The System (7 page)

‘How’s my hot girl?’

Frankie reddened. She still hadn’t entirely got used to holding all her very personal conversations in front of so many people, but that was the price for being so popular.

‘I’m good. How’re you?’

His image appeared on the larger screens; someone, somewhere had realised who she was talking to. Or maybe Milo had told the mainframe himself. Immediately a thousand messages appeared in front of her: ‘He’s so dreamy!’ ‘Oh, Frankie, so happy for you,’ ‘Wowzer, I love that guy. If I didn’t love you so much too I might go after him myself!’

She blinked, looked back at the image in front of her eyes, a bonus of trialing Infotec’s latest software – a bonus of having Milo as her boyfriend. ‘So I was hoping to take you out to dinner tonight,’ he said. ‘Somewhere special. What do you think? Can you squeeze me in?’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘I think I can probably manage to fit you in after the prize-giving at the Ritz,’ she said with a wink. ‘Does 8.30 p.m. sound okay?’

Words in front of her eyes. ‘Somewhere special – he’s going to propose!’ ‘Hey Frankie, he’s got it bad,’ ‘I hear wedding bells!’ She did her best to ignore them, but managed a little smile for the camera.

‘Great, I’ll pick you up outside the Ritz.’

He mouthed a kiss then disappeared, but she saw a message left behind, a private message just for her eyes: ‘I love you. Can’t wait to see you later.’

She smiled secretively, pleased for a second that the cameras didn’t have to see everything.

She ate quickly, drained her coffee, then thanked the staff, waved her hand over the payment machine, added a generous tip – essential now that she had so many followers, but expensive – then walked out onto the road again, down towards the Info Palace, then across into Louvre Street and finally into the Library on Rivoli Road, where she quickly updated her status before shutting down her communication portal. ‘Out of respect to people trying to study,’ she explained to her disappointed followers. ‘Back in 15 minutes!’

The Library was where Frankie worked, where she wrote, researched, where many of the City’s bloggers came to work, to see each other, to compare notes. Blogging was a dying art; they all knew that. Images were far more popular than words and reader numbers were dwindling. But still the bloggers came, to think, to write, to rant. A lot of the time they wrote blogs on the sad implications of the demise of the blog, ever-diminishing circles that were chock full of irony, but written anyway. And Frankie knew why. She didn’t need to write a blog anymore; the income she received for it was peanuts, utterly inconsequential. But she’d never give it up.

Milo didn’t get it at all, could not see why she would spend so much time writing stuff that no one read when she could be out and about gathering more Watchers. The problem with the Library, he’d say with a shrug, was that there were no cameras there. She could still update her status, but if she wasn’t visible, people would switch off, would watch someone else. Words didn’t matter anymore; people wanted visual stories, not boring text. And she owed her Watchers, after all. They needed her.

He was right, of course he was. But there had to be a balance. Frankie hadn’t decided to be a blogger because she’d thought it would bring her fame and fortune. She’d done it because she’d always done it, because it was her way of pausing the world, of figuring out what she thought about stuff. She’d started when she was a teenager and had got enough people reading it to make it vaguely financially viable. Now there was no need for her to do it, but she just couldn’t give it up. It was as though the blog kept her on the ground; without it, she was afraid she might just blow away with the wind.

Plus it meant she got to hang out at the Library most days, and if she was completely honest, she rather enjoyed a few hours out of the glare of being watched; being like she used to be, anonymous, a person known for what she wrote rather than for what she looked like, what she did, the minutia of her day. It still amazed her how many comments she got from complete strangers following her decision to have cereal for breakfast or a chicken sandwich for her lunch. Until recently, such comments had come only from her friends and family – or, rather, her extended network of friends-of-friends and acquaintances built up over her life. Fifteen hundred or so Watchers; respectable by most standards.

Now, though, it was something else; now she had followers in America, in China, Africa, the Middle East. Now she was a role model; a beacon of the new world, inspiring and engaging people everywhere. And she loved it; loved the knowledge that she was making people happy, that they were rooting for her, that in some way she was giving their lives meaning. Because, as Milo had pointed out, not everyone lived in Paris; if you lived in a village in the middle of nowhere, reading about the life of someone in the metropolis would help you to feel connected, part of the whole. But it was still a little overwhelming. Still a bit terrifying sometimes when someone from Kazakhstan commented on the toothpaste she was using.

So Frankie’s balance was that in the mornings she worked. In the afternoon, she’d be out and about, shopping, partying, going to launches, whatever; being visible. But from nine to one, she got to focus on her blog. Her blog that barely anyone read. Her blog that was, according to Milo, utterly pointless.

She walked in through the grand entrance, past the download terrace and through to the work bank, where fifty or so people sat, typing furiously onto keyboards, hologram screens in front of them. The room was silent, one of the few places such a thing was possible; no audio or visual updates were allowed.

She sat down in front of a screen, then opened a hologram keyboard by opening her hands and choosing a tab button.

‘You made it, then.’

It was a message from Jim, her old comrade in arms, her friend since she was … well, since always as far as she could remember. She scanned the line of people, clocked him and gave him a little wave. He pretended to ignore her.

‘Hey, some of us have work to do,’ appeared in front of her eyes. She grinned. Jim was about the only person nowadays who didn’t treat her like a superstar, who wasn’t intimidated by her, who didn’t fawn over everything she wrote or said. If anything, he judged her for being a celebrity; he preferred to keep a low profile, only updating his status every fifteen minutes, when his chip reminded him, avoiding cameras where he could and refusing to follow anyone. Which was why, she regularly told him, he was such a social outcast and couldn’t get a girlfriend.

She sat down, took her keyboard out of her bag and unfolded it; when she was properly writing she liked the satisfying click of an old-fashioned physical keyboard rather than a VR one. Then she moved her hands to bring up her screen and opened the investigative report she was working on.

But before she could type, another message appeared.

‘Hey, gorgeous. I’m missing you. What are you up to?’

She smiled. Milo. She instinctively moved to turn on visual, but remembered where she was in time and stopped herself. ‘Hey yourself,’ she typed back. ‘I’m working. I want to get this blog done.’

‘The party girl strikes again?’

Frankie raised an eyebrow then remembered that Milo couldn’t see her.

‘Not today. And I don’t party all the time. I want to write something interesting.’

‘You want me to go, is that it?’

She smiled. ‘Milo, you’ve got a big job. Shouldn’t you be doing it right now?’

‘I can’t help it if you’re irresistible. You’re definitely meeting me for dinner later?’

‘I wouldn’t be anywhere else,’ she promised, and the message box disappeared. He was super keen, she found herself thinking. But whereas that might put her off another guy, with Milo it just made her more excited. She’d never met anyone like him. So intense, so interested in everything she did, everything she thought about.

She frowned as another message pinged into her inbox; a personal message sent to her blog but with no name attached, no return address. A total stranger had sent it and it wasn’t the first time; she’d seen and ignored the same message several times already that morning. And sure, the world was full of total strangers and it was the fact that they followed her that made her who she was, but this kind of persistency still irritated her, particularly when it was obviously a crazy person peddling some made-up conspiracy theory,

‘Communications blackout over UK. Haven’t you noticed? Why? Radioactivity doesn’t require it. We have been lied to.’

Another crazy kook. She got all sorts of drivel sent to her; kind of came with the territory. She rolled her eyes and deleted it, then started writing that day’s blog, a rather deep piece, she thought, about how the world was now so similar that the only divisions were down to weather and terrain; people were united by common language, common aspirations, and had more in common these days than at any time in history. She wrote three hundred words, re-read it, and was about to publish it when another message arrived. ‘You think I’m crazy so why not look into it for yourself? As far as your systems are concerned, there is no UK. Don’t you want to know why?’

Frankie looked at it in irritation. What was it with people and their conspiracy theories? They were so pointless, so damaging. Only desperate bloggers took them seriously. Her blogs were considered, thoughtful, carefully researched. Like that one she did on wheat rationing in sub-Saharan states.

Of course, her reader numbers had dipped to an all-time low after that blog. Like Milo kept telling her, it was new dresses that people were interested in, parties, kissing Milo for the cameras. That’s why the vast majority of her followers had deselected her blog when they’d subscribed to Watch her. Which hurt a little, if Frankie was honest, but she understood why. Kind of.

‘Gorgeous,’ Milo had explained patiently, ‘it’s not that you’re not a great writer. You are. But no one reads your blog because people don’t care about serious things. They have enough of that stuff in their own lives. They want you to take them away from that. They want to know where you’ve been, what you’ve been up to.’

Maybe a conspiracy theory piece wasn’t such a bad idea after all, she found herself thinking, then shook herself. She wasn’t that desperate. Instead, she forwarded the email to Milo with a quizzical face. Maybe she should write the story, she found herself thinking, but with a damning indictment of the whole conspiracy, warning against anyone taking such stupidity seriously.

To her surprise, Milo messaged back straight away.

‘Total loon. Frankie, don’t get sidetracked by crazy people. And whatever you do don’t give them oxygen. People won’t respect you for it. You’ll lose social capital.’

Frankie pulled a face. Milo was always using phrases like ‘social capital’. Everything was business to him; everything was about on-message branding. But he was right. He was always right.

The weird thing was, though, that him telling her not to cover the crackpot theory somehow made her want to write about it.

‘I was thinking about writing about it, but not giving it oxygen, more talking about the way that all those conspiracy theories over the UK just refuse to go away and why that might be?’ she asked him.

‘Absolutely not,’ Milo messaged back right away. ‘Don’t do it. You don’t want to upset people. People will have relatives who died over there. Don’t go reminding them. That’s an order, Frankie.’

Frankie stared at the words for a few seconds. An order? What the hell did that mean?

She took a deep breath. He meant it tongue in cheek. He had to. He’d never give her an order seriously.

She re-read the message. Of course, he was right about reminding people. People never talked about the UK; it was the world’s elephant in the room; it quashed most arguments for letting people do their own thing, for not worrying if people didn’t update regularly enough. A whole country annihilated because a few extremists got too powerful, because the government didn’t act quickly enough to stop the inevitable retaliation and escalation. A whole country destroyed by a nuclear bomb that should never have been activated; no one was even quite sure who controlled it. According to those who had been alive at the time, it had been life-changing, world-changing. No one felt safe anymore; no one took anything for granted afterwards.

She closed the stranger’s email and turned back to another blog she’d started the day before – a piece on how information sharing was the latest development in human evolution, about how for billions of years humans had developed tools like language, the written word, the telephone, the television, to communicate ideas with each other, and that now InfoSharing meant that humans were almost like one, ideas being communicated instantly across the globe, total openness meaning that genuine equality was becoming more and more achievable. It wasn’t great, but it was better than the piece she’d written today. It would do. She read it over once more, then felt her stomach clench as another message popped up from the stranger.

‘If you want the truth, don’t expect to get it from the people who lied in the first place. I thought you were an investigative blogger. So investigate.’

Frankie could feel her heart thudding in her chest. How did they know she’d spoken to Milo? Then she shook herself. Of course they didn’t know. They were guessing. Milo was her boyfriend after all.

But it still irked her. Still made her feel hot and uncomfortable.

Another message appeared. ‘What if I’m not crazy? What if I’m telling the truth? Just dig a little bit, then ignore me if you want to. Because your interest is piqued, isn’t it? And you’re your own woman, right?’

Frankie stared at the screen, feeling the blood drain from her face. Her own woman? It was like this person had seen the message Milo had sent her. And taken it seriously.

‘How about if I say please? And smile flirtatiously? You can’t see it, but I’m doing it, right now. My most charming smile.’

The messages were coming through thick and fast; Frankie leant forwards to read them all again.

Her heart was thudding in her chest. Who was this? He wasn’t like the usual conspiracy theorist, who would write long diatribes full of assertions that had no evidence to back them up. This guy … he was different. And it was a ‘he’. Frankie was sure of it. She frowned.