Haterz (40 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE HEART OF THE INTERNET

I
T WAS A
lazy, sunny morning and I was nervous. It shouldn’t be this way, of course; I’d done this before. But a heaviness had settled between my stomach and my bowels, in the nasty little spot reserved for that first day at a new job, for swimming lessons, first dates and driving tests. I was nervous because I had come to find my last victim.

I looked around, convinced everyone was looking at me, talking about me, thinking about me. “Was this him?” they were wondering as they pointed at me, took photos of me, tweeted about me.

But really, they weren’t. They didn’t notice me at all. I was just a loser in a tabard with a fake smile, chugging away. I was nobody.

People were milling around the square in an almost exact replica of the Photoshop mockup from the architect’s original plan.

Long ago, this had been a square of elegant mansions in a distant London suburb, with plenty of space for carriages and communal gardens. Then, after a mixture of the Blitz and development, it had become a surly mixture of flat-conversions, council block and a utilitarian office building. Very East London.

Now, after the latest surge in property prices, the whole area had been cityscaped and reclaimed. The communal gardens had been replaced with an ‘urban hangout’ plaza, a mixture of raised flowerbeds, wavy benches and coffee carts. The last few remaining houses were gone, their fronts retained, with an effect rather like substituting a lifesize standee of Han Solo for Harrison Ford. It didn’t matter. What dominated the plaza was the sculpted glass carapace that had devoured the once-ugly concrete office. The tinted glass relentlessly reflected the surrounding skyline. Even though it wasn’t really worth reflecting.

I stood there, waving my clipboard, trying not to show my fear. I couldn’t stop looking at the building. The way it was both simultaneously imposing and also self-deprecating. “Look at me,” it said. “I’m not really here.” The office block was a giant mirror, studiously reflecting all the square back at itself. If I looked really closely, I could see myself. Ignored by everyone. The building that wasn’t really there told me that neither was I.

The office was the headquarters of Sodobus. Or rather, it wasn’t. True, a lot of people worked here. And, if you’d asked them, they’d have told you they worked for Sodobus. A few of them would have cannily added ‘Sodobus [UK],’ leaving unspoken its relationship to ‘Sodobus S.à r.l.’ of Luxembourg. If called before a Commons Select Committee (as executives frequently were) they would have explained with the patience of dentists that, although they were a vital part of Sodobus’s UK operation, they in no way contributed to the profitability of the parent company, which went a long way towards explaining why Sodobus, despite employing several thousand people in the UK, paid really very little tax there indeed.

The company regularly pointed out that it did pay the legal amount of tax in the relevant territories, but no one was quite sure where these were. In fact, no one was exactly sure what Sodobus did (or didn’t) do. Like a badly-cut jewel, if you looked at it through one prism, it provided school meals; from another angle, it ran hospitals and prisons. Take a step back and it oversaw government data systems delivery contracts. Squint and it provided broadband infrastructure, mobile phone masts, and, curiously, wind farms. Glance over your shoulder and you’d perceive that it also provided health screening, credit reference checks, and disability benefits tests. Plus there was a controlling interest in a home-delivery network and a dating website.

There’s a famous story about a member of parliament. He was a fairly insignificant back bencher, but he was diligent and helpful. Short of cash, he offered to fill in the tiresome expenses claims of other members for a small fee. As he was ‘one of their own,’ colleagues gladly took him up on the offer. A few months later and he earned himself a small promotion by gently letting slip some titbits he’d gleaned from doing a member of the opposition’s paperwork. A job as a government whip followed, allowing him to ruthlessly exploit the various trifles he’d helped his honourable friends claim for. Soon he had a seat in cabinet. And all because he’d become expert in looking after the little things that no one cared about.

What I’m saying, the reason why I’m telling you this, is that on the one hand, Sodobus did a reasonable job of mundane tasks. But on the other hand, Sodobus ran the country.

Sodobus was everywhere. When we talk about Skynet in
Terminator
, we talk about an omniscient, cunning cyber presence. But really, Sodobus wasn’t particularly clever. It just knew all the dull things about you. If you bought some daffodil bulbs from them, they’d have your name, number and postcode. They’d know from trying to deliver if you were likely to be in during the day time, which would match with whether or not you were receiving disability or unemployment benefit or were simply unable to find a job because you’d just come out of prison or hospital, all of which would count against you the next time you tried to renew your credit card, get health insurance, change broadband provider, or apply for a job which went through one of their screening systems.

Sodobus had spent years snapping up unconsidered trifles to make itself a king of shreds and patches. That’s a high-faluting way of saying it owned you. The thing is, you could try very hard to sidestep Sodobus, but they’d still get you. They didn’t run a bank, but they did run a network that processed contactless payments for a range of supermarkets and chemists. Which meant that they knew exactly how much you drank before you lied about it to your GP.

As you’ll have guessed by now, my last victim wasn’t a person. It was a company. And there was a good reason for it.

• At the risk of sounding like a nutter on the Tube, Sodobus were behind everything. Even me. At first glance, I was a lone crackpot, driven on by Amber and her friends. It was as simple as that.

• Only... Hold up the prism, turn it a little, squint, look at it another way. There was a different story to be told. Imagine you were one of those smart data-driven news sites that cover current affairs through pie charts and Venn diagrams and infographics. If you checked my career in killing for coincidences and overlaps, then another picture emerged. Little dots of information were joined up to spell out a name. Sodobus.

At first I thought I was clutching at straws. When I ran away from Amber’s wedding, I felt like I’d just been dumped by the world. “I think we should see other people,” humanity had said, trying to be kind but also eager to finish its drink and get along home.

S
O ANYWAY, THERE
I was, running out into the night with nothing. Literally nothing. Even my cat was staying with neighbours. And I couldn’t very well turn up and reclaim it. I may not be being watched by a global conspiracy, but surely by now the police would have worked out what was going on. They didn’t deal with a world of fantasy. They dealt with evidence. That’s how you caught stupid people.

That night I was staying in a bland hotel. There wasn’t even anyone on reception to lie to. I went up to my bleak little room and flailed around it in despair. Then I went down to the grim corner-shop opposite and bought a hideously expensive bottle of bad scotch. I didn’t even really like scotch. I just figured it’s what you drink when you’re having a breakdown.

I sat sipping it from the already-cracked plastic tooth mug and I went through the file Amber had given me. At first I just denied it all. I’m not sure any fact has ever changed its mind simply because it’s been shouted at. But that’s what I tried first.

Then I went through the paperwork again. And that’s when I spotted it. At first I pushed it to one side. Because I was aware of how mad I now was, I just didn’t trust any thought I had. After all, it may have been put there by a ninja. Or the tooth fairy.

But I carried on going over the paperwork. I put the exciting glimmering notion to one side and just worked through the paperwork—what amounted to Amber’s confession. She was, it had to be said, pretty thorough. It was all carefully ordered and scrupulously filed. She’d even kept accounts. No wonder she’d been so freaked out when I’d gatecrashed her band’s gig. She’d never even considered she might be caught, so she’d taken no steps to hide the evidence.

The thing is, the more I went through that evidence, the more a name emerged. Sodobus. Eventually, I allowed the penny to drop, to listen to how it sounded. And it sounded good. What if there really was a conspiracy after all?

What if Sodobus had been controlling me? Not since the start, but pretty much, nudging Amber’s scheme along, gaming the results. They’d not directed every hit. But more than you’d think. Fast Eddy, for example, had been the whistleblower on one of Sodobus’s dodgy database contracts. Jackie Aspley had written up a bad profile of their CEO. Vampantha’s husband was one of their regional sales executives. And Henry Jarman had warned everyone about them. The stupid fool had been right all along. I still didn’t know how, and I didn’t know why. But they were involved.

I drank some more scotch and I swiftly emptied the KillFund. I was on my own now. I knew what I’d had to do. I’d found my last victim.

I
WAS NERVOUS.
But that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that it was a nice, lazy sunny morning in the plaza. People pottered in a self-important way between shiny offices and expensive coffee shops, occasionally loitering to make phone calls while puffing away on electronic cigarettes. Everyone was ignoring the chugger. Especially when the drone turned up.

As a marketing campaign, the small remote-controlled helicopter was a bit of a failure. It flew above the square with a banner that said ‘#SodobusOwnAllOfUs.’ Some people noticed it. Most of them worked for Sodobus. A few people wondered if marketing had really got their head around the hashtag as a concept. No one actually used it. A spate of people tried to scan the QR code, after a PA had pointed out that no one ever used QR codes, and that she’d once won a holiday purely on the basis that no-one else had bothered entering the competition. Those that scanned the QR code found that nothing happened—but then, it was quite small on a moving object a bit away, so it wasn’t really surprising.

One person noticed the helicopter and groaned. It had made a bad day that little bit worse. His name was Ray, and I’m going to tell you all about him.

R
AY
R
ICHARDSON LIKED
to tell his colleagues that he was the only person from around here. It was stretching it a bit—the estate he’d grown up on was about half a mile away—but it had been pretty much the same. “I remember when this was all burning cars,” he was fond of saying. He’d always thought the area was a dump. It didn’t seem much better now. The idea that people were fighting to pay half a million to live in one of the same grim boxes his family had grown up in appalled him as much as it made his mother laugh. He marvelled that people would want to live somewhere like here, where, for all the coffee shops and sandwich bars, the streets were still full of drunks with dogs. Only their flats were now worth a fortune, because they were ‘just half an hour from Liverpool Street.’

O
NCE HE’D EARNED
enough, Ray had run in the opposite direction, to a charming village that had made an earnest point of how accepting it was of a gruff-voiced black man and his endlessly smiling “yes, yes I am white” wife.

Ray Richardson was the head of Marketing & Communications at Sodobus [UK]. He was the man I’d come here to meet. I tried stopping him as he crossed the plaza. “Good morning! How are you today?” I beamed at him.

“Well, you can sod off,” said Ray and went in to work.

“Have a good day!” I said. I knew he wouldn’t. He’d be back.

R
AY WAS MY
new best friend. I’d got to know Ray very well without ever meeting him. It was actually really easy. Amanda was now at that stage of pregnancy where she felt too bloated to go to work and too miserable to stay at home, so she spent most mornings in the village cafe, swiping her iPad and cursing the sluggish wifi. She was in the mood for a distraction, and that was me. I found her through an article in
PR Week
on Ray’s appointment.

A year ago Ray had quite a nice job in technology journalism. Then Amanda had got pregnant and Ray had realised the time had come to use his contacts and get a better-paid job in PR. After casting around quite hard, he’d been approached by Sodobus. He’d wrinkled his nose slightly, but nothing better had come along. At one of several interviews he’d asked, “But why do you want me, exactly?” It was the most tactful way he could think of saying, “Is it because of the colour of my skin?” Certainly, for a supposedly global company, the people he’d seen so far looked not just white, but pale.

The crisply Swiss woman interviewing him had assured him it was for his contacts. Really? Surely a vast multinational like Sodobus needed someone more experienced? There was a shrug. Of course, he was told, Sodobus itself was a vast international conglomerate, but the UK branch was little more than a cottage industry. “Practically a jam factory,” the Swiss woman had told him, with a laugh that afterwards had struck Ray as peculiar. Journalistic instincts firing, he’d asked, “Is there anything bad I should know? Anything brewing?” The Swiss woman had shaken her head.

One month after his appointment, the tax scandal had broken. All of the problems of the world suddenly landed on Ray’s desk. There was an ‘unwitting’ double-charging fraud in a hospital contract. And then the revelations of the ‘completely accidental’ leak of data between two legally unlinkable databases which resulted in thousands of people being denied home insurance because of things they’d declared on a dating website. On the long train journeys home to Amanda, Ray would switch his phone off mid-ring and leaned back exhausted in his seat. He was hopelessly out of his depth.