Infiltrating the Scientific Testing Station was a lot easier and less dramatic than it now sounds. I applied for the post of Test Co-ordinator at Westbridge STS, a station which handled approximately one sixth of UK testing, making it the second largest in the country.

£79.99 (or '¬97.48, had it not been for the UK's rejection of the Euro and subsequent split from the EU) bought me a relevant sounding diploma on the internet, and I researched my discipline and put together a credible CV.

On reflection, I don't think I need have bothered. No questions were raised about my modestly impressive resumé. I provided no proof of the qualification I claimed to have, and they never once asked me to.

When interviewed, I made all the right noises, gave all the correct conditioned responses, nodded reverently when points were made, smiled at their jokes. I was offered the job on the spot and was told to attend the station a couple of days later for my initiation and guided tour.

I would love to be able to forget what I saw, past the guards and the barriers and security checks, behind thick steel doors in soulless white rooms, but I know I never will. And what's more, I know I can't afford to. In a society in which mistakes are forgotten, rather than learned from, someone has to remember, and remind the world and keep on reminding until the right people have no choice but to change things.

If I don't remember, no one else will.

I saw humanity with its skin ripped off. I saw mankind red and wet and writhing.

I was guided through rooms slick with suffering and watched through one-way glass from a sterile observation cubicle as a girl who could have been no more than nineteen was held down and industrial bleach was poured in her eyes. Wires and speakers and microphones connected the cubicle to the test room, transmitting her screams and sobs. My guide just smiled in silent satisfaction beside me while I forced myself to keep watching as the girl convulsed and struggled and shrieked on the other side of the glass.

Show no weakness, or they'll know. Show no surprise. Act like this was exactly what you expected. Act like this was why you applied.

After a while the girl stopped screaming and just slumped, motionless in her restraints, against the white-tiled wall behind her, head bowed, her soft whimpers mixing obscenely with the heavy, excited breathing of my guide.

For a brief moment she looked up. Bloody, blinded eyes stared out of a chemical-scarred face, wet with tears, and she seemed, for a sick, heart-stopping instant, to look right at me. Her sightless eyes seemed to burn through the one-way glass and hold me there, as trapped and hopeless as she was.

I later learned that her name was Whitworth, Naomi Jane, and she had served a month and a half of a six month sentence for two counts of shop-lifting.

I don't know if she survived her sentence. I'm not sure she'd have wanted to.

After that, it became a little easier, though it was never easy. The shock abated a little, but the sick, wretched feeling remained.

I soon learned that there were no fewer criminals in the country, no fewer murderers, no fewer sadists. But now the killers, rapists and torturers had uniforms and government-paid salaries.

I did my best to detach myself from the viciousness that surrounded me for the month I remained in the station. I watched, a disconnected observer, as healthy limbs were amputated, cancers purposefully nurtured on bodies, spines severed and people unmade. I myself injected a man of my own age, bound to his bed, with HIV, almost proud as I did so, that my hands barely shook.

I forced myself to stay a month. In that time, no scientific objectives were seemingly met. I wasn't even sure there were any.

And then, one day, I wasn't there any more. I clocked out on a Friday evening, flashing my pass at the security check through the window of my car without stopping, with the intention of never going back. By the time I was missed, on Monday morning, when I failed to turn in for work, the damage was already done. By then, my damning headline glared defiantly from every newsstand up and down the UK: '2058: the Year of the White Coat Killers'.

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