. I thought that something like this Lombroso Program would be a good idea. And look what happens: I get given the mark of Cain; on a computer file anyway.

Until that moment I had never given much thought as to which of my personal details appeared on what computers. I dare say I was aware that my bank, my employer, my building societies, my doctor, my dentist, my analyst, and possibly even the police (there was that old parking-ticket) all had information about me. But it never seemed to matter very much. I certainly wasn’t one of those who bleated on about civil liberties and Big Brother when the EC made the carrying of ID cards compulsory. Not even when they added a bar-code containing things like your genetic fingerprint. I have never even read 1984. What’s the point? It’s long past its sell-by-date.

They were reprising an old television series called ‘The Prisoner’ the other night. Very popular with the more disaffected sections of society. ‘I’m not a number, I’m a free man,’ exclaims the granite-jawed hero. Well now I know what he was so upset about. Russell said that there were simple relations between different numbers of things (individuals). But between what numbers? And how is this supposed to be decided? By experience? There is no pre-eminent number. Not number six. And certainly not number one.

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to erase my name and number from those files. I was not persuaded by all the guarantees of confidentiality that had seemed so irrelevant before taking the test. I felt like someone who had been persuaded to give a half-litre of blood in the expectation that it would be used to save a life, only to discover that it was to be fed to a colony of vampire bats in a zoo. Bats, what is more, who might well come and attack me while I was asleep. Because there is no telling what can become of information these days. Any database can become the target of unauthorised entry. Electronic vandalism is rife.

Suppose, I thought, that someone managed to break into the Lombroso Program’s database and, having got hold of the identities of those people who had tested VMN-negative, sold them to the News of the World? I could just envisage the headlines: WE NAME THE HUMAN TIME-BOMBS IN OUR COMMUNITIESl TOMORROW’S RIPPERS?/ SEEKING OUT THE PSYCHOS/ POSITIVE STEPS NEEDED TO CANCEL OUT THESE NEGATIVES...

I had read enough about the activities of the Cologne Chaos Computer Club to know that for the really determined electronic burglar, even the most sophisticated system of data-security is vulnerable.

Probably it was the effect of the sedatives, only it took me several more minutes to realise that if someone else could break into the Lombroso database and steal personal information about me, then so could I. Not only was I possessed of all the equipment for such a task — PC, modem, the telephone company’s Jupiter computer information system, digital protocol analyser — I suddenly recalled the most important fact of all, which was the basic information for entering and using the system.

I have always been interested in all kinds of electrical equipment, an interest which originally was encouraged by my grandfather, who owned a chain of electrical retailers. There was nothing electrical which he and, after a while I, couldn’t fix. So when I was back there in the waiting room at the Brain Research Institute, confidently anticipating my PET scan, it had been quite natural for me to start trying to adjust the television set they had in there when I saw that it was on the blink.

The problem was a simple one — a channel improperly tuned — and I had just started to rectify this when I noticed that the set, which was rather an old one, was picking up electromagnetic radiation from one of the computer installations in the building. Somewhere in the Institute, a VD U was radiating out harmonics on the same frequency as the television set. There was something almost readable on the television screen and by adjusting the direction of the desktop antenna I found that I was able to see that it was an image of information that someone was feeding into the Lombroso computer. It’s roughly the same principle that used to enable the old television detector vans to see if you were using an unlicensed set, when there were still such things as TV licences. It wasn’t a particularly clear image, just black letters on a white background, and the picture had a tendency to swim, but it was easy enough to recognise a basic entry code, an individual operator’s personal ‘key’ word, and the Lombroso system’s password for the day.

The image of the computer-hacker spending many hours in front of a screen trying to break into a system is a false one. He is more often to be found scavenging in a company’s refuse bins in an attempt to find a piece of information that will provide a clue as to the computer system’s password. In other words, I had already achieved what is ordinarily the most difficult part of any hacker’s task.

I cannot say that at the time I consciously committed this information to memory. There was no reason for me to have done so, believing as I did then that I would pass the PET scan without a problem. Perhaps fate plays a hand in these things, for later on I found that I was able to visualise the various numbers and codewords on that anonymous operator’s VDU as easily as if I had been sitting in front of it myself.

Of course, all a password does is to get you into the system. Then you have to find out which set of rules or protocol the target system is using so that you can interface with it and speak the same computer language. That’s where the protocol analyser comes in handy. It has got some ingenious software that examines the other system’s entry port to see which of the many data communication protocols is in use.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, because I encountered my first major difficulty the minute I buttoned the Brain Research Institute’s telephone number. They weren’t even on the public switched telephone network. They were using a private leased line — the newly installed ECDN, the European Community Data Network. This included records for all member governments and their various departments on one exclusive network.

I was still not thinking properly, and it was at least another minute before I recalled that the computer system at work was on the ECDN. All employers in the public sector, Police, Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise, Medical, Information, Employment, Women, Conservation were on it.

I tapped my head with the flat of my hand. It was obvious that if I really was going to do this and use the computer system at work, I was also going to need some juice. So the first thing I did before unplugging the analyser and going out to the van was to find my cognitive enhancement pills.

Nobody at work was surprised to see me. I’m often working late at night, catching up on the administrative paperwork for which there’s little time during the course of an average, underpaid and over-working day. Anyway, I switched on the computer, and while it was warming up and coming on line, I started swallowing. Dilantin for sustained periods of concentration. Hydergine for a general intelligence increase through the drug’s creation of extra synapses. And Vasopressin, a neural hormone which helps to improve the memory. To be honest, I’ve been using a combination of cognitive enhancers for a while now, so I was just topping up the dose. The effect on the human brain, while we’re in the way of talking about computers, is that of upgrading a machine from say 40 to about 50 terabytes. But to really get myself warmed up, I finished this cocktail of drugs I had swallowed with some cocaine.

Have you ever shot coke in the vein? It hits that medullar brain centre like electro-convulsive therapy and switches you on like the Christmas lights on New Oxford Street. For about fifteen minutes you’re in the seat of an F26 with all your cannons blazing, your laser-guidance keeping you locked onto the tail of some enemy plane. As an aid to pure concentration it’s terrific. No wonder Sherlock Holmes found it an aid to investigation. You feel as if there’s a new intelligence working within you. If you were to inject some into the computer’s software port you would not be surprised if the machine were literally jolted into life itself, like something dreamt up by Mary Shelley. Normally I’ll use about.20 of a gram, however I had the suspicion that I was going to need a longer flight than normal if I was to be able to run where I wanted within the Lombroso system. So I made a solution that was twice my normal percentage and pushed the needle into the skin.

Using the ECDN, and with a legitimate identity, I was interfacing with the BRI in less than a minute. They must have anticipated having to deal with unauthorised entrants to the system, because the very first thing that happened was that a nude Marilyn Monroe graphic appeared on my screen and, with a wiggle of her lifelike bottom, asked me if I felt lucky.

‘Because if you can answer just three little old questions you and your reality approximation software get to fuck my brains out.’

Marilyn was referring to the software which controlled the computer’s optional body attachments and which enabled one to enjoy an approximate physical sensation of whatever kind of reality was being created. This kind of Reality Approximation program was very popular in the amusement arcades. Like I said before, I own an RA machine and body suit myself.

‘Well?’ pouted Marilyn. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

Even though I did not have my own RA suit with me, I wasn’t about to fall for this. The point of Marilyn was to trap the unwary schoolkid hackers into wasting their time and not progressing any further within the system. I knew the chances were that if you did manage to answer Marilyn’s questions correctly and got to fuck her, then you were liable to discover that your own computer software had been infected with a very nasty, possibly terminal virus.

Marilyn dropped a hand between her legs and rubbed herself provocatively.

‘What’s the matter sugar?’ she cooed. ‘You one of them, or something?’ And, right on cue, Marilyn was immediately joined on screen by James Dean, wearing nothing else but the kind of gladiator-style outfit that would have looked very fetching in the heavy leather bars of Earls Court or Chiswick.

Before Jimmy could try and tempt me with his own particular brand of sexual allure, I typed ‘goodbye’ and then the Lombroso system’s password for the day which, according to my watch was due to expire in less than fifty minutes.

Marilyn and Jimmy disappeared as the password transported me into the basic operating system. Now I had to find the root directory with all the system files stored on it, and the easiest way of doing that was to reboot the system, to shut it down completely. So I pressed the right keys simultaneously and watched the screen clear itself of everything but a flashing ‘root’ prompt which told me that I was getting closer.

Next I told the computer to list all the sub-directories which were contained in the root. First up was the directory containing Lombroso personnel, and then several others which dealt with things like accounts, payroll, counselling procedures, PET scan operating procedures; last of all came the two subs I was particularly interested in accessing, which contained the super operating system and the VMN-negative database.

My optimistic attempt to immediately view the sub containing the VMN database was, as I had expected it would be, firmly denied with a reminder of the system’s first decretal, which was the confidentiality of this particular information. It seemed logical to assume that if I was going to be able to roam freely through the system as I wished, I would have to do it from the privileged access point of the so-called super operative — which in any system is usually the person who created it. So I accessed the super-op sub, and set about the creation of a trapdoor. I hadn’t been in there very long when I met Cerberus.

It’s difficult to say exactly how I triggered him. It could have been the very fact of my using an outside keyboard. Or it could have been the fact of my attempting to create a trapdoor from the super-operating sub into the VMN database, but suddenly there he was on-screen, a three-headed black dog graphic with blood-chilling sound effects, and guarding the system from anyone like me who sought to circumvent its first decretal. From the size and number of his teeth I was very glad I had not been wearing my Reality Approximation body suit. It was clear that I wasn’t going any further until I had dealt with him.

My intoxicated mind was already racing through a number of classically-inspired solutions. Could I drag the monster away, like Hercules, and release it outside of the Lombroso system, somewhere within the BRI’s ordinary administrative program files? Or, like Orpheus, could I lull the brute to sleep with the playing of my cithara or my lyre?

Well, I have always liked music and, quickly exiting the Lombroso system program, I set about the creation of a simple tune which I hoped might, in Congreve’s phrase, soothe the savage beast.

Re-typing the day’s password I faced Cerberus once more and played him my little melody, but to my surprise and irritation he shook each of his three heads, and growled, ‘I don’t like music, and what’s more Eurydice isn’t here. There are no women allowed in this particular nether world.’

Exiting the system once more I tried to remember how dead Greeks and Romans had been able to pass into Pluto’s kingdom without molestation. And wasn’t I forgetting Aeneas and the Sybil who had guided him through the Inferno? What was it that she had given Cerberus? A bone? No, that was not it. Some meat? No. It was a sop: a cake seasoned with poppies and honey with which she drugged the dog. And this was how the Greeks and the Romans had managed it too. A cake placed into the hands of the deceased. The only question was, what sort of cake might seem appetising to a computer-generated guard dog?

Cerberus was programmed to eat up anyone who attempted to disobey Lombroso’s first decretal which was to protect the confidentiality of its information. Thus the trick would be to create a cake that would enable Cerberus to fulfil a standard legitimate routine, specifically to eat someone or something, but which would hide a piece of unorthodox active instruction, specifically to fall asleep.

This took rather longer than I thought it would and by the time the cake was baked, so to speak, I could feel the effect of the cocaine beginning to wear off Even so, I was working at a furious pace and I don’t think that I could remember the exact lines of operating system code that I used in my programming recipe. However, the general effect was similar to a computer virus, except that the basic premise was to limit the action of the binary mechanism to Cerberus himself.

Back in the super-op sub-directory, I offered the shiny black beast the cake and, to my delight, he snapped it up greedily. He even licked his chops. For several seconds I waited to see if the ‘drug’ inside the cake would take effect. Then, almost as quickly as he had appeared, Cerberus fell to the bottom of the screen with a very audible computer SFX thud, and remained motionless.

With the system-guardian out of the way I returned to the trapdoor I had partially created. It seemed there were no other safeguards for halting unauthorised entry and so all I had to do was locate a set of partially accessible pages of data on how the VMN database was constructed, and then to progress from there. Think of it as like an architect knowing which walls were there to support a ceiling and which were not, and which walls might hide a ventilation shaft, or an inspection tunnel, through which a burglar might be able to pass.

Once the trapdoor was completed, I simply dropped through into the VMN database and, like some ghastly nouveau riche in an expensive restaurant ordering the waiters around as if he came there every night of the week, I told the computer to go and search for my file. Thus, in only a matter of a few seconds I had it and, in a few seconds more, had deleted it.

As with reference libraries, most major computer systems have a horror of missing material, and it’s normally one of the cardinal rules of electronic burglary that one leaves the database in the same condition as when one logged in. And so I accompanied my own heretical instruction to delete my file with a command that the computer make a hard copy of the whole VMN-negative database, in order that I should placate the system into permitting this one excision.

I don’t know that I meant to keep the hard copy I made on disk. As I say, at first it had been my intention merely to delete my own file. But then you don’t get to visit the underworld every day of the week. The more I thought about it, the greater was the temptation to do precisely what I had imagined some other unauthorised user doing, and retain the hard copy I had made of all the other VMN-negatives which Lombroso had recorded. Perhaps it was the drug which overcame whatever scruples I might have had about doing such a thing, but in the end the temptation was too great and I kept it.

It would be wrong to say that I knew what I was going to do with the list. 1 had certainly no intention of selling it to the News of the World. Money means little to me. Apart from that I had no more idea of what to do with it than I had of ethics or morals. It was something done on impulse, for which I made no apology since I firmly believe that one should be a creature of impulse. Principles and such things seem to me to be nonsense, unless of course they are principles of mathematics.

All the same, I feel that I must honestly record the fact that not only did I try to cover my tracks within the program itself, but also that I left in place a logic bomb for anyone who would attempt to uncover them. In logic nothing is accidental. Therefore I must believe that subconsciously at least, the real purpose of copying Lombroso’s list of VMN-negatives was already known to me. If at that stage my purpose, in a manner of speaking, could not be consciously imagined, nevertheless it must still have had something in common with the real world.

One hour later, when I was back in my own apartment, watching a film on the Nicamvision, a new state of affairs began to make itself obvious. To what extent the film itself was responsible, I have no idea, but my own situation seemed somehow to fit a thing that could already exist entirely on its own. Perhaps I had better describe the film. It was one of those old-style vigilante movies, a dystopian tale of the 1970s with a man taking a rough and ready concept of Justice straight through the chests and stomachs of evildoers. Stalking the streets and riding the New York subway at night, this terrible simplifier made himself the bait for unwitting muggers and murderers who, revealing their criminal hands, were themselves gunned down. This was a potent image for one such as myself. Because if things can occur in states of affairs, this possibility must be in them from the beginning.

Even if one discounts the depression I was feeling in the wake of my cocaine-use, the proposition which presented itself then still strikes me now as logical. As the only logical extension of the Lombroso Program.

But here am I reminiscing — I’d quite forgotten that I am supposed to be planning another execution.