‘Got it. I’m there.’
‘And you’ll report back the second you have a thing.’
‘Yes, yes. And Krish –’
‘Aye?’
‘What’s all this about pigs?’
Snootlet! Porquette! Dip-Dap!
And Trottie, too!
If you’re wiggly
And not very biggly
Then you’re giggly
You’re giggly
A giggly giggly piggly!
‘Ay, ha ha, yes, that’s the song. Giggly, giggly, giggly. Oh, God, right? Ha ha! Proper off it!’
‘And your spam misery began as soon as you registered online for the government’s pilot Digital Citizen programme.’
‘Well, that was a while back, but now it does keep coming on. I can’t use a website except those wee pigs keep popping up. On my PC, on my phone, even here in the office. I log on. I think I’m OK for a while. Then I click on my Internet and it says Piggle instead of Google and there they are – those wee pigs dancing like a bunch of divvies. And I hear that di-di-di-didididi-di. Everything I click on after that, it’s pigs.’
‘And this constant invasion is making your life hell?’
‘I wouldn’t know about that but now I don’t know how to stop it on the computer. I’m not so technical, me like. The bairns are going mental.’
‘Your children are being driven to desperation?’
‘No, they love it. They do the dance. Those canny wee piggies.’
‘So there you have it, Susan. Just one unsuspecting member of the public who thought they were signing up for a secure service from the government –’
‘They said I could get the bins done weekly, as –’
‘– and who has found himself pursued by the most unlikely of tormenters: TV’s popular foursome of miniature laughing pigs.
‘Susan.’
¶LabelMabel:
Why are these people complaining? I would LOVE my Internet to be only pigs. Hack my data! I want a virus too!
¶lolcatz:
Ermangerd I can haz piggliez?
¶LabelMabel:
¶TurdoftheDay:
A whopper. One single slug 13cm in length. Fat and gristly. It glares up at me and cries: ‘Come on you mother! Flush me! I wanna see you even TRY! Boo-ya!’
Three flushes later. Still it will not leave.
Even I am slightly terrified of it.
Four
‘You’re not making sense, Miss Farr. Either you’re writing Sick Girl’s posts or you aren’t. Either way you need to make them stop.’
Hugging herself against the relentless harassment, Dani stops outside meeting pod 1.02 and turns to glare at Racist.
‘I need my swipe card,’ she says, pointing at the door. ‘There’s a machine in here. I can show you.’
Racist clocks the meeting-pod door, which is easy to miss, it’s so seamlessly cut into the floor-to-ceiling photo mural that coats the wall. The photo, which is labelled Creativity, driving our people’s excellence, is the fourth in a series of images lining the ground-floor hallway like stations of the cross, expressing Our Eight Shared Values. It shows a gorgeous young giantess, fizzy-haired and neutrally black, laughing and hurling into flight an astonished-looking dove. The background scene – lush fields under desert sky – glows with Tomy blues and greens. Only the model’s eyes betray her fright as talons scrabble at her face.
Acne approaches.
‘One of the lads is on his way down with her card,’ he says, waving his shortwave radio, which gives out a reassuring kkht.
‘They find anyone upstairs?’ says Racist.
Acne gives a brief shake of his head. The two of them round on Dani.
‘Looks like you’re the only person here,’ says Racist. ‘Our information says the person going by Sick Girl is posting from this building. And here we find you. All alone.’
Dani opens her mouth and shuts it. She nudges her phone into life but Jonq hasn’t responded to any of the whispers she’s sent over Parley. The network is silent.
)) stone face ((
says her phone.
‘Look,’ she says, holding up the phone, ‘I’ve contacted Jonquil. Ms Carter. My boss. Can we not wait for her? She’s better at explaining things to – normal people.’
Acne seems to find this hilarious. Racist keeps with the blank look.
‘There’s only two scenarios here,’ he says. ‘Either you’re Sick Girl, in which case you’re in serious trouble. Or she’s someone else, and you know where we can find her. Every second of our time you waste, your friend leaks more damaging material. Which makes this obstruction. So what’s it to be?’
Dani swallows. Parley grants her official maverick status, in her role as Chief Social Architect (or as Gray says, Chief Antisocial Architect). She gets away with all kinds of crazy because she’s unconventional and uncompromising in the exact way Parley values. The rules don’t apply to her. Take the time last summer when she punched the Head of Channel Marketing, Billy Dukakis. He’d yanked her chain one time too many about the need to add bullshit ‘brand tags’ (i.e. ads) to every inch of her perfect, clean screen layouts. He called her control freak little bitch in front of the entire dev team, which wasn’t even English; and she basically punched him in the face. To be fair it was more of a butt-of-the-hand-against-the-nose kind of move but unfortunately it kind of broke the nose in question.
Anyone but Dani would have been out of the door in twenty seconds; but in this case it was Billy who was frogmarched out, a meaty pay-off in his pocket and his signature at the bottom of a thirty-two-page legal document whose contents roughly translated as I will not sue Dani.
That was far from the stupidest thing she’s ever done. Sometimes it seems she’s never shouldered a burden for any of her actions. And it’s damn sure nobody ever asks her to speak on behalf of the organisation.
She glances down at her phone.
‘If you can send a message to Mrs Carter,’ says Racist, nodding at the phone, ‘you can send one to Sick Girl. Unless of course she’s you.’
‘No, no. Sorry. Jesus, why do you people not listen? I’m not sic_girl. I wrote her.’
Another of the Abercrombies jogs down the hall towards them, waving Dani’s swipe card.
‘All floors clear,’ he says, handing it to Acne.
He jogs off again. Dani reaches for the card but Acne jerks it away and uses it to swipe the door before passing it to her. The door clunks and he pushes it open, cutting a rectangular absence into the lower half of the photo model’s body. As Dani enters the demo pod, the lights flick on automatically. The cops follow and shut the door behind them. A hard drive chatters on the demo table. The machine is an all-in-one Mac – i.e. a toy, but fit for hailing a continuity. Dani sits and wakes the screen. A measure of control returns as her fingers touch the keyboard.
‘Sic_girl isn’t a person,’ she says, logging in as root. ‘She isn’t anything, she’s nowhere.’
She calls up the Parley Admin app and navigates to the dashboard screen they use to monitor the sic_girl engine.
‘Look,’ she says, swivelling the screen towards the cops and pointing at the data chugging through the logs. ‘There. This is sic_girl, OK. You want to know where she lives? She lives in here. I made her, on an Apache server in our data centre. She’s not a person, she’s a ware.’
Mystification.
‘Aware of . . .?’ says Racist.
Dani sighs. This is going to have to be the full one-oh-one.
‘A piece of software?’ she translates.
She turns back to the screen and clicks up sic_girl’s status screen.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘I’ll show you how she’s made. This –’ clicking on the first tab ‘– is her source data bucket. See all the chatter in here? We have this crawly bot that trawls the net every ten minutes, scooping up stuff that people say online. It knows how to filter things that already sound a bit like sic_girl, that relate to her i
nterests. It scrapes them off the net and dumps them in the bucket here. Right now we’ve got –’ she clicks a status button ‘– just under ten thousand phrases sloshing around in there.’ She nods to herself. ‘That’s a solid number. Then over here –’ she clicks the second tab ‘– is the status of sic’s text-parsing algorithm. It searches the top of the bucket for things that sic can say. Stuff that’s relevant to what’s going on right now, and what people are saying to her. And here –’ another click, another tab ‘– are her finished proffers. This is what she’s “saying” right now. All her sentences are stitched together from whatever bubbles out of the bucket – and tweaked into her style of speech.’
Satisfied with a job well done, Dani folds her arms and turns to look from cop to cop, seeking out some flicker of understanding. All she finds are the same null-set faces.
‘She’s a software,’ Dani says again. ‘As in – not real? As in every single Parley user knows that sic and the other Personas are built from text and glue. That’s why they love them.’
Still nothing.
‘OK, God,’ she says. ‘Look, you can see right here. Sic proffered – what? – forty seconds ago. She said Whoosh, thxx lovelies. Much praise – so wow. So I guess that means she isn’t me? Because I have a, what do you call it – an alibi – for forty seconds ago? As in I was sitting right here? Talking to you?’
Still not a flicker. After a pause Racist restarts the conversation where he left off – as if the past three minutes never happened.
‘The person you’re defending here,’ he says, ‘is a malicious hacker. Someone who’s wilfully sharing confidential government documents. If you’ve got her timeline on there I suggest you read it. Start at twelve midnight.’
Yet again Dani struggles not to correct the man. Yet again she fails.
‘Continuity,’ she says.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Not timeline,’ she says. ‘Jesus. Parley has continuities. That’s trademark and copyright, by the way. Messages on Parley are proffers, not posts, and they go together to form continuities.’
Racist perseveres.
‘The continuity for Sick Girl, just after midnight. Her posts—’
‘Proffers.’
‘All right, dammit, proffers!’
Dani blinks. Racist collects himself and tries again.
‘Her proffers begin at oh, oh, sixteen hours.’
‘OK,’ she says. ‘Jesus, OK. But I’m telling you it’s pointless. Whatever she said, her algorithm pulled it out of the air.’
Wearily, Dani closes the admin screen and pulls up the standard consumer-grade Parley app. She clicks on the clock and starts to dial it back.
Parley is not just the place where the Personas live; it’s also a time machine. When you turn on a Parley viewer, by default you see a slice of the living present; but the true power comes when you shift it to some other now, zoom back in your software Delorean to see what the Personas – and their legion of human fans – were saying and doing at a single moment, follow the threads of time and meaning back and forth; then widen and narrow your focus to find a different path back to the place where you began. It’s a giddy sensation that can leave you reeling when you land back in the now. Parley’s users spend almost as much time in the past as they do in the present. Nostalgia’s popular: even for a week ago.
Dani spins the clock to sixteen minutes past midnight.
‘OK,’ she says, slipping into demo mode for the benefit of the neanderthals. ‘I’ve landed at that time. Now I’m tightening the aperture – see this slider? It’s like focusing my view on sic_girl alone. Shutting out other voices.’
The drag of her mouse erases Personas and people alike, until only sic_girl remains in view – plus the handful of human users she was taking to at midnight. Dani reads and scrolls.
¶sic_girl:
Meds time, hooray. Needed. Argh day today, insomnia fans. Pain, rain and a double shot of lows. Poor me, yes?
So. Let’s talk. I’m gonna start with Bethany Lehrer. The minister-lady? With the hair? Yoosh.
>>cite ¶mardyboy: She’s ok i think shes kinda hot tho’
Really, mardy? REALLY? Ek. She creepy.
>>cite ¶womble-gone-bad: Hi sic. She’s sort of cool. She didn’t fiddle her expenses.
Hi woms. You look cute. May I girl-crush? But listen. Bethany L? Fergeddaboudit. She’s the cover-up queen.
You know the Giggly Pigglies?
>>cite ¶worldofmeow: I the Giggly Pigglies!
WHO DOES NOT? But newsflash, my lovelies. Those ickle pickle pigs are made of spam not ham. Didja see this story on HUMBOX?
The day every website turned into pigs hum.bx/f80du7
Can ya IMAGINE? Ev’ry website you ever visit automagically turned into a Giggly Piggly home screen!?
>>cite ¶worldofmeow: THAT SOUND AMAZE!
There’s a silence. Dani turns to Racist.
‘So?’ she says. ‘Pigs and cartoons and whatever. This is normal for sic_girl. Or what passes for it.’
Dani has a special love for her first-made artificial girl. But she’s the first to admit that sic talks a load of mimsy crap.
‘Fans proffer this stuff at sic,’ she says, ‘and it’s like I showed you: the algorithm stitches relevant-seeming sentences out of the word-soup in the bucket. That’s all this is.’
‘Really?’ says Racist.
‘Yes, fucking really.’
‘Watch your mouth,’ says Acne.
Racist quiets him with a hand.
‘In that case,’ he says to Dani. ‘I suggest you read forward.’
She sighs and scrolls.
‘There,’ says Racist, pointing.
Dani stops the clock.
¶sic_girl:
Ask yerselves, sweeties. Howcum ten thousand peoples who all HAPPEN to live in Teesside, get their PCs taken over by cartoon pigs ON THE SELFSAME DAY? I’ll tell ya. That piggy spam only hit the muggles who signed up for DigiCitz. Count ’em, biatches.
Here’s the news: two weeks ago someone walked onto the Digital Shitizen servers and swiped their oh-so-private data. Unhackable? HAH! And you know the worst of it? Bethany L knew all about it. Yuppety. She knew she knew she knew.
Don’t believe me? Ask her about this internal memo from MinTech last Tuesday. Seems somebody there knew all about this thing she sa she kno nuffink about.
There. Sigh. So the sainted Bethany’s a lying lying liar. Pigglies ain’t so frolicsome when they workin’ for the big bad data wolf AM I RIGHT???
Also. Sorry. Still on about it.
But.
Dani bunches her forehead at the screen. There’s something off about this. It’s normal for sic to proffer about Hello Kitty or Spongebob or whatever, but apparently the Giggly Pigglies are suddenly meat for some political story.
Digital Citizen is the new so-called ‘online ID card’ – which is actually not a ‘card’ but a public-key token so it’s dumb that people refer to it that way. Security is supposedly tighter than Jonquil’s butt. If it’s been hacked, that’s proper news. Which puts it totally out of whack with sic_girl’s usual burbles on antidepressants and puppy videos – the stuff that’s programmed into her.
And this, right now, is what plants the clue in Dani’s head: something major is going down this morning, and these men are trying to pin it on her. She needs to tread careful.
‘OK,’ she says. ‘And?’
‘And,’ says Racist, ‘you need to stop this.’
He speaks like a dad addressing his six-year-old.
‘Well but why? Is it untrue, what sic’s saying?’
‘That is not your business. I don’t care if she’s a human or a robot, she’s posting confidential government information and you are going to contain this situation right now.’
Contain the situation? How do you contain a software construct? This is impossible. A combined wave of fury and exhaustion comes over Dani. She can’t believe they won’t understand when she just showed them. They
must breed these giant morons in a tank, like seamonkeys. She crushes fists into either side of her head. The two men stand in silence, flanking her chair. She drops her hands and looks from one police-y face to the other.
‘But look,’ she says, ‘even if sic is doing what you’re saying it’s not like I can just turn her off. She’s part of the wiring. You’re asking me to turn off the whole of Parley.’
‘All right,’ says Racist, ‘then I guess that’s what you’ll have to do.’
Oh. He’s trying to stare her out but she can’t look him in the eye.
‘But I –’ she tries. ‘I don’t –’ Still nothing comes.
She doesn’t have tools for anything approaching this situation.
‘I can’t just – turn off Parley,’ she says at last.
‘Well, find some fucker who can!’ Acne shouts, making Dani start.
Racist touches his arm, gives him a dose of the pale eyes.
‘A word?’ he says to Acne, and leads him to the far side of the table.
En route he turns back to Dani.
‘Come back to the present,’ he says, quiet but firm. ‘On the machine. Take a look at what’s happening on your system, right now. And think about how to stop it.’ He checks his ’90s-era Casio. ‘You have two minutes. Then you’re shutting this thing down.’
He touches Acne’s arm and leads him into a huddle by the window.
Robotically, Dani flicks the clock, spinning it back to the present. She drags the slider to widen her aperture, adding her full list of devotees back to the screen. She sees it right away: a Parleystorm, ballooning across the screen. Sic_girl’s proffers about Bethany Lehrer have stirred attention from the social media night watch – coders, insomniacs, journos – and now the morning crowd is up and catching on. Sic_girl has tapped a reflex point to do with trust, lies and politics. Dani follows daisy chains of chatter. As best she can parse it, last week thousands of people received an invasive software worm which makes the Giggly Pigglies pop up on every website they visit. Now, somehow, sic is putting it out that their data was hacked from the Digital Citizen servers – and that this is how they got spammed. And for some reason people give a major shit about this. Everyone finds the pig thing hilarious and they already hate the Digital Citizen – or dCitz, as it’s getting called – and this morning sic has made the two things collide and go boom.
Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle Page 3