Summary: By Tim Pratt Read by A Kovacs Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in Diet Soap (2007) All stories by Tim Pratt All stories read by A Kovacs Rated 17 and up for explicit language Observer Effects By Tim Pratt “Ubiquitous surveillance isn’t the problem. Asymmetrical ubiquitous surveillance is the problem.” The Liberator was playing Chinese checkers against himself and talking, talking, talking, like always. “Who watches the watchmen, after all?” We were superheroes then. Celebrities, back when there were such things. It was a slow night at orbital headquarters, and Eye-Oh was sitting at the big screen, watching a couple of people fuck — consensually, or we would have done something about it — in an alleyway. The screen was green with night-vision enhancements, and Eye-Oh’s strange complicated face was perfectly placid and empty as he observed. “The problem is that we can watch ordinary people, and they can’t watch us,” the Liberator went on. He looked at me longingly, searchingly, and I thought it might be nice to tweak the inside of his brain and get rid of his earnestness, give him a little taste of what infamous brain-damage victim Phineas Gage got when that iron bar slammed through his frontal lobe, a total personality turnaround, from nice guy to sociopath. Let the Liberator be selfish and impulsive and violent and mercurial for a while, so he could appreciate the way normal avaricious sneaky hungry desperate needy people felt. But that was supervillain thinking, and I’d gone straight and narrow. In those days I cured neurological damage instead of inflicting it. I fixed people. (Except bad people. Those, I was sometimes still allowed to play with with.) I’d refused to give up my supervillain name though. The Liberator had wanted to call me “Dr. Neuro” when I joined his little boys’ club, but I’d insisted on keeping my maiden name, as it were. Doctor. Please. I was a high-school dropout. “Do you see?” the Liberator said. “If ordinary people could see us, if everyone could see everyone else, it wouldn’t matter if there were no privacy.” “Mmm,” I said, and tried to keep reading my book, a physics textbook. I was deep into a chapter on Heisenberg. His big achievement was the uncertainty principle, which says you can’t know both the position and the momentum of a given particle at the same time. (I know, you know that. But like I said, I didn’t do much school. I had a lot of catching up to do if I was going to hang with the super-science types.) I always thought the uncertainty principle had something to do with observing, how just the act of looking at something changed its nature, but apparently that’s a whole different thing, called the observer effect. That’s the kind of confusion you get when your grasp of physics comes from made-for-TV science fiction movies named after the monster that eats the boyfriend in the second act. I wasn’t too clear on the implications of the uncertainty principle, but I understood the observer effect. Me and the boys observed things all the time — Eye-Oh observed _everything_ all the time — and we sure as hell changed what we saw if we thought it needed changing. “In cultures where many people live in the same house, or otherwise in close quarters, they develop coping mechanisms to deal with the lack of privacy,” the Liberator said. “They are capable not just of ignoring one another, but of genuinely _not noticing_ certain actions or behaviors of a personal and intimate nature. If everyone in the world could see everyone else, at will, we would all surely develop those same skills, do you see? Selective blindness for the greater social good.” “Sure, sure,” I said, and turned a page. “But for now it’s one-way. We can watch ordinary people, and see them[...]
