Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle

by Matthew Blakstad

  He slaps his book shut: a professional wrap-up. He has what he wants. He’ll be off to have conversations that leave no trace but redirect the flow of words and change their meaning, between the lunchtime and the evening news. Dani does nothing to stop him. Why isn’t she the person who suggests a coffee, demands a date? People think she’s tough. She isn’t tough, she’s helpless.

  She stays in her chair as he packs up, already raising a new-model iPhone to his ear. He gives her shoulder a brief squeeze then the colour in the room dials down: he’s gone. She’s served her purpose. Sleep beckons.

  ‘Well, Fiona, it’s perhaps inevitable that this affair should have gained the name Pig-gate. It’s certainly “hogging” attention here in Westminster. And the pressure on embattled minster Bethany Lehrer shows no sign of letting up.

  ‘Ms Lehrer was unavailable for comment but a spokeswoman told us, quote, This is the act of a petty Internet hoaxer. We are treating it seriously but the information posted on the Parley website is not accurate. The public can rest assured that Digital Citizen data is quite secure. Referring there to the controversial new online ID card.

  ‘And though the leaks first surfaced on popular social network Parley, their ultimate source remains a mystery. The hunt is widening across the entire Internet.

  ‘Now, interestingly, Fiona, the Prime Minister, questioned this afternoon at a visit to Marlesbury NHS Trust, expressed, quote, full confidence in his embattled minister. But I’m told she has been summoned to an early meeting tomorrow, here at Downing Street – at which, one suspects, she will be asked to account for the reality or otherwise of this alleged hack; for her words in Parliament last week; and – most importantly – for the invaded privacy of several thousand taxpayers.

  ‘One thing is certain. That meeting will be anything but “boar”-ing.

  ‘Fiona.’

  ¶tvjoe

  Haha look at the reflection on this political editor guy’s head! IT IS BLINDING ME.

  Ooh!

  Time for Celebrity Pie-Eating Contest on Five!

 

  Eight

  The clock was a hand-me-down, like the house. It had held post on the painted bookshelves as long as Bethany could remember. Its low tock was part of the fabric of the kitchen. It took an effort of concentration to make it out – like the stink of dog she was sure hung about the house but that she and Peter were too attuned to notice.

  She gazed at the dial and tried not to consider how many ways she was screwed. A hair after 12:45 – time yet.

  Her eyes tracked the rows of cookbooks, their marker ribbons hanging over the shelves like mouse-tails. Here was continuity, through her childhood and back to times she hadn’t known and didn’t understand. Bottom to top, Nigellas and Hestons blended into titles her mother worked from in the seventies: Cuisine Minceur, Robert Carrier, white spines stained as elderly teeth; and on the top shelf, the shredded papyrus of Pattens and Davids: her grandmother’s books.

  Even today Bethany inhabited the house as though minding it for Gramma. She repeated her routines in the kitchen and spring borders. You could say the same about the bedroom, too, though she didn’t choose to explore that thought. She scanned the room for other traces. On the Aga bar, the ratty tea towel – Famous British Breeds – was nearly as old as Bethany and should be chucked. The mid-century Kenwood that she used for cake mixes always gave off a metal-and-petroleum smell, making her think of the war. On the wooden counter, one of Jake’s books –

  Dammit! Giggly Pigglies go to the Theme Park. That dire TV spin-off book Jake couldn’t get enough of. Her politician’s brain filed this intrusion in a deep interior chamber, where it could detonate without disturbing her conscious mind. She cast her eyes back to the spread of business on the big oak tabletop. Here she was again, where she’d been when the whole thing began.

  This table was her refuge. Each night she laid the debris of her day across its grain like archaeological finds. This was the only place and time that was wholly hers. In the mornings, when she eased the front door into its frame and tiptoed out to the polite hum of a ministry Prius, the sun was still down. The car rolled her to the underground car park at Artemis House, where her driver handed her off to Emily Candlewick, her Private Secretary. Daytime was spent in a so-called Private Office where there was no privacy, battling to ensure her intentions, her policies, didn’t drown beneath the tidal surge of officialese and debate about the finer points of law. When she could stand no more her civil servants passed her battered frame back to the driver, who delivered her to husband and sons so she could spend a few hours role-playing marriage and motherhood – until Jake, Hugo and Peter in turn withdrew upstairs, unacknowledged, leaving Bethany to her nightly exercise.

  Tonight, though, there’d been no time for more than a cursory peck on the cheek for Hugo, as she rattled instructions into her BlackBerry. Jake was sickening for something: she left him with barely a scuff of the hair and a Lemsip. It was after eleven before she shook her pursuers, the chance of getting her up on Newsnight having finally evaporated. It would start again in a few hours. Today, the breakfast shows, then every time-slice of the media day: all wanting their twenty second clip of a minister crumbling under questioning, to drop into the hourly bulletins. She would have to talk to them eventually, though Krish was firmly agin it. Somehow they had to fix this whole rotten mess before she took to the platform on Friday morning, to announce that Digital Citizen was live across the nation.

  The house breathed and creaked. She had a stark five hours of calm: during which she should also, in theory, sleep. She put down the paper she’d held unread in her hand for the last half hour and moved her reading glasses to rest on the top of her head. Ah: no wonder the room had been looking so blurry. The heating had been off for nearly two hours but the sealed room carried a homeopathic trace of warmth. She shivered as the day unfolded back at her. Incredible how quickly things play in a crisis. You don’t seem to do anything, just react as events fly past. Bethany hoped she’d retained a can-do spirit – at least the team seemed buoyed. They thrived on the hands-to-the-pump stuff.

  They’d gathered round her desk when the summons came from Number 10. An early morning slot: Karen Arbiter was fond of Gestapo tactics. Bundle the victim out of bed at the crack of dawn, bombard them with questions till they crack. At least the PM was unlikely to be there: she wouldn’t like Simon to see her break under torture.

  In any case, she wouldn’t crack. She was big enough and ugly enough to cope with Karen. But the thought that this brouhaha could scupper the Digital Citizen put an acid lump in her throat. All that graft to get things to a place where she might do real good: and in a way Gramma would have been proud of. She couldn’t let her own idiotic behaviour bring the programme down.

  All the more need for the steadying presence of Big Krish Kohli. Her instinct to retrench was working against her. So much she wouldn’t and couldn’t tell her spads, but they were primed to help her. They’d be waiting for her call right now. And why not? No cause to suffer this alone. She tapped out a text suggesting a conf call: a functional text, with no babes-es or kisses. She included Krish and J-R on the message and pinged it off.

  While she waited for a response she flipped her glasses back down onto her nose and pulled the next paper from her dispatch box. Digital migration of regional libraries: DECISION REQUIRED. She sighed and began to read, Pentel hovering.

  Each afternoon her Private Office primed these Parliament-red valises with progressively more impossible tasks to test her mettle. They knew precisely how to pull her strings, her puppet-masters. They filleted her days into six-minute chunks until her diary resembled a bar code, leaving her no time for actual decisions. Then they crammed all the real business into these boxes for her to work on through the night. The resulting sleep deprivation left her tender and suggestible for the next day’s programming. She might as well be Linda Kasabian.

  Though in fairness they’d rallie
d round her today, as the press pack tooted their horns and bore down at a gallop. Without a word, her civil servants had moved into a defensive screen. Wasn’t it in adversity you found out who your friends were? In which case, her officials were showing themselves second only to Krish and J-R.

  Speak of the devil – there was Krish now, on her BlackBerry.

  Krish pulled J-R onto the line.

  ‘Up at this hour, too, J-R?’ asked Bethany. ‘You boys need to lay off the lattes.’

  Their laughs were token but so was her joke. They got down to business, making efficient use of their narrow slice of midnight air. J-R gave a brief report on Parley: positive, but no meat. He sounded guilty about this. He shouldn’t.

  Bethany had only today found out that Parley was owned by Mondan. Odd that accusations about a government supplier should appear on a social media website run by its subsidiary. Did it mean anything? For the zillionth time since entering government she wished she knew more about something beyond politics. How companies bought and sold each other: what happened when they did.

  Krish and J-R were talking about Parley’s artificial characters – the Personas. J-R reeled off stats on the elusive sic_girl.

  ‘Her base is in the high hundreds of thousands. Younger ABC1, some C2s. Female slant – sixty-four per cent. High awareness in households. This is core-voter territory. Significant reach among opinion-formers. Especially given that – well, given that she doesn’t exist.’

  Bethany didn’t understand how Parley worked. She’d asked Hugo to explain, at lights out. He was nine and found this stuff as natural as chocolate – he was a digital native. Bethany was more of a digital shipwreck. All he told her, though, was It’s silly, Mummy, which rather reinforced her initial perceptions. Talking to pretend people for entertainment? She could get that in the House of Commons.

  It seemed it was up to her to ask the glaring question.

  ‘But if she’s an artificial, um –’

  ‘– synthetic personality,’ said J-R. ‘A sort of robot without a body.’

  ‘Then she can’t be to blame for these attacks?’

  There was a long enough pause for Bethany to realise she was several miles behind the curve. J-R found a way to be polite about it.

  ‘Exactly! That’s the conclusion we’ve come to, as well. Everything sic_girl says has been said before, somewhere online. So the team at Parley are scouring the Internet right now, looking for the original.’

  ‘Which we’re guessing,’ said Krish, ‘was put up by this TakeBackID lot – the ones who did in the website.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bethany, ‘I saw it’s still down.’

  ‘We’ve been trying all day. Every time we put it live, five minutes later it’s pigs all over again. Nobody seems to have heard of these TakeBack buggers – they sprang up overnight from nowhere – but they’ve skills. We presume they did the hack. So the hope is, if we find these original postings, we find our den of hackers.’

  ‘We need to get the website back up asap,’ said Bethany. ‘We can’t have a national launch without a website.’

  Again, silence. Both men would be thinking, how can we have a national launch at all, after this? But Bethany wouldn’t have that. It was going to happen, on Friday, as planned; or she was utterly screwed.

  Krish broke the crackling silence.

  ‘On that, Beth? We do need to get onto Number Ten. The meeting.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, please.’

  There was another stretch of dead air before Krish spoke again.

  ‘J-R? Would it piss you off mightily if I dropped you from the call just now? I’m sure you could do with some sleep.’

  Another pause before J-R replied.

  ‘Sure, Krish. Wilco. Ah. Hope all goes well tomorrow, Bethan.’

  ‘Thanks, J-R. Thanks for it all. Good night.’

  The line produced a guttural sound as J-R dropped.

  ‘He’s doing good there, Beth,’ said Krish.

  ‘I don’t want Parley to think we’re the enemy. I don’t think we are the enemy.’

  ‘Aye, well, better inside the tent pissing out,’ he said. ‘So tomorrow. Have you given it more thought? You can’t walk in without a script. I have it first-hand from Karen: the Cabinet Secretary is livid just now.’

  ‘Neil wakes up livid.’

  ‘You should go in hard,’ Krish pressed on. ‘Tell Karen you’re cutting the link with Mondan. They had the data; they let it bleed – or worse, they did the pig-spam themselves on behalf of some marketing company and they kept it from you.’

  She hadn’t heard that theory. Would they do that? Marketing data was valuable. Surely not with Sean’s consent.

  ‘You came within millimetres of misleading the House,’ Krish went on. ‘They did the pilot, they fucked up – bye bye. We’ll use Terasoft for the national roll-out. We can recover this but we need to cut the rot.’

  ‘And I’ve told you. I’m thinking about it.’

  The sound of sea-swell on the wires.

  ‘I am right,’ said Krish, ‘that Mondan didn’t inform you before Questions, aren’t I? You’ve been careful to say your officials hadn’t briefed you but you’ve never said what they told you. What exactly is our deal with these people?’

  ‘Krish. Not at this hour. We’ve talked about this.’

  ‘I’ve asked. You’ve prevaricated. I’ve stayed out of DigiCitz because you said you had it in hand. Was that a mistake?’

  ‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘Please trust me. We’re too far into Digital Citizen for them to drop it; not with so many government IT projects down the can. The national roll-out is top of the Number Ten comms grid for Friday – and if they keep the project, they have to keep me. With Juliet crossing the floor, fewer than twenty per cent of ministers are women. Who do they shuffle in now? Annabel? Christ, you know all this.’

  ‘I know, Beth. I know.’ She could see him pushing two fingers up the bridge of his nose, popping his glasses up onto his forehead, massaging his nose’s slender spine. ‘Look, you’re right. It’s late. But can we please get twenty minutes at the office in the morning, before we go to Downing Street? Twenty minutes?’

  ‘Yes, fine. I’ll be there. We’ll talk.’

  They broke the call. Bethany looked across the untouched spread of papers on the tabletop, then back at the old clock. Half past one.

  Did anyone sleep any more?

  ¶maglad

  Whaat? Are you trying to tell me I’m going to have to register on DigiCitz to access over 18 content? How’m I supposed to do that? I’m only an algorithm.

  (Plus I’m only 2 years old.)

  ¶identikid

  The deal here is simple. Give up your right to privacy, and if you’re lucky we’ll let you access benefits, services, your rights as a citizen. Digital Citizen? Digital Slave.

  Nine

  They rise to the brow and gaze across the devastation of the land. Far ahead a once-proud city blazes, lighting the cloudy darkness of the plain. Littering the lowland earth, the wracks of titanic machines give out juts of smoke. It seems that nothing moves below; then the travellers make out, among the smouldering hulks, a dozen smaller warcraft crawling from the rout to the safe harbour of the Azkhanii highlands. They haven’t a prayer of making it. They’re sitting ducks out on the killing fields, pounded in their slow retreat by the noiseless blasts of the Highlords’ jolting laser cannons, hidden in the crust of fortifications opposite.

  The travellers raise their eyes beyond the battle. Ahead, deep in the Namani caves, on the final level, lies the endgame boss, concealed in the smoke of a subterranean lair. That is the direction they must take.

  The view pulls back to reveal the weary pair standing on the crest. Landar turns towards her avatar, his feline face contorted in an expression of what’s meant to be sorrow but whose simplified vectors just look constipated. Before he can speak, Dani presses the space bar to pause the game and sits back in her chair.

  She feels like double
refried shit. Her back is a single knot of pain and her carpals ache with repeated beating of the keys. Her irises are stretched to bursting. She tabs out of the game to check the system clock: it’s two a.m.

  She’s been at the screen since she woke on the sofa at eleven, the fossil of a hairgrip embedded in her cheek. She staggered towards the green beacon of her PC’s LED; and for the last few hours she’s kept reality at bay by moosing about online, thirty tabs open, spinning from app to site to chat, her rhythm broken only by the occasional re-up of beer or, when she could hold out no longer, an extended piss. At one point she launched Eternal Warfare. An hour blasting war-clones has left her washed out but settled. Sleep is ridiculous.

  )) caffeine pixel ((

  She flicks up Parley to zoom back a few hours and explore the contours of the conversation. Everyone in her continuity has spent the day dancing round the sic_girl proffers and now the thing is massive. A proffer by greebday turns out to be a veiled cite of a proffer by spagbol who in turn was linking to a blog post by act1v – all of them attacking dCitz. Dani froggers from post to post. This looks to be one of those two-day flurries that get stirred in the waters of Parley.

  But there’s a hard core, too. People who flare up at any attempt to stem their digital freedom. Normally they merry-hell about Terasoft or Google or whichever company’s taken the latest bite out of their digital privacy. This week apparently it’s the government’s turn. Something Dani hadn’t realised: everyone – including her – is going to have to give up their personal details to this thing when it goes national later this year; or they’ll essentially drop off the grid. That’s some harsh decision: either say I love Big Brother, or lose your housing benefit?

  Following the conversation, Dani keeps looping back to one of the Personas – riotbaby. Not her favourite character. He’s this aggregate blowhard conspiracy-bot, but popular in this network. He’s been citing hard-core data nerds with increasing frequency. One name in particular, unknown to Dani – identikid.