Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (15 page)

Whoever did that hack, they’re OK by Leo – by identikid, that is. They helped make him what he’s turned into since only yesterday: a player. No more script kiddie hustling for a zero-day hack.

The Flamingo is quiet this arvo but Leo knows from static on the boards how fast things are moving. He’s edgy. Maybe because of that property guy was on their dicks again this morning. But more, too. Something the whole squat knows is coming.

¶identikid

So pumped about takeback Friday.

He gets more cites, more devotees, when he proffers what he feels, not just what’s happening.

Perched on a flock-covered stool, Leo types fast enough to rub off his fingerprints. In the dinge of the saloon his MacBook bleeds blue light on the knife-etched countertop. On the wall above the row of empty optics, a Warholed poster of Elyse Martingale shouts . . .
or we shall step around it 
. . . in fraying lower-case Courier.

Identikid is Leo when he’s off the wires. His whole thing goes on here in the Flamingo. This peeling barroom is the smaller of their two public spaces. At night they use it for pop-up shows: club spots, comedy, micro-burlesque. It raises serious coin for their other activities. But by day it’s quiet and the perfect hub for identikid’s oppos.

Wifi and electricity they gank from the next-door supermarket, but they need to keep the usage down. If the fluorescents dip in the shop, the three big Pakistani lads come round to tell off the Flamingo crew, but they’re mostly chill if Leo and his mates don’t take the piss. So during the day it’s lights out. You’d never know it wasn’t night, except for what cracks in through the window boards. Reynard can’t power up his PAs while the shop is open so the only sound is the ambient drone of Kingsland Road and the sub-bass of the trucks.

Leo proffers.

¶identikid

We have work to do.

How to make a citizen understand what’s been taken from her? Someone steals her wallet, she feels a loss. Bankers lose our billions, we’re mad as hell. Someone takes away my privacy? Never mind, I got a discount on this fifty-two inch plasma. Someone steals my identity? Big whoop. I got five free downloads.

Leo types up a quarrel, pushing a dread from his eye. That’s right, Mum, he thinks. Still got
those awful dreadlocks.
She rang yesterday. Why’d he have to answer? First thing she says is, she goes,
Have you still got that hair?
He’s never going home. She goes,
You
’
ll never get a job interview with all that going on up there.
She doesn’t know what’s going on. There’s things more important than
proper jobs.
She goes,
Your father is ya ya ya ya ya.
What did they ever give him?

He angles the screen of his graduation MacBook to get a sharper image and keeps telling the people:
soon, soon, soon.
Doors bang about upstairs. That’s Winter. She’s not forgiven him for when they had words before. She’s doing what she does when she’s mad, i.e. storming the pub rooms, cleaning up cans, pulling paper and bottles out the rubbish. Stuffing them in the recycling sacks. Passive aggressive, like. Blaming. It’s cool to be green but that girl can be this total recyclopath.

And what did she want to get so pissed with Leo for, this morning? It was because of that fascist bailiff. OK Leo had, to be honest, let the situation in the street get a little out of hand, but it was the guy who started in with aggro, after Leo tore up the notice he was sticking to the door. And maybe Leo spat, but not
at
the guy. He’d been handling it. Fuck, what did Winter need to start screaming out the window for? You call a guy a cunt, he has to get back at you. That’s logic. Now he’ll be back for definite and he won’t be alone. Screaming blue shit at people solves nothing. Leo trusts in subtle. Winter always wants a brawl.

What Leo’s working up today you’ve got to say is super-subtle. For once identikid has something to throw. He sees the noise from the groups, knows what’s going down. On the street outside, citizens walk past talking their shit to each other. They have no idea. They don’t know where to look, or how to listen. Identikid knows.

Friday is just a couple days away. Then TakeBackID will be more than just a meme.

¶identikid

404 City, watch your ass.

¶techwave

Here, everybody. This:

>>cite ¶thegrays

Everyone worries about losing they’re privacy but they don’t hesitate for a nanosecond before giving credit card details to Murdoch or Bezos or Perce

Six

The M&M came to life. The plastic figure had been standing inert on the desk, right arm raised in a solidarity salute. Then without any obvious cause came a
bong
and a whine of servos as the arm chopped sharply down and up. A sweet popped green and immaculate from a dimpled hole in the smooth belly, to land in a cupped hand. Graham reached for it, tossed it in the air and caught it in his mouth like a feeding fish.

‘So that was a cite,’ he explained, munching sugar.

‘A sight? Of –?’

‘
Cite.
Citation,’ said Graham.

On his screen he called up a Parley continuity, as J-R now knew to call it. He pointed to the spot where one of Parley’s software characters – or Personas – had quoted someone called
thegrays.

‘See, here,’ said Graham, ‘that’s me – thegrays
.
Techwave cited my proffer about, well, you can see. Which comment was pretty sharp, though I say so.’

J-R read the ‘cite’ – a quoted comment from thegrays. From Graham.

‘Yes, I see. Isn’t Sean Perce ultimately your boss?’

J-R shuddered to imagine publishing a similar comment about a minister. Graham shrugged.

‘And I have this Parley app,’ he drew a rectangle around the screen, ‘wired up to MC M&M here. Every time I get a cite from one of the Personas, my little plastic friend dispenses me a reward.’

For the first time in the conversation, Graham turned from his screen to look at J-R, grinning widely at the ingenuity it had taken him to achieve this pointless outcome. How they fetishised these soulless ‘Personas’.

‘So everyone using Parley,’ said J-R, ‘is aiming to be quoted by an artificial person?’

But Graham had returned to his screen and for a moment he didn’t reply. J-R accepted the silence and looked around at the genius mayhem of equipment, cables, cardboard boxes and shuffling boy-men filling the artificially lit, low-ceilinged space. This was the
Geek Farm
, the engine room of Parley’s techie elite. The untended walls were the dirty blue of a faded tattoo, giving the room a nighttime flavour. A grey hum filled the air and there was a sharp smell of freshly unearthed truffles – the distinctive odour of men who’ve spent the day surrounded by overheated equipment.

J-R’s BlackBerry buzzed. A text from Krish.

So we survived Karen this am though I’ve now two choices where to shite from. Stay at Parley. Keep head down and eyes peeled for media interest re Parley or Mondan. Come to me first.

Or in other words,
do nothing.
J-R put the phone away.

Graham flicked between windows, clicking and typing in gnomic bursts. He had an angular, ancient face, wiry glasses, a scraggy bunch of hair pulled through a scrumple of yellow rubber. His wispy half-beard and waistcoat gave him a nineteenth-century air. Beneath the waistcoat a crown device and capital letters decorated his red T-shirt. J-R did not understand the motto on the shirt. In the style of the popular wartime slogan,
Keep calm and carry on
,
it read:

USE BINARY

AND

CARRY ONE

His concentration was absolute.
Parley’s ‘Systems Ninja’ – as his business card described him – never seemed to do just one thing at a time. While giving J-R a guided tour of Parley, he was also mining a massive base of Internet data, called up overnight, trawling for some trace of Bethany that might have been used to form sic_girl’s infamous messages.

For a while J-R assumed his question had passed unheard. Then Graham spoke.

‘See, it’s a bigger thing getting cited on Parley than on other social networks, by people. When you get cited by one of the Personas, you’ve cracked the algorithm. You’ve decoded what the Personas are thinking at that one moment. What the Internet’s thinking.’

‘And that’s a more interesting challenge than working out what a human being will respond to?’

‘Um . . . yes?’ said Graham, turning to face J-R with genuine puzzlement. ‘I mean, who knows what
people
are going to do and say?’

J-R chose not to respond. This was only his second day at Parley, but he’d already heard as many different explanations of Parley as he’d had conversations. Nobody agreed why this gaggle of artificial personalities was worth spending time among; or why people were so eager to disclose such intimate thoughts to them.

Truncated names and inexplicable messages flickered past on Graham’s screen.

‘I was wondering,’ said J-R. ‘Why the archaic words?
Proffer
.
Parley.
Is someone a historian of language?’

Graham looked at him with disdain.

‘They have more Google-juice than modern generics.’

‘Ah –’

‘Uniqueness in search space.’

‘All right. And this is probably a stupid question, too, but –’ Graham looked back with lidded eyes, as if that were a foregone conclusion ‘– how do you tell the Personas from the – ah, real users?’

Graham sighed deeply, his fears confirmed.

‘Personas in grey, users in black,’ he said.

Ah, yes. J-R had noticed the different shades of text but had assumed they were random. Perhaps nothing in this online Babel was truly random.

‘Mondan,’ J-R ventured next.

Graham gave no sign of having heard.

‘You work for them now,’ said J-R. ‘Since Parley was acquired, what, two years back? Does that mean work
with
them? What’s that like? They have something of – ah – of a mixed reputation in the sector?’

Graham gave an adolescent sigh and glared at his screen. J-R had noticed the same aggression in other software people: an intimate rudeness, like the bickering of long-married couples who no longer care that their squabbles are on public show. Charm was irrelevant to getting the job done. J-R knew many people like that in Whitehall, too.

‘I’m there once a week,’ said Graham. ‘For meetings and stuff. Tech integration. Bulk data handling, email. Obviously I hose my soul down afterwards.’

He turned to offer J-R a grin that was more a simian snarl.

A female voice cut through the male hum.

‘So how are you planning to get all those processed, Fatnav? There’s shit-to-the-power-of-N gigs to crunch and you fucking know I have Jonquil on my arse.’

This could only be Dani Farr. J-R swivelled on his chair and saw where she’d landed in the room like phosphorus in water. She stood in a cluster of software engineers who were feeding at a screen a few desks along. At its centre sat Graham’s assistant, Colin – a man seemingly unaware of how a thin cotton T-shirt looked when draped across two generous man-breasts and a great dome of stomach. Known as
Fatnav
to his colleagues because of his droning computerised voice; and his shocking girth.

‘We’re doing the whole set in parallel batch,’ said Colin without pausing in his typing.

‘Jesus shitting Christ that’s farting in a fan. Use your brain, you obsessive anal zombie.’

Colin appeared to take active pleasure at this abuse. He hunched over his keyboard and did something that resembled J-R’s mum’s terrier, Granville, choking on a plum stone; but which was presumably laughter.

‘OK, twats, give me admin rights on this domain.’

Dani requisitioned the next-door computer. The installed programmer near-leaped from the chair.

‘And someone get me a re-up of storage.’

‘Hey! Use your own machine!’ said Colin.

His sudden anger was territorial: evidently this was his fiefdom.

‘Superuser me now,’ said Dani.

Colin gave her a furious US Marine-style salute, leaned over and made a short rattle on her keyboard before shoving it back to her.

‘Thank your fucky stars I’m in a hurry,’ she said, laying her smartphone beside the keyboard and starting to type, ‘or I’d shove your head so far up your arse you could french-kiss your liver.’

J-R was soaked in the wake of Dani’s anger. This was not play-acting: not entirely. She was edgier than she’d been yesterday. As she worked, she checked her phone obsessively for something that never appeared.

‘See this? This is my poker face.’ Colin again, pointing with one hand at his face while typing with the other. ‘It’s a face that says
I
’
m going to poke
’
er.
’

Uneasy laughter.

‘Yes, good. Right. Be so kind as to kiss my fucking ring,’ she said, distracted.

Breaking from her typing, she ploughed past the slower males on the wheels of her chair, landing at another keyboard.

‘I like that you didn’t deny that you’re obsessive and anal,’ she announced, her back to Colin.

‘What’s that you say? You’re obsessed with anal?’

A silence fell. Danielle slammed a drawer shut, hard.

‘Fucking brogrammers,’ she muttered into the screen.