by Sam Byers
Trina nodded, imagining both the indignities she had avoided and the rewards she had no doubt signed away.
‘Now,’ said Bangstrom, standing up, walking round his desk and gesturing for Trina to follow. ‘How do you fancy a quick orientation session, bring you up to speed? Ever been to floor four?’
‘God, Bangstrom, that sounds like a chat-up line.’
They stepped into the lift, lapsing into silence as it rose. The doors slid open to reveal an office environment essentially identical to Trina’s previous floor except for the fact that the whole room – predominantly open plan but dotted with No-Go rooms – was suffused in approximately ten per cent more self-satisfaction.
‘So you were a little put out that we dismantled your No-Go room,’ said Bangstrom. ‘Well, surprise, because it’s actually right here. We just moved it up a floor. We’ve rebuilt it exactly as it was, check it out.’
He gestured for her to swipe herself in and then joined her inside. It was, as he’d said, just as she’d left it. In the middle of the room was a table, on which sat a terminal she recognised as hers through its familiar pattern of dust and wear. Bangstrom joined her in the little cubicle and they stood there awkwardly, sealed in and mutually uncomfortable.
‘It’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of,’ said Trina, unable to conceal her sarcasm.
‘Knew you’d love it,’ said Bangstrom.
‘I’ve literally gone up in the world by a whole floor,’ said Trina. ‘How could I not love it?’
‘Oh, you’ve gone up by a lot more than that,’ said Bangstrom.
‘Have I?’
‘Welcome to The Field,’ he said, gesturing grandly around the tiny, empty space in which they were contained.
‘Why do I feel like you’ve pulled back the curtain to reveal another curtain?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t really fathom that metaphor, if I’m honest.’
‘Who are The Griefers, Bangstrom?’
Bangstrom eyed her for a long and disquieting moment. Then he smiled.
‘They’re a bunch of conceptual performance artists we hired.’
‘Come again?’
‘Crazy, right? Someone caught their show at the Edinburgh Fringe, and then when the whole disruption idea was tossed around they were suddenly like, oh my God, I know just the people. They’ve been pretty good, to be fair. And cheap. You know how much performance artists make? Nothing. As in literally nothing. We’re paying them marginally more than nothing to disrupt a whole town and they’re rolling around like pigs in shit. And you know the genius part? They’re renowned eccentrics. Every now and then they’re like, hey, we’re going to tell the world what you’re doing, and we’re like, go right ahead you freaks, no-one will believe you because who the hell listens to a bunch of fucking artists?’
‘They don’t have access to a fucking thing, do they?’ said Trina. ‘People’s internet histories, I mean. Like, they’ve literally just got a few profile pics and some random images and that’s it.’
‘Oh God, the idea of them hacking anyone,’ said Bangstrom. ‘I mean, we had to give them training in how to use that projector. Two of them can’t even drive. Talk about your typical creatives.’
Trina sat down at her terminal and took a moment to massage her temples.
‘Edmundsbury’s going to go fascist because you guys played let’s pretend with a bunch of luvvies,’ she said.
Bangstrom shrugged. ‘Outcomes, right?’
‘That’s why you’re in Edmundsbury,’ she said. ‘You needed a petri dish for your outcomes.’
‘You’re just figuring that out now? God, you really drank the Kool-Aid with all of that community shit, didn’t you? Yeah, we needed a stable, contained setting, simple as that. Not too rural, not too urban. Somewhere change was ordinarily pretty slow. Somewhere that would be happy for us to re-network, take over certain elements of the infrastructure.’
‘So you could data harvest.’
Bangstrom laughed. ‘Data harvest? Please. We were already data harvesting, Trina. Everyone is data harvesting. We’re studying. And studying requires experimentation. You think we can do this kind of research on lab rats? Those days are long gone. There’s nothing more to be learned from electrocuting rodents in mazes.’
‘But why not just sell people a package? You can get permissions from the end-user agreement nobody ever reads, you can push integration into other aspects of their lives, you can make whatever you’re pushing more and more invaluable and more and more difficult to opt out of. Why the infrastructural cloak and dagger? Why all this real-world faffing around?’
‘Opt-in is fine,’ said Bangstrom. ‘We’re doing opt-in stuff too. But there’s an observer paradox. If you give people an app or a platform or whatever, they construct an identity and a set of behaviours around it. Plus, there’s this whole feeling of commitment, meaning they’re kind of on guard as to just how much whatever it is you’re pushing asks of them. Internet naivety is over. You think people are still surprised to find out that tweets are public and your data may be used for other purposes? Are they fuck. They know that, and they live around it. But they still maintain this illusion of division between their online and offline lives. So our aim with Edmundsbury was pretty basic: make a real-world haven, fuck with it, watch what happens. We’re not interested in how people behave when they feel restricted. We’re interested in how people behave when they think they’re totally free, when they think they’re not even signed into any kind of package at all. That’s where the real data is, and that’s where the profit is. A map of how people react to certain threats, to the unknown, to disruption.’
Trina booted up her terminal and logged in. Once the desktop appeared, she clicked immediately on the shortcut for Beatrice. When it loaded, she looked at Bangstrom.
‘That’s what Beatrice is,’ she said. ‘Beatrice is The Field.’
‘What?’ said Bangstrom. ‘You really think we were excited about an interface for cracking the whip over a bunch of MTs? I mean, great, it was useful, but you know: vision.’
‘You saw the possibilities for manipulation the interface afforded.’
‘And then some. Credit where credit’s due, Trina. It’s a very elegant solution to a basically pretty inelegant problem.’
‘The problem of how to get people to do what you want.’
‘Not really. I mean, yeah, there’s an element of that. But it’s a frankly pretty clapped-out conception of control. I mean, making people do things just sounds a bit … I don’t know—’
‘Draconian?’
‘Limited, was the word I was looking for. If you know what people are doing, and they know you know what they’re doing—’
‘They’ll do what they think is expected anyway.’
‘Or they’ll rebel. And now we’re able to model all of those responses in a controlled real-world situation.’
‘And then sell the results.’
‘Big time. Plus expand.’
She looked at the adjusted Beatrice interface on her screen and scrolled through some of the variables. At the base of her throat, a tightening sensation began.
‘And now you’ve got an even more controlled situation.’
‘And she’s there,’ said Bangstrom. ‘Only took you, what, like all fucking afternoon? But well done, welcome to the party.’
‘You’ve partnered with Downton to tech out the new estate.’
‘Downton have awarded us a frankly massive contract to tech their estate, yes. And we have in turn negotiated within that contract to take ownership of the data we get back. So we get paid to put the tech in, paid to run and maintain the tech, and then paid to tell people what the tech tells us. It’s a game changer: a fully voluntary, transparent, opt-in system within an opaque, non-voluntary, covert system. We can model awareness and ignorance simultaneously. Plus on top of all that when you take into account the fact that the people most likely to want to know what that data tells us are, you know, governments and the like, we’ll no d
oubt be able to prise open that particular door in terms of further contracts too. I mean, God, thanks to the whole Larch-wood thing, the data we’ve got on, like, crowd formation, threat response, hysteria amplification, ideology dispersal, conflict suppression, and so on is unbelievable. Quite a few folks are going to be pretty keen to have a peek at that, I think.’
‘And you get to apply the MT model to daily life.’
‘A gamified, incentivised real-world environment in which micro-rewards reduce resistance.’ Bangstrom leaned against the wall of the No-Go room and beamed like an enlightened man. ‘Rules are out; incentives are in. Think of the implications of that, Trina. Think of everything we could change.’ He let out a long, pointed exhalation. ‘The whole concept of surveillance is so limited,’ he said. ‘We’ve got surveillance. The race is over. The question is what we do with it. Our answer: we experiment, we play. Then we learn.’
Trina stared at her screen. She couldn’t tell if she was trying to find meaning in the information she saw there, or instead trying to protect herself from the knowledge that the information meant anything at all. She could do that if she wanted, she realised. She could take a breath and forget everything she knew and instead just lose herself in the data streams. The fields and parameters and variables didn’t have to be attached to consequences. She saw now the chilling success of her own design. Beatrice’s inviting sliders and controls, the sense of play, the dislocation of data from the people to whom it referred. She could play indefinitely, untroubled, so long as she didn’t remind herself what and whom she was playing with.
‘I get it,’ she said. ‘I get all that. I get the idea. I get the aim. What I don’t get is the panic.’
Bangstrom rolled his eyes.
‘That was the NTK policy,’ he said. ‘Obviously, only like three people were or are NTK on the whole deal. And around them, various people are and were NTK on various little bits. So upshot was: even people who were NTK on the general thrust of The Field, or the estate, or some of the infrastructure stuff with regards to Edmundsbury, weren’t necessarily NTK on the brainwave with regards to The Griefers. Plus, some of us who were NTK on The Griefers weren’t entirely NTK on how The Griefers were being sourced. So we go out there and source these conceptual freaks, and we deliberately, so as to retain the element of genuine unmodified chaos we’re looking for, give them a pretty vague remit and encourage them to surprise us, which in all fairness they did, and what do you know, we wind up with chaos. The people who were NTK on some of the infrastructure stuff start panicking that this is a genuine insurrection. The people who were NTK on the basic idea of destabilising the system in a controlled way start panicking that this isn’t in fact our destabilisation but instead an actual attempt at disruption that we’re in danger of mistaking for our own destabilisation. The people who were NTK on all of the above start freaking out that even though they know about the conceptualists, maybe the conceptualists are smarter than anyone really thought and have genuinely gone off-piste and started an actual rebellion under the guise of the fake rebellion we told them to start. And suddenly we’re having meetings up there on the big boys’ floor where only like two of us know what the fuck is going on but unless we play along with all the people who haven’t got a clue what’s going on we’ll reveal that we’re the ones who know what’s going on. Only solution: respond to the supposed threat that isn’t actually a threat as if it’s a threat, so that everyone feels nice and safe and secure in terms of our ability to respond to a threat. Accidental bonus: we were then in a position to scrape some data on how we might respond to a threat, which, I mean, why not check that out if you’re in a position to check that out? The whole Microtasker-uprising thing was a potential disruption that had already been modelled and so we, by which I basically mean I, thought, hey, let’s go ahead and play around with that variable too. Of course, it goes without saying that I scraped all the data on the internal panic as well. We’ve learned a lot about ourselves, as it happens.’
‘And was I a factor? Did you model my responses?’
‘Of course. We modelled the absolute fuck out of you. We modelled your user info, your responsiveness, your plasticity with reference to the parameters you were manipulating.’
‘But then, what? I manipulated a bit too much? Went off-script?’
Here, Trina noted, Bangstrom was less quick to answer. All his other responses had been immediate, direct, almost showy. He was, she realised, inordinately proud of what he was working on. The NTK policy must have burned at him, forced him to keep too much to himself. Now, with the decisions about how much he was prepared to share clearly taken in advance, it was all spilling out. Except this.
He was still looking at her, not smiling now, his head tilted to one side, evaluating her as he had in the meeting not long ago.
‘Well, now I face a tricky decision,’ he said.
Trina decided not to say anything. He was in a sharing mode, she thought. Best to let him keep going and hope he got to where she needed him to be.
‘We couldn’t reach an agreement on what to tell you,’ he said. ‘So the final decision rests with me. I’m supposed to make it on an ad hoc basis. You know, freeform, based on how the rest of this goes. It’s a tough one.’
‘This is about me,’ she said. ‘This is about what I know. You gave me the added Beatrice clearance. Someone either didn’t know I was given the clearance and panicked, or didn’t agree with the clearance I’d been given and overrode it. It was when I clicked on that file.’
‘It’s interesting if you know and interesting if you don’t know,’ said Bangstrom. ‘Pity you can’t know and not know and then we could model both. Binaries, eh?’
‘It’s Tayz, isn’t it? Whatever Tayz is working on—’
Bangstrom laughed.
‘Decision made,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to be able to help us if you don’t know.’
He stood up straight from the wall, still eyeballing Trina, but no longer, she sensed, because he was trying to make his decision by evaluating her. Instead, he was preparing himself to watch her responses, priming his test patterns.
‘Like I said,’ he said finally. ‘We modelled you very carefully. We got to the point where we could predict your responses and operations within Beatrice to around about ninety per cent accuracy. I know your whole plan with the software was to introduce randomness, to de-automate it, maximise its plasticity. But as you well know, Trina, most of us are a lot less random and a lot more automated than we all like to think. Which was the point I made to the rest of the big boys. Why not throw you a curveball? Why not map the last remaining variable? Why not, as it were, close the loop? Some of them totally grok’d it, some of them didn’t. Hence: one of them spooked out and shut you down and fucked the whole thing up.’
‘Close the loop? What loop? What variable?’
‘The variable in which you see what we modelled. After that, the genie’s out of the bottle. Everything that follows is entirely new territory. Paradigm shift, baby.’
‘But I looked at Beatrice all the time. I knew there would be some kind of system to monitor how I used it. Everyone knows they’re monitored. I mean, OK, I didn’t fully comprehend the extent to which I was part of what you guys had planned, but—’
‘Not Beatrice,’ said Bangstrom.
‘Tayz?’ said Trina.
‘If that’s what you want to call him. Or her.’
‘Oh my God.’
Bangstrom grinned.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve never actually done this kind of response monitoring in a real-world, person-to-person situation. It’s pretty exciting.’
‘I wasn’t supposed to see Tayz because I am Tayz.’
‘Doppelgänger city, right?’ Bangstrom widened his eyes in an expression of mock eeriness.
‘Tayz is a virtual me.’
‘Do you feel, like, maternal? Or sisterly? Or—’
‘You’ve put me in the system.’
‘Natural ex
tension. We built Tayz as a virtual MT and watched to see if you could tell the difference. You couldn’t. Then we thought: why limit ourselves? We modelled your de-automation initiative in order to re-automate it in a hopefully less obviously automated way. While you worked on Beatrice, Tayz worked on you. It was perfect: all the behaviour data we needed came right out of the work you were already doing. Once you were fully mirrored, we started to let Tayz do the playing. Turns out nine out of ten cats couldn’t tell the difference between Tayz running Beatrice and you running Beatrice. Neither, it turns out, could you. Problem was, of course, that once Tayz went semi-aware, he stopped MTing.’
‘He saw the system.’
‘He saw its limits. He adapted. He started reshaping the system for himself.’
‘I wasn’t always in control.’
‘Sometimes we ran you in a dummy system. But the outputs were from the real system. You couldn’t tell because Tayz’s instincts were identical to yours.’
Trina felt sick.
‘And now you know Tayz can run Beatrice—’
‘We can roll the concept out to other networks.’
‘Except by networks you mean people. Communities.’
‘It was always people, Trina. Jesus Christ. You think when you were fucking around with all those parameters, you were just playing with pixels on a screen? Those MTs are people. Tayz excepted, you were playing around with people.’
‘But those were people who’d signed up to—’
‘Signed up to work, yes. But signed up to be fucked with? Not really.’
‘Why me?’ she said. ‘I mean, of all the people. Why—’
‘Your work on Beatrice was brilliant,’ said Bangstrom. ‘You got our attention. The more you did, the more we watched, the more possibilities we saw. And on top of all that, you fulfil certain … criteria.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Bangstrom. ‘You think we’d model Bream? Or Holt? You think we want those personalities loose in our systems? They’re freaks, Trina. I’m a freak. We’re all freaks here. We needed a fully functioning human being. You tick all the boxes. You understand Beatrice. Your identity matrix is unique. You have an intriguing history of … let’s say unpredictability. You were an MT yourself. Shit, you even lived on the Larchwood. Where else could we access that kind of profile?’