Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (6 page)

WHO DOES NOT? But newsflash, my lovelies. Those ickle pickle pigs are made of spam not ham. Didja see this story on HUMBOX?

The day every website turned into pigs hum.bx/f80du7

Can ya IMAGINE? Ev’ry website you ever visit automagically turned into a Giggly Piggly home screen!?

 >>cite ¶worldofmeow: THAT SOUND AMAZE!

There’s a silence. Dani turns to Racist.

‘So?’ she says. ‘Pigs and cartoons and whatever. This is normal for sic_girl. Or what passes for it.’

Dani has a special love for her first-made artificial girl. But she’s the first to admit that sic talks a load of mimsy crap.

‘Fans proffer this stuff at sic,’ she says, ‘and it’s like I showed you: the algorithm stitches relevant-seeming sentences out of the word-soup in the bucket. That’s all this is.’

‘Really?’ says Racist.

‘Yes, fucking really.’

‘Watch your mouth,’ says Acne.

Racist quiets him with a hand.

‘In that case,’ he says to Dani. ‘I suggest you read forward.’

She sighs and scrolls.

‘There,’ says Racist, pointing.

Dani stops the clock.

¶sic_girl:

Ask yerselves, sweeties. Howcum ten thousand peoples who all HAPPEN to live in Teesside, get their PCs taken over by cartoon pigs ON THE SELFSAME DAY? I’ll tell ya. That piggy spam only hit the muggles who signed up for DigiCitz. Count ’em, biatches.

Here’s the news: two weeks ago someone walked onto the Digital Shitizen servers and swiped their oh-so-private data. Unhackable? HAH! And you know the worst of it? Bethany L knew all about it. Yuppety. She knew she knew she knew.

Don’t believe me? Ask her about this internal memo from MinTech last Tuesday. Seems somebody there knew all about this thing she sa she kno nuffink about.

There. Sigh. So the sainted Bethany’s a lying lying liar. Pigglies ain’t so frolicsome when they workin’ for the big bad data wolf AM I RIGHT???

Also. Sorry. Still on about it.

But.

Dani bunches her forehead at the screen. There’s something off about this. It’s normal for sic to proffer about Hello Kitty or Spongebob or whatever, but apparently the Giggly Pigglies are suddenly meat for some political story.

Digital Citizen is the new so-called ‘online ID card’ – which is actually not a ‘card’ but a public-key token so it’s dumb that people refer to it that way. Security is supposedly tighter than Jonquil’s butt. If it’s been hacked, that’s proper news. Which puts it totally out of whack with sic_girl’s usual burbles on antidepressants and puppy videos – the stuff that’s programmed into her.

And this, right now, is what plants the clue in Dani’s head: something major is going down this morning, and these men are trying to pin it on her. She needs to tread careful.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘And?’

‘
And
,’
says Racist, ‘you need to stop this.’

He speaks like a dad addressing his six-year-old.

‘Well but why? Is it untrue, what sic’s saying?’

‘That is not your business. I don’t care if she’s a human or a robot, she’s posting confidential government information and you are going to contain this situation right now.’

Contain the situation?
How do you contain a software construct? This is impossible. A combined wave of fury and exhaustion comes over Dani. She can’t believe they won’t understand when she just
showed
them. They must breed these giant morons in a tank, like seamonkeys. She crushes fists into either side of her head. The two men stand in silence, flanking her chair. She drops her hands and looks from one police-y face to the other.

‘But look,’ she says, ‘even if sic is doing what you’re saying it’s not like I can just turn her off. She’s part of the wiring. You’re asking me to turn off the whole of Parley.’

‘All right,’ says Racist, ‘then I guess that’s what you’ll have to do.’

Oh. He’s trying to stare her out but she can’t look him in the eye.

‘But I –’ she tries. ‘I don’t –’ Still nothing comes.

She doesn’t have tools for anything approaching this situation.

‘I can’t just – turn off Parley,’ she says at last.

‘Well, find some fucker who can!’ Acne shouts, making Dani start.

Racist touches his arm, gives him a dose of the pale eyes.

‘A word?’ he says to Acne, and leads him to the far side of the table.

En route he turns back to Dani.

‘Come back to the present,’ he says, quiet but firm. ‘On the machine. Take a look at what’s happening on your system, right now. And think about how to stop it.’ He checks his ’90s-era Casio. ‘You have two minutes. Then you’re shutting this thing down.’

He touches Acne’s arm and leads him into a huddle by the window.

Robotically, Dani flicks the clock, spinning it back to the present. She drags the slider to widen her aperture, adding her full list of devotees back to the screen. She sees it right away: a Parleystorm, ballooning across the screen. Sic_girl’s proffers about Bethany Lehrer have stirred attention from the social media night watch – coders, insomniacs, journos – and now the morning crowd is up and catching on. Sic_girl has tapped a reflex point to do with trust, lies and politics. Dani follows daisy chains of chatter. As best she can parse it, last week thousands of people received an invasive software worm which makes the Giggly Pigglies pop up on every website they visit. Now, somehow, sic is putting it out that their data was hacked from the Digital Citizen servers – and that this is how they got spammed. And for some reason people give a major shit about this. Everyone finds the pig thing hilarious and they already hate the Digital Citizen – or dCitz, as it’s getting called – and this morning sic has made the two things collide and go boom.

Dani chances a look at the policemen who are bickering almost silently about something. Acne gestures with his head at Dani, who ducks back behind the Mac’s screen. Somehow she needs to seize back control of this thing; but what can she even do? A so-called
situation
is tightening around her and she doesn’t understand thing one about it. Well, but what’s a hive mind for? By now most of her devotees are up and active on Parley. One of them will know what’s going on. She proffers, typing quietly so as not to attract the attention of the whispering cops.

¶Nightshade:

anyone understand what sic is saying
dummies mode pls
its for a thing

While she waits for replies, she chances another look at Racist. His lips move on mute as he whispers at Acne. He slips his smartphone back in his jacket pocket and for a second she glimpses something lodged under his armpit. She can’t be sure but she is sure. A patterned grip on a cold heavy shape. Danger. First time she’s seen a gun in the real but her eye is trained by first-person shooters to know one in a flash-frame.

She looks from cop to cop. Unconnected fragments force their way from her mouth, spilling like cards from a pack. The policemen turn and look at her expectantly. Pieces fall away.

)) word salad ((

Then Jonquil is there. Like the hero who only ever arrives in the nick of time her boss, Jonquil Carter, stands in the door, bringing with her the certainty she carries like a designer clutch – though even she double-takes at finding this unlikely trio in her demo pod.

The police stand to attention and Dani hears at last their proper handles.

‘DS Raeworth. This is DC Ackroyd. Parliamentary Branch.’

Wonderful normal names that have stared in her face the whole time like the solution to a cryptogram. The cops align themselves before the new arrival – the whole male gender having evolved to seek out authority and fawn on it.

In one charming motion Jonquil prises everyone from the room, giving Dani a look that communicates how uncool it was to give a bunch of strangers the run of the building, and ushers everyone up to her office. En route they pass Acne’s weekend-casual team, who are standing chastened at the bottom of the stairs. Guess Jonquil got to them already. On the way upstairs Jonq nips Dani’s arm and hisses, ‘
Why the FUCK did you not CALL me?
’

Oh,
thinks Dani,
why didn
’
t I?
She never uses the phone part of her phone, only ever sends people whispers on Parley; forgetting over-thirties like Jonquil. What other self-evident things have strolled by unnoticed in the past half hour?

While Jonquil magics coffee, juice and pastries, Dani slides into a chair, concealing herself behind the green plastic rim of the meeting table, keeping Raeworth (not Racist) in her eyeline. She blinks away sleep, then blinks again to erase the image of the gun. Jonquil places herself at the head of the table and makes a cathedral with her hands. She and Raeworth talk but Dani can barely hear above the sound of her own neurons firing. Who brings a gun to a software house in the early hours of the morning?

)) brain jam ((

Far away, at the other end of the table, Jonquil and the policeman play a game of verbal Asteroids. Raeworth launches phrases into the air –
close down
–
official business
–
disruptive element
– and Jonquil shoots each one down; but more and more of her shots are missing the mark. Any other time, Dani would love to watch the indestructible Jonquil Carter lose a battle of words but this pains her.

‘Listen, friend,’ Jonq pulls on the Bronx rasp, though she’s actually from Ohio. ‘You guys may not have a First Amendment but I’m telling you: the government cannot send a gang of thugs to accuse my staff on the back of zero evidence, and curb the free speech of a legitimate organisation.’

‘This is not a free speech issue, Ms Carter,’ Racist says. ‘It’s a question of confidential Parliamentary information. We are requesting that you cease publishing this information.’

‘We’re a goddamn channel, not a publisher. This is unwarranted. I’m calling lawyers on your ass.’

Before Jonquil can follow through, the door falls open like a badly sealed parcel and from it spills a breathless red-faced person, who stops short and stares at them one-by-one. He’s overweight and appears to be wearing his dad’s unpressed suit and shirt. A folded bike hangs from his left hand.

‘Ah . . .’ says this person. ‘The lady let me in?’

He uses the bike to indicate the door, as though unaccustomed to being admitted into buildings. He places the bike by the wall and sheds a backpack.

‘What the hell are you?’ says Jonquil. Dani never knows whether her boss does this on purpose. They say geeks are autistic but whenever Jonquil flubs the basic rules of human-to-human interface, Dani has to dig nails into her palms. Undaunted, the new arrival thrusts his hand at Jonq as though he needs help removing it. When he speaks he’s self-assured, even blunt.