Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (29 page)

Shit, man. That riotbaby can be like a real mummy. He’s some kind of arsehole – for an artificial intelligence, and everything. Aw crap and look now, the DIN plug’s come unwired for the nth time. Leo sleeps the Mac, takes a breath and starts again.

He holds the cable in bony fingers, threads candy-stripe wires into pinprick docking points on the socket. A nubbin of tongue protrudes from the side of his mouth. As he neatens the fray and crimps he thinks of the splash the flashmob’ll make tomorrow. Riotbaby’s right: numbers matter. If they fill that room, the TV cunts will swallow the videos whole. It’s so cool to be the one who’s going to bring the ruckus to their corporate shit. Leo thinks of faceless suits making plans right now, over where the streets are hosed clean every hour and rows of pigs with plexi shields line up in concrete basements waiting for the shit to fly. They’ve no idea tomorrow someone’s going to drop a grenade right through their window.

He grins as he works the Torx in the half-light. The room is quiet. Winter and Reynard are silent: he could be alone.

He’s not alone. Grubly sailed into his MacBook weeks ago. Grubly grows each time it finds a new machine. It reaches through directory trees to feed on the bytes around it, then
flip-flip-flip
changes shape and grows like a Transformer. The mash-up of illicit software on this hard drive is the biggest code-hack collection it’s even seen. So Grubly loves the user, too.

Leo sets down his tools and tries the plug. Snap, it’s in. The plasma flickers into life and displays a test reel of rotating, overlapping circles. Job done. The ’kid grins at Winter like a crazy man. She gazes back at him, like no one home.

These Black Boxes are the key to everything, to Saturday’s big display. The stunt at the minister’s event, the bot attack, are just the lead-ins to that one big ultra-public event. And Leo will be there. He’ll be on the news. He’ll get them to put in the caption,
identikid
. Not
Leo Sandberg.
He wonders if they’ll let him.

‘Meanwhile the pressure on embattled minister Bethany Lehrer is mounting by the hour.

‘Adding to her woes, a further set of emails was leaked this afternoon, appearing to confirm her prior knowledge of data breaches at controversial IT giant Mondan. The government has been quick to deny that these emails are in any way connected with the alleged hack of the Digital Citizen programme. They insist there has been no risk to the privacy of people taking part in the Teesside pilot of the Digital Citizen project. But it’s now clear Lehrer is the target of a sustained campaign. And given her closeness to Mondan, and their central role in the government’s flagship online ID project, these leaked emails will be making difficult reading here at the Ministry of Technology.

‘Surely, Huw, in spite of these denials, we have to question whether this national programme – or this minister – can survive the mounting tide of public criticism.

‘Huw.’

Nineteen

The room is an abstraction. Everything is modular and co-ordinates with brown – i.e. it’s brown. Dani orders room service curry, which arrives with meat and rice in separate plastic blisters. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, she forks marsala by the light of Terry’s laptop and sniffs the net for company. Now her intentions are carnal she can see the limitations of rolling as Terry. She’s fresh to these follows. They step cautious, wanting to learn how she plays. It’s the provisional stage of anonymous mating, where the index finger hovers ready to swipe you away.

Tiring of vague attentions she logs off MeatSpace and logs back in under Dani’s handle, SafeWord. Gray told her not to use any Dani logins but nobody will troll her on MeatSpace. It’s not that kind of place.

As soon as she connects she’s located again.

SafeWord