Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (10 page)

‘Her base is in the high hundreds of thousands. Younger ABC1, some C2s. Female slant – sixty-four per cent. High awareness in households. This is core-voter territory. Significant reach among opinion-formers. Especially given that – well, given that she doesn’t exist.’

Bethany didn’t understand how Parley worked. She’d asked Hugo to explain, at lights out. He was nine and found this stuff as natural as chocolate – he was a digital native. Bethany was more of a digital shipwreck. All he told her, though, was
It
’
s silly, Mummy,
which rather reinforced her initial perceptions. Talking to pretend people for entertainment? She could get that in the House of Commons.

It seemed it was up to her to ask the glaring question.

‘But if she’s an artificial, um –’

‘– synthetic personality,’ said J-R. ‘A sort of robot without a body.’

‘Then she can’t be to blame for these attacks?’

There was a long enough pause for Bethany to realise she was several miles behind the curve. J-R found a way to be polite about it.

‘Exactly! That’s the conclusion we’ve come to, as well. Everything sic_girl says has been said before, somewhere online. So the team at Parley are scouring the Internet right now, looking for the original.’

‘Which we’re guessing,’ said Krish, ‘was put up by this TakeBackID lot – the ones who did in the website.’

‘Yes,’ said Bethany, ‘I saw it’s still down.’

‘We’ve been trying all day. Every time we put it live, five minutes later it’s pigs all over again. Nobody seems to have heard of these TakeBack buggers – they sprang up overnight from nowhere – but they’ve skills. We presume they did the hack. So the hope is, if we find these original postings, we find our den of hackers.’

‘We need to get the website back up asap,’ said Bethany. ‘We can’t have a national launch without a website.’

Again, silence. Both men would be thinking, how can we have a national launch at all, after this? But Bethany wouldn’t have that. It was going to happen, on Friday, as planned; or she was utterly screwed.

Krish broke the crackling silence.

‘On that, Beth? We do need to get onto Number Ten. The meeting.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, please.’

There was another stretch of dead air before Krish spoke again.

‘J-R? Would it piss you off mightily if I dropped you from the call just now? I’m sure you could do with some sleep.’

Another pause before J-R replied.

‘Sure, Krish. Wilco. Ah. Hope all goes well tomorrow, Bethan.’

‘Thanks, J-R. Thanks for it all. Good night.’

The line produced a guttural sound as J-R dropped.

‘He’s doing good there, Beth,’ said Krish.

‘I don’t want Parley to think we’re the enemy. I don’t think we are the enemy.’

‘Aye, well, better inside the tent pissing out,’ he said. ‘So tomorrow. Have you given it more thought? You can’t walk in without a script. I have it first-hand from Karen: the Cabinet Secretary is livid just now.’

‘Neil wakes up livid.’

‘You should go in hard,’ Krish pressed on. ‘Tell Karen you’re cutting the link with Mondan. They had the data; they let it bleed – or worse, they did the pig-spam themselves on behalf of some marketing company and they kept it from you.’

She hadn’t heard that theory. Would they do that? Marketing data was valuable. Surely not with Sean’s consent.

‘You came within millimetres of misleading the House,’ Krish went on. ‘They did the pilot, they fucked up – bye bye. We’ll use Terasoft for the national roll-out. We can recover this but we need to cut the rot.’

‘And I’ve told you. I’m thinking about it.’

The sound of sea-swell on the wires.

‘I am right,’ said Krish, ‘that Mondan didn’t inform you before Questions, aren’t I? You’ve been careful to say your
officials
hadn’t briefed you but you’ve never said what
they
told you. What exactly is our deal with these people?’

‘Krish. Not at this hour. We’ve talked about this.’

‘I’ve asked. You’ve prevaricated. I’ve stayed out of DigiCitz because you said you had it in hand. Was that a mistake?’

‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘Please trust me. We’re too far into Digital Citizen for them to drop it; not with so many government IT projects down the can. The national roll-out is top of the Number Ten comms grid for Friday – and if they keep the project, they have to keep me. With Juliet crossing the floor, fewer than twenty per cent of ministers are women. Who do they shuffle in now?
Annabel
? Christ, you know all this.’

‘I know, Beth. I know.’ She could see him pushing two fingers up the bridge of his nose, popping his glasses up onto his forehead, massaging his nose’s slender spine. ‘Look, you’re right. It’s late. But can we please get twenty minutes at the office in the morning, before we go to Downing Street? Twenty minutes?’

‘Yes, fine. I’ll be there. We’ll talk.’

They broke the call. Bethany looked across the untouched spread of papers on the tabletop, then back at the old clock. Half past one.

Did anyone sleep any more?

¶maglad

Whaat? Are you trying to tell me I’m going to have to register on DigiCitz to access over 18 content? How’m I supposed to do that? I’m only an algorithm.

(Plus I’m only 2 years old.)

¶identikid

The deal here is simple. Give up your right to privacy, and if you’re lucky we’ll let you access benefits, services, your rights as a citizen. Digital Citizen? Digital Slave.

Nine

They rise to the brow and gaze across the devastation of the land. Far ahead a once-proud city blazes, lighting the cloudy darkness of the plain. Littering the lowland earth, the wracks of titanic machines give out juts of smoke. It seems that nothing moves below; then the travellers make out, among the smouldering hulks, a dozen smaller warcraft crawling from the rout to the safe harbour of the Azkhanii highlands. They haven’t a prayer of making it. They’re sitting ducks out on the killing fields, pounded in their slow retreat by the noiseless blasts of the Highlords’ jolting laser cannons, hidden in the crust of fortifications opposite.

The travellers raise their eyes beyond the battle. Ahead, deep in the Namani caves, on the final level, lies the endgame boss, concealed in the smoke of a subterranean lair. That is the direction they must take.

The view pulls back to reveal the weary pair standing on the crest. Landar turns towards her avatar, his feline face contorted in an expression of what’s meant to be sorrow but whose simplified vectors just look constipated. Before he can speak, Dani presses the space bar to pause the game and sits back in her chair.

She feels like double refried shit. Her back is a single knot of pain and her carpals ache with repeated beating of the keys. Her irises are stretched to bursting. She tabs out of the game to check the system clock: it’s two a.m.

She’s been at the screen since she woke on the sofa at eleven, the fossil of a hairgrip embedded in her cheek. She staggered towards the green beacon of her PC’s LED; and for the last few hours she’s kept reality at bay by moosing about online, thirty tabs open, spinning from app to site to chat, her rhythm broken only by the occasional re-up of beer or, when she could hold out no longer, an extended piss. At one point she launched
Eternal Warfare.
An hour blasting war-clones has left her washed out but settled. Sleep is ridiculous.

)) caffeine pixel ((

She flicks up Parley to zoom back a few hours and explore the contours of the conversation. Everyone in her continuity has spent the day dancing round the sic_girl proffers and now the thing is massive. A proffer by greebday turns out to be a veiled cite of a proffer by spagbol who in turn was linking to a blog post by act1v – all of them attacking dCitz. Dani froggers from post to post. This looks to be one of those two-day flurries that get stirred in the waters of Parley.

But there’s a hard core, too. People who flare up at any attempt to stem their digital freedom. Normally they merry-hell about Terasoft or Google or whichever company’s taken the latest bite out of their digital privacy. This week apparently it’s the government’s turn. Something Dani hadn’t realised: everyone – including her – is going to have to give up their personal details to this thing when it goes national later this year; or they’ll essentially drop off the grid. That’s some harsh decision: either say
I love Big Brother
, or lose your housing benefit?

Following the conversation, Dani keeps looping back to one of the Personas – riotbaby. Not her favourite character. He’s this aggregate blowhard conspiracy-bot, but popular in this network. He’s been citing hard-core data nerds with increasing frequency. One name in particular, unknown to Dani –
identikid.

Dani hadn’t noticed the anger building on the wires – online protest is more Gray’s kind of thing – but it makes her less sure she wants to help this Bethany Lehrer. Why is Parley going all guns to help her out of her mess? Especially if Sam’s right, and the government people are dissing Parley to the media. And why is Dani on the hook for it?

For the hundredth time today, that prickle of unease takes a tour along her spine. There’s something Sam said when he met her earlier. About the police invasion at Parley. He said they were armed because of a
credible threat
– and it’s true. Those guys weren’t just there on account of some social wasp, tickling at the reputation of government. Six of them came, armed and certain that someone called sic_girl was in the building and was a threat. Why? Straight away they accused Dani of being sic, searched her; still suspect her as far as she knows. This shit is real and somehow Dani has to set it straight – but right now she can’t even see its edges.

She rotates her clogged shoulders. Queries and jibes have been pouring into her whispers tab all day. As Jonquil’s prime trouble-shooter and sic_girl’s creator, everyone expects her to know what’s what. As if. She proffers a group response to all her questioners.

¶Nightshade

for the elimination of doubt i have no fucking idea what is going on

and neither do you

fml

The second she proffers, she’s reconnected. It sparks a waking system-dream that flares across her optic nerve. She often gets these visions in the night, when she’s run herself raw on too much screentime and too many pills. They’re difficult to describe. The only person she ever tried to explain them to was Gray, and he didn’t get it. She told him they were data turning into light, with dimension and shape. He thought those were fuzzy words for some randomness in Dani’s head. She got mad he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand how present and specific her visions are.

Images flash – of her and someone chubby who might be Pemberton, both of them tooned into sprites from an ’80s arcade game. Two pixellated Giggly Pigglies. Purple pig and green pig waggle stubby legs to race through corridors, grabbing and discarding balls of light. No idea guides them. Dani must have asked a dozen people to help her today, pulling in data from a hundred sources; but she didn’t know what she was looking for. A random walk with no destination. How do you hunt a Pacman ghost?

Sometimes you need a software concept to explain the world.
Spinning
:
when a system cycles from task to task so quickly it never finishes one thing before moving onto the next. To the user the machine looks frozen but the system believes it’s working double-time. Dani, spinning up and down the building. Jonquil and Pemberton, spinning round each other in a wary dance. Sam, spinning stories to the hacks and flacks. The whole system spinning and moving exactly nowhere. Pointless.

Dani’s pig hits a neon carton and spills her balls of light. They scatter and balloon across her field of vision – and right away it comes to her. So obvious. The vision screen-wipes away, quick as it arrived, leaving only screenlight. All she’s done so far is chase the data. That’s the raw material, the dumb unfiltered mass before the spark of life is added by sic_girl’s algorithm. What they need is meaning. She has to talk to sic_girl – and not through Parley; in person. She’ll batch up a semantic dialogue in the morning, soon as she gets in. It’ll be ready to run by the evening.

She stares at the silent snow-cap mountain screensaver and takes a tug on the Michelob. It’s warm, but that’s OK. She’s wired and numb and isn’t tasting it.

Out of sight at the back of her machine, an LED flashes crazy. Her network card is active. Someplace inside the metal case, an imp of the wires named Grubly has woken to receive a signal. The signal ends and Grubly starts transmitting in return. The transmission is long and hungry but Grubly is artful. Dani sees nothing and bandwidth is cheap, this time of night. Nobody gets hurt.

She takes another swig. Would anyone else grok her
spinning
meme? Gray would. Sam not so much. Is Sam too prim? She tries to imagine kissing him and finds she can, quite easily. Very easily. In her mind he’s silent but his breath races. Today he was tightly shaven but here he grates the skin of her face and neck. His tongue is in the cleft beneath her jaw. It’s sticky and hot.

She twists in the chair, touching herself with two fingers of her left hand while reaching forward with the right to fire up a browser. She googles Sam and he’s there.
Profile. Senior Associate.
His face washed white by flash, his eyes tightly perfect. She clicks on the mailto: link. A new message appears, primed to send. She closes it again.

She wants to build him afresh, package him up. Something strikes her and she digs around in an old project folder on her hard drive until she finds it: an abandoned coding project she called the lovebot. You could email it from anywhere and it’d come straight back with a sex message, tailored to the vocab in your mail. An ancestor that evolved into sic_girl and the other Personas. Nothing too smart or sophisticated, but tonight she doesn’t need either of those things. She starts to hack at the lovebot, chiselling its generic voice into a simplistic scrape of Sam.