Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (25 page)

‘He’s my humanoid shield,’ says Gray.

She looks back at him.

‘Who are you, Gray?’

‘I’m – preparing. That’s all. Some day soon, the greatest luxury you’ll be able to buy is privacy. The haves will be the ones who can afford to segment their identity, hide parts of it. The have-nots will be who they are and nothing more. Anyone who knows one thing about them will be able to find out everything else. Click, click, they’ll be owned. Like you’ve been owned today. But me? If they’re tracking Terry, they won’t know anything. And vice versa.’

The yard stays silent.

‘But I don’t have anything like that,’ says Dani. ‘I’m just me.’

‘Yeah. You are.’

‘I can’t just turn myself off. I don’t think I want to turn myself off. I want to kick every troll on the Internet in his tiny nads.’

Gray starts scooping up the documents and tucking them away in the folder.

‘You’ve been out there, Dan. It’s not for you today. You need a zero-knowledge system. If you leave a single chink they’ll be on you in a nanosecond.’

He never looks her in the eye when he’s confronting even a bit.

‘And what would you know about it, Robot-Boy? What the shit use is this to me?’

She chucks the card at his face. It bounces off his glasses and lands between his hands. He slams the laptop shut as if he wants to break it.

‘Well, so aren’t you lucky you have so many exes in town? Why not go ask
Sam
for help if
Sam
is so smart?’

She stares at him. That wasn’t Robot-Boy, not at all. He stows the laptop and documents.

When she was with Gray, all she ever wanted was to provoke a reaction. It never worked and all she got was furious. Then it started to work too well – but that was an age ago. She’d forgotten what it was like to see him turn like this.

He puts the bag on the ground and breathes, head down. Then he looks up and to her amazement he’s grinning.

‘So Dan?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Have you ever actually been to a
trendy Soho sex party
?’

A jolt of laughter escapes her.

‘I had sex in a wardrobe once at a party in Holborn. Does that count?’

‘I actually do not want to hear about that.’

‘Yeah. Sorry.’

They listen to the dog scratch and scuffle then catch each other’s eye.

‘So Dan?’

‘Uh huh?’

‘Do you think we might have got together again if we hadn’t –? I mean, this place –?’

‘Oh, fuck, come on!’ she says.

‘No, OK. Sorry, too, I guess.’

But they’re good now. She studies his face. He’s bonier, more drawn about the eyes.

‘Do you still deal out here?’ she says.

He sizes her up before answering.

‘Not so much. Since The Big M moved in, it’s harder.’

Dani nods. Things have changed since Mondan adopted Parley. Emails monitored, tiny cameras appearing in high corners.

‘But do you have anything now?’ she asks.

Gray looks at her for a moment then unzips a pocket concealed inside the strap of his backpack. He pulls out a little Ziploc, weighs it in his hand and holds it out for her. It’s the ones with the little Reebok logo. She never knows if they’re a bad knockoff of the Nike ones, or it’s a pill factory with a sense of irony. But they’re actually pretty good.

Before she can take the baggie, Gray pulls it back. She’s left with her hand out as he reaches into his rucksack, pulls out his wallet and extracts something from it. He hands her back the baggie and this time it’s wrapped around the credit card. Terry Salmon’s credit card.

‘On me,’ he says. ‘Pills and card. I have another ID I’m shaping, anyway. Terry can be yours. You can have him all. Or
her,
now, I guess. Theresa. Terry.’

She takes the baggie, then the card. She holds the card up to inspect it, squinting against the white light overhead.

‘Terry. Huh. Well, hello, Terry.’

Dani levels up.

From
The Electronic Radical

by Dr Elyse Martingale (1957, Gollancz)

We see here the approaching crisis of the modern age.

When the machine becomes a tool for solving every conundrum we will believe we can achieve anything; and yet what new problems will these machines throw in our paths? Problems that today we cannot even imagine.

These engines of thought will become vehicles for war, crime and disorder; they will exasperate and frustrate our dreams as much as they promote and realise them; they will taunt us with their superior knowledge of every topic; but their mechanical nature will be too slow to grasp our human needs. In spite of this we will face great disappointment each time they let down our heightened expectations.

A great thinker began our century with a challenge known as the Decision Problem. It asks:
is there a method by which we can always know, in a given system of proof, whether a statement is true, or false?
This little puzzle will seem abstruse to many readers; but it is the key to our crisis. I hope to demonstrate this by restating it, as has Professor Turing, in terms of machinery:
Can I create a machine which will answer any question I can present to it?

Let me now put you out of any suspense you may feel in this matter. The answer is, ‘No.’ Soon we shall set in motion many millions of ingenious processes. But we can never know which will lead to the great achievements of the era and which will collapse in ruins; or merely churn on: endless, fruitless.

¶sic_girl

Never say sic_girl done gone cast stone one. (Or mebbe a bitty one. Soz.) But dey got dirty and shirty and now I’m feeling hurty. So, whoosh. Right back atch’a, Beth.

Ahem.

Exhibit a) The contract lady Lehrer signed six months ago in her own fair hand with big bad Mondan. May I draw m’learned friend’s attention to clause 21.7.1?

In which The Supplier (that’s Mr Perce) agrees to disclose any data breach to The Service Owner’s Responsible Officer (that’s the lovely Lehrer – do keep up) within 24 hours?

I guess they must have done that when someone hacked all that data, right?

Right?

#sigh#

Darling ones, will you do a thing for me? You will?

Rinse and repeat:

I am not Dani Farr

I am not Dani Farr

I am not Dani Farr

Ten

J-R fiddled with the lock on the toilet-stall door. The fussy mechanism somehow exemplified the precious impracticality of Parley’s offices. He brute-forced the bolt into place and breathed out. For a moment he was protected from the disorder outside. His hand shook as he worked his fly.

The stall was narrow, making it hard to navigate around the fixtures. J-R lifted the seat and positioned himself against the left-hand wall to avoid the sink and hot-air dryer encroaching from his right. He waited for a coherent stream to emerge; but in spite of the raging pressure from his bladder, stress staunched his urethra. Three rudimentary drops edged out, then nothing. He gazed into the well-proportioned bowl.
Villeroy & Boch.
Sic_girl’s latest post had amplified his position from awkward to devastating. Mere hours after he emailed Mark the Mondan contract, ‘she’ had shared the self-same document with the world. It had to be a coincidence but it could only look terrible for J-R. How long would it be before he got the phone call saying – what? That he was dismissed? Under investigation? For the first time he wished everyone would stop pussy-footing around the issue and shut Parley down before any more harm was done.

He gave his penis a hopeful tug and repositioned his feet to relieve the tension in his inner thighs. He feared his bladder might rupture if he didn’t let out something soon. The BlackBerry trilled and vibrated in his left hand. He flinched: he hadn’t realised he was holding it. On cue, a bright stream of urine issued from him and strafed the water in a hearty rush.

He fumbled the BlackBerry. Krish’s name lit up the screen. He breathed twice as the pressure in his bladder eased. The ringtone played again. Better to answer. He redirected the pee against the back of the bowl to minimise background noise and answered left-handed. Krish’s voice took over before the BlackBerry had made it to his ear.

‘So who
exactly
is this Mark Dinmore? The truth, now.’

‘Ah, Krish. As I said—’

‘Because let me tell you what I’m looking at. To my left is a commercially confidential government contract that you emailed to Mr Dinmore yesterday afternoon.’

‘Krish—’

‘And to my right, a missive from sic_girl, posted twenty minutes ago. Linking to a leaked copy of – can you guess what she’s linking to, J-R?’

J-R watched the continuing stream of piss. Would it never end?

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘The contract.’

He eased around to his right to direct the stream against the side of the bowl.

‘Well, you know what, J-R? You just
–’

As J-R turned, his elbow swung under the sensor of the hand-dryer. A roar of heated air shot down his leg. He flinched away, spraying urine up the side of the bowl and onto the wall. As he righted the stream the sweaty BlackBerry slipped through the fingers of his other hand.

There followed a moment of suspended time. The BlackBerry hung in the air as the heater roared and his brain struggled with a snapshot choice: control the flailing stream of pee, or catch the flying smartphone? He attempted both; but he’d never been good at such double tricks. His right hand squashed wetly on his penis. His left flapped the air around the BlackBerry, knocking it towards the toilet bowl. It bounced on the porcelain rim, chipped hopefully sideways for a second, then slid to the bottom of the bowl, lighting the water with a yellow glow. Undaunted, J-R plunged his hand into the liquid and grabbed the sunken plastic slab. Only when he’d pulled it out, dripping but still apparently alive, did he register what he’d done. He looked at it, shook it a little and held it several inches from the side of his head, as though miming a much larger handset. His cuff dripped onto his shirtfront.

‘Ah – hello?’ Silence. ‘Big Krish?’ Still silence.

He looked again at the sloppy device then held it under the hand-dryer, which roused back into life and began to toast it. After a few seconds of this treatment, the screen died and refused to respond to any form of button-press.

J-R stood breathing. He surveyed the wreckage of the wall, his trousers, the unlit thing in his hand. His breath was short. He thought:
I am off the map. For the first time in years, they cannot find me.
This thought was a matter of surprise. An intense resolve gripped him but he’d no notion where he should direct it.

After a moment he dropped the BlackBerry through the metal waste flap in the wall. He began to rinse his hands at the miniature sink, letting the water touch and warm him.

¶identikid

It happens tomorrow, people. 18 hours and counting. We still need 15 more bodies. Whisper me NOW.

Eleven

The female Terry Salmon becomes active at 16:03 on Thursday at FoneBiz on Theobalds Road, with the purchase of a quad-core 3GHz Samsung Galaxy Edge smartphone on a 4G contract. She uses her CreditU MasterCard and IDs with a January gas bill. Her credit check clears at first touch. She adds a USB dongle and a hard shell case for the phone – like Dani, Terry is prone to dropping electronics. The bill comes to £326.85. The card has a £22,000 limit.

Her next stop is PC Xpert on Kingsway, where at 16:18 she adds £4,478.43 to the card with the purchase of an HP EliteBook 9960, a gunmetal Samsung Gear 3S smartwatch, an assortment of cables and adaptors, a slew of portable storage and a slick black backpack with a laptop compartment; and space for a bunch of other stuff.

Continuing her passage west she withdraws £250 at 16:30 from a generic ATM in PAYWELL FOOD 24 HOUR on Endell Street. The transaction charge is £1.50.

At 16:39 Terry appears on Parley, with the handle
AStrangeFish.
She uses mobile tethering to go online, so wifi logs do not provide a record – but from the timing of the transaction, we surmise that this takes place in Starbucks on Long Acre, where at 16:36 she puts £12.73 of coffee, sandwich and rocky road onto the MasterCard. Once online, she begins to register for a variety of cloud-based services and downloads open source software at an accelerating pace.

Gray gave her the folder. Combined with the credit card, the documents will authorise any transaction with relevant, accurate, fictional data: address, NI number, mother’s maiden name.

She starts with gentle spikes, nudging at the fringes of her powerful new opponents in government. Citing sic_girl, cracking wise, acting and reacting, connecting. Gray says she’s a black belt in social media kung fu and here she’s amazed how little she needs Dani’s existing footprint to spur this on. She knows what tone to strike when pinging unsolicited slogans, links and jibes to the Personas, and to influential human users she knows will cite them. They do; and AStrangeFish is seen and read, and rapidly builds a following. She parasites blogs and the growing library sic_girl is linking to. Someone has created a wiki of the leaked emails and documents, plus thousands of user-generated docs commenting on them. It’s a mishmash, the hokey and the random bleeding into the credible and alarming.