Friday 3rd July

-[ So that was how he did it.  Clever, I must admit.  The metal cupboard must have had some sort of lead lining to block out completely his com-unit, as we couldn’t detect it at all.  Mind you, this was deep underground too, I am not sure we were specifically looking beneath the surface at all.  And we had completely overlooked the Aldwych branch, and a few other disused bits of the tube system too.  The whole system has been in a constant state of expansion and upgrade for over a century and whole corridors were blocked off when stations were renovated, some simply tiled over and forgotten about.  Many plans had been lost or misfiled and most of the network is so deep that those lost bits of tunnel are simply undetectable.  Of course when Janek’s little diary came to light we made a clean sweep of the entire system, but apart from the Aldwych cell we never found any other rebs living down there.

I doubt they were quite as benign as Janek seems to have believed them to have been.  They were pretty well-organised actually, growing their own version of manna down there.  Of course they could never get hold of any cred so couldn’t buy anything in any real shops.  However it has long been suspected that amongst the lowest ungraded strata a degree of barter takes place.  It seems that criminality of this type is hard-wired into these people, that no matter how well we treat them, how many rewards we deem them fit to receive they are never satisfied.  We are attempting through a programme of intensive edu-crammer and revision of cred levels to rectify this aberrant behaviour, but with only limited success so far.

I am afraid that at some point a more permanent solution may have to be considered.  However that is for others to decide.  As I said before we are incredibly busy, and imperfect as some parts of our system are, we have other fish to fry.  (Though I hasten to add that this particularly unhealthy method of preparing farmed fish-protein has long since been consigned to history – still, it is a handy aphorism.)

So Janek has finally jumped ship, to use another popular figure of speech.  This caused quite a commotion I can tell you.  It wasn’t as if he was unimportant; his gift for detecting deceivers was highly appreciated, though as the nature of his work was so secret we never felt it wise to raise him to too high a strata.  Maybe we should have done so, and taken him into our confidence to a degree, although wiser minds than mine had decided otherwise.  Given his recent actions possibly they were right.  It is quite probable that the same quirk in his brain that enabled him to detect those irregularities we prized so highly was also responsible for his reb tendencies and they would have manifested themselves at some point anyway.  Who is to say?  Predicting the future has always been a precarious business.  The most any of us can do is to extrapolate current trends and try to take note of all possibilities.

Janek spent a few weeks underground, but eventually he surfaced.  Although it was many months before we tracked him again.  We had never forgotten him though.  As you know we do not forget anything.  However as time wore on, the level of importance we had at first placed on his disappearance was overtaken by other events.  It is amazing thinking back, what a chaotic time it was.  The fighting in the Middle East was getting quite serious and there was a danger that at last the Arabs might actually destroy Isreal.  It was imperative that, despite our written constitution, we would have to interfere in another region’s wars.  Restoring the somewhat precarious balance of power was the justification we came up with, but in the end the Arabs pulled back from the brink.  No-one is quite sure why, possibly without their old adversary their own identity, their ‘raison d’etre’ if you will, would simply vanish.  It was almost as if hating the Jews was what defined their ‘Arabness’, just as for the Jews, being surrounded by hostile forces somehow reinforced their idea of being the ‘chosen’ people.  Ridiculous, but there you are. But it was a good thing the Arabs stopped short of actually crossing the Nile and invading Isreal proper, as the Jews were just about to move into a nuke phase, and no-one had used those monsters since Kamchatka in twenty-eight.

We were also discovering that the Ambivalence was actually anything but, and what were reported to the general public as stable temperatures were in fact fluctuating wildly.  So much so in fact that we began to doubt both our own recording equipment and our whole predictive climate programming.  On top of all this the perfectly balanced financial system was showing signs of failing, or at least of needing a complete revision.  Rogue elements in the Russian con-gloms were secretly making vast profits and trying to buy Brazil.  In short 2066 was not turning out to be a good year.

So it is hardly surprising that this little matter of ‘a disappearing mid-strata special powers operative’ was slipping down the scale of importance.  But I for one felt some personal responsibility; Janek had been one of my protogees.  Not that we had ever met, of course, but I was technically speaking his superior, in fact I was responsible for the whole anti-deceiver programme at BettaBrit con-glom, amongst my many other responsibilities.  So, rare for me, I felt a sense of responsibility when one of my own, admittedly far beneath me, had absconded.  I should add that after the usual review I was completely exonerated of any personal responsibility but even so no-one likes to think they have failed, no matter how small the degree.]-