When Kitson really begins to comprehend how much power he can wield, through Laura, he does a very sensible thing. It stampeded the money-markets and in one day Britain lost a thousand million Eurocredits. Idris retaliated by sending the Treasury computer berserk. The Ests demanded Laura be revealed and dismantled. The Ests found out after a year, when Idris started correcting other people's programmes.
By electronic stealth, Idris had burgled them all. Before Laura, there'd been many computers: police, military, public-health. Not that the country had originally intended to have a main computer: In the thirty years since Idris built her, from stolen parts, in a locked loo of this very toilet, Laura had gathered all knowledge to herself. Kitson earns his promotion to Assistant to the Chief Analyst, which means he learns how to control the country's main computer, known as Laura.
It is inevitable, I think, that a Tech will learn more about how his society works than he really wants to know. That isn't a very enviable position either. He is one of a comparatively small group of technicians who maintain the whole computer-based society. He does so well in his final exams that he finds himself elevated from mere Establishment. They live a hard and short life occupying their time in squalid, mind-numbing entertainment domes. They are never given an opportunity to work their way up out of their Zone, into something better. As you will discover, the Unnems don't live in a meritocracy. That happens to Henry Kitson's best friend, Roger. If he flops at school, he will be banished from respectability for all time, dragged out to a place 'beyond the Wire', where he will have to survive as best he can. Henry Kitson lives in a meritocracy - that is, if he does well at school, he will live a comfortable and unquestioning life as a middle class 'Est'. Perhaps what makes this a particularly unattractive future is that it bears quite a strong resemblance to the world that we all live in today.
Here's an unpleasant peek into an uncomfortable future.
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