Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (35 page)

‘So. Colin. Paint me a picture of how you are not perving my every move.’

‘Sorry. I was worried. About you.’

Which was the last thing she expected.

‘You –
hah?
’ she manages.

‘I thought you might do something, well, dangerous, because. When you said you were where Bethany Lehrer will be. And so I mined Parley. You stopped proffering yesterday but I guessed you had other identities. And there were all these proffers about this hotel being where the event is today. And. And I did a related terms mine and cross-reffed with frequency analysis to your signature pattern and rate of proffers. And I saw your proffers from this morning. As AStrangeFish. About hotel breakfast in the Pugin Lounge. And AStrangeFish was newborn a few hours after you vanished and I worked it out? I’m good at working things out. And it’s you, isn’t it?’

Body slam. Conclusion: nothing she does will ever be hidden from anybody. She starts to nod, then stops.

‘Wait. What – you’re not making sense, Colin. When did I say anything about Bethany? OK, I mentioned the hotel but I sure as hell haven’t proffered about her.’

Except in whispers to that guy, identikid. Surely – no. Colin cannot be identikid. In what universe would this tub of steaming lard call himself
kid
?

‘You did. You mentioned it when we were doing chat. Last night?’

He’s giving her this seven megaton LOOK. The room goes out of focus then zooms back in at vertigo speed. Oh, Christ, no. Dani makes a noise in her throat that’s something like
you, you, you,
but gets no further.

‘I’m monkey_love, Dani. You and me. monkey_love and SafeWord. It’s us. We’re like a MeatSpace couple!’ A laugh that doesn’t come off. ‘It’s funny really. At first I didn’t know it was you. I was just, you know, attracted.’

She wants to puke. He makes himself laugh again. It sounds like a cleaver landing in a cabbage. This is a practised speech.

‘And you know what? The thing that first attracted me to you in open forum was actually the speed of your typing! And you were, you know. Really mental. Back then it was only SafeWord I was with. But over time, Dani leaked out. Things you said: I worked it out. Like I say, I’m good at working things out.’

‘How long?’

‘Uh?’

‘How long have you known?’

‘Dani, there’s something real. With us.’

‘How long?’

‘Why does it matter?
I
haven’t changed. It was
us
who thought those things together.’

She sits on the bed. It’s a surrender but her legs need a reboot.

‘
At
me.’

‘What?’

‘You thought those things
at
me. Did them
at
me. Every fucking day, watching me. Knowing – in front of everyone.’

‘That isn’t fair.’

Spasms pass down the left side of Colin’s face and his arm twitches as though it’s about to fly out and grab her or hit her. He stares at the beige bedspread.

‘And what a fucking power trip was that, Colin? Did you enjoy slapping down the scary bitch, safe in your cubicle? Is that it?’

‘I – you liked what we did, too.’

‘No. No.
We
didn’t
do
anything, Colin.’

‘But you always—’

‘I what? I loved it did I?’

‘No, you
understand.
You understand the reality of, of –’

His hands roll in a frantic tombola motion, trying to wind out the right words. This man she’s barely glanced at in four years of office smack-downs, who isn’t real enough to hate. It doesn’t add up – the red wound she gave someone, pure as a stone on a beach: in the real, what touched her was the chubby paw hanging from this fat wreck of a boy of a man. Memories march up one by one to stab her in the gut. She lets them come. Her breath slows and she watches Colin shake. The throb of breakfast news starts up from the next room.

‘I do. I actually think I do. But it doesn’t matter how real it was. It’s not real enough to make what you did OK.’

He’s started, quietly, to weep, in a helpless stream.

‘I’m no good at, at –’

She puts a hand on his forearm. He jerks it away as if shocked, then tentatively replaces it into her hand. She gives him a short squeeze. His arm-flesh is Haribo marshmallow. She stands up and lets him go.

‘Colin, if I’m honest, I don’t think anyone is.’

She looks around the room, but there’s nothing like a tissue in sight.

‘Listen, I really have to go,’ she says.

He looks at her as if she’s about to pull the plug on his life support. She grabs the laptop from the bed and stuffs it in her backpack. She looks around for anything she might have missed.

‘I do just have to go. Wait here till you feel better. The door will lock itself. We can talk about this. Later. Or email. I’m – I am angry at you, OK, but it’s going to be all right. All right? Col?’

Colin nods rapidly and keeps looking puppy-eyes at her. Who but Dani could end up consoling her own stalker? She moves to go but the panic in Colin’s eyes makes her hesitate.

‘I do want to help,’ he says. ‘You’re – you’re not about to do something crazy?’

He looks like he’s been punched repeatedly in the face. She shakes her head.

‘Nothing crazier than I’ve already done. God, Col. It’s OK. And look – thanks for worrying actually. I’m glad someone’s worrying.’

He nods and wipes his nose on his sleeve. She makes to leave a second time.

‘But Dani, Dani.’ Again, she hesitates. ‘I wanted to say: I’ve done something wrong.’

Dani nods.

‘Let’s leave it.’

‘No, no, I don’t mean this –’

‘Colin, mate. I. Need. To go.’

She sweeps open the door and goes. Colin starts to say,
But
, then stops. He watches the mechanism bring the door back into place. Nothing moves. Through the bedroom wall, the breakfast theme builds to a motivational peak.

‘I did the hack,’ says Colin to nobody.

¶identikid >>whisper -> ¶AStrangeFish

You here? You with us?

¶AStrangeFish >>whisper -> ¶identikid

something to do first.

later maybe.

Five

Sean is training. Silver-white Mizunos strike the Hackney pavement to the beat of in-ear Boses. The mp3 strapped to his arm is geared to live consumer stats. The most-downloaded tracks of the global week roll from the cloud into his eardrums. He hears what the market hears, thinks what they think.

He runs by a graffitied wall:
.
Gloss eyes of the morning commute catch the spring light: they are receivers, taking signal from the street, from storefronts, smartphones, bus sides, points-of-sale, mag racks, branded T’s.

From the headphones a female voice marks 4k. Sean’s pace is steady. He’s been running since 08:10, running since forever, since uni, those long hard runs.
The Bionic Grebo
they called him, though they only ever saw him in long-shot as he pounded the fields by the reservoir. He read them cold. Always asking,
what is it they want?
Online through the night in his digs, air bitter with sweat and solder, his needs monastic: two mains sockets, a one-bar heater and the pop, squeal and crackle of a modem. Blu-Tacked on the wall Alan Turing broke the rope at Walton Athletic Club. Beside him boyish Elyse Martingale probed the patchboard of the prototype Manchester Baby. What pride to be there before everything became smooth. So few of them then, locating one another behind the cursors of slow-load bulletin boards. Their homebrew circuits the template for what came after
.

For Sean it was always the data. The logics he cooked up in utility bedsits now feed the smartphones of the City workers crowding his jogging route. Their devices are hungry for data. They suck it in and fire it through the air and paving stones. They need, and their needs are predictable. Consumption ruled by bounded appetites driving runnels into data sets they never see. Sean sees through their skin and into their data. It’s his gift and curse.

Her, with the multi-buckled bag and this season’s feathered cut to mask her plainness. Subscribes to
Grazia
on her tablet. Every Saturday, before she shops, she digests the catwalk snaps like holy writ.

That man-boy in Reiss pulls a ton with commission, headhunting for investment banks. Favours a classier stand-up drinking joint. By the bottle, export only. Violence sells to him.

Her. Consumes 4–5 hours social media per diem. When stating a preference would say she trusts her online friends more than her real ones.

The salarywoman in ill-fitting L.K. Bennett. Downloads illegally. Says it’s free advertising for the labels.

He buys only high-end porn. His male partner doesn’t know.

She blogs about her ugly child, day after living day.

Fuck and bless them all. Sean knows them before he sees them. Bubble-sorted terabytes of consumer data indexed in a nanosecond. The data feeds the wetware in his skull. It’s how ideas arrive – and on a good day, these ideas can be monetised.

He passes a boarded-up lot.
MISSING. WORK FROM HOME. ONE NIGHT ONLY.
Flyposts irk him. Who looks at walls, with personal space available in their hands? What if smartphones and social had existed on 9-11? No plastic wallets of wilting paper pinned to downtown hoardings, just one enormous online wall. Imagine the data they would have captured overnight. Pain, vulnerability; opportunity. Sean would have beamed the blurry loved ones – tuxedos, prom gowns, uniforms – all along the London skyline.

He skips off the pavement to skirt a City boy staring at his Samsung. Left onto Shackleton Road. City Road another left. Directly towards 404. Newsfeeds and market tickers on the great screens, 60–60–24–7. With the inevitability of the random, what now cycles into place is Bethany, storeys tall, elbowing her way to an official car.
PIG-GATE
–
MINISTER
‘
SHOWED BIAS IN AWARDING CONTRACT
’
CLAIMS ANON BLOGGER.
Sean loses stride then regains it. He’s been keeping his thoughts away from his sweet well-intentioned minister. Really, though: her fault. Whoever accessed those mails did it through some insecure government network. Never trust tech implemented by the state.

The clip loops.

Beth’ll keep fumbling for an out but her ticket’s marked. She’ll scrabble for any small advantage, burn boats; maybe she’ll even last out today’s launch event before she finds she’s nowhere left to turn.

He does care for her, probably; or he did. If she only had the luxury of failing to give a flying fuck what people think; like Sean. Mondan reads everything in and gives nothing back. They’ll say nothing about the Digital Citizen hack. The facts are too murky to see through. Silence is the cleanest form of truth.

It was pure pleasure to fire the lardball who did the hack – and to shove a lethal gag clause up his arse. Colin Randell. How could such a nimrod apology for a code monkey have made it through their recruitment screens? He’s finished now of course, along with the security geeks who failed to spot his sloppy paw-marks on Sean’s servers, Sean’s data. What a sorry mess.

Though the lad has skills. Far as they could piece it together, he’d dipped into their data warehouse four times in total, over two months. First three times he took nothing, which made no sense – if you’ve just cracked the tightest nutshell in the world of digital security, surely you take a trophy out with you? – but the bitch of it was, every one of these pointless exploits counted as a breach. Each time Randell triggered their digital alarms – clumsily, in spite of his evident skills, to the point where you’d almost say he
wanted
them to know he’d been in. So three times Sean had to report the breach to the ministry; and each time he needed to manage Bethany a little harder to keep her from going public over what he assured her were housekeeping matters. Matters he would fix. And bless her heart, she didn’t bleat – even at the risk of lying to Parliament.

Then, two weeks back, in spite of all the extra protections Sean’s security boys had laid in place, fat-boy waltzes in for the fourth time – and this time he lifts the entire DigiCitz data set. Two days later: Pigglies. Fucking Pigglies. And the worst of it? This time there were no alarm bells. This time Sean didn’t know a thing about it until sic_girl started stirring the shit.

But for the first time, Randell had screwed up. He’d failed to wipe one minute digital fingerprint when he erased the logfiles. Sean’s data forensics boys spotted it yesterday and right away dragged fatso up to the Top Spot, where Sean browbeat him to a whimpering jelly – but still he didn’t spill. He said it was a freelance gig but wouldn’t say for who. Knew Sean couldn’t press if he wouldn’t prosecute. Knew Sean never would.

That dimension of the thing was troubling. Who would want the DigiCitz data now: a few thousand lives, a pilot? Why not wait another six months to get a hundred times more data?

No matter. They’re clean now. They’ve given government plausible lines. They’ve denied the hack. The three minor breaches were manageable, but no way were they going to land the national contract if the hack came out. So: on his instructions, all traces of it will be erased. At noon tomorrow they’ve manufactured a watertight rationale for wiping every byte of data off those stacks. They’ll restore the data from backup. Nothing will be said. It rolls on. The launch event will go ahead this morning as planned.

Sean has no qualms about sharing a stage with Beth. She’s damaged goods, but he’s never cared about protecting his reputation. Reputation is for politicians and sneaker manufacturers. It doesn’t mean a shit when you’re the first place people land when they power up in the morning and the last click they make before shutting down at night. Who worries about the reputation of the air?

Without breaking stride Sean takes a power-up from his bottle. The voice in his head tolls 8k. Arrow-straight, he locks onto the bright glass doors of 404 City.