Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (53 page)

From across the office, Pemberton snorts from behind his laptop screen.

‘I’ve met Corrigan,’ he says. ‘That’s one thing he is not.’

‘Yeah, well screw you too, twinkletoes. If you’re Albert Einstein, why didn’t you work this out for yourself?’

Sean cuts in.

‘Go on, Dani. Tell me about Sam.’

‘So now that Gray’s read his mails we know the free data stuff was BS. This whole thing is designed to screw you – Bethany was collateral damage. He used TakeBackID, used Leo, all so Terasoft could eat your lunch.’

Pemberton chips in again, but the snarky tone has turned to amazement.

‘That’s it? That’s all? Bethany just lost her job over this.’

Dani glares but Sean beckons.

‘Your turn, J-R. We were bidding against Terasoft? For the hundred seventy million.’

Pemberton slips into a chair at the desk, nodding.

‘Bethany made the decision.’ He swallows. ‘In your favour.’

‘And I bet Terasoft really, really didn’t like that piece of news.’

‘I’ve been getting periodic calls from them ever since,’ says Pemberton. ‘Lobbying for a change. Most of the calls from –’

He gestures at the screen, at the shuttering images from the other side of town. Dani finishes his sentence.

‘From Sam. And there’s more. First Sam said it was Bethany who doxed me, stirred up the trolls. Then when I realised that wasn’t true, he said it was you, Sean. Mr Perce.’

‘Sean.’

‘But he was lying, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, he was lying. It’s what he does, in his line of work.’

‘Oh, fucking
hell!
’ Dani punches down so hard on the side of the desk she thinks she might have broken a bone. ‘I knew it was him, right away. But I let him spin me. Idiot.
Idiot!
’

‘Seems we were all taken in,’ says Sean. ‘But you’ve sussed it now. You’ve got him.’

‘Too late, though.’

She drops against the back of the swivel chair and lets it spin. It’s taken everything to get to this destination, only to find there’s nothing to be done. But Pemberton, who’s been gawping like a haddock, flips into that authoritative mode she saw him use when she first met him. His voice drops an octave.

‘We need to act now. They’ll be announcing Bethany’s replacement any minute. Odds on this is Andrew Carpenter.’

The name strikes an electrode into Sean.

‘Carpenter? But he’s—?’

‘Former non-exec on Terasoft’s European board. So that’ll be that.’ Something strikes him. ‘Oh, God. No.’

‘J-R?’ says Sean.

He’s conducting the pair of them like musicians. Pemberton stares at him with an expression that looks like grief.

‘It
wasn
’
t
just you. Bethany was a target, too. This has been a campaign to get your contract terminated,
and
Bethany fired. And Carpenter in her place. Is that –? Do people
do
things like this in the real world?’

‘Black PR. Countries have gone to war because of it.’

‘Terasoft will own us.’

‘You think? Come on J-R. We can do this – sign on the dotted line. Let’s say, better the devil you know?’

Pemberton’s face contorts. There’s more to this than Dani understands.

‘I need guarantees,’ he says. ‘Safeguards. Transparency.’

‘So accept the job and set those for yourself,’ says Sean. ‘If we’re going to stop this thing, we need to do it now.’

So much testosterone slopping about the room it’s hard to breathe. Pemberton may look like an over-inflated toddler but he’s waving his dick around just as much as Sean. Dani doesn’t have time to wait on them.

‘No sweat,’ she says. ‘I just solved this. And it’ll take, oh –’ she checks her phone ‘– five minutes?’

She wishes she could proffer the looks on their faces.

Five minutes pass at a crawl – how time in the real can. While they wait for Gray to message back with confirmation, Pemberton does business over an antique smartphone that’s about an inch thick, and Dani digs under the hood of the production engine Perce has built out of her
Me All Over
pilot. She watches herself go off the grid, on Thursday. It’s amazing, seeing herself disappear, like
SNAP.
She follows herself through Shoreditch, from Sam’s office to the yard at Parley, the angry bustle and the shouting that took her there; her call with Jonquil chopped in sushi-slices and played back as music. Then she meets Gray and
foosh
:
the screen blanks. If she leaves the clock there, Dani’s nowhere. If she nudges it forward a few hours, the app starts to backward-compile a skeleton of someone new – of Terry – from the tills of shops and cafes. It fleshes up as she acquires devices that can capture and assemble richer knowledge, deeper sensations. By the evening, Terry’s flesh has formed around the bones of her purchases and she’s breathing. Her colours and frequencies and sounds are different from Dani’s, though she can’t say how. She flips time back and forward, consuming both instances of herself. She plays the sequence back and again on loop. It’s how something changed in her, too, that she can’t yet pin down.

She sits back and claps hands, one-two-three, in front of her face.

‘These display components are built on my original sampling engine?’ she asks.

‘Plus some fuzzy algorithms and audiovisual loops from the team here. But you did the heavy lifting.’

Dani shakes her head.

‘Awesome. We made this.’

Sean looks like he wants to kiss her. Which would be weird; though he’s solidly in the fuckable-older-man region of the Venn diagram.

‘See, this is –’ he says. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be territorial. There are devs who’d say, how dare you march in and use my code? But that isn’t you, is it?’

Dani shrugs. It’s freaky: Perce is no way the corporate douche she’d expected. Awesome the way he showed up with that lawyer downstairs, and used Bethany’s speech to get Dani off the hook. For now.

Awesome, too, to hear Bethany speak for her in the first place. Though why she’d do that is a mystery for another day.

Dani’s phone bongs. She pulls it out.

Gray mobile:

All set.

Ready at the keyboard, Dan?

roger roger, cap’n

Gray mobile:

I’ve turned the bots away from Mondan.

Terasoft’s UK web is about to go doooown.

But omg – Sam, though? Terasoft?

Everything’s gone all

my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend.

word                                                    

ive almost lost track of who to hate

Gray mobile:

And Perce is definitely OK with me

hacking his screens? I mean, I don’t want

your friendly coppers beating my door

down.

bare sure – hes right here                                

JR says the attack will be more real                

if it comes from takebackID, not from Sean

its fuzzy                                                              

ill explain later                                                  

Gray mobile:

OK. I guess.

Tell everyone to watch the big screens.

The main feature attraction is about to start.

Eighteen

_{weve got something to say}

The second the TakeBack pennant hits 404 City’s screens a colossal cheer rises from the encampment, relayed inside through rolling news and laptops. The building shakes. Here’s the takeover those hopeful kids were promised by the lying man.

Turns out Dani, Gray and J-R are some kind of perfect, team-wise. The most unlikely group, shaken into collaboration, can sometimes form an efficient mechanism.

_{watch this}

But this fusion – of Gray’s accelerated hacks, J-R’s instinct for words that will speak for themselves, and the sharp edge of Dani’s online persona – is seamless.

_{dirty tricks}

Pace is everything. Dani animates words and images onto the giant screens, sliding them in great neon blocks. She mirrors them on the resurrected Parley.

_{listen to me}

Names and pictures and puns and provocations.

_{lies they told about me}

The circling beasts of mass attention turn and latch onto this narrative. It’s new, and it’s a perfect reversal-of-fortune story: what the hive mind loves.

_{lies they told about identikid}

Much amaze. Perce, the villain, transformed to falsely accused hero. A cynical attack from a juggernaut of global tech. An attempt to wing a cocksure British entrepreneur. Outsider hero archetype. This is now the story.

_{what they stole from you}

How swiftly the current of opinion turns. Gray scrapes proof points from Sam’s emails. J-R watches raw clippings flip onto the screen and dictates new eye-bait for Dani to proffer.

_{who sold identikid?}

Inside, all around the atrium, the screens howl with overlapping content. The monster screens outside shimmer above the city with Dani’s supple magic.
Moar secrets
, cries the crowd below.
Moar lies.

J-R takes a new tack: he racks up verbatim clippings from Sam’s mails to Terasoft. Dani cherry-picks the choicest provocations.

From:
Sam Corrigan

Date:
TUESDAY

Yeah, that’s right. We fed the Met an anonymous tip-off that an ‘activist’ under the AKA of sic_girl was holed up at Parley HQ and was a credible threat. Apparently they showed up armed :-/

Dani feels a special burn of delight, releasing that nugget of intelligence.

From:
Sam Corrigan

Date:
WEDNESDAY

These demonstrators don’t know what they want. Give them a cause and they rally round it like flies to dogshit.

Perce will be their dogshit for today.

Dani ices that one with a dancing line of poop emojis.

And then:

From:
Sam Corrigan

Date:
THURSDAY

Sure Mondan have done nothing wrong. But we’ve amped the message until people are too riled to notice there’s nothing there. People are dumb when it comes to it.

Way to alienate a generation, Sam. Your turn to be the dogshit. Dani knows without seeing that down below, a couple-hundred demonstrators stand, feet planted, heads cranked back, to welcome this validation of their anger and suspicion. Righteous rage echoes in their proffers back. She throws the best replies onto the screens, beside Sam’s mails.

From:
Sam Corrigan

Date:
FRIDAY

News flash: I just had a brainwave. I’ve shopped Leo Sandberg, my protest-monkey, to Krish Kohli, my contact at MinTech. Far as they know now, he did the sic_girl leaks. Way I hear it, the Met are hunting him down already. We’re in the clear, guys.

Some words you can’t back out of. Once spoken, no return.

_{hunting him down}

At some point Sean drags J-R away – something to do with the ministry. Dani doesn’t register. She’s in the code-freeze. The cites rack up. Trending doesn’t come close: this thing explodes.

_{we’re in the clear, guys}