Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (55 page)

‘Fuck off. I don’t have the energy. What do you want?’

Maybe this is how it always is. In a breakneck moment, everything you thought was important gets swiped off the screen; but the morning after, in the weird hush as the clean-up operation starts, all the badness you were carrying comes bleeding back.

‘Two things,’ says Sam.

‘OK. But quickly. Because you have literally five per cent of my attention.’

She scans Perce’s glass throne-room. Nothing else of hers left. Outside, the atrium screens are back to their rabid marketing, celeb noise and social media pulls. She spots a proffer with the meme followed by a burst of her own TakeBackID messages, on loop. There’s Dani, baked into the new reality.

‘This is difficult,’ says Sam. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot since we – you know.’

Dani stalls on her way out of the room. Surely this isn’t going to be
that
conversation?

‘I know this is totally out of order,’ he says, ‘but I had to say: I felt something last night. Look, there it is. I know I’m a lying cunt. You don’t have to say anything. I’ll move on to point two in a second. I just wanted you to know.’

Dani’s a millimetre from killing the call stone dead – but she leaves the Bluetooth running in her ear as she uses her new upgraded swipe card to exit the Top Spot.

‘OK, silence on point one is fine,’ says Sam. ‘Point two’s a warning.’

Her data-trail buzzes as she crosses the bridge to the body of the building. Tracking her movements, from her phone, is the mobile build of what used to be
Me All Over
and is now
Everything About You.
It’s way better than the desktop app. It’s going to be her life. Everyone living all of themselves online, through her. Sound, vision, pulse from her watch. This conversation, now, with Sam: already part of her trail. What will it be, converted to jets of pixels? She’ll view it later. It means less live. The beauty is walking back across the artwork of your life and living it again: she’ll do that tonight, at home.

She’s half-listening to Sam as she steps into the lift.

‘You need to know what you’re getting into,’ he says. ‘What I’ve heard.’

Inertia tugs her stomach as the lift pulls her down.

‘Heard? Is that from
sources
?’

Should it worry her: how everything about her is going down in a whole new dataset, stored in the basement here at 404? After the week she’s had, maybe she should kill every account she has, light out for an island in the Pacific. Eat nuts and berries. She won’t do that. This is where she lives and you don’t just one day decide to change that. It’s all of her or nothing. She chooses all.

‘I get that,’ he’s saying. ‘But can’t this just be, like old school friend to old school friend?’

The lift spews her out.

‘School –! That’s flown, Sam. It’s flown.’

She doesn’t look down onto the police scrum, three floors below ground level: the
do not cross
line, the plastic tent. She swipes out of the turnstile. Sam’s voice persists like flies in her hair.

‘You need to hear this. You can decide whether to listen once you hear. Perce is poison.’

On the street, remnants of the fleeting camp: cans, butts, scratch graffiti. Four weary community support officers. A smell of burnt wood and plastic and a sense that everyone has vanished in a puff. Still Sam talks.

‘I know people who’ve done what you’re doing with Perce. Been sucked in. Given up their ideas, IP, lives. He eats them.’

A sense that it isn’t one thing but a coincidence of small movements that’s brought her to this.

‘Look,’ says Sam, ‘I’ve been massively fired from the Terasoft account, and I’m not holding out my chances of remaining at the agency.’

‘From the
account
?
You’re going to
prison
,
Sam.’

‘Yeah, well, I doubt that. But the point is, I’ve got no vested interest. Why would I lie about this?’

‘Why would
you
lie?’

No answer. Traffic eases past. Nothing is the same. Leo died. Dani’s been drawn across the face of the world; now she’s become this tech-sector superstar. Nine a.m. on Monday morning, flanked by £200-an-hour lawyers, she’ll be questioned by police. Today a government minister spoke for her from the steps of Number Ten. Where does she put all that? Plus she has a vintage book to return to its rightful owner. So much to do.

‘Sam?’ she says.

‘Still here.’

‘You know what Bethany said, in her speech.’

‘Do I?’

‘Right. Well, here’s my answer. To both your
points.
Listen to her and fuck off out of my life.’

She kills the call and wheels about. She’s going to walk home today, through the uncomplicated sunlight.

¶sic_girl

Hello, world.

Acknowledgments

To my editor, @fingersofgod, for showing me the good and bad in my manuscript with such perspicacity and helping me make it the book it is today; and to my agent, @taffyagent, for seeing its potential in the first place.

To @RichardNSkinner and @IanKEllard of @FaberAcademy. I started writing a formless thing called
Lobster Pot
on Richard’s six-month Writing a Novel course. The fact that it is now a novel called
Sockpuppet
owes a huge amount to Richard, and to his weekly mantra: ‘Well done. Keep going.’ Best advice a writer ever had.

To my first readers, @mollyflatt, @garethmammal, @testudo_aubreii and Jonathan Skan (who has broken the convention of this page by failing to be on Twitter) – along with all my fellow Faber Academicians – for their insight, support and honesty.

To @paul_clarke for telling me a story once, about a restaurant bill that was paid with a credit card carrying a fake name: and for the train of thought this anecdote inspired.

To Jim Davies (again, no Twitter) for his detailed critique of my clumsy UNIX.

To @martylog for gracing these pages with a cameo appearance. A fitting memento of what was once the best night out in London. #kc.

And, lastly, to Alice – for everything not covered above, so far beyond what I can set down here.