Later on, sat alone on my bed, the evening's light shining dim and golden through the window, I tried to think of a way out. A way back to somewhere, some life that would be better than this, this pointless endeavour. No solution presented itself.
As far as I could tell, I was committed, tied in. Served me right for joining that first group in Swansea, I told myself.
I picked up the book that Natasha had given me, and everyone else, as part of our induction. Walking the Road Back to Ourselves, it was called. terrible title. I flicked through a few pages, read the odd passage. It was as bad as I had feared; part techno-revolutionary's handbook, part rambling self-help manifesto, every page seemed to scream at me that they were biting off more than they could chew. It practically gushed wishful thinking out of the page at me. I put it back down again. There was no hope of success, there couldn't be. Could there?
Dammit. I almost believed there for a moment. I shook my head, trying to throw off the thought. the Copyrights would find this place. sooner or later, their surveillance would find this little island in the middle of their vast empire, and the waters would rise up, and submerge us. We'd all be swapped, or killed, and then this grand enterprise, all its technology, all its aspirations for change, would be forgotten, shadow memories in new people living new lives. I felt bad for them. I felt bad for me. They were marching along happily towards their doom, and I was marching with them.

"What's the point?" I asked the air around me.
There wasn't any escape. No way back home. I was part of this crazy scheme, whether I liked it or not. I guess that'd been the case for quite some time, now, hadn't it? No going back to anything good. Someone else was Adam Marks now. Someone else was everyone I'd ever been. And Sally was still unreachable. Who knows where she was, or who she was right now. I don't know why she popped into my head at that moment, but there, in that blank little room in Safe House, I missed her as much as I ever had, and found myself wondering what she was doing right now. I could almost see her, sat in our little apartment, sat on her bed, reading, her hair in an unbrushed golden tangle over her face. I ached with sadness. I burned for her. I lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to let my mind empty. come on, I told myself, you're being weak.
I lay there all night, waiting for the morning, and the chance to forget these doubts.
Eventually, morning came. And with it, work. I threw myself in, deciding that it was best not to have time to brood.
First off were asssessments. We filled out psychometric tests, threw rubber balls at boards of flashing lights in darkened rooms, and subjected ourselves to a hundred other seemingly meaningless tests, all of which were overseen by various calm, efficient members of one committee or another, with a minimum of fuss and distraction. Such things as conversation were clearly not for those moments; the meetings were all we had. This lasted for about a week. During this time, I didn't see Sarah, at all. I wondered how that pointless enthusiasm was holding up. If my mood was any indicator, that irritating chirpiness couldn't be lasting. This wasn't revolution; it was a punishment regimen!
The Resistence did make a couple of attempts to liven the place up; they always ate together, for all the good it did. Truth be told, they just weren't the most talkative bunch. As a result, meals tended to proceed in a sombre, almost brooding silence. At the head of the table sat the leader, who told me after two days that his name was Matthew. For all his air of charming, hands-on authority, he cut a troubled figure. He was as silent as the rest, like a hurricane finally come to rest. There were signs he was uneasy; he kept scanning the eyes of his ill-assorted group, trying to gauge the mood, probably coming to the same conclusions as I was. Every now and then, our eyes would meet, and then we'd quickly look away. People-watching is a detached sport; something you can't really do with someone else. And then there was Darius. He kept staring at me. He was doing it to other people, too. I started to imagine that behind that impassive mask of a face, he was idly planning out horrendous deaths for all of us. I tried to put it out of my mind, and just concentrate upon my work. I could still feel him grinning at me, though.
The first few evenings, Sarah tried to make conversation with the person sitting next to them, or to the table in general, but she found her eager questions hanging in the air, ripping the skin of the silence, and making the spaces between conversation seem even longer and more poignant. She asked them about all manner of things, relevant or not, only to have her well-meaning sociability batted back with curt, one-word answers and polite smiles. Darius was the only one who kept answering her questions, always flashing that inane grin.
Me, I'd been in my share of environments like this; heck, it felt like the last home I'd been in before being Swapped. And like a good little Pavlovian subject, I slotted right in. Not her, though. What Sarah, and perhaps all those gathered round the table had perhaps simply come to accept, was that whilst these people had chosen to devote their lives to creating a better world, a society without all the neurosis, all the walls we buiild up between each other, they still carried it within themselves. Maybe we all wanted things to be different, maybe we wanted to be people towards each other, to let each other in.

Well, wouldn't that have been nice. Maybe they could have been a little family, full of happy-clappy revolutionaries all caring and sharing like people used to be before the big bad Copyrights changed everything.

Maybe it was possible. Maybe that's how things had actually been between people, though in my heart I doubted it. Whatever, that certainly wasn't the way of things at Safe House. The fear was still there in everyone. I could see it, smell it in the air, that sickening, nasty unsettled feeling in your gut that says somebody could be gone at any moment, things could change and if you made the mistake of trusting them, then in a second, you could be falling backwards with no-one to catch you. The Copyrights do their work well, all right.

Poor Sarah. I guess she was braver than us. I couldn't help but admire her halting attempts at friendship. I never did tell her that, though.

The grind was starting to get to her, too; on the evening of the seventh day after we arrived, she flounced into my room, and collapsed onto my bed, in a perfect pose of teenage petulance.
"I'm bored" She told my impassive back.
"Bet your parents loved you at thirteen." I grunted. "Do you mind? I'm working. Preparing myself for the glorious struggle."
"I know you don't believe that. How can you keep awake in those sessions?"
"I enjoy them" I replied, turning round to face her. "And they'll make the difference, in the end. Thought you were all for this?"
She frowned, embarrassed. "Well, yes, I believe in the cause, and in the plan, it's just-"
"What? you'ld rather we were raiding a fucking library, or running around painting slogans on the walls like before?"
That had been one of our most misguided and optimistic ideas; writing 'you will always be yourself', 'you are perfect where you are' and other such pointless phrases, in the back alleys of Swansea, thinking we were planting the seeds of rebellion. compare that to the strategy Natasha had been demonstrating to us today. The careful insertion of coded subliminal suggestions into the streamed infotainment that reaches every home, and the subsequent triggering of these commands by means of portable hand-held sonic devices, at key moments, kind of knocked our efforts into a cocked hat.
"No, no, it's not that, it's just-" she stared out of the window for a second "we're not doing anything. there's nothing to fight against, nothing to do."
"But that's the way it's always been, why don't you get that? There's no one bad guy to go out and kill like on the Vids, no switch to throw to destroy the villain's cunning plot. This lot know that. Of course, they haven't figured out that what they're trying is completely pointless."
"You don't believe that." she said, her voice a little shaky.
I smiled. "No, well, I'm not sure. I wanted to see your face, though."
And that's one of those situations where I really should have seen the slap coming. It didn't hurt so much, as shock. It seemed to come as quite a surprise to her, as well. I laughed, to break the silence. She gave an exasperated yelp and turned away.
I don't feel we're contributing." So that was it; she was feeling out of her depth.
"Well, we can't, not yet. Not feeling insecure, are we?"
"No. Of course not." she snapped.
"Well, I wouldn't feel bad about it, if I were you." I said. "They're a pretty elite bunch. Not like we were before. This lot know what they're doing."
for a second, she looked like she was going to retort. But then she bit back whatever comment she was about to come out with, and stormed out. Guess she was genuinely upset.

Things carried on as they were for about a month. We studied hard all day, studying the things they wanted us to study, and
wondering when something was finally going to happen. And then something did happen. gradually. I knew something was up before anyhting was said; it's hard to say what it was exactly, a change of mood, I guess. something in the air. people were going about their (still largely incomprehensible) business with an new attitude, a purpose and an urgency to their workwhich was something wholly new, wholly refreshing. Sarah noticed it, too, and though she didn't say anything, you could see she was starting to get excited, too. I guess she was getting what she wanted. It left me cold, I have to say. I don't know why; it was what I was there for, after all. I suppose I've always been good at detaching, keeping aloof from what's going on. But it was more than that; it was as if none of this extra hustle and bustle didn't involve us. I came to the conclusion that they didn't think we were ready, yet. Well, fair enough.
I stuck to my task, which was learning to work with their surveillance systems, breaking database defences and system infiltration. I've always been good at that. I was working less and less with the main group now; at the beginning of the third week, I was set to work on a series of purposely designed dummy systems, designed by the cell for this purpose. Simulations, which worked on the same principles that the copyrights used. I was paired with a member of the monitoring comittee, a thin little man by the name of Nate. He had an unusual accent; American, I think he was. That in itself marked him out as unusual, people don't move around that much, but that was the most interesting thing there was about him. He seemed uninterested in anything beyond his computer system. We got on quite well, all things told; he didn't talk too much, he just showed me what I needed to do, and needed to get on with it. And that's how I liked it. I could get lost in my work; looking through reams of data, understanding the system, and the mindset of the person who put it together, and trying to find the way in. Finding the gaps, the things people miss. Everything has a weakness. A way to crack it open, and get to the heart of it. just like with people, the key to breaking into a computer network is to say the things that they don't want to say.

My first big success was the day they let me go live on the Copyright networks. Nate was watching me, ready to jump in if I did anything disasterous, or anything to betray our presence to the Copyrights.
"Right, Simon, here's what we're going to do. We're going to break into Dunetech's daily reports."

This was small fry, but still, it was nice to be trusted. couldn't expect them to start me off on anything too big straight away. I brought up their page on the screen, set the search programmes running, and then waited for the first barrier warning to show up on the screen. In the main, the leg-work was done by algorhythms, and pre-set infiltration programs that we always used. however, the finer moments needed a personal, intuitive touch.

Ah, there was their first line of defence; WARNING: INTERGRITY SEARCH COUNTERSCAN DETECTED. A standard response for their security systems; it was double-checking the ID I'd given it, which was a different Copyright sub-index requesting a standard information transfer. No problem. I keyed in the correct code sequence without a hitch. At the same time, of course, my system would be feeding the relevant information back to that programme, so we didn't leave any footprints.
My system beeped at me, and flashed a reassuring colour.

ID CHECK CLEAR. COMMENCE DATA REQUEST.

"Nice" said Nate. "You know what we want."

I pulled up our list of the data we required, and then typed it in.

halfway through, however, my system froze, and an error message flashed up.

ERROR AX 374V239CM/b. PARTITION CONFLICT; POSSIBLE DOUBLE CONNECTION. PLEASE RESOLVE.

"What the hell is that?" I said, trying not to panic.
"The original Index wants that info, too."
"What?"
"The one we're pretending to be. It hasn't been disabled properly."
crap, crap.
I pulled up a second system on my screens, and started to hack into the first copyright's system. I didn't have long for this, usually fifteen seconds before a trace was launched as a standard precaution. That could lead them back to us. I glanced sideways, and saw Nate's hand hovering above the disconnect switch. He'd explained previously that in this situation, he'd disconnect us before the trace could be launched, and the Copyrights would just assume that this was another glitch in their system, leaving us safe. No way I was screwing this up, though. All I had to do was access that programme's list of communication attempts, and shut it off. Five seconds gone. come on, come on. There.
VIEW LIST, I typed, and it spewed out a huge scrolling string of requests. Fifty-two of them! Bloody hell, where was mine in all that?I scrolled down, frantically looking for the right one to delete. In my head, I was counting down.
nine, eight, seven, six.
Come one!
Ah! got it!
My fingers shaking, I typed in the disconnect command, and in what seemed like longer than the second it was, the entry disappeared from the list. Nate grunted. "nice one. Two seconds to spare."
I let out the breath I'd been holding, and tried to act nonchalant as I finished the procedure.

That evening, I sat in my room, mulling things over. Then, as was becoming her habit, in came Sarah.

"Are you finished for the day, then?" she asked.
"yeah. And a pretty successful one, if I do say so myself."
"Really?" she said "what did you do?"
"I broke into their system. Actually took something from the Copyrights." I let a smug grin spread over my face. "All that hard work and good honest dedication paying off."
She rolled her eyes. "oh, for goodness sake. I know you don't believe that."
"well, no, but it felt good to be trusted. Feels like I'm doing well, finally. How's things with you?"
She looked away for a second.
"I'm still going through simulations. They haven't given me anything big to do yet?"
"what? not so far advanced as little rebellious me?" I couldn't really resist it; I never could, with her, even though I knew this was just going to provoke another sulk. She didn't know quite what to say for a second, and I relished her embarrassment. it's so easy to press her buttons, I thought.
"They're taking it steady. But I'm ready now" she said, her eyes flashing indignation that I was doing better than her.
"Oh, really?"
"Yes!" she said, and then, in a smaller voice "they just haven't noticed yet."
"Well, never thought I'd hear you criticise this wonderful group of heroes" I said, and laughed as she started towards me, making a fist as if she wanted to punch my lights out. I caught hold of her wrist, and gently pushed her away.
"Now now, don't let your jealousy get the better of you."
She made a little scream of annoyance, and punched my desk instead.
"You know, Simon, I don't know why I even bother talking to you." she said.
"Must be my natural charm."
"Don't flatter yourself." she said "I think I just must be desparate for company." and then she flounced out, leaving me speechless.
"well I never," I said to the empty air. "She's actually getting the hang of me."