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  Hacking off most of your fingernail is supposed to be humane; the chip is very sensitive to pressure to stop you trying to cut it out. So the nail gets grafted on as protection. But it doesn't take Sigmund Freud to figure out that mutilation is a way of impressing the full majesty of the law on the reprobate.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention as the nail got stuck into place, and a Band-Aid got stuck on top of that.

  (One other point of information, brethren and sistern; in the old days, the state used to beat the crap out of dissidents, imprison them, or kill them. Nowadays, instead of guns they have tasers and bean-bag guns or those sound systems that give you a massive pain in the goolies . . . The state doesn't kill or do anything headline-grabbingly horrible anymore. They have the technology to tackle dissent "humanely." And because of that they can be loads more repressive. Okay, sorry, I'll shut up now.)

  "Next!" slurred the Finlay. In a flurry of strap-undoing and wire-disconnecting, the goons hauled me from the chair. I noticed the doc's hands were falling to pieces; he had eczema like Siberia has tree-stumps. And he wasn't wearing gloves. He had probably left a quarter of his healing hands in the root of my brain.

I was kept with some of the others – all men – in a bare cell with a couple of buckets, one for drinking water, the other for the bog.

  We swapped notes; how much the implant hurt, what Babylon would do next, how long we'd all be sentenced for, how Amnesty International would save us. But after the first couple of hours, nobody said much. Some tried to sleep, some used various meditation techniques to chill. Some just stared at the wall. I tried to sleep as much as possible. I'd already figured that the local on my finger wasn't going to last and it'd get bloody sore. I was right.

  In two days, they fed us once. A nice old duffer came in with a big box of Tesco sandwiches. There was lots of meat and fish, but as we were starving we just threw the animalstuff away. The butties were two or three days past sell-by. They were supposed to go to the roofless, the shanties, and other first quadranters – a charity handout. I guess the manager of this branch of Cops R Us had told the Sally Army he didn't have the budget to feed us.

A.M. on day three, we got sentenced. Our brief was a brisk young woman done up in pearls and navy pinstripe who said: "plead guilty or spend ten years on remand," i.e. in prison. Plead guilty, she said, and you'll be free in a few months.

  The courtroom was empty apart from a few rent-a-cops and suits. The press and public galleries were empty. Since Babylon was marketing the bust as a major victory against terrorism and declining family values, they invoked state security to keep media, friends, and relatives away. My eloquent defense would impress no one. I pleaded guilty.

  "Brian Harper," said His Honor consulting the terminal on the bench, "the grave offences to which you have pleaded guilty are in no way mitigated by the misguided, and if I may say so, intellectually sloppy ideology to which you and your co-defendants adhere. However, in view of your comparative maturity – you are . . . let me see . . . twenty-eight years old – and your hitherto clean record, I am prepared to be lenient in the hope that when you have served out your sentence, you can make something of yourself . . ."

  This was good.

  "I sentence you to three months reparative custody for criminal damage, three months reparative custody for conspiracy to commit criminal damage, and twelve months for being an accessory to trespass in an electronic communications system. The sentences will run consecutively."

  Eighteen months! A year and a half! Aaaarrgh!

  "The crimes were all committed against Southern Cable PLC," continued His Judgeship. "They will take custody of all defendants in this case . . ."

  This might be good. Often the victims don't want their taggies, so they get privatized. You could end up breaking rocks, breaking the necks of chickens, assembling hardware . . . Working for a cable TV company didn't sound too dirty or dangerous. And we'd all be together.

  Babylon knew this but didn't care. Babylon also knew of the Margin's greatest coup. A while before I joined they'd put Satan – Iron John's creation – into the stock system of Homeworld. Satan tumbled all the swipe numbers to one, the number for a gift-set of leatherex-bound novels by Jeffrey Archer – exactly the thing Mrs. Middle England would put in her front room to convince visitors she was a person of taste.

  Homeworld had a just-in-time setup. Satan went live at 2:30 P.M. on a Sunday, and all over the country, stores – and the Homeworld Virtual Store – reordered nothing but these books from the merchandising bot, which automatically showed the supplier a legally binding contract. The Late Lord Archer's estate ended up a lot richer, and a printer somewhere ended up very rich indeed.

  The Marginals never got busted for that. Homeworld was not a contributor to the funds of either of our two interchangeable ruling parties.

  We were bagged and tagged for the Cable job. A couple of the zits had come up with the plan; wire is very vulnerable to elves and goblins and long-leggedy beasties. So they rigged up a van with a generator and all their magic boxes. My role was minimal – touring scrap yards picking up lengths of old coax cable. When everything was ready, they cut into all five of their porn channels at 3 A.M. with just a superimposed caption: "YOU'LL GO BLIND." The van injected from waste ground a mile from the borders of the nearest gated municipality while the rest of us watched at IJ's house.

  It worked.

  We met the women on the bus. There was a lot of hugging and chatter and a sort of feeling of relief.

  It amounted to: nobody was going to prison (excellent), we were going somewhere together (good), we were going to be given to a cable company (probably good), and they were all going to the West Country (there are worse places).

  Mo sat down next to me, managing a smile. Mo was about my age, five and a bit feet tall with short, red hair and several layers of unkempt clothing.

  "How're you doing?" she asked.

  I shrugged. "How's your finger?"

  "Fine. You can control physical pain easy enough. It's all this shit that's hard to deal with."

  "Could be worse," I said fatuously.

  The bus set off. Mo and I chatted. She, too, got eighteen months as she'd had little to do with the cable scam. Mo was no fundie, but distrusted technology. Man-stuff, she called it. Computers work by machine code, she said. Binary can only handle on or off, right or wrong, yes or no. Same thing with what they put up on screen; the only way to deal with a game-nasty or virtual enemy was to kill it. No room to be kind to it, no way to change it; machine code has no maybes, said Mo.

  I wanted to tell her she was way behind the times, but I guessed it would be pointless. She'd only have argued that no amount of logical relativism in programming and no amount of games where you needed empathizing or negotiation skills changed the basic facts.

  Instead I said, "Poor Phyllis," noticing she wasn't on the bus.

  "Bitch," said Mo.

  "Oh come on," I said, surprised. "They'd have given her a terrible time. You can't blame her for breaking under pressure."

  Mo looked at me like slantwise. "Haven't you heard?"

  "Heard what?"

  "Phyllis was a plant. She works for Safe 'n' Sound Security. She was an infiltrator, a mole. Her job was to give us away in time for the election."

  "Oh," I said, then said nothing for quite a while.

  "Once we could freak around with the wire," Mo went on, "what were we going to do? Broadcast programs about whales and dolphins? Run meditation workshops? Tell people the government were liars? We'd not decided. We tried to cast a spell without visualizing the result."

  Just beyond Chiswick, I realized I fancied Mo. It was no big deal; I used to fall in love at least twice a week (as I was only too painfully aware). Every time I felt it would be different.

  This time I felt
it
would be different. Mo had strength and sense and, with all that witchstuff, she had an aura of serenity and mystery. I closed my eyes and in rushed this weird idea of her and me having babies. And I liked that.

  This was very odd. At the time, I simply put it down to the stresses of events.

  So I told her what I'd been thinking. It was clumsy, but there was no time for the usual etiquette. Besides, I'd tried this ploy before. ("Hi, my name's Brian and I've chosen you to have my babies.") Sometimes they hit me, or whistled up fifteen stone of musclebound drongo boyfriend. Usually they just laughed and ignored me.

  Mo put her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her, and we said nothing.

An hour later the bus was still bowling along the guide lane when a guy at the front, a tall, nervy bloke with a beard, stood up and speeched.

  "Okay folks, listen up. My name is Daniel Organ, and I'm your probation officer. I'm not supposed to do this, but it's only fair to let you know what's going to happen . . ."

  Everyone looked up.

  "Southern Cable has accepted custody of you all. They'll be sacking some of their cleaning staff and junior technicians and replacing them with some of you . . . Most of you, though, will be assigned to the homes of individual members of the Board and to some senior managers."

  We took this in silence. "Sounds like a roll of the dice to me," I said to Mo at last. "You might end up with a good family, or a bad one."

She snorted. "This isn't justice."

  Tagging was the Law and Order magic bullet of the moment, a cost-effective way of dealing with convicts. If someone had mugged you, or burgled your house, they became your property for the term of sentence. You could use their labor to make some kind of restitution. A lot of people liked the idea because victim and perpetrator looked each other in the face; it helped them deal with it. In tests, it usually turned criminals into more useful people than being locked in a prison cell twenty-three hours a day. And if people didn't want their own personal criminal, the taggie could be sold to some firm as a laborer for the term of sentence and his pay would go to the victim. Not that the pay ever amounted to much.

  But this was wrong; we were being handed over like a basket of party favors to people we had not harmed directly.

  "You want to put the big pink ribbons round our necks now or later?" said someone behind us.

  Daniel Organ produced a small box with a keypad, like the remote control for a Drudge or a Hent System. "This is colloquially known as the Bastard Box, the Pain Pack, and several other things. This particular handset can control all of you, which is why there are no guards on this bus. I'm not going to demonstrate even the minimum extent of pain which can be inflicted via your implants, but what I will do is show you how it can be used to immobilize you. Please brace yourselves . . ."

  He squeezed his thumb against the keypad, and everyone stiffened. Some of the others even stood to attention.

  I couldn't move. No matter how much I told my arms and legs to do something, anything dammit, they would not obey.

  Daniel Organ squeezed the pad again. Instantly, my limbs resumed obeying orders.

  "You are supposed to have certain rights, but forget them. We don't have enough people to visit you even once during your term. If you're lucky, you might get a visitor from the Howard League for Penal Reform, or a nice old lady from some charitable organization. If they do visit, and you have a problem with your owner, don't bother complaining. You'll only make things harder for yourself. You are the property of the person into whose custody you are transferred, and that's that. On the plus side, most of you are being assigned to private individuals. You're not being given to a hazardous waste cleaning company, or a quarrying firm. And I don't imagine any of these nice folks are going to try setting up gladiatorial combats between pairs of you . . .

  "You are not permitted visits from family and friends. You can write to them once a month via the Probation Service. Your letters will be read by the censor, and any attempt to disclose your whereabouts will be removed from the letter . . ."

  The censor needn't have worried about me. My mother died years ago, and I never got on with the old man. I hadn't seen him for years anyhow. And I didn't have any friends who'd be the sort to risk springing me.

  "Don't imagine that you or any expert can tamper with either your box or the system," continued Organ. "The codes are immense, and they're changed every fifteen minutes. Britain's privatized penal set-up is now in the hands of global corporations who earn vast amounts of money, and you may be sure that their systems are very secure. They've not been cracked yet. And don't believe any stories you hear about people who can reconfigure the box to give you orgasms instead of pain. It's not true. Which is probably just as well.

  "By the way, don't get too upset if nobody comes to release you on the exact date your time's up. That's just the way things are. Someone will remember you eventually."

When the bus left the motorway the signposts were for places like Bristol and Weston-Super-Mare. A short while later it pulled up at a well-lit gatehouse, with two heavily armed rent-a-cops dressed like New York's Finest (the more a private security goon's dress looks like something out of Hollywood, the less they get paid . . .), a robot dog, surveillance cameras, the lot. The sign said WELCOME TO HINTON LEA.