Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (13 page)

Me All Over. The next Parley, according to Jonquil, but a million times better. Parley is words and pictures and video clips. This is all of her. A way to feel what someone else felt in and of a street, a time.

It’s just a thumb-suck but it runs in a buggy way. It isn’t pretty – she’s nobody’s graphics monkey – but now she’s set it running it follows her everywhere. It comforts her to know there’s something watching, that every time she moves a disk spins somewhere to absorb a little more Dani. She hasn’t turned on sharing yet, so the data isn’t published. But it totally could be, and when it is all her past trails of sensation will flash into existence over London. The server is always there, logging abstract poems about everything she does and everywhere she goes. Telling her story in snapshot stills and coded pairs of words. Like these:

)) sun rush ((

Me All Over and Pimpmyhide take just a narrow slice of Dani’s morning. All the other apps eating RAM in her phone and in her brain are dedicated to tracing Sam. Since nine this morning, when she woke for the second time, she’s been nudging about the edge of his online shadow. She’s hooked on him in Parley, Facebook, LinkedIn and some PR sites; and googled up a dozen pages of hash about him. She’s aggregating photos of him in an album but as she hops from app to app the image that lingers comes from behind her retinas – Sam on a beach, near-naked; arms, neck and buttocks eclipsed against burning island sky. The smell of salt and beach-weed rises in her nostrils from the halal shops and continental grocers.

The groaning fact of a London bus lands inches from her face, giving out a Wookie roar of brakes. She keeps typing on her phone as she mounts the platform and swipes her phone against the Oyster reader. The reader beeps and lodges data. As she bounds to the upper deck the driver pumps the accelerator and the brake in fast succession like he’s playing the drums, and she’s thrown upstairs by the lurch. She picks herself up and dumps her arse and bag on the upper deck’s front seat, still typing.

As she proffers,
an alert pings up from MeatSpace.
Really?
That is seriously not a zone for mornings. But there. Yep. monkey_love just posted in her private space.

monkey_love

I can smell you.

I know you’re on here. I can smell the sweat on you and your hot wet sex.

I can smell your pheromones and your blood.

Are you here? Your account’s live.

SafeWord? Are you on here?

I could really do with talking to you.

Need to talk to someone.

Does the guy ever sleep? She doesn’t want this now; but as she swipes the sext away it triggers a memory: last night. That rambling batshit mail she composed to the Sambot. Did she ever send it?

She flips to Mail and selects
Sent Items
. She scrolls up and down, but the mail isn’t there: it wasn’t sent. She checks
Drafts
. It’s still there, unsent and unfinished. Now she remembers: she got too hot last night to finish it. She drifted instead to the instant scents of MeatSpace. Christ, what a night. What the living fuck was she writing? She doesn’t want to know but she can’t not open it.

i can still feel the warm of your hand on my shoulder as you left the room. how are you doing these days? im in a mad state. always so busy. haven’t slept more than four hours in the last two days. its crazy isnt it. you looked great, though. you were hot against me when you hugged me. do you remember summer camp in aviemore, that one time? a bunch of first year sixth up all night on the hillside. the fire had burned out and everyone had to huddle round the embers to stay warm. did you notice I was wrapped around your back? i couldnt tell if you were still awake. and anyway fucking jenny harris was lying the other side of you.

This shit goes on fold after fold, scroll after scroll. How long was she writing? It helped tone down her horny urge, for a while at least. These itches are getting harder to scratch. More and more she’s channel-hopping an endless feed of online lovers; trolling pickup sites, especially Codr, the new dating site that’s exclusively for geeks. She picks and drops men with a porn-hound conviction that something better will come with the next swipe. Something perfect. Why it’s never slaked. Why she has to land somewhere soon or she’ll pop.

She hits
Send
. No reason the poor old Sambot shouldn’t get his morning oats.

She slides down in the bus seat and puts her feet up on the front rail, squeezing her warm phone into her chest with both hands. What she needs is neat transactional sex: the kind she can leave behind with no stray correlations; but it never goes that way. Things end up twisted and angry, especially with monkey_love – the only partner she goes back to over and again. She wonders who monkey is, what kind of person it takes to match her urgency. He never shares photos with her but she’s sure he’s a guy, and British from the words he uses for her pussy and his cock – but their encounters are so raw there are no other clues.

She wishes she had a good picture of Sam. The ones she’s found are too processed and professional. She needs to find the earliest images, from when she knew him at school. She ons the phone again and returns to Facebook where she rolls back into the past. As she gets to her earliest albums, she hits a cliff-edge and realises her mistake. Facebook wasn’t launched until she was up at uni. Her school life might as well not exist. She tends to forget Internet services haven’t always been there.

She opens the oldest album and there’s Dani the pale-faced fresher hanging with her tech-boy homies. Each was a way-mark. Those were wild years, before Gray – dipping fingers into zany tech and pipe-dream start-up concepts that never materialised; and into each other. She was this glorious geek-girl, costumes belladonna purple, her pale body a gift she gloried in sharing. She burned away uni light-starved in grotty basements, surrounded by the neutral blink of router stacks and the hum of cooling systems. All the hope then.

And if she got herself a reputation as another easy geek-girl (what Gray calls a
wonk-bonk
) it was pretty much deserved. These awkward boys were no pushover. Lord knows, it takes commitment to get a nerd back home at night – and even more to stop him talking long enough to get even the first thing done – but she felt a kind of love for them all. Each of them had, under layers of nebbish bluster, a timid sweetness she could unlock. And if many encounters ended prematurely, or didn’t really begin, one or two always managed to surprise her; and each brought the same delight that the abstractions they shared could translate into tenderness and physical release. They laid their fingers with awe on the cold milk of her belly and were kind to her soft skin. Kinder than she was.

This was before those first overwhelming online encounters with Gray.

With an instinct for how far the bus has staggered down the street, Dani looks up. They’re about to pass the burned-out Haggerston pub with flamingo stencils on its hoardings. She always tries to check it out as her bus passes. It’s inhabited by hobbity squatters she rarely manages to glimpse, but is fascinated by. Today she catches a violent situation at the half-open doorway. A man in grey suit and foreman’s anorak shoves a young white man with ginger dreads. Directly above them, level with Dani’s upper-deck seat, a bony girl shouts something from an upper window. Possibly ‘
Don
’
t!
’ – or ‘
Cunt!
’ She has a scarf round her hair in a wartime style. All Dani’s vision retains as the bus pushes forward is the blue moiré pattern of the scarf.

)) high shout ((

She twists her neck to see more but the angle’s wrong. She looks into first floor flats for a while, then turns back to her phone and the rough-shot images from uni. She looks happy there. But everything erodes, given time. Confidences leak out, condoms burst and promises pass unspoken expiry dates. When she graduated, and hooked up at last with Gray in the physical world, they found a more determined, constant rhythm. But she was already too committed to unsettling adventures, and was never true to him. Maybe she’s chronically impatient. She never wants any one thing long enough to make it real.

Her email chimes. That must be the reply from the Sambot. It took its time – this’d better be worth it. She skips back to mail. No, it’s just a purchase confirmation for the porn site.

Something occurs to her – something really, really bad that can’t be true. She taps on her
Sent items. There it is. Ten twelve a.m. she sent that rambling mail to the Sambot –

No. Shit no.

She opens the mail but the bitter, vicious fact won’t change. The address she sent it to wasn’t sambot@local. It was [email protected]

She sent that mail – the mail of a sex-crazed drunken maniac – to Sam. Twelve minutes ago now. It’s been twelve minutes since the world came to an end and she never even noticed.

She can barely focus on the mail.

fuck you sam i think i love you

Somewhere between here and Shoreditch, she is going to have to kill herself.

¶TurdoftheDay

Modest and tidy, it slipped from me like a buttered potato.

Sorry. Sorry.

I did something bad. I can’t talk about it.

Four

‘I shouldn’t tell you any of this,’ said J-R.

Mark bent forward to set down a second milky tub for J-R and another tiny espresso for himself. He pinched the knees of his jeans and sat.

‘Because I’m from the craven private sector?’

‘No, no. I shouldn’t speak to
anyone.
’

‘All right, look.’ Mark made a fan with both hands. ‘Apart from we’re friends, my reputation rests on my ability to keep a secret. Whatever this is, you know it’ll stay between us.’

J-R took a steadying breath.

‘Yes. All right.’

And suddenly he found himself all business. He might have been making a report to Krish or Bethan.

‘So from what we can tell,’ he said, ‘this Giggly Pigglies virus started appearing on people’s computers two weeks ago.’

The corner of Mark’s mouth curled up a little.

‘But three days before
that
,’ J-R continued, ‘I received an email from Bethan.’

He wiggled the laptop out of his bag. Now he’d started speaking he was eager to reveal. It was like stepping onto a departing train, without looking back. He set the laptop on the table and spun it round so Mark could read for himself.

‘There,’ he said. ‘See?’

That, Sean, is a very generous offer. You do know how to please a girl! Here’s the goods. I’ve protected the files with your encryption thingy as you asked. (Tell me if I did it wrong . . .!!) Do with them what you will, fella.

Bx

Mark looked up from the screen.

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘That does look—’

‘Yes,’ said J-R. ‘This was sent to Mondan’s CEO, Sean Perce.’

‘Yes, yes, sure.’

Naturally Mark would know who Perce was. In recent years his firm had romped through the British digital media sector, acquiring businesses like burrs on a dog. They’d recently crowned this growth with a shining new HQ. Just this morning, emerging from the Tube, J-R had looked up from the hustling City traffic to see the enormous digital displays wrapped round the pinnacle of 404 City Road. Impossible to ignore. They shone down Moorgate like a new sky, the width of a city block, running a constant loop of financial, commercial and celebrity news. Spattering data across the rooftops.

‘But why did she copy
you
?’ asked Mark, dimpling his brow at the email.

‘Bethany sent it to Perce’s
home
email address – and copied it to my
Ministry of Technology
address. Which appeared odd until I realised: when you type my name into our email system, it shows up as
Pemberton, John-Rhys.
And because I’ve mailed Perce a lot, I happen to know how
his
work address appears.’

‘
Perce, Sean
?’

‘Yes. So my guess? Bethan meant to send this to Perce’s home and work addresses, but instead—’

‘Autocomplete,’ nodded Mark. ‘
Pemberton. Perce.
She got you instead of him.’ J-R decided he’d said
yes
enough times and stayed silent. ‘So – this is undeniably fascinating but I’m guessing you want something more from me than polite interest?’

‘Well, yes, there’s this attachment. I suppose I’d assumed –’

J-R was incapable this morning of completing a sentence. Mark filled the vacuum.