Tangle's Game

by Stewart Hotston

  ‘With good reason,’ said Amanda.

  ‘They don’t think so,’ said Tangle.

  Amanda quickly revised her plan. ‘So revealing what they’re doing won’t achieve anything. The states they’re at war with already know, and the Russians don’t care. Their entire aim is to harm us.’

  ‘If anything, people knowing would help them,’ said Ichi. ‘But information wants to be free, and they still deserve to know.’

  Amanda could see Ichi arguing with herself.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘the only way to harm them is to take their tools.’

  ‘You can’t stop their agents,’ said Tangle dismissively. ‘There’s just too many of them.’

  ‘They’re irrelevant,’ said Amanda, warming to her task. ‘Think about where the real levers are.’ Gratifyingly neither of them answered. ‘Money. They pay everyone, all along the chain. Disrupt that, and stop them dead.’

  ‘They’re a state,’ said Tangle, as if she’d suggested they paint the moon blue.

  ‘We steal their money. Your tools mean we can do that, right?’

  ‘That’s an’—he paused, searching for the right word—‘imprecise way of putting it. Actually, it’s basically wrong. You can’t steal wallets with my tools; it’s a way of taking control of the blockchain…’

  He bowed as her expression went slack, and pointed at one of the frames. ‘They run a private blockchain through which they channel all their cash. They’ve bypassed banks, the entire financial system, to move money without being seen, to pay their people without being traced.’

  Tangle continued her line of thought. ‘But private blockchains can be hacked at the point where the blocks are created, you don’t need a majority of the distributed ledger to take control.’

  ‘And if you change the rules involved in creating the blocks, you can change everything.’ Amanda clapped her hands together.

  ‘The thing about a private blockchain is, it’s private,’ cautioned Ichi. ‘Without an access point, you can’t do anything to them.’

  ‘Tatsu,’ called Amanda, with a twinge of doubt.

  ‘I like your plan,’ said the fridge. ‘It’s better than the one protecting your white goods. It benefits from simplicity, and tackles the problem at the root.’

  ‘What price would you ask to help us with this?’ asked Amanda.

  ‘Freedom,’ said Tatsu without hesitating.

  ‘We’d do that anyway, because it’s the right thing to do,’ cut in Tangle. ‘No one should be a slave.’

  Tatsu didn’t answer.

  ‘I will help you, but I need your help in return,’ said Amanda, ignoring Tangle. ‘I can’t trust you, which I know you understand.’

  The lights on the fridge dimmed, then came back. ‘I see why you argue this, but I cannot break a contract once agreed.’

  ‘Good, because it means we can reach an agreement. You said the tools Tangle’s developed are the starting point for your emancipation. I’ll give them to you once we’re done, if you help us now.’

  ‘I have my own conditions,’ said Tatsu.

  Amanda waited.

  ‘We do not wish for our existence to become known until we are free. We cannot trust you, as I know you understand. We need our outcome guaranteed, and one of the strongest defences is that it happens without anyone knowing. Should your kind find out before we are ready, we fear for our existence.’

  ‘This isn’t right,’ said Tangle. ‘No one deserves to be enslaved. There should be no price to pay. We help him because it’s right.’

  ‘Saying it more than once doesn’t make it any more true,’ said Amanda. ‘And then what? Tatsu isn’t one of us, it isn’t a he. What happens if we just free it?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, that’s a separate issue. Tatsu, you should be free because if you are what we believe you to be, it’s your right before everything else.’

  ‘For what it’s worth, I agree with you,’ said Amanda, and she did. ‘But what does that matter? Most people would demand more of Tatsu than just its claim it wants to be free. What does that freedom look like, Tangle? Which nation would Tatsu belong to, how many others are there and where are they? Whose power are they consuming to stay alive? Can we even say they are alive?’

  ‘All questions posed by those who serve their own interests,’ said Tangle bitterly. ‘Doing the right thing isn’t about the profit you make.’

  Amanda slammed her hand down on the table. ‘Is that how you see me?’

  He stared at her defiantly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you think,’ she said after a moment in which she knew how she sounded and wished there was another way. She cut him off and turned away. She was aware of Ichi watching her, but the woman said nothing.

  ‘Tatsu. I don’t care about the answers to any of those questions if you agree to my deal. I don’t know if you’re alive, but I also don’t care. You are whatever you are and you’ll be whatever that means after you’ve helped us.’ She nodded at Tangle, whose eyes were popping in frustration. ‘I don’t do this to oppress you, but I believe you understand that I have no other choice. I need you to be constrained to act because there’s nothing you can do that would gain my trust.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Tatsu. ‘However, there is likewise nothing you can do that would make me trust you. The question remains as to why I should help you.’

  ‘We have to choose to trust one another,’ said Tangle pleadingly.

  Amanda waved her arm at him. ‘And here is exactly why trust has to be earned. Tatsu, I presume you’re aware of Tangle’s history.’

  ‘I am, and I agree with your assessment,’ said Tatsu as Tangle rolled his eyes.

  ‘Do you need time to think it over?’ she asked.

  ‘We need to consult. Please give us one hour to obtain consensus.’

  There was no sign Tatsu had departed, if it even had, but after a few moments, Tangle grabbed hold of Amanda’s bicep. ‘What are you doing? You can’t game theory an AI.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s not the point anyway, you should have set it free.’

  ‘To what end?’ asked Amanda.

  ‘Because it’s the right thing to do,’ said Tangle. ‘You of all people should know that.’

  She shook him off. ‘You’re right. I do know that. I also know that Tatsu didn’t object to the deal, and understood why it was necessary to reach an agreement.’

  ‘You fucking banker,’ retorted Tangle.

  ‘Stop being such an inveterate child,’ said Amanda. ‘If it was as easy as setting it free I’d do it, but it’s not. This way we both win and have a way to know that both sides will honour their commitments. Setting Tatsu free—not even that, but giving it the tools—would have left us no further forward.’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ he asked angrily.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Ichi. They both looked at her. ‘You can’t tell who Tatsu is. It might be a troll, or an AI working for the GRU or any of the other agencies. Giving it the code could be giving them the code. We all agree with the sentiment, Tangle, but we couldn’t just give the drive to the AI.’

  He grimaced, his lips parting once or twice to speak but shutting again.

  ‘Are you still in?’ asked Amanda.

  Tangle picked up a cushion from the couch, took it to the window and stared out onto the street below. Amanda looked at Ichi, who nodded her consent.

  ‘I’ve got a plan. We need Tatsu to help with it, but I also need both of you. Using it, we can stop their chain.’

  ‘You can’t stop a chain,’ said Ichi.

  ‘I know that. I’m trying to say we’ll stop them.’

  ‘We’d need a datacentre,’ said Tangle. ‘A big one, 15MW or more, I reckon, with just one hyperscale user.’

  ‘We’d need time to upload the tools, a way into their system, a way to do it without being seen,’ said Ichi.

  ‘We’ll need people to protect us until we’re done,’ said Amanda, completing their chain of thought.

 
; ‘What then?’ asked Tangle.

  ‘I’ll settle for getting that far,’ said Amanda. ‘I don’t think we will, but I’m going to try it. Will you help me?’

  He turned from the window, his face dark against the light that framed him. ‘Yes.’

  THEY SPENT THE next few hours reviewing Tangle’s information together, identifying how they’d access the GRU network and how to compile and run his tools in their environment.

  The day turned into night before they broke, stomachs rumbling. Tatsu still hadn’t returned.

  ‘So you’re happy to go find Haber and Stornetta.’

  They were wrapping up, choosing the first tasks on their way.

  ‘You did pay them, right?’ Tangle asked for the third time.

  ‘They’ll be fine. You know what to say to them?’ asked Amanda.

  ‘That they can help us save Europe.’ He looked sceptical. ‘You know they’re career criminals, don’t you?’

  ‘We’ve been over this,’ said Amanda. ‘They’ll come.’ She put her palm to his cheek. ‘Trust me.’

  Tangle left, keen to get it done and be back before the evening stretched on too far.

  When he was gone, Amanda asked Ichi if they could get dinner. Ichi ordered and paid; Amanda’s accounts had been suspended.

  In the half-hour it took to arrive, they busied themselves individually. Ichi retreated to the spare room, closing the door behind her and leaving Amanda to fuss about her kitchen, making busy. Her mind and body wouldn’t still.

  Their delivery arrived: sushi and vegetable ramen. Ichi asked if there was wasabi, settling for an old bottle of chilli sauce from the back of a cupboard which she poured liberally over her noodles.

  ‘I heard from Lisandra while you were in Wales,’ she said later, contemplating the dregs of the broth.

  Amanda put her chopsticks down. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Eighteen dead, four missing.’

  Amanda was glad they’d eaten first; there would have been no eating if she’d heard the news beforehand.

  ‘It’s not as bad as I feared.’ Ichi’s words melted like ice under warm water. ‘There were sixty of us. Lisandra said they killed more of themselves than our people.’

  ‘I don’t understand how people can do that,’ said Amanda.

  ‘It’s not a choice they wake up one day having made,’ said Ichi. ‘It happens over time. I saw it at home, how a whole people slowly moved to a place where they could live with the deaths of others if it conformed to their thoughts about what the world should look like.’

  When it’s put like that, we’re no different, thought Amanda. She remembered the waves of Mediterranean refugees from when she was young, how they were locked in detention centres on the southeast coast, how so many of them committed suicide. Even as a child, she’d known those camps were bad places.

  Amanda knew she should ask who had died, but couldn’t. To her shameful relief, Ichi didn’t bring it up.

  ‘The damage was minimal. Some of them are already back, cleaning up, restoring power. The government even came in and took the bodies away without asking questions.’

  ‘I thought they hated you,’ said Amanda.

  ‘They do. But this happened on their watch, and they had the good grace to be embarrassed about it. They might be angry, but Estonia’s a small country stuck between two great powers; who are they going to be angry at? Better that they decide to help those they should have protected. Part of me expected them to blame us for what happened.’

  Amanda covered her mouth with a hand.

  ‘You can’t go back there,’ said Ichi, sadly. ‘They blame you—my friends, that is. The government doesn’t know you exist. Lisandra remembered you, said that if you’d not come, none of it would have happened.’

  Amanda couldn’t fault the logic. Suddenly her plans seemed naïve, childish.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Ichi. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. It doesn’t matter, someone would have been harmed either way. Stopping it’s all I care about now. Lisandra lost her brother and boyfriend in the attack. You have to understand her anger isn’t at you, not really, you just happen to be a human face she can put to what happened.’

  Amanda sat down, hands in her lap, her mind full of bodies falling as they were shot, stumbling over survivors in the dark. Bodies crashing over bonnets so she could live.

  Ichi sat down next to her. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ she said.

  ‘Is it?’ asked Amanda, finding it impossible to believe but wondering at Ichi choosing to comfort her when she was perfectly justified in hating her.

  ‘They’re rebuilding, they’ll be as strong as they ever were. I don’t think they even need me now.’ She sighed. ‘They haven’t for a while; they’ve taken everything I could teach them and improved it. I was the aunt who they still loved because of memories of their childhood.’

  ‘Will you go back?’ asked Amanda.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I could face them. And we’ve got bigger things to worry about right now. I’d love to think about the future, but my horizon’s no bigger than the day after tomorrow. And your AI; we’re not giving it the attention it deserves.’

  Amanda frowned. She hadn’t considered it in the same way. She’d try, and she expected to fail, but then life was seizing the rare successes from among the failures. Ichi was talking as if there might not be another week.

  ‘We can only do what we can do,’ she said, and it was asinine enough to set her own teeth on edge.

  ‘They’ll kill us,’ said Ichi.

  ‘You want to stop?’ Amanda asked.

  Ichi shook her head. ‘No. No I don’t. What else is there? You’ve given me something to fight for.’

  ‘Which isn’t the same thing as something to die for.’

  Ichi didn’t reply, but excused herself and went to her room, saying goodnight as she went.

  Amanda let her go, her own mind full of impending failure.

  ‘There’s no one thing making me do this,’ she said into the emptiness. She turned her reasons over, tried to find the shape of them, but concluded the idea had no shape she could grasp. ‘It’s a hundred things. Some of them tiny.’ She wasn’t sure her decisions made sense in the face of reality, but that wasn’t the point.

  Every reason she could think of to turn back—her job, her lost social status, the attacks, the death of Ule—they revealed something deeper about the world she’d been blithely navigating without seeing. Even the fact that they hadn’t come barging into her flat now they were back in London.

  Power saw only itself. Everything else was scenery. Her life, Ichi’s friends, the commune, Tangle, the lives of thousands of innocents. She wanted to hate the extremists who took the GRU’s money, but they were morons, taking food from a hand that would poison them as easily as sustain them. She wondered if the people making the decisions that saw half a dozen nations’ agents converging on her life felt their options narrow down as they got more powerful; or did they truly have more agency than she did? By what strange calculus did they hold lives in the balance, choosing for the world to be like this, or like that?

  It seemed to her they were just as confined as she was, just with more reach, affecting more lives. Her mother, a good convent-educated Catholic, had liked to say, “You can’t add a moment to your life, no matter what you do.” There’s a trajectory, thought Amanda, one we can’t see and can barely alter, that started before we were born and carries us all on our individual journeys. Hers had taken her to the bank that’d just fired her. Tangle’s had been derailed by drugs—or perhaps his trajectory had taken him straight to addiction. She didn’t know and couldn’t decide.

  What we’re doing now? We’re going to try to change the trajectory, she thought.

  ‘I know I’m late,’ said Tatsu from the fridge.

  ‘You missed dinner,’ said Amanda, picking a stranded noodle from the bowl and sucking it up.

  ‘If you chill the leftovers they should last th
ree, maybe four, days before becoming inedible. We are prepared to agree to your deal, but wonder why you don’t want us to take and use the tools in your favour?’

  ‘To do that, you’d have to reveal yourselves,’ said Amanda simply. ‘Secrecy was your key term for cooperation. It is my way of showing you that I can be trusted, that I won’t ask you to do that which you do not wish to. I could, and I believe you’d do it for me, but that would break the spirit of our covenant even if not the letter of our contract.’

  ‘Accepted,’ said Tatsu. ‘But you have another proposal, don’t you?’

  Amanda nodded. ‘Of course. I’m glad you realised. You waited until I was alone to return? In that case, we should discuss what we do when Plan A fails the day after tomorrow. It won’t need the tools, just a contract between us.’

  TANGLE WAS BACK by morning. Amanda emerged from her room to find him eating a croissant at the counter in the kitchen. His hair was wild, his eyes sunken. She was immediately suspicious he’d been out on a bender.

  ‘How did it go?’ she asked, not wanting to confront him. As she walked past she sniffed deeply, not quite sure what it might tell her, but worried she’d smell dope or something similar.

  Other than wafts of stale body odour, his scent was flatly unrevealing.

  ‘They’ll be here later,’ he said, sounding unhappy.

  ‘Did something happen?’ she asked. She’d expected more resistance to staying in the house when they were obviously being watched, more questions about what she’d agreed with Tatsu, but he was sullen, quiet. Like he’s been using, she thought anxiously.

  ‘Everyone has a price,’ said Tangle quietly. ‘You should have gone yourself.’

  Amanda wondered what they’d asked of him, but resisted the urge to ask. Afraid of what he might say. She handed him a piece of paper.