Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (39 page)

Weeeell, weeeell, weeell. The company that’s about to sign a nine-figure contract with Bethy L is managed by her bouffant fuck-buddy Seany P.

Life’s full of funny coincidences.

Ain’t it, though?

Ten

‘This is the kill order.’

Jonquil wriggled her butt on the Lexus back seat to face Sean.

‘What? No, it isn’t. It’s the
do-this-and-I-walk
order.’

‘Fuck off a minute, Jonq. You saw what happened back there. It’s trench war now and I don’t have time to argue.’

Sure, Jonquil had seen – she’d been right there. After this morning’s call she’d gotten straight in a cab to hijack Sean at the Digital Citizen launch and argue out the future of Parley. She’d been with him in the wings when the protest began and had witnessed the charming sight of Sean high-tailing it to the car so fast she had to take off her kitten heels to keep up with him.

But the raw courage of those kids. What they did was totally art; and they were beautiful. Hungry ribs and unwaxed bodies. And they’d used Parley to organise. That kind of free-spirited action was what Parley was there for in the first place.

She looked out the frosted window at the intersection of Clerkenwell and Hatton, where they’d been stuck for what felt like twenty minutes. This whole town was grinding slow. The car was street furniture.

‘Correction, Sean. We have all the time in the world. This here is slower than the Van Eyck Expressway at rush hour.’

‘Doesn’t matter how long we’re here. I’m killing Parley.’

‘Sean. People love our network. Customers. You keep telling me about how important customers are.’

‘They’re important because they have money. If I wanted their love I’d write them a poem.’

Jonquil tried to break in but he did that talk-to-the-hand thing.

‘Believe me, they’ll get over this in ten days max. There’s always a next big thing. Parley is nothing. You’ve never understood where to find value in your code base. Lucky I know.’

‘What? What about my code base?’

‘Forget it.’

‘Are you using my code for some shit?’

Rage crackled under the skin of Sean’s face. In spite of herself, Jonquil flinched. This was why he always won an argument, goddammit.

‘
My
code,’ he said. ‘Do not forget that.
My
code.
My
IP. I do what I damn well please with my code. You can help me or you can get out of my way. It’s your buy-out bonus you’ll flush down the shitter.’

The thing here was, it was not OK for a man to treat a woman this way. No matter how much of a ‘character’ he was. Jonquil had never been one to borrow trouble. How had she gotten to a place where this shit passed as normal?

‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’

‘Excuse me?’

The car had gotten way too small. She grabbed her clutch.

‘I won’t do this. I’m out of here.’

‘So go.’

He tapped at his phone like it was a voodoo doll of Jonquil. She flipped the door catch. Nothing moved. She slapped the door and turned on Sean.

‘So what am I, kidnapped?’

Sean spoke without glancing up from his touchscreen.

‘Oh, for – Derek, would you pop the door for my colleague who would like to take a stroll?’

The silent driver reached for the controls and a mechanism jolted in the door. Jonquil pulled the catch to its tipping point, then stopped.

‘This is not a bluff, Sean. You are about to lose me.’

He looked up as if surprised to find her still there. His poker face was so impassive you could hit it with a real-life poker and it wouldn’t budge.

‘All right. Bye bye.’

Her hand was hooked on the chrome-plate catch. She wondered what she was about to do: usually she was good on outcomes but she couldn’t trace them now. She flipped the catch. Two yellow lines striped the cinder by the kerb, like mustard on a hot dog. Street roar; a bum screaming; the smell of grilled meat. She planted a Choo on asphalt. Then it struck her.

‘Hold it.’

‘I’m not going anywhere. I thought you were.’

‘Whoah, whoah, wait. Damn, I get it. Stupid motherfucking –’

She slid back into the car.

‘Excuse me?’

‘This isn’t reputational risk. This isn’t sic_girl.’

‘What in God’s name? Are you planning to use that door or just let in fumes?’

‘You’re not doing this for the media or the government. You’re killing Parley because you’ve got something else. Something new. You
want
it gone – and me gone is two birds with a stone.’

‘Fascinating to see people squirm while they’re on their way down.’

‘No.’ She slammed the door; Sean kept fiddling with his phone. ‘You
want
me to walk. I’m like the, what is it?’

‘The scapegoat?’

‘No, no, it’s a horse.’

‘Now you’ve really lost me.’

‘Stalking horse! You want me to take media fire. I will not be your goddamn horse.’

His eyes hadn’t left his Samsung.

‘If there’s one thing I do not need right now it’s a fucking horse.’

She snatched his phone. He sighed and spread his arms.

‘Suppose I
am
forcing you out.’

‘Ah
hah
!’

‘
Suppose
I am. Sake of argument. Would you want to stick around if so? What do you think that would even be like, day in, day out? You know how I can be.’

He was, as ever, correct.

‘In either scenario, Parley’s history. Why not take the clean break? Head high?’

Goddamn him to hell. It didn’t even matter if you knew he was manipulating you.

‘You are the devil.’

‘Moral authority retained. But it’s your call.’ He trained his dismal eyes on her. ‘And let me tell you what you’re missing, Jonq.’

‘Oh, OK, sure, uh-huh. You tell me.’

She needed to stop with the demented nodding.

‘Right now everyone’s coming in their shorts about social. What I know and they don’t is they’re backing Betamax. Social media is a fad.’

‘
Are
a fad. Plural.’

‘Glad you agree.’

‘No, I – goddammit, Sean!’

‘– and a cheat. Using other people as content. Fucking liberty. Only reason you’re using people’s so-called-friends to give them lols and information is, we don’t have enough data on them. Yet.’

‘I don’t know about you, Sean, but I enjoy interacting with people.’

Perce gave the sigh of a teacher disappointed by a star pupil.

‘Wrong. We interact with people online because they validate who we are. Their Likes are our Likes and that feels good. Except when they aren’t – and then what?’

‘My friends know me better than an algorithm.’

‘That’s just lack of data. When the system knows everything about you – and I’m saying
everything
,
even the things you hide from your friends – it’ll know who you are, better than people can. As soon as you connect you’ll experience who you really are: meet yourself coming back the other way. In which case who needs friends?’

‘Well, that statement sums up your attitude pretty damn well, Sean. Jesus!’

He let that hang for five, ten seconds, then reached across her and pulled the door catch. The volume turned back up on the street sounds. Sean held out his hand, palm up.

‘OK, fun’s over. Give me back my phone and say goodbye nicely.’

¶NewsHound

Blogger assaults minister at demo

sh.rt/f9w7ter

¶LabelMabel

I don’t want to be all OMG SQUEE here, but. Bethany Lehrer and Sean Perce doing sexy-talk? I can’t look.

Second thoughts, cancel that. I’m going to click the actual fuck out of this link.

Eleven

‘So what
is
your name?’

Identikid’s – Leo’s – words are sharp and loud. Someone has moved the mic too close to the world. Every rustle of his parka is high-def intense.

‘So like back there in the lift,’ he said, ‘you shouted your name was Terry but the Lehrer bitch called you Danny and like those are both boy’s names?’

‘Don’t call her bitch.’

Leo checks her out. She doesn’t mind so much.

‘Y’know, I don’t get you, girl. That bitch owns this bullshit. Stealing our identities while we sleep.’

Wicked witches. Bitches.

‘Is she? I wish I knew who was doing what.’

They trawl east through a London that thinks it’s any Friday night, letting the city guide them, their conversation stop-and-start-and-stop-again. There’s a current in the air of something starting. The City is hollowing out as salarymen head home. Angry scenes are starting up, drunken packs trailing north to Shoreditch. Dani and Leo pass a group of kids with hoodies pulled low and bandannas over noses; hiding their features from the CCTV. This one lad in a pig mask, a baseball bat dangling from his hand. Dani keeps her eyes to herself but Leo exchanges nods with them.

They cross Bishopsgate onto Aldgate.

‘What do I even call you?’ says Leo. ‘I want to call you something.’

‘So call me Fish.’

‘Fish, huh? Like the code they broke with the Colossus Mark Two, at Bletchley Park? Japanese naval ticker. Elyse was totally there, y’know?’

Dani checks Leo from the corner of her eye. He strides on, in love with the twilight, with himself and with everything he’s done. But there’s more to this one; and he’s cute, in an undernourished way. It tickles the she-cat heat in Dani’s belly. She runs up behind him and grabs his neck, swivels him around and kisses him hard on the lips like that’s what anyone would do. He holds back.

‘You’re Dani Farr,’ he says into her eyes.

Bollocks. She turns away.

Well, but she’s hardly inconspicuous. She’s used to being recognised by a certain kind of edgy nerd – but since she’s had Terry to hide inside she’s been weightless. She doesn’t want to be reminded of anything.

‘It’s OK, truth,’ he says. ‘I just wanted to ask: is it real? What they’re saying on Parley?’

Aw, God. He’s like the rest. He wants to perv over that vicious spew of lies and dirt. She walks north, between the plastic shanties of Petticoat Lane. He follows.

‘I mean, have the Personas really come to life?’

Oh. He means that. She stops and lets him catch up. Bare bulbs light up stalls as the daylight fails.

‘No. Some people think so but it isn’t true. I thought it for a while. I talked to sic_girl the other day. She was sort of crazy. But I found out it isn’t true.’

‘You talked to sic? Fuck. But it is, too, totally possible.’ A ginger flush in his cheeks. ‘I was doing a masters on this until – other stuff happened. The first time intelligence evolved, millennia back, it was from this random pattern of basic algorithms teeming round the nerves of some protozoan slug. Believe.’

He makes her laugh. His energy and certainty are delicious.

‘It’ll happen again,’ he says, deflated. ‘Maybe you made it start.’

They weave through the market crowd. The street is coming to life in the twilight. Energy swills through Dani like blood through a pig. A man offers her some kind of yam.

‘I get you, Leo. I do. I wanted to believe it. But it got fucked up. I don’t even know if I’ve got a me to go back to tonight.’

A clip-art moon is rising. Dead house fronts come alive as a banghra passeggiata starts up all around. Arc-lit tarpaulins lashed to workshop doors bristle with rusty oddments. Red-faced skinheads in puffa jackets hawk their junk to the cool approaching night. Dani stops at a façade which looks to be a shop but whose window display is a microcosm of model skeletons and skulls. Day of the Dead things, inhabiting a village of household junk. In the corner, a pile of skeletons fucks uproariously. She turns to Leo, face tight with cold, grabs him round the neck again, hangs there like a swing. The little-girl-lost routine. He looks back. He has something to say.

‘See, there’s a secret. Can I tell you?’

‘Kid, you are totally my hero. You saved me from a fascist with a gun. Kind of. I think that means I’m yours. Do what you will.’

He nods.

‘OK then, so. The thing at the event today? It was the warm-up. Serious. Stuff kicks off all over town tonight. Building up to – we have social buzz now but by morning we hit the channels big time. I’m expecting interviews and shit.’

Something is wrong with this. The stunt before was genius – spontaneous and brave and funny and she totally knew where it came from. But now Leo’s tone is off.

‘What kind of stuff?’

She slips from his neck and doesn’t know what to do with her hands.

‘We’re ahead now. This morning we bought eyeballs. Now we need to not flub our competitive advantage.’

Where does he get this mash of online slang and marketing buzz-words?

‘Leo. Hold up. What exactly are you going to do?’

‘The big nudge. And I’m the one doing the takeover.’

‘Taking what over?’

He points, high up and over her shoulder.

‘That.’

Her eyes follow his finger to the north-west. A Blade Runner display hangs in the air, churning branded celebrity fables.

‘Wait, what, 404 City? Mondan? You mean the screens?’ He nods. ‘But that’s – Leo, I work there, ish, and that’s serious security shit. What are you planning to do?’

‘We got to cut through the noise.’

‘
We.
Who is
we
?’

‘That’s where they’re going to pipe the stolen data. We are. Isn’t it awesome?’

Now
we
, now
they.
Something is here. The logic is screwed but it connects up.

‘Who’s they?’

But he’s lost in gazing at the high screens. Then he turns to her.

‘Do you do karaoke?’

¶NewsHound

Whoah. BREAKING: Protestor identikid pulls gun on digital minister at demo.