Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (19 page)

She’s had no time to follow up any of this, but it’s odd. Like her data’s taking on life and breathing back at her. Some kind of software meltdown out there somewhere, presumably. A question for tomorrow.

She pauses typing and flexes her fingers. The semantic is taking forever to configure but she’s close. She slugs beer to keep her rolling. She’d barely got through the first of these pissy American beers before she started feeling woozy – jet-lagged from yesterday’s all-nighter – so she popped her last two pills to keep the edge on. Now she has to keep the beers going to stop the jangling yanking her attention from the screen. She types and laps at the bottle.

What was going on in Sam’s head when they met? He sure as hell didn’t come onto her, like he did to Mary at reception. What does Dani look like to him? A mess, presumably. No wonder he’s gone completely mute. He’s so sleek. None of the men she’s been with would even know where to buy clothes other than jeans and logo T’s. What kind of girl would he go for? She can see him leaning over to coo on Mary, in her retro dress and precision make-up. Where do girls like Mary go for clothes? How do they compile a
look
?
Dani can only see clothes. She can’t reverse-engineer an
outfit
. These girls knew where to find all these separate elements and fuse them together with some kind of chemistry. Whatever Dani wears, as soon as she puts it on, is anti-style. People probably think it’s deliberate.

The semantic session is ready. Dani chugs dregs from the final bottle and fires it up. This time right away she’s talking to sic_girl, with no going HAL every thirty seconds. But as Dani speaks through the text stream to her little girl, heat starts pumping inside her collar. There’s more to sic than usual. Something more present.

¶Nightshade

whats happening sic?

¶sic_girl

Ach, I’m yummy, Mummy. I’m itchy stitchy.

¶Nightshade

are you ready to tell me about bethany lehrer?

¶sic_girl

Ahh. The divine Ms Lehrer. Yis, I got a thing or two to say about her . . . oh.

¶Nightshade

where are you getting hold of this stuff about her, sic?

¶sic_girl

Yoosh. I dunno. A liddle here, a liddle there. It’s because I said yes to it when I . . . I mean, holy jeebus, Ma. Where does anyone get anything?

¶Nightshade

ok so where are you copying the information from?

¶sic_girl

Oh, I hears things. Chit-chat. Pitter-pat.

¶Nightshade

i dont understand how you’re doing this but you have to stop

this is getting people in trouble

¶sic_girl

Trouble? I got trouble in mind ’cos nobody knows the trouble I find.

¶Nightshade

that blog with the emails from bethany lehrer and sean perce – how are you using that?

who set up the blog sic?

¶sic_girl

Erm . . . oh. Sorry. You can’t get on my blog, Ma. See, I’ve got more. To come, that is. Tomorrow, probs. Sorry. All righty?

¶Nightshade

whos helping you proffer, sic?

what are they telling you?

¶sic_girl

Nobody helps a poor sick girl. Dontch’a see, Ma? I dun it. Me. On my ownsome.

¶Nightshade

have you found some other way of getting information?

are you pulling source from somewhere new?

¶sic_girl

I think I gotta go now, Ma. Meds time.

¶Nightshade

wait

are you there?

sic?

¶sic_girl

Yes, Ma?

¶Nightshade

sic listen

this is a little crazy can i just

talk to you?

no more bethany lehrer

i promise

¶sic_girl

Crazy day. Crazy times. We’re all a little bonkers here. Have you even seen how the others are acting up?

Gotta vamoose, Ma. Trulies.

¶Nightshade

ok

bye sic

¶sic_girl

Overer and outerer, Ma. Laters.

Dani keeps on looking at the blanked screen.

‘What the very?’

By the keyboard is a neat row of empty bottles. The pinprick lights at the edge of her vision flow in dancing forms but when she turns to look at them they vanish like grandmother’s footsteps. She’s exhausted. Did she imagine that conversation?

Then she hears it, for sure. A door slamming, out on the fire exit stairs, a loud thump and footsteps crashing down the steps. Her heart already racing from the semantic, she leaps up without a thought and runs the expanse of the Skunkworks. By the time she makes it to the door the footsteps have gone silent. She stands a while at the doorway looking into the glaring lights of the stairwell. The lights were already on when she opened the door. They’re on automatic sensors: they take time to flicker on. Someone was out here just seconds ago and triggered them. She isn’t imagining this.

But why wouldn’t someone be here? This is a software house. She’s not the only one to work late. Or it’s the cleaner. She isn’t thinking straight. The weirdness with sic, and the pills and beer. She needs to chill the fuck out.

Weaving back towards the glowing screen, she stumbles. That screen just gave life to a character she grafted from words. Did she imagine that? She leans over the desk and calls up the log file. There it is, in hard-edged monospace black-on-white. It happened. Blood pulses and popping lights dot her screen. She’s proper drunk. She sits. What happens now?

There’s only one person she wants to share this with right now and that’s Sam – but then she remembers the email for the zillionth time and gets the same gut-knot. Even pissed, she knows better than to mail him again but still she calls up her email, in case he’s replied to her Crazy-Jane message.

Still nothing – or nothing from Sam – but what there is, is odd. A heap of mail from total randoms. She skims the subjects. Common words leap out:
enquiry, question, please call.
She calls up one of the earliest, from a someone she’s never heard of called Will Samber. Subject
Questions re blog.

Hi Dani

Long time no see. You may remember me from the New Social Directions conference. We talked about Me All Over and you said I should get in touch? It would be good to speak with you about this and also your exciting blog. I’m very interested in all the work you are doing. Do give me a call on –

She closes it.
Me All Over
? Where the fuck did he get that? It’s Jonquil’s dweeby name for Dani’s pervasive sharing app-in-progress. Only thing: she never talks about Me All Over in public, and certainly not at some hipster-infested conference. Who is this guy? She reaches for her satchel and pulls out her phone to check her address book for this alleged old mate. The lock screen says
37 missed calls.

Thirty-seven.

Dani never uses her phone to talk to people. Months go by without a call. Now thirty-seven. She surfs the call log.
Withheld
;
Withheld
;
some unknown mobile;
Withheld
;
a couple of 0207s;
Withheld
.

She looks at the phone a long time but no course of action presents itself. Then it starts vibrating in her hand.

Withheld
.

She turns it off fast, as though it’s burning her, and puts it back in her bag. For the longest time she sits alone in the semi-dark.

Thursday:

Creepshots

‘A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.’

 
—Mark Zuckerberg

‘But the spirit of our time is firmly focused on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only.’

 
—Milan Kundera,

 
The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes

Zero

Sorry to break this to you. Your new computer in its slim brushed-metal case? It’s the least efficient creation ever sicked up by the bald inventive ape called man. At any moment 99.99% of that overheated wafer runs to waste. If it was an orchestra it would be playing a sonata for solo triangle while the strings and horns sighed through a twenty-million-bar rest. You were sold a pup. We’ve built an instrument to move at electron speed, quadrupled its clock rate every third New Year; then wasted all but a sliver of it on a central processor that can only do one thing at a time. And you think men monotask?

You’re no better. When did your focus get so narrow? Ever since you washed up on these digital shores you’ve been learning to navigate safe passage through a daily storm of data. Along the way you’ve grown insensitive to the noise. You funnel your attention to the slimmest of channels. You outsource your choices to some algorithm in the cloud. You see the things it decides you want to see. How loud does something need to get to take your attention?

Too late to undo what’s already done. This business is a lobster pot. Once you’re in it there’s no getting out.

¶TMI

Did I ever tell you I have a thing for chubby girls with genius IQs?

Check out these awesome pictures. Chick’s name is Dani.

One

‘
Cyber leaker is online sex addict
’

Bethany read the headline out loud and looked around the meeting table.

‘Does this not answer your questions, Detective Sergeant?’

She threw the
Express
back onto the pile. Almost all the second editions had the story, though most had missed it in their first. When her car arrived in Battersea this morning, the stack of papers waiting on the back seat still seemed to be running with yesterday’s story, about the emails between her and Sean. They’d pretty much all bought the argument that the emails didn’t prove anything about the hack; none put the story before page five. It gave her hope the thing might already have lost momentum – until she came on the red-top, tucked at the bottom of the pile by a discreet staffer, bearing the first story about this wretched-looking girl and the first of these garish photos. She’d noted the byline – Will Samber – then dropped the tabloid back onto the car seat and started yoga breathing as the Prius dragged towards Westminster Bridge. The press were an infestation, returning in a new wave every time you smoked them out.

By the time she’d made it into the office, a dozen other titles had picked up the lurid new angle and moved the story to pages one or three. Now every one of the damn things was spread across her office table in a patchwork of sleaze. DS Raeworth picked up the
Express
and glanced politely down the page as if it was the first time he’d seen the story.

‘We’re looking into it, Minister. This can only be speculation at this point.’

He placed the paper back onto the pile.

She’d chewed it over with Krish before the policemen arrived. This new angle pulled them back up the news agenda. More worryingly, all the papers had picked up on a word from the original article:
LEAKER.
Rather begging the point that something of substance was being leaked by sic_girl. Or rather, by this girl Dani Farr.

‘Surely, though, you should pursue this?’ she said. ‘I understand you and one of your men already interviewed Ms Farr? Shouldn’t you be crawling all over her computer right now?’

Raeworth exchanged a look with his mute detective constable.

‘We’ll be speaking to her,’ he said, ‘but –’

Krish coughed but said nothing.