Matthew’s first career was as a professional child actor. From the age of ten, he had roles in TV dramas on the BBC and ITV, in films and at theatres including the Royal Court. After graduating from Oxford with a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy, he began a career in online communications, consulting for a range of clients from the BBC to major banks. Since 2008, he has been in public service, using his communication skills to help people understand and manage their money.
Matthew is a graduate of the Faber Academy’s Writing a Novel course. Sockpuppet is his first novel.
Sockpuppet
Matthew Blakstad
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by
Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Matthew Blakstad
The right of Matthew Blakstad to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 473 62473 3
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.hodder.co.uk
For Alice
Contents
Welcome
Tuesday: Spinning
Zero
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Wednesday: Trusted Third Party
Zero
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Thursday: Creepshots
Zero
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Friday: The Happy Path
Zero
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Saturday: Demos
Zero
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Acknowledgments
Welcome.
You are now a Digital Citizen.
As a Digital Citizen you have your own unique identity. Everything about you, from your medical history to the tax you’ve paid, is stored in one secure location in the cloud.
Do I need any special software?
You don’t need to be a software wizard to access the wide range of Citizen Services! We have already installed the Digital Citizen software on your device – automatically.
How secure is my information?
Nothing matters more than the security of your information. Our industry partner Mondan plc works hard to protect your privacy. You can rest assured they are guarding your valuable information very closely indeed.
THIS PAGE HAS BEEN REVIEWED
BY
WE DECLARE IT A LIE AND A FRAUD
NOTHING IS PRIVATE
NO ONE IS SAFE
IT IS IN THE NATURE OF INFORMATION
TO MAKE ITSELF FREE
Comments? Questions? Find us at ¶ MinistryOfTechnology
Tuesday:
Spinning
‘The trouble with words is, you don’t know whose mouths they’ve been in.’
—Dennis Potter
Zero
Who are you?
All I see of you is the shape you leave behind. The world is an engine for logging your desires. In these late days you don’t have identity; you have a browser history.
People who liked cheap illusion also liked advanced consumer capitalism.
Recommended for you: willing subjugation.
All I know is what I see; and I see new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of botwars, celebrity break-ups, stock quotes, mailbombs, cock extensions; of start-ups in Guangzhou, Tallinn, Bangalore; I see podcasts, flame wars, mp3s; I read blogs, memes, proffers, webcasts, phishing scams, RSS feeds and other fresh alarms. Nothing starts anywhere. The story I’m writing isn’t new.
I save and upload: one click, no undo. I shut my laptop and sleep the world. No point thinking consequences. Now it’s out there, nothing’s going to bring it back.
One
‘Bethany? Christ, are you planning to answer your phone?’
Bethany was in the kitchen when it struck, ministry business strewn across the dining table, two red dispatch boxes standing to attention by her chair. She’d been inching her way through the document that, when she signed it, would consign fakery and fraud to the dustbin of history – that at least was how she would describe it when she spoke at the Digital Citizen launch event this Friday. But the tight numbered paragraphs of legalese kept congealing before her tired eyes. The law was so hard to digest in raw form. She’d reread one especially chewy clause for the seventh time when Peter, her husband, stormed in.
She pulled off her reading glasses. He was standing naked in the doorway.
‘Phone?’ she said. ‘Which one?’
‘Which the hell phone do you think?’ he said, nodding behind him into the hall.
But by then she’d heard the jaunty doo-wop of her official BlackBerry.
‘I like the look, babes,’ she said, hopping up and shimmying around him to the coat hooks, patting his bum en route.
‘Godsake, it’s nearly two a.m.’
Bethany fumbled through the pockets of her mac. The BlackBerry was in the last one she tried. As she pulled it out the ringing stopped.
‘Damn.’
She checked the screen. God, yes: it was 01:54 already; and she had seven missed calls. Her stomach knotted.
‘I wouldn’t worry, Minister,�
�� said Peter, ‘it’ll start up again in another twenty seconds.’ He was making his way back up the stairs. ‘Maybe you’d like to fly off to another international symposium so I can get a bit of peace? I slept like a log that week.’
He was looser these days around the rear. Not that she wanted to make comparisons, but.
‘Do you not want to put some ’jamas on?’ she whispered. ‘The boys?’
He didn’t turn back.
‘What I want is sleep,’ he said. ‘I have an eight-thirty conference call.’
‘Well, I have a seven-thirty meeting. And unlike you I can’t do it in my pyjamas. Or in your case butt naked probably.’
But he’d already turned the bend in the stairs. He creaked above her head to the master bedroom and the door clicked shut. She put a hand on the banister to follow; but true to his prediction the BlackBerry kicked off again in her hand. Caller withheld. She answered it quickly to stem the ringtone – stable door, horse.
‘Yes, hello?’ she said.
‘Thank God, Beth. I thought you must have turned in already.’
And who would it be at two in the morning, but Big Krishan Kohli, her sleepless chief of staff?
‘No, Krish. I’m here. What is it?’
She sat on the stairs, the catastrophe-seeking part of her brain already kicking in. Had the PM withdrawn his backing? Had child pornography been found on their servers? Had one of their Digital Champions been electrocuted by his own PC? Krish cut short her list of worst-case scenarios, with the only one she hadn’t considered.
‘They’re saying we’ve been hacked.’
Bethany swallowed, once.
‘Hacked.’ Her voice was stuck in neutral. ‘What, our voicemails?’
‘Not us – real people. The Digital Citizen pilot group. Someone’s hacked their data – addresses, ages, income, medical . . .’
‘No, Krish. No no no.’
Sean had promised her nothing had got out. He’d promised.
‘That data cannot be hacked,’ she said.
‘I’ve already had to hit Cancel on a dozen calls from journos,’ said Krish. ‘It’ll be code red by morning.’
‘Hold on, stop – what do you mean, they’re saying we’ve been hacked? Who’s saying?’
‘Some wee girl posting online. You realise how shite the timing is? After what you said in the House last week, in Oral Questions. You specifically used the word—’
‘Yes, all right. Don’t remind me.’
‘—unhackable.’
‘But if this is some lone stirrer?’ she said. ‘We’re rebutting her?’
‘Beth. It’s real. It’s not just this girl. Someone’s defacing our homepage. Every time we take it down, fix it and put it back up, they graffiti it all over again.’
‘Graffiti? On a website?’
‘Or the equivalent. They keep adding this same screwy message in typewriter font. The nature of information will be free, some bollocks like that.’
Bethany sat forward.
‘The nature of information,’ she said. ‘Those exact words?’
Krish left one of his significant pauses before asking, ‘Any reason the words should matter?’
‘No, none. I thought it sounded familiar.’
‘Point I’m making, this is concerted and it’s credible. This blogger lassie seems to know a hell of a lot more than we do. She says our data’s being used to target Digital Citizen users. Taxpayers, Beth. Voters. We can’t rebut a thing like that until we know what’s true.’
‘We sure as hell can’t stay silent and let someone trash us.’
‘Press pause a second and listen. This girlie’s posted what she claims are departmental documents, saying we knew the data was hacked, as much as two weeks ago. Saying you knew.’
Bethany wanted to sit down all over again. This could not be. This Friday she’d be announcing the nationwide roll-out of Digital Citizen. Four days. Could she not get through four slender days without some further blow-up?
Krish was letting the point hang.
‘Which is clearly nonsense,’ she said.
‘If you say so.’
‘Come on, Krish. Do you not know a stunt when you see one?’
She pushed back her unruly hair, fast-forwarded through the consequences.
‘This is so – gah!’ she said. ‘People like this: all they ever do is undermine. We’re asking the public to surrender this personal, private thing – their identity. They need to believe we have a safe place for them online. This woman – this – blogger? She’s out to kill trust. We need to cut off her oxygen – right now, before the breakfast news cycle. I don’t care how credible she sounds.’
‘No chance. None. This thing’s out there already.’
‘When did everyone start assuming government’s out to get them? She probably thinks she’s ‘‘protecting’’ people from us. That’s such crap. We’re the ones protecting them. I’ve worked so hard to get our message across. You know I have.’
‘I know if this thing goes tits up, it comes back to you. I know this was your programme from the off. You fronted up the Personal as your fingerprint campaign, you crowbarred the money out of Treasury, you led the procurement—’
‘Yes, thanks for the fact check. I’m waiting for the good news.’
‘Just saying, like. And you had to pick Mondan to hold the data. Who the hell is Mondan, anyway? You couldn’t go with Terasoft, like we’ve done for every bit of government tech since Harold Wilson bought his first pocket calculator. You had to pick good old unhackable Mondan.’
‘Yes, can we please try to start from a place we haven’t been hacked? At least until someone proves to the contrary?’
She pushed back her hair again and took three pranayama breaths. Come on, Beth. You’re Minister of State for a Digital Society, dammit, not some jobbing newbie. Engage your tummy muscles and get to work. Move the conversation on. There was something Krish had said before, that she’d let pass. Oh, yes.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Wait. You said somebody is targeting our pilot group? Targeting how? Have members of the public been harmed?’
‘Well, now—’
Krish let out a breath. The pause that followed was way too long for her liking.
‘You’ve heard of the Giggly Pigglies?’ he said.
She pulled the phone from her ear and stared at it.
¶NewsHound:
BREAKING: Unidentified hackers access private data of members of the public who signed up to the government’s Digital Citizen online ID programme. More follows.
¶9th&sunset:
Noisy night. The whores and the pundits are all breathing fire.
Take my advice: keep your head low and your hands clean. No telling who they’ll turn on next. They sicken me, with their phoney indignation and their ready blame.
We’re all human. We’re all dirt.
¶maglad:
Oy oy lads! Who is this Betty Learner? Should I care?
¶pieandmash:
I think she’s like Minister for the Internet? Brunette. OK on the eye. Kind of milfy. High heels.
¶maglad:
We have a minister for the internet? Who knew? Do I need a minister? I need a haircut. And a shag. But a minister?
Two
That unwelcome stranger, the sun, creeps in through the skylights. From outside the first hints of day break through: the hiss of the artics’ brakes as they pull up at the sheds below; the Bengali shouts of the packers; the crump of Beemer doors slamming in the yard as six armed men approach the building. Dani Farr is unaware. Alone in a halogen pool, all she hears is the white noise of her computer’s fan, all she sees are the slashes and curly braces shimmering over her twin displays like insects dancing on the surface of a pool. The only parts of her that move are the fingers flicking across the keys.
She’s in the state that Gray calls the code-freeze. You could set off a bomb outside the window, she wouldn’t flinch. One time, a month back, the building was cleared for a
fire alarm, when a Pop-Tart went molten in the sales team’s toaster. It was soon put out with a blast of phosphate from the extinguisher but not before the whole place was evacuated. After an hour stamping in the yard with stone-cold lattes, the staffers were cleared to file back inside: to find Dani immobile in her chair, still coding, eyes locked on her screens. They moved around her silently, replacing their headphones and logging back in as though trying not to wake a sleepwalker.
Daylight spreads across the wooden floor. This is the Skunkworks: the high-ceilinged warehouse space where Dani and her team of software engineers turn out their elegant, efficient packages of code. Any night of the week you’ll find one or two of them up here, burning the small hours at a battered workstation, wrestling with some herculean deadline. Usually, Dani loves working through the night: the way the Skunkworks morphs into a new and private space; the midnight pizza sessions; the long trudge home at dawn, climbing four flights to her flat with a carton of milk; passing tomorrow morning on its way downstairs. But tonight she’s stuck with a brain-dead hunk of uncommented code she said she’d fix by morning. It’s nearly morning and there’s no way she’ll fix it in time; but her fingers don’t know how to stop working the keys. The sound of their typing fills the room like water coursing through underground caves.
The buzzer sounds. Dani’s mouse-hand jerks, sending her mug skidding over the desktop. She grabs at it, knocks it further, catches it with both hands – it’s empty. She resets it, making the handle perpendicular, and gives a bleary look around. The buzzer sounds again, for longer. She pushes aside a purple lick of hair and thinks: first, is there anyone else in the building to get that? – answer clearly no; second, what cunt is ringing the doorbell at argh o’clock in the morning?
When the buzzer sounds again and doesn’t stop, she lets out a swear and stamps the length of the room to the videophone.
Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle Page 1