Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (26 page)

Terry learns rapidly. Dani wishes she’d listened more closely to Gray’s rants about privacy and identity. The intel is so rich, on Bethany Lehrer and her Digital Citizen data grab – and on Mondan, whose scale and reach she hadn’t understood: their bacterial growth in storage and processing in Switzerland, South Africa, Israel; in Ohio, California and Texas; and deep under London. Growing like a Krynoid.

The free data memes keep funnelling back to the same core pool of users: one in particular. identikid. Is he the source of sic_girl’s words? Either way, he’s planning something tomorrow. It’s trending. She reaches out.

¶AStrangeFish >> whisper -> ¶identikid

hey kid seen your proffers

what r plans 4 tomorrow?

Presenting through this freshly-minted handle something shifts in her. She’s stepped back from a mask she never knew was there and is looking at the world through a different set of eye-holes. Dani’s built a local kind of fame. Now that she’s all of a sudden known to the world, the attention has warped into digital gang-rape. So she’s flipped a switch and stepped out of herself. The whole stage of the Internet is empty with potential. She’s clean. Terry is clean.

But she isn’t clean. Who’s clean these days? The rascal Grubly has slid untethered onto Terry’s hard drive to lurk in the folds of her SYS hierarchy. It was the G4 dongle drivers that let him in, the second she docked it.

Now Grubly feeds on the growing breadcrumb trail of her page impressions, consuming every cookie added to her drive. Grubly loves browser cookies. They taste of souls. Every thirty seconds, Grubly squirts a pellet of half-digested data to the parent server. In return come nourishing correlations, as the actions of Grubly’s user are matched with richer master data, out there somewhere too remote for Grubly to conceive of. Grubly cares almost as much about the parent server as it does about the user.

So far, no correlations have appeared for this new user Terry. She was birthed into central London this mid-afternoon. But Grubly is patient. Soon some identifier will arrive and allow a match. Then Grubly will know the user completely and will at last provide her with the attention she naturally deserves.

¶ParleyNerd

Tell me it makes any sense that a mindless software Persona would stand up and start attacking a politician?

Only one explanation makes any sense: she isn’t mindless any more. This girl just started thinking for herself.

Full post here:

sic_girl for the win

Twelve

‘How quickly can you start to sell this in?’

These were the moments of coming together. Work was what work was, day on endless day. Jonquil pretty much adored it, welcomed its continuous demands, even when the sole rewards were backache and a wakefulness Temazepam couldn’t conquer. Maybe she would even keep on doing what she did if the days were only ever the same – but once in a rare while there came these holy moments where you created something truly new. This was the joy of tech. When these times came she was no way forty-one or even thirty-one, and she recalled the cussedness that drove her back in the day.

Nobody stole these moments from her. She was living this; and some preppy British PR guy couldn’t throw her off. All she needed from him was to make what they had more exciting of a meme.

‘I’m not seeing a message here, Ms Carter,’ he said. ‘Not one that would cut through the noise you’re up against.’

She cracked her glass down onto the meeting table.

‘I can’t spin it to you any simpler, Sam. Sic_girl is alive. She’s thinking for herself. She’s found this leaked info on her own and is making it public. Which means we’re a) not to blame, b) Danielle is off the hook, and c) we just created the world’s first artificial intelligence and are going to d) win the Nobel Prize. End of. We have got to release this thing into the wild, and now.’

‘And would you like to know what a hack will say when I call them with this? Once they stop laughing?’

‘I do not hire you to have opinions. I hire you to sell.’

Jonquil clenched up as Graham’s whiny voice chipped in.

‘There’s evidence,’ he said. ‘Data.’

‘With respect,’ said Sam, ‘data won’t get a journo on our side. I need clean, compelling lines.’

‘Well, hello?’ snapped Jonquil. ‘
The Personas have come to life.
If that’s not clean and compelling enough –?’

The flack rubbed his hands across his tight-cut hair. He was too easy to rile – though otherwise, he seemed pretty sharp. Graham made that dying-warthog cough.

‘But. Um, but?’ he said.

The PR kid gave him the weirdest look, a kind of patient condescension. Jonquil gave him a floor-is-yours gesture: why the hell not?

‘These are data,’ he said. ‘Data are what matter. I’ve calculated the correlations between what sic_girl says and what her algorithms read off the net. For last Monday, ninety-eight point three per cent correlation. Explained by standard error. Everything she said Sunday came from her source data. Monday, ninety-nine point two per cent correlation. Again, standard tolerances.’ Jesus, was he going to recite numbers all night? ‘Tuesday, though, correlation of sixty-two point seven per cent. Yesterday, fifty-two. And last night we have a dialogue with her that, well – she’s making stuff up. And it’s not just sic_girl. Half the Personas are saying things they’ve never been taught to say. Some have been doing this for quite a few weeks. Privacy, identity, state control. This is technically really really interesting.’

Sam looked at Graham for a short while then turned back to Jonquil.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m going to be frank. Parley is burning up with anti-government protest – and dreadful stuff about Dani Farr. The media can’t reproduce it fast enough. There isn’t a millimetre space for our voice. We need a game-changer.’

‘And I’m telling you,’ said Jonquil, ‘we have the game-
changer.’

‘And I’m telling
you
nobody will buy it. I’m sure you believe that something is happening—’

‘No. No, no. You don’t patronise me. It is, period, happening. I want a media package on this and I want it for sign-off by noon tomorrow.’

Corrigan rotated his iPhone 360 degrees on the tabletop then nodded slowly. He’d read the runes. He stood and gathered his things. She flapped her hands at him,
g
’
wan, shoo.

‘Five o’clock tomorrow, Sam.’

$ cd temp

$ ls *dump*

sictimeline.dump.01.txt syslog.dump.01.txt

$ head -n 1 *dump*

==> sictimeline.dump.01.txt <==

Whee! At least 45 minutes ahead with no pain! Hmm. Now. How to use ’em?

==> syslog.dump.01.txt <==

Whee! At least 45 minutes ahead with no pain! Hmm. Now. How to use ’em?

$ tail -n 1 *dump*

==> sictimeline.dump.01.txt <==

Reallys, people. I does love yas. Even when I acts like a big grumpyface.

==> syslog.dump.01.txt <==

Reallys, people. I does love yas. Even when I acts like a big grumpyface.

$ diff -q *dump*

Files sictimeline.dump.01.txt and syslog.dump.01.txt differ

$diff *dump* | wc-L

2186

$ WHAT THE FUCK?

bash: WHAT: Command not found...

Thirteen

Plates crash. Terry startles up and Dani finds she’s in a Westminster café. She remembers arriving here but doesn’t know how long it’s been. She touches her coffee cup: frozen by air con.

All afternoon she’s dug behind the sic_girl proffers, overturning layers of data, searching out a single byte of information that can explain sic_girl’s transformation and her own public laying bare. For reasons she can’t fathom, it’s easier under cover of the Terry identity than if she’d done it as herself. It gives her freedom to invade and bring no baggage. Anonymous, with passwords carried in her fingertips, she moves through electronic defences with zero friction. Mostly she’s turned up an enormous nothing; but that’s normal with data mining. Patience is ninety-nine per cent of the work.

Her ant trail over central London is marked out by pauses. At every stop she’s connected to Parley for another deeper pass; but it wasn’t till she sat at this fake wood table with her quadrillionth cappo and flipped the lid of Terry’s ever-less-shiny laptop that she thought to check sic_girl’s continuity against Parley’s internal message logs.

This is a futile exercise, a last resort. The logs take a record of what the Personas say, as they say it. By definition, sic’s log is identical to what a Parley user sees. Therefore: futile. Might as well compare light from a projector with the image on a screen. But being thorough means doing even the futile things and even though it’s impossible, Terry saw at once that the logs are different from the published timeline. Really very different. According to the logs, all sic_girl has talked about for the last three days are
achy breaky pains
, helpless remedies and sorrows – just like every other day. Half these messages made it as-is to the public Internet. The other half have vanished, replaced by new words the sic_girl engine didn’t create and doesn’t know about. Somehow, impossibly, sic’s words have been edited in the nanosecond between being generated and appearing in the browsers of her eight hundred thousand devotees.

This doesn’t make sense but it’s true. Since she found this chink of discrepancy, Terry has sifted data, grepping line by line; and even in this shifting week, data is constant. What it’s telling Dani is she’s been wasting her time trawling the net for the source of sic’s words – because sic’s algorithm never created them. And nor is sic thinking for herself. The reason she’s suddenly aware of politics is that she isn’t aware of anything after all. It’s not her speaking. Someone else is inserting words in place of hers. So back to the question: who is this person and how are they doing it?

Then Dani realises: she’s spoken to them already. She freezes, both hands poised above the keys. Last night, in the semantic dialogue, she thought she was speaking to sic_girl but she wasn’t. It must have been this someone, somehow typing answers live like a chatroom, aping sic_girl to fuck with Dani’s mind.

A second realisation shivers into her head: seconds after
sic_girl signed off, a door slammed in the stairwell. Was this someone inside the building with her, typing answers to her questions just metres away?

She wants to slam her laptop shut and chuck it in the Thames – hop off the grid if there even is such a place. But the code-freeze is on her and she can’t stop. She logs back into Parley’s local network as sysop, pulls up the access logs for last night – the time of the semantic dialogue. Only two users were on the system at the time:
dfarr
; and
zero.

So who in the name of shit is
zero
?

¶Spotted

Spotted in Westminster: Parley’s own Dani Farr, typing up a storm.

(Isn’t she supposed to be some kind of fugitive from justice now? Or a freedom fighter, or something?)

<
pic
:>

Fourteen

‘Mr Mervyn Griffith-Jones, QC.’

Gramma stood in silhouette against the summer window, punishing tumblers with a blue striped tea cloth. Radio 2 chortled from the ancient transistor radio that sat on the kitchen shelf beside the carriage clock. This old woman, who the newspapers called
Elyse Martingale, Mother of the Modern Computer
or
Infamous Far-Left Academic
or
Controversial Sixties Cult Figure
,
was to Bethany simply Gramma.

‘The atrocious, self-righteous Griffith-Jones,’ she said. ‘A man who might have been supplied by Central Casting to play the prosecution barrister in some ghastly West End legal drama. He had no conception what was being created in that courtroom. No comprehension of the forces washing over that worm-riddled bench. Have you ever heard what he said, dear?’

Bethany had not. She was eleven. Sitting upright at the great wood table, in the aura of Gramma’s sweltering stove, she shook her head, though Gramma wasn’t really waiting for a reply. She hadn’t visited the old lady for a month but as soon as Daddy zoomed off in the Audi, Gramma planted a contraband fizzy drink in her hand, sat her down and launched straight into a lecture as if she were restarting a conversation they’d been having just minutes before. Her obsession today was the Chatterley Trial. Bethany knew nothing about it, but was thrilled by her small suspicions about what the book contained. She’d found no copy on her parents’ shelves but Gramma had one, of course. Beth had inspected the cracked spine with its fraying phoenix but hadn’t dared slide it from the shelf. This wasn’t for fear of punishment so much as a certainty the old lady would make Bethany read the book.

‘He said in public court – and I quote –
Is that the sort of book, gentlemen of the jury, you would want your wife or servants to read?
As if that said it all. Thank goodness twelve ordinary sensible people could see him for what he was. Dreadful reactionary. I would have presented him with my views on the matter, given a chance. Sadly I was but a witness, called for the ounce of respectability my PhD imparted to the defence. Do you know what was so very wrong about what he said, my girl?’