Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (5 page)

¶TurdoftheDay:

A whopper. One single slug 13cm in length. Fat and gristly. It glares up at me and cries: ‘Come on you mother! Flush me! I wanna see you even TRY! Boo-ya!’

Three flushes later. Still it will not leave.

Even I am slightly terrified of it.

<
pic:
>

Four

‘You’re not making sense, Miss Farr. Either you’re writing Sick Girl’s posts or you aren’t. Either way you need to make them stop.’

Hugging herself against the relentless harassment, Dani stops outside meeting pod 1.02 and turns to glare at Racist.

‘I need my swipe card,’ she says, pointing at the door. ‘There’s a machine in here. I can show you.’

Racist clocks the meeting-pod door, which is easy to miss, it’s so seamlessly cut into the floor-to-ceiling photo mural that coats the wall. The photo, which is labelled
Creativity, driving our people
’
s excellence
, is the fourth in a series of images lining the ground-floor hallway like stations of the cross, expressing
Our Eight Shared Values.
It shows a gorgeous young giantess, fizzy-haired and neutrally black, laughing and hurling into flight an astonished-looking dove. The background scene – lush fields under desert sky – glows with Tomy blues and greens. Only the model’s eyes betray her fright as talons scrabble at her face.

Acne approaches.

‘One of the lads is on his way down with her card,’ he says, waving his shortwave radio, which gives out a reassuring
kkht
.

‘They find anyone upstairs?’ says Racist.

Acne gives a brief shake of his head. The two of them round on Dani.

‘Looks like you’re the only person here,’ says Racist. ‘Our information says the person going by Sick Girl is posting from this building. And here we find you. All alone.’

Dani opens her mouth and shuts it. She nudges her phone into life but Jonq hasn’t responded to any of the whispers she’s sent over Parley. The network is silent.

)) stone face ((

says her phone.

‘Look,’ she says, holding up the phone, ‘I’ve contacted Jonquil. Ms Carter. My boss. Can we not wait for her? She’s better at explaining things to – normal people.’

Acne seems to find this hilarious. Racist keeps with the blank look.

‘There’s only two scenarios here,’ he says. ‘Either you’re Sick Girl, in which case you’re in serious trouble. Or she’s someone else, and you know where we can find her. Every second of our time you waste, your friend leaks more damaging material. Which makes this obstruction. So what’s it to be?’

Dani swallows. Parley grants her official maverick status, in her role as Chief Social Architect (or as Gray says, Chief
Anti
social Architect). She gets away with all kinds of crazy because she’s unconventional and uncompromising in the exact way Parley values. The rules don’t apply to her. Take the time last summer when she punched the Head of Channel Marketing, Billy Dukakis. He’d yanked her chain one time too many about the need to add bullshit ‘brand tags’ (i.e. ads) to every inch of her perfect, clean screen layouts. He called her
control freak little bitch
in front of the entire dev team, which wasn’t even English; and she basically punched him in the face. To be fair it was more of a butt-of-the-hand-against-the-nose kind of move but unfortunately it kind of broke the nose in question.

Anyone but Dani would have been out of the door in twenty seconds; but in this case it was Billy who was frogmarched out, a meaty pay-off in his pocket and his signature at the bottom of a thirty-two-page legal document whose contents roughly translated as
I will not sue Dani.

That was far from the stupidest thing she’s ever done. Sometimes it seems she’s never shouldered a burden for any of her actions. And it’s damn sure nobody ever asks her to speak on behalf of the organisation.

She glances down at her phone.

‘If you can send a message to Mrs Carter,’ says Racist, nodding at the phone, ‘you can send one to Sick Girl. Unless of course she’s you.’

‘No, no. Sorry. Jesus, why do you people not listen?
I
’
m
not sic_girl. I
wrote
her.’

Another of the Abercrombies jogs down the hall towards them, waving Dani’s swipe card.

‘All floors clear,’ he says, handing it to Acne.

He jogs off again. Dani reaches for the card but Acne jerks it away and uses it to swipe the door before passing it to her. The door clunks and he pushes it open, cutting a rectangular absence into the lower half of the photo model’s body. As Dani enters the demo pod, the lights flick on automatically. The cops follow and shut the door behind them. A hard drive chatters on the demo table. The machine is an all-in-one Mac – i.e. a toy, but fit for hailing a continuity. Dani sits and wakes the screen. A measure of control returns as her fingers touch the keyboard.

‘Sic_girl isn’t a person,’ she says, logging in as root. ‘She isn’t anything, she’s nowhere.’

She calls up the Parley Admin app and navigates to the dashboard screen they use to monitor the sic_girl engine.

‘Look,’ she says, swivelling the screen towards the cops and pointing at the data chugging through the logs. ‘There. This is sic_girl, OK. You want to know where she lives? She lives in here. I
made
her, on an Apache server in our data centre. She’s not a person, she’s a ware.’

Mystification.

‘Aware of . . .?’ says Racist.

Dani sighs. This is going to have to be the full one-oh-one.

‘A piece of
software
?’ she translates.

She turns back to the screen and clicks up sic_girl’s status screen.

‘Look,’ she says, ‘I’ll show you how she’s made. This –’ clicking on the first tab ‘– is her source data bucket. See all the chatter in here? We have this crawly bot that trawls the net every ten minutes, scooping up stuff that people say online. It knows how to filter things that already sound a bit like sic_girl, that relate to her interests. It scrapes them off the net and dumps them in the bucket here. Right now we’ve got –’ she clicks a status button ‘– just under ten thousand phrases sloshing around in there.’ She nods to herself. ‘That’s a solid number. Then over here –’ she clicks the second tab ‘– is the status of sic’s text-parsing algorithm. It searches the top of the bucket for things that sic can say. Stuff that’s relevant to what’s going on right now, and what people are saying to her. And here –’ another click, another tab ‘– are her finished proffers. This is what she’s “saying” right now. All her sentences are stitched together from whatever bubbles out of the bucket – and tweaked into her style of speech.’

Satisfied with a job well done, Dani folds her arms and turns to look from cop to cop, seeking out some flicker of understanding. All she finds are the same null-set faces.

‘She’s a
software
,’
Dani says again. ‘As in – not real? As in every single Parley user knows that sic and the other Personas are built from text and glue. That’s why they love them.’

Still nothing.

‘OK, God,’ she says. ‘Look, you can see right here. Sic proffered – what? – forty seconds ago. She said
Whoosh, thxx lovelies. Much praise
–
so wow.
So I guess that means she isn’t me? Because I have a, what do you call it – an alibi – for forty seconds ago? As in I was sitting right here? Talking to you?’

Still not a flicker. After a pause Racist restarts the conversation where he left off – as if the past three minutes never happened.

‘The person you’re defending here,’ he says, ‘is a malicious hacker. Someone who’s wilfully sharing confidential government documents. If you’ve got her timeline on there I suggest you read it. Start at twelve midnight.’

Yet again Dani struggles not to correct the man. Yet again she fails.

‘
Continuity
,’ she says.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Not
timeline
,’ she says. ‘Jesus. Parley has
continuities.
That’s trademark and copyright, by the way. Messages on Parley are
proffers,
not
posts,
and they go together to form
continuities.
’

Racist perseveres.

‘The
continuity
for Sick Girl, just after midnight. Her posts—’

‘Proffers.’

‘All right, dammit,
proffers
!’

Dani blinks. Racist collects himself and tries again.

‘Her
proffers
begin at oh, oh, sixteen hours.’

‘OK,’ she says. ‘Jesus, OK. But I’m telling you it’s pointless. Whatever she said, her algorithm pulled it out of the air.’

Wearily, Dani closes the admin screen and pulls up the standard consumer-grade Parley app. She clicks on the clock and starts to dial it back.

Parley is not just the place where the Personas live; it’s also a time machine. When you turn on a Parley viewer, by default you see a slice of the living present; but the true power comes when you shift it to some other now, zoom back in your software Delorean to see what the Personas – and their legion of human fans – were saying and doing at a single moment, follow the threads of time and meaning back and forth; then widen and narrow your focus to find a different path back to the place where you began. It’s a giddy sensation that can leave you reeling when you land back in the now. Parley’s users spend almost as much time in the past as they do in the present. Nostalgia’s popular: even for a week ago.

Dani spins the clock to sixteen minutes past midnight.

‘OK,’ she says, slipping into demo mode for the benefit of the neanderthals. ‘I’ve landed at that time. Now I’m tightening the aperture – see this slider? It’s like focusing my view on sic_girl alone. Shutting out other voices.’

The drag of her mouse erases Personas and people alike, until only sic_girl remains in view – plus the handful of human users she was taking to at midnight. Dani reads and scrolls.

¶sic_girl:

Meds time, hooray. Needed. Argh day today, insomnia fans. Pain, rain and a double shot of lows. Poor me, yes?

So. Let’s talk. I’m gonna start with Bethany Lehrer. The minister-lady? With the hair? Yoosh.

 >>cite ¶mardyboy: She’s ok i think shes kinda hot tho’

Really, mardy? REALLY? Ek. She creepy.

>>cite ¶womble-gone-bad: Hi sic. She’s sort of cool. She didn’t fiddle her expenses.

Hi woms. You look cute. May I girl-crush? But listen. Bethany L? Fergeddaboudit. She’s the cover-up queen.

You know the Giggly Pigglies?

 >>cite ¶worldofmeow: I
the Giggly Pigglies!