Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (21 page)

‘But what has Mondan to do with this Grubby?’ asked J-R.

‘Grubly. Didn’t I say? Mondan’s putting Grubly out. Has been for a while I think, but most recently through your Digital Citizen pilot.’

‘No, that can’t be right. We don’t just force software onto people’s computers.’

‘Which I guess is why you’re making people sign up to Grubly
before
their lives are invaded?’

J-R felt a cold touch on his neck.

‘We’re making people do what?’

Mark flicked to a Word file of numbered legal paragraphs and began to scroll.

‘Terms and conditions. Tricky things. People don’t read them, just click the box marked
I accept.
’ He highlighted a paragraph. J-R worked to decode the nested clauses. ‘I saw this and thought, what the heck is
Digital Citizen Component Software
? So I ran a dCitz install on my own machine.’

‘But – you’re not in the pilot area.’

‘Oh dear. Then I suppose I must have entered a fake address. I wanted to know what this
Digital Citizen software
was. And it turns out it was Grubly. This thing didn’t come in on some email scam. You put it there. It’s mugging by permission. All that effort the criminal fraternity puts into phishing scams. All the work me and my colleagues do to prevent them. You just handed over the shooting match on behalf of HM Government.’

‘Mark, you would really need to prove that. It’s a major thing you’re implying.’

Mark took a sip of his coffee, and nodded.

‘Except it isn’t just me who’s got a beef here; is it?’

The penny, for J-R, dropped.

‘This is why someone’s trashing Bethan on Parley. Because we’re signing people up to this Grubly.’

‘Maybe even why someone hacked your data. If they did.’

They sat in silence, the wind kicking at their heels. On the table, Mark’s newspaper was weighted down with a glass ashtray. The arm and breast of Dani Farr protruded from under the ashtray, black lace curves abstracted from her body.

‘Perhaps she’s on the side of the angels after all?’ said J-R.

Mark followed his eyes and lifted the ashtray. Dani stared unhappily back.

‘You do think it’s her?’

‘I don’t know: she comes across as ruthlessly straightforward. And puzzled by all this.’ J-R smiled at Mark. ‘As am I.’

Mark unlocked his laptop.

‘Something I’m doing for a client.’ He pulled another programme from the depths of his screen. ‘Monitoring activist traffic. This app seeks out patterns, threats. When a red-flag topic gets attention a digital bell goes off. This morning it’s like every alarm has been tripped at once.’

The application was designed with no regard for the novice. A patchwork of sharp-edged black panels where snatches of text pulsed on and off. Phrases appeared, were highlighted in flashes of red or green, and vanished. J-R caught a few words –
demo, takebackID, Martingale, riotbaby.

‘For a couple of weeks there’s been mounting traffic on Parley. Rallying cries to some event. People are angry. But this morning’s outing of Dani Farr was a catalyst. This guy, identikid.’ He placed his finger on a stream of chatter highlighted in red. ‘He’s important. And Dani Farr means something to him.’

He tailed off, frowning at the text stream.

‘What does this tell us?’ said J-R.

Mark snapped out of his trance.

‘Wish I knew. But suppose your instinct about Dani is right. Suppose she’s not to blame, and someone’s smearing her. Same question I asked you before. Who stands to gain?’

J-R looked across the river to Mondan’s building, 404 City, its animated screens revolving between glass and metal towers. Perce’s domain. Then left towards St Stephen’s Tower. Westminster. Which reminded him –

‘Heavens, I almost forgot: Bethan’s email attachment?’

‘Ah. Yes.’ Mark shook his head. ‘Sorry. Nothing. It’s still locked down tight.’

J-R nodded.

‘No answers, then.’

Of course not.

Their bill arrived. Mark placed his hand over it to protect it from the wind. On the laptop screen, a flurry of proffers started up the screen like game birds taking flight.

Terms and conditions of use

13.2.4 Notwithstanding the above, the User acknowledges that by accessing the Digital Citizen platform (‘Platform’) or using the services offered by Digital Citizen (‘Services’) they additionally agree and acknowledge to be bound by the Consequential Terms and Conditions of Use of the Digital Citizen Component Software (‘Consequential Terms and Conditions’) including but not limited to the transmission and storage of information by the Provider and certain trusted third parties to perform functions and provide services to Users. If the User does not agree to these Consequential Terms and Conditions they shall not access the Platform or use the Services.

Three

Dani wakes on a pillow of her own discarded jacket. Second night in a row she didn’t make it to bed. The sofa feels like it’s stuffed with gravel. Her head feels like it’s stuffed with razor blades. Her phone, when she fishes it from her pocket, insists it’s after nine thirty. Her phone is full of shit. She screens out the sixty-plus missed calls it’s had overnight and tucks it in her jeans, then unfolds herself from the rumpled sofa cushions.

She makes the street in a hung-over trance. Zags of light jab at her between the buildings. City boys in turbo cars make Grand Theft Auto moves; pedestrians loom like a first-person shooter. She isn’t surprised by the curious, suggestive looks all down the street. That’s her paranoia, grinding her forehead and churning her empty stomach.

She buys a morning-after Coke from the corner shop. It’s the older Khan lad behind the counter. He gives a leer and looks about to speak, but doesn’t, just passes the change like it’s some kind of award. The air is thick with sick hot spice; she needs some air. The old white guy at the exit nods and gives her the up-and-down like he’s sizing up a stripper. Has she got a boob out? As she pushes her way out she checks her front with her hand, even though she has a T-shirt on. No: all in order. She sips the frosted Coke and lets it slap her cerebellum into shape. She has things to do and needs to shake this queasy anxiety. But still these blank and greedy looks from every man she passes. By the time she gets to the bus stop she’s genuinely freaked.

Men always look at Dani; at her purple swash of hair and at her tits, but it’s usually covert. She scares them, probably; she hopes she does. Her slipshod ferocity is some kind of provocation. They check her out, but from the edges of her vision, fearing and hoping she might look back at them, which she never does; but this morning it’s blatant, like someone’s been handing out licences to troll.

She returns the stare of one young black guy passing the bus stop. He looks back at her with this possessive half-a-smile. She casts her eyes to the ground – where she sees the trodden free-sheet on the pavement. A front page splash.

Time stops. The angry hum of the Kingsland Road condenses into a vanishing point. A tunnel forms between her eyes and the newspaper. She reaches down for it as though it’s primed to explode.

Dani’s always hated photos of herself. She especially hates drunk-shots; but it’s hard to take her picture when she’s anything less than paralytic. So she’s usually captured in some shade of gawping and/or shambolic eroticism. In spite of all the images she posts of exposed unknown young men and women, she never shares selfies – except, OK, the occasional private sext; but even then only when she’s absolutely shit-faced. Still, she can’t stop people taking photos and tagging her. So these ugly snatches of her persist here, there and Christ knows where; and links and connections build around them.

She’s switched off alerts and never ego-googles, so she passes weeks without seeing a single picture of herself: apart from the cropped publicity shot they dragged her into doing for work. She sees that every morning, blown up on metre-high foam mount in Parley’s main reception, under the caption
Celebrating our key talent.
Her birthmark is a garish presence in the picture, staining the bottom of the frame like something spilled. She’s come to like that image.

But seeing herself now, flash-lit in lace and leather on the front page, draped across a tatty chaise, straddled by some man who’s pouring liquid at her mouth from a giant test-tube, is a gut-blow. The paragraphs slide in and out of each other but she doesn’t need to read the words to understand.
Malicious geek
,
they say.
Sex-freak. Spoiler.
They’re saying she hacked the Digital Citizen. That she’s the one proffering under sic_girl’s handle.

She looks around for some out, some explanation. She marches back to Khan’s and this time scans the shelf at the foot of the magazine display, its irregular stacks of papers. Five minutes ago she walked past them like a zombie but now she sees: every one of these papers has a picture of her. Wayward images, sampled from God knows where. She doesn’t recognise half of them, but they’re her. It’s a dream of appearing in a TV show called
This Is Your Drunk Whore Life.

She picks one up. It’s fat and rough-edged. The print is surreally sharp and colourful. She never reads papers, has never seen the point of them. They’re hours out of date and they don’t tell you what anyone thinks about anything: just page after page of stone-dead information. But suddenly they’re immense and powerful. She thinks how many hundreds of thousands of these dumb identical things are spattered across the nation. Then she thinks of their online editions, how they’ll have multiplied and spewed ten thousand proffers, links and threads and likes. She drops the paper back on the pile and pulls out her phone to catch the expanding bubble of news. She sees the notifications still on the screen and then it hits her: why all these calls and mails and whispers? Because she’s some trash celebrity overnight. Some fat slut anti-government nutjob. Here are the thousands of people who suddenly want a piece of Dani. Her finger hovers over the
Unlock
swipe for a fraction of a second before unleashing what’s under the surface of the screen.

Makes sense a fat ugly whore like you would want to hide her identity. I wouldn’t fuck you if you had a bag tied over your head. Unless it was a plastic bag and you were dying of suffocation. Let me know when you catch aids and die so I can fuck your corpse and laugh in your dead bitch face. Don’t worry, I’ll wear a condom, lol.

She offs the phone and pushes it back in her jeans. She wavers in the passing rush of trucks and buses from the road outside; thinks for a moment she might pass out.

Then her scrambled brain kicks in. She knows who’s done this to her, who’s to blame; and the knowledge unfreezes her. Asshole. Shitting shitting asshole. It’s less than ten minutes from here to the address on the card, which is stuffed somewhere in her courier bag – but she doesn’t need to dig it out. She’s turned it over in her hand so many times the address is burned into her eyeballs. She leaves the shop smooth and mechanical as the Terminator, remorseless and programmed to destroy.

Except really? She feels like shit. She’s pretty sure the Terminator was never this hung over.

¶bottomhalfofthepage

My granny always said you eat what you sow. I think people who live in glass social networks shouldn’t throw accusations at popular public figures.

¶riotbaby

You go sister! Stick one to the Man. And the lady minister.

¶xxbabesxx

I don’t care what yous all say I think she is pretty hot for a fat chick
.

¶tvjoe

Woot! Peoples! We’s on telly!!! Dani Farr for the win!

¶9th&sunset

Do you believe this sick fat whore above an elected politician? If you do you’re just as filthy crazy as that bitch in the pictures.

¶lolcatz

Me no geddit. Me iz Dani Farr, too?

¶TurdoftheDay

Spattergun. The force of a car backfiring.

<
pic
:>

I don’t know what to do. Help me.

Four

Identikid does a trial login to the botnet server. It’s still there. He scrolls the list of captive IPs. Total count today is over thirty thousand. Just under twenty-three thou active at this very moment. Way more than he needs to DDoS the lights out of those pigs at Mondan, come Saturday.

Leo just walked onto thousands of unprotected PCs, dotted about the world. The bot launches from off a virus scam, so he’s only spoofing net virgins dumb enough to open a dot-exe in the first place. All these citizens alive right now, doing their Amazon, downloading their porn and emailing their grans.

A familiar voice slides out of the portable speakers on the bar. His pianist fingers pause over the laptop keys. Shuffle has thrown up an unfamiliar nerd-lounge track that’s wrapping its beats around something very known to Leo. Through rolling crackles and interrupted jets of synth runs a sample – schoolmistress tones laid with viral energy:

WHAT THEY WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE

WHAT THEY WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE

WHAT THEY WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE

Then a break, then: