“How much of a chance?”

“Nobody outside Panopticon knows for sure. If you ask, they tell you, ‘Less than a hundred percent, but more than zero.’ It’s a joke, see? ‘Ubiquitous intermittent surveillance’ means they aren’t always watching, but they always might be.”

“Do you think they’re watching now?”

“I think the odds are closer to a hundred percent than zero.”

The doctor reaches to take down the photograph, but it’s fixed firmly in place. “Well,” he says, “I suppose I could get a towel or a washcloth to drape over it.”

“Don’t bother. I don’t really care if they’re watching. Besides, those aren’t the only eyes in the room.” She points to the identification badge clipped to the front of his lab coat. “And you’ve got more photo I.D. in your wallet, right? And maybe some snaps of the family?”

“They can see out of my wallet?”

“No, but they can hear.”

“The Eyes have Ears?”

“It’s an imperfect metaphor. Panopticon’s run by geeks, not poets.”

The doctor takes out his wallet and does a quick survey of its contents. Peering into the billfold, he asks: “Do they put these devices on currency, too?”

“Oh yeah. Smart money, they call that. They use it to track cash transactions.”

“Interesting,” says the doctor. “And disturbing.”

“It’s scary when it works. But that’s the other half of the joke: the Eyes go blind a lot, and they miss stuff—whole trucks, sometimes.”

“Who told you about Eyes Only? Annie?”

“We covered it in dream class. But I guess you could say it was Dixon who really schooled me on the subject.”

“Did Mr. Dixon work for Panopticon?”

“A subdivision of Panopticon,” she says. “One that you really don’t want watching you…”

Malfeasance

I PASSED PROBATE.

I wasn’t expecting to; you’d think letting your Probate officer get killed would pretty much guarantee an F. But the Loose Ends team that collected Annie’s personal effects found a half-finished progress report that said I showed “real potential,” which I guess was enough to bump me to a D-minus.

A month later I got my first assignment as a full-fledged Bad Monkeys operative, at an old folks’ home in Russian Hill. A doctor in the critical-care ward was playing God with the senior citizens. He’d put stuff in their IVs to cause a cardiac arrest, then call an emergency code and bring them back to life. Sometimes he’d “save” the same patient two or three times before their systems couldn’t take it anymore.

He’d been at this long enough that the nurses on the ward were starting to get suspicious, and he probably would have been busted eventually, but the organization got wind of him first. Panopticon did a background check and found out he’d worked at three other old folks’ homes before this one. When Cost-Benefits heard that, they decided enough was enough.

I got a job sweeping floors on the night shift. My first night on, I caught Dr. God alone in the break room and gave him a taste of his own medicine.

That was it for the Bad Monkeys op, but I decided to keep working at the home for a while. I needed the money. It turned out Annie’s lottery stipend was a special deal just for her; whenever I bought scratch tickets, they were losers.

You didn’t ask Bob True to provide you with a salary?

Nah. After squeaking through Probate, I figured I wasn’t in a position to ask for anything. Besides, when I thought about it, it made sense: I was supposed to be doing this for the good of the world, not for a buck. And it’s not like they had me killing bad guys every day. I had more than enough downtime to manage a second job.

So I stayed on at the home, and even took a shot at having a personal life. I made friends with some of the night nurses and started going to breakfast with them after our shifts ended. There was also this cute doctor, John Tyler, who came in to replace Dr. God. I tried to get something going with him.

Did you?

No. I’d hang around the break room with him, you know, dropping hints, but he wasn’t interested. And not that I’m God’s gift, but I figured that probably meant he was gay. Then one night when he was off-duty I was sweeping the floor outside his office and noticed the door was unlocked. I decided to snoop a little, see if I could confirm my suspicions—or if he wasn’t a lost cause, find some clue to what might float his boat.

There was nothing out in the open. Nothing in his Rolodex, either. I started checking desk drawers, hit one that was locked, grabbed a paper clip…and then, when I had the drawer open and saw what was inside, I reached for the phone.

True was waiting for me on the roof of the nursing home at dawn. Catering had set out chairs and a buffettable, and as I came out of the stairwell, I saw a guy puttering around the tea service. I might have taken him for a waiter, except he looked more like nearsighted Gestapo: blond crew cut, black leather trench coat, and these thick pebble glasses, you know the kind they stopped making once plastic lenses were invented?

And this was Dixon?

Yeah, although I didn’t catch his name right away. He didn’t introduce himself, and I was in too much of a hurry to tell True what I’d found to insist on the niceties.

“The drawer was full of pictures,” I said. “Pictures of little boys. Not, like, hardcore stuff; they were cutouts from mainstream magazines, product ads mostly: little boys in blue jeans, little boys in bathing suits, little boys in underwear…I suppose there could be an innocent explanation, but what makes that hard to believe is how many of them there were. I mean, we’re talking stockpile, hundreds of images…”

“Five hundred and forty-four, at last count,” said True. “There’s also a catalog of parochial-school uniforms hidden at the back of the X-ray drawer in his filing cabinet.”

“You already knew about this?”

“Eyes Only,” True said.

It took me a minute to get my head around the concept. “You bug children’s underwear ads?”

“An obvious strategy for identifying pedophiles. Though perhaps not as cost-effective as initially hoped.” He glanced at the guy in the pebble glasses, who was sitting down now, stirring his tea.

“So I was right. Dr. Tyler is a bad monkey.”

“He has potential.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that so far as we know, he’s never laid a hand on a real child, or even tried to. He just thinks about it.”

“So what?”

“So, wicked thoughts alone aren’t enough to classify someone as irredeemable.”

I couldn’t believe it. “You’re not going to do anything?”

“We’re evaluating him. If it’s warranted, we’ll arrange a Good Samaritan operation to get him some counseling.”

“That’s it? You might make him see a shrink?”

“I was referring to moral counseling, actually,” True said. “If his own conscience isn’t enough to keep his impulses in check, I doubt psychiatry will be much use…What is it you’d like us to do, Jane? Execute someone for keeping magazine clippings?”

“Well if you’re not going to send me in, you could at least let people know about him.”

“And beyond ruining the reputation of a man who’s done nothing wrong, what would that accomplish?”

“Jesus, True, do you really need me to spell it out?”

“I do appreciate your feelings in this matter…”

“You appreciate—”

“You’re a proactive personality,” True said. “When you see a potential threat, you want to eradicate it. That’s a useful instinct in a hunter, and it’s one of the reasons you’re in Bad Monkeys. My desires are a bit different, however. Like you, I want to fight evil, but I want to fight it effectively. In particular, I want to make sure that when the organization acts, it’s out of a reasonable expectation of a positive result, and not just for the sake of doing something. That’s why I’m in Cost-Benefits. And that’s why you take your orders from me.”