The Spy Who Loved You

The BT Digital Baby Monitor Plus, a weapon in the modern parent's information war.

I hope you won't be too perturbed to learn that there's a significant level of espionage involved in modern parenting.

Some of this espionage takes the form of what military types call HUMINT (it's an ugly contraction of "human intelligence"). As the name suggests, HUMINT relies on information supplied directly by human agents. Your mother and I will be heavily reliant on this form of intelligence when it comes to monitoring your activities while out of our sight.

For instance, we might depend on information from a source in the field regarding, say, your compliance with apple juice consumption directives or standing orders on taking naps. Later, we might call on another well-placed source for intelligence on whether it was you or the other kid who commenced hostile hair-pulling manoeuvres.

In addition to HUMINT, some parents also utilise forms of COMINT, or communications intelligence. For example, I understand that there are commercially available means for tracking the geographical location of children's mobile phones. Personally, I consider this level of surveillance excessive, but I'm afraid your mother and I will also be using limited forms of COMINT.

For a start, we're going to bug your cot.

I know, it sounds kind of creepy, but it's really not all that bad. For a start, we'll only be bugging the cot when we're not in the room, and that's not going to happen at all for the first little while. When the time comes, think of it as a kind of intercom; a convenient way of ordering room service. Hungry? Just whimper a little in the direction of the listening device. Need a hug? No problem, we're keeping this frequency clear.

And anyway, we've already bought the bugging device. Or, as the military types would say, we've acquired the technology assets needed to project a strong COMINT presence into theatre.

The model we chose is the BT Digital Baby Monitor Plus, pictured above.

In addition to its eavesdropping capabilities, this device also provides low-intensity near-field illumination (it has little star-shaped night lights) and can effect configurable auditory placation measures (it plays five different lullabies).

I tested it out a little last night while your mother was asleep, and I think you're going to be very happy with the quality of this device.

For a start, it uses digital radio signals, so the sound quality is excellent. Sitting downstairs reading, I could hear every nuance of your mother's breathing. It was strange, the intimacy of the sound, and made me feel oddly close to her, and to you.

This was illusory, though. Think of all the intervening physics and biology.

Each breath I was hearing was a sequence of vibrations that had been carefully reconstructed from a stream of electrons. The electron stream, in turn, was a transcription of radio waves. Before these came an original stream of electrons and, before this, gently thrumming against a tiny microphone, there was the delicate concatenation of sound waves radiating from the disturbed air as your mother drew in oxygen and expelled clouds of carbon dioxide and vapour.

Some of this carbon dioxide came from you, having been gently cleansed from your blood in the placenta (the big, squishy thing by your feet), where your tiny blood vessels and your mothers' are intricately and inseparably enmeshed.

It was nice to think about, this funny, faraway connectedness. I put down my book after a while, and just listened. Eventually, it started to make me feel sleepy, which is something I'm going to have to work on, because sleepiness is not an asset in the world of parental espionage.

It occurred to me that, if the technology were available, we'd probably buy a monitor to look right inside you. In fact, the mothers and babies and foetuses doctors do have this kind of technology, but we don't get to use it very often. What we'd like, if we had our way, is a kind of 25th century baby monitor, one that listened to your heartbeat, analysed your brain waves and took frequent samples of inward and outbound blood to ensure adequate nutrition and optimal clearance of waste products.

But it's probably just as well that we can't do all this. It probably wouldn't hurt you, but we'd turn into unsleeping maniacs with bad cases of Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy.

For now, I think it's best if we confine ourselves to the formidable diagnostic tools of the imagination. Until you get out and we can mount full-scale, 24-hour surveillance, that's what I'll content myself with. Imagining the busy susurration of your blood, the sturdy fluttering of your heart and the unfathomable flickering of your gathering thoughts, just out of reach of the bright, waiting world.