dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “Was that one designed here?”

  “No, but it was a good one.”

  “So how do I see the in-house memes?”

  “Dot2me,” the Count said, snatching another quick look around. He saw that Ian Black was staring at them, and then snapped back to his monitor like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  dot2me, again.

  Ani didn’t give the site much credit. Since they’d started the investigation, she’d spent a lot more time there than she would usually have, but she’d been looking for mission critical chatter rather than pictures with funny captions. It seemed like she’d missed something. But what?

  Image macros were one of those odd things the net threw up, but she had never really become a fan. They drew their actual name from the fact that they used images from stock sites with captions applied using something close to a macro—computer speak for a series of input commands that gave a different, pre-programmed output.

  The first popular image macros were probably the LOLcats from 4chan. The image of a fat, happy cat with the slogan I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? was probably the first megastar of the image macros: the cute cat picture that launched a thousand memes. It was good for a smile, maybe, but hardly a logical choice of weapon for victorious to use, so why were they wasting people’s time creating them?

  Ah, victorious, where every discovery brought another series of questions.

  There was a “disaster” around midday when the whole computer network went down. Every terminal in the room just decided to stop talking to the Internet. A red-faced tech ran around babbling about “hardware integration problems” and “server load,” but the long and short of it was that lots of people went home, and Ani was pretty close to the front of that line.

  She ended up walking with another member of victorious to the Tube station. The guy was screen-called Touchshriek, although he confessed that his real name was Brian. He had an easy manner and was a lot more approachable than the Count, so Ani chatted away with him and ended up pretending she was heading the same way as he was on the Central line, in reality heading away from where she wanted to be.

  “It’s crazy,” Brian said, when they’d found seats and the train had left the station. “I really don’t know if I’m cut out for this office-style approach to bringing down capitalism.” He laughed. “There’s me, raging against the machine, and I end up in an office of the guys who make me rage in the first place.”

  “It’s a bit weird,” Ani said. “The guy next to me seemed terrified to talk with me earlier, as if he was sure a supervisor was going to come along to tell him off.”

  “You’ve just joined the good fight, haven’t you?” Brian asked, wiping a curl of mousy hair off his brow. “I mean, I haven’t seen you around before.”

  “I just started yesterday,” Ani said. “But I’ve been fighting the good fight on my own for as long as I can remember.”

  “Did you stumble into it, or were you recruited?”

  “Recruited, I guess. You?”

  “A puzzle on a website that led down a rabbit hole into an alternate reality game of emails and more websites. I thought I’d stumbled onto the next Cicada 3301, but it was just a recruitment drive, I guess. Still, it’s kinda cool to be on the cutting edge of … well, whatever this turns out to be.”

  “It seems like a pretty well-organized hacking team.”

  “It’s a bit more than hacking,” Brian said, then quickly glanced around the car as if checking no one was listening. “I mean, sure, the hacking’s part of it, but there’s something else going on. There’s also a meme factory and a homebrew gaming division …”

  “I heard about the memes. Seems a bit weird.”

  “I reckon there must be some kind of steganography or something going on in the images, and the memes are just a disguise. Or maybe it’s all some colossal wind-up and we’ll be on the next series of Derren Brown.”

  Ani laughed. “It does feel a bit like some hidden camera stunt, doesn’t it? And you say there’s a gaming division?”

  “Yeah, but it looks pretty crude. 8-Bit Sims-looking stuff that they’ve got a few people working on. Again, I’m thinking it’s a way of hiding some kind of messages, like a spy’s dead letter drops but, like, digital. There’re some camera apps in development, too.”

  “Someone must have some serious bank to be hiring out an office and filling it full of computers,” Ani said. “You kind of wonder about the endgame.”

  “I’m hoping that we bring down the whole capitalist mechanism. If not that, I hope it’s an interview for a big security company.”

  “Well, those are diametrically opposed ambitions.”

  “So what are you in it for, then?” Brian raised an eyebrow with Spock-like efficiency.

  “I just can’t keep out of other people’s networks. It might be that I’m part-anarchist, or just that I’m just nosy as hell and don’t know how to take no for an answer. Most people buy a computer and think ‘What games can I play on this? or ‘Oh, incognito mode on my Internet browser—result!’ Me, I think ‘Where can this get me into?’”

  “I know what you mean.” Brian looked around again.

  Paranoid, much?

  He sighed. “I swear that it’s taking all my willpower to not hack into victorious to see what they’re really about.”

  “Snap.”

  “You, too?” Brian looked relieved. “Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that I’m not alone.”

  “Is that still a thing?”

  “What?”

  “The Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

  “Haven’t got a clue. Although, you know what they say?”

  “What do they say?”

  “The Internet’s forever.”

  “Yeah, but who is this ‘they’ that keeps saying all these things?”

  Brian “Touchshriek” laughed. “The wizards. The ones that run the Internet through unicorn magic.”

  “Wanna grab a coffee?” Ani asked.

  “I think that’s about the best idea I’ve heard all day.”

  When you’re an operative for a top-secret government task force, the simple act of asking someone out for coffee means something completely different from its use in everyday, civilian life.

  It’s a weapon.

  Ani had even taken a course about it.

  That was her life now as a YETI operative. Two-and-a-half days a week taking intensive school lessons, cramming a whole curriculum into half the usual time, the rest spent learning how to charm your way into a building, break a man’s arm, or interrogate a suspect.

  The fact that Brian was pleasant, funny, and seemed to know his way around networks that he really didn’t belong in were secondary considerations. That was one of the odd things about being a spy. Something as commonplace as social interactions with strangers became a double game where the surface goal was having fun, but the real goal was gathering intelligence.

  Ani had always been good at playing two roles at the same time.

  It was something you learned being biracial in the UK, by being the daughter of a petty criminal in everyday society, and by being a hacker in a world that misunderstood the whole hacking scene. She had learned to hide parts of herself from just about everyone, presenting a normalized version of Ani Lee that was more surface veneer than actual, living breathing person.

  That being said, it still took a lot of getting used to: the idea that most of the people you met were simply conduits through which—that word again—intelligence could flow.

  It sure took some of the shine off of a coffee date.

  They got off the Tube at St. Paul’s and took in the majestic sight of the old cathedral as it failed, spectacularly, to blend in with its modern surroundings. They stood and looked at the massive dome and its Baroque trappings, brought to silence by the sublime building and its glass and concrete restraints. It took a while before Ani could bear to break the reverent silence. As a new inhabitant of London, she still found the historic
al architecture pretty humbling and, at times, overwhelming.

  “Sometimes disaster has another side,” she finally said.

  Brian gave her a confused look.

  “The Great Fire of London,” Ani explained. “It cleared the city’s canvas and allowed this building, and others, to rise from the ashes. Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor took advantage of the chaos to make a thing of beauty.”

  “I never looked at it that way before,” Brian admitted. “But how many people had to die before the phoenix could rise from their ashes?”

  “Apparently, the answer to that question is six,” Ani said, showing off her nascent memory skills and some trivia she’d read in a guide book months before. “Six confirmed deaths during the whole of the Fire of London. Of course, that doesn’t take into account those that died of indirect causes …”

  “So you think the sacrifices of the few are justifiable if the end result is positive?” Brian was surveying her with an intensity that made her feel uncomfortable.

  “It was an accident,” Ani said. “People made the best of it. If the question is would I sacrifice those six people to make the rebuilding of London possible, of course I wouldn’t.”

  “Thank goodness for that,” he said. “I thought you were one of them.” He looked around again.

  Looked like the money for coffee wouldn’t be wasted.

  Ani located a nice non-chain coffee place, got some drinks and pastries, and then asked him who them were.

  “Ah, you haven’t been in the victorious HQ long enough to have met any.” He took a sip of his cappuccino, leaving behind a white mustache that he wiped away with the back of his hand. He ended up still leaving behind a toothbrush mustache that Ani rubbed off with a napkin.

  “There is a sort of … attitude … among some of the victorious faithful,” Brian continued. “A kind of ‘ends justifies the means’ outlook that leaves me kind of cold. I guess that’s probably why I overreacted to the whole Fire of London thing. I’m sorry about that. I just don’t think it’s true. I think the means are pretty damned important. My uncle—my mum’s brother—was at the back of the Tavistock Square bus on 7/7. I don’t really remember him that well. I was … what, six when he died, but I see the ‘ends’ of that atrocity in my mum’s face all the time. It leeched some of the joy from her, and sometimes I think that she’ll never get it back.

  “Now, I’m pretty sure that the Islamic Fundamentalists who detonated the bombs that day were clear where they stood on the issue of ends and means, and do you know what? They were wrong. A hundred percent wrong. If innocent people get hurt in accomplishing your goals, then you’ve lost sight of reality, whether you’re a terrorist, a government, or a hacking collective. You have to have values, and there is no sane value set where innocent people suffer. End of. Simple as.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Ani said, reaching out and touching his shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. “That’s horrible. I can’t even imagine how it affected your family.”

  Brian gave her a weak smile that was a combination of pain and gratitude. “When I hear people at victorious talking about ‘collateral damage’ and ‘acceptable losses,’ it makes me angry. And I know it’s probably all bluster. We’re hackers, not terrorists, and we hurt systems, not people. But I just don’t want to be part of a club where losses like that are ever acceptable.”

  “I can see that,” Ani said, realizing her hand was still on Brian’s shoulder and retracting it quickly before it got embarrassing. “But, as you say, it’s systems we’re attacking, not people.”

  Brian waved her closer, and she leaned in until her ear was next to his mouth.

  “I have doubts,” he whispered. “Suspicions. And I hope they’re wrong, I really do …”

  “Suspicions about what?”

  “victorious, I guess. Did you see the people who came in yesterday: the heavy rocker, the suit, and the caricature of an anime hacker?”

  “Yep.”

  “Never seen them before. Happens all the time, people turn up with tech or software that I’ve never seen before, and they’re like ‘this is for Phase 2’, but no one ever tells us what Phase 2 is. It’s like this important event we’re working toward, but we’re not even allowed a glimpse of the finish line: the thing we’re supposed to be fighting for.

  “And that 3-D printer, what the hell was that? There’s no company coming close to making something that prints that quickly and is that portable, so who’s behind this? And if you have the resources to manufacture something like that, how come you’re giving the tech to a bunch of hackers?”

  “The Palgrave masks were in pretty bad taste, too,” Ani added. “At best, that looks like poor judgment, at worst …”

  “… they’re glorifying a racist lunatic? Yeah, I thought that, too. It hasn’t made me feel any happier about the situation.”

  “So then, why stay?”

  Brian shook his head and fixed Ani with a solemn stare. His eyes were incredibly blue. “I don’t know. Maybe I just think that I’m better in than out. Does that make any sense to you? If victorious look like they need reining in, then maybe being on the inside is the best place to do that. Sometimes, you’ve got to stand up and be counted, even if it means you end up standing alone.”

  “Screw that,” Ani said. “You’re not alone. Looks like this is the first meeting of the Dead Cell inside the Dead Cell. We’ll keep our eyes and ears open, and the first sign of anything sinister, we take it to the authorities and let them sort it out.”

  Brian looked at her with something close to admiration. Those blue eyes offering up that kind of reaction made Ani feel a flash of guilt for all the things she wasn’t telling him. Only a flash though.

  “You going to eat that muffin?” Brian asked.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HAS SCIENCE GONE TOO FAR?

  The guard at the gate looked at Joe’s paperwork with impatient incomprehension. Goodness only knew what pressing tasks he was being kept from accomplishing, but it was pretty safe to say that they weren’t earth-shattering, because the guy had been reading a racy paperback when Joe arrived. The guard had stuffed the book under his desk, so Joe couldn’t say for certain, but he looked like the type who moved his lips when he read.

  “You’re from Dorian Interactive,” the guard said, repeating it in the hopes, it seemed, that it might make sense this time around. “But you don’t have an appointment?”

  Joe looked stern, oozing authority—literally, it was an absolute pheromone blast of it—and tried again. In his closest approximation of a California accent, because that was the accent that went with his cover story.

  “An appointment would hardly be useful for a security spot check, now would it?” he said.

  The guard looked him up and down. “You don’t look old enough to be in plant security.”

  “And that’s why I’m so successful.” Joe cranked up the authority another notch. It tended to blur into arrogance if he went any higher. He’d need to offset it with a little flattery to throw the guy off, then launch into a threat. “Look, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you look like you’re elite security material, so here’s the skinny: some top secret Dorian chips from this very establishment have turned up on the black market, and I’m here to find out how. Now, do you want me to inform Mr. Dorian that I was stopped from carrying out that duty by a—Sorry, what’s your name?” He reached into his pocket and showed the guard enough of his phone to make sure his message was heard loud and clear.

  The guard had a craggy face with a sloping brow, a hard kind of face that was probably the reason he got hired for security to begin with. But Joe saw it soften and become compliant with those last three magic words and that partial reveal of his phone.

  “So, who do I tell that you’re here?” the man asked.

  “No one,” Joe said. “Again, that’s the point. We have no idea who, or how many people, are involved in this breach of security, so from here on out, it’s a case of trust
no one.”

  “So I just let you in and …”

  “And I do my stuff,” Joe said. “I’ll call you when I need you. It’ll look good for you if you’re the one to take the thieves down, and it might save your job …”

  The guy flicked a switch, and the barrier that stood between Joe and the factory suddenly was no longer an issue.

  “You’ll do that?” the guard asked.

  “Of course. Now, if anyone asks …”

  The guy zipped his lips.

  And Joe walked into Dorian Europe while the man who was tasked with keeping him out had not only let him in and would keep quiet about it, but also felt grateful to Joe for the privilege.

  Of course, that was the easy bit.

  The bit that Joe had been able to plan in advance.

  Inside the fence, everything was about to get a little more … improvised. Or fluid.

  Or make it up as you go along.

  There was a big main door in front of him, but it was behind a high fence with turnstile gates and ID card readers, so that wasn’t going to work. Instead, he turned to the right and went up the side of the building, looking for a window, fire door, or loading bay. He found none of the above—just a long, blank, plastic-clad wall that was at least the length of a couple of soccer pitches.

  Joe followed the wall, aware that the forest on the other side of the fence was getting thicker and darker, and that something large was moving around in the undergrowth. He didn’t know enough about Romania to know whether the cab driver had been pulling his leg about the wolves and bears, but Joe didn’t feel like meeting up with it either.

  He was almost to the back of the building when a clearing appeared through the fence and Joe saw what had been moving parallel to him: a large, brown shape, like a hairy pig, with curved horns jutting up from its bottom jaw. A wild boar, foraging in the forest. Joe had never seen one before, and he took a moment to watch as it continued on through the trees, soon disappearing from view. Sometimes nature just snuck up and surprised you like that. Joe was still pretty glad about the fence, though. Despite being a big furry pig, the wild boar had looked pretty mean, and those tusks …