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instantly of knowing how to do a thing and of doing it. You could plug a kid from the urban ghetto into the head of an engineer, give him a sense of the pleasure that came with finding a successful design for a turbine blade, and the pure joy of holding the actual object in his hand, fresh from the cadcam shop, then dump him back into the classroom and say “And that’s why you want to learn math.” You could take a fat, shy, laughable nebbish and give him the experience of being physically beautiful and confident, then haul him out and say “This can all be yours, really yours, if you’ll get to the gym and the personality development courses.”
    You could take a psychopath with no empathy and give him the experience of being a victim. That was the experiment that revealed the flaw.
    Legally it took them some years to get cleared to try it on a prisoner. The first time, it was merely the accident that an XV reporter had been raped, mutilated, and left for dead while the recorder was running. Many experts confidently predicted that if habitual violent criminals were exposed to that tape, and really understood what they were doing to their victims, they would stop doing it.
    In fact, once they had felt the terror and pain themselves, inflicting it on
others gave them more of a thrill than ever. It was the effect they had been hoping they were having. One former model prisoner became so excited by the XV tape that he raped an unarmed male guard on his way back to his cell block.
    The human race’s great past cynics, everyone from Lao-tzu through Ben Jonson to Simone de Beauvoir, could have told them this would happen, but cynicism is a sensible, civilized view. To live in the midst of endless violence one must have sacred principles with which to endorse the violence. By the end of the twentieth century, the most brutal in human history, there were only idealists left. Even when forced-memory extraction and vicarious rapefor-hire emerged, XV, like all other information channels, had become effectively impossible to censor. Technology—and the cravings of thousands of proselytizers of all stripes—forbade it.
     
     
    Berlina Jameson is having a bad day. Charlie, the idiot station manager, gave up on yelling at her, which was good, but then he got Candice, the station owner, to get on the phone and yell at her, which was discouraging, especially since it’s all the same yell—she’s not going to get time off, or expense money, or anything at all for “this insane idea.”
    She doesn’t want to quit the job, because her resignation will instantly hit the public databases, and Berlina is extremely close to the edge on credit, so they’ll be all over her if she quits her fourth job in three years.
    Yet the idea itself is so, so sweet. She hears the familiar voices in her head again, even as Candice goes on at her …
    “This is Edward R. Murrow reporting from London. Another raid by German bombers, in greater numbers than we’ve seen before …”
    “This is Walter Cronkite, from Houston. Tonight if all goes well men will land on the moon …”
    “Wendy Lou Bartnick reporting—I’m about four miles from the glowing crater that used to be Port au Prince. The only light is from the blazing sky—there is no electricity and no sign of a headlight other than my own …”
    These tapes all play in her head, as they have played on her audio and video systems for more than half her life, so often that she can recite them word by word, frame by frame. A lot of younger kids brag that they can experience XV without needing goggles and muffs to shut out the real world, that they can live real and virtual simultaneously. Berlina figures she can go them one better—she can get television and radio in her head, all the great broadcasts of the last ninety years, followed by the seductive murmur of one more opener:
    “This is Berlina Jameson, reporting from—”
    Her name right up there with Murrow, Shirer, Sevareid,