Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle

by Matthew Blakstad

  Dani hadn’t noticed the anger building on the wires – online protest is more Gray’s kind of thing – but it makes her less sure she wants to help this Bethany Lehrer. Why is Parley going all guns to help her out of her mess? Especially if Sam’s right, and the government people are dissing Parley to the media. And why is Dani on the hook for it?

  For the hundredth time today, that prickle of unease takes a tour along her spine. There’s something Sam said when he met her earlier. About the police invasion at Parley. He said they were armed because of a credible threat – and it’s true. Those guys weren’t just there on account of some social wasp, tickling at the reputation of government. Six of them came, armed and certain that someone called sic_girl was in the building and was a threat. Why? Straight away they accused Dani of being sic, searched her; still suspect her as far as she knows. This shit is real and somehow Dani has to set it straight – but right now she can’t even see its edges.

  She rotates her clogged shoulders. Queries and jibes have been pouring into her whispers tab all day. As Jonquil’s prime trouble-shooter and sic_girl’s creator, everyone expects her to know what’s what. As if. She proffers a group response to all her questioners.

  ¶Nightshade

  for the elimination of doubt i have no fucking idea what is going on

  and neither do you

  fml

  The second she proffers, she’s reconnected. It sparks a waking system-dream that flares across her optic nerve. She often gets these visions in the night, when she’s run herself raw on too much screentime and too many pills. They’re difficult to describe. The only person she ever tried to explain them to was Gray, and he didn’t get it. She told him they were data turning into light, with dimension and shape. He thought those were fuzzy words for some randomness in Dani’s head. She got mad he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand how present and specific her visions are.

  Images flash – of her and someone chubby who might be Pemberton, both of them tooned into sprites from an ’80s arcade game. Two pixellated Giggly Pigglies. Purple pig and green pig waggle stubby legs to race through corridors, grabbing and discarding balls of light. No idea guides them. Dani must have asked a dozen people to help her today, pulling in data from a hundred sources; but she didn’t know what she was looking for. A random walk with no destination. How do you hunt a Pacman ghost?

  Sometimes you need a software concept to explain the world. Spinning: when a system cycles from task to task so quickly it never finishes one thing before moving onto the next. To the user the machine looks frozen but the system believes it’s working double-time. Dani, spinning up and down the building. Jonquil and Pemberton, spinning round each other in a wary dance. Sam, spinning stories to the hacks and flacks. The whole system spinning and moving exactly nowhere. Pointless.

  Dani’s pig hits a neon carton and spills her balls of light. They scatter and balloon across her field of vision – and right away it comes to her. So obvious. The vision screen-wipes away, quick as it arrived, leaving only screenlight. All she’s done so far is chase the data. That’s the raw material, the dumb unfiltered mass before the spark of life is added by sic_girl’s algorithm. What they need is meaning. She has to talk to sic_girl – and not through Parley; in person. She’ll batch up a semantic dialogue in the morning, soon as she gets in. It’ll be ready to run by the evening.

  She stares at the silent snow-cap mountain screensaver and takes a tug on the Michelob. It’s warm, but that’s OK. She’s wired and numb and isn’t tasting it.

  Out of sight at the back of her machine, an LED flashes crazy. Her network card is active. Someplace inside the metal case, an imp of the wires named Grubly has woken to receive a signal. The signal ends and Grubly starts transmitting in return. The transmission is long and hungry but Grubly is artful. Dani sees nothing and bandwidth is cheap, this time of night. Nobody gets hurt.

  She takes another swig. Would anyone else grok her spinning meme? Gray would. Sam not so much. Is Sam too prim? She tries to imagine kissing him and finds she can, quite easily. Very easily. In her mind he’s silent but his breath races. Today he was tightly shaven but here he grates the skin of her face and neck. His tongue is in the cleft beneath her jaw. It’s sticky and hot.

  She twists in the chair, touching herself with two fingers of her left hand while reaching forward with the right to fire up a browser. She googles Sam and he’s there. Profile. Senior Associate. His face washed white by flash, his eyes tightly perfect. She clicks on the mailto: link. A new message appears, primed to send. She closes it again.

  She wants to build him afresh, package him up. Something strikes her and she digs around in an old project folder on her hard drive until she finds it: an abandoned coding project she called the lovebot. You could email it from anywhere and it’d come straight back with a sex message, tailored to the vocab in your mail. An ancestor that evolved into sic_girl and the other Personas. Nothing too smart or sophisticated, but tonight she doesn’t need either of those things. She starts to hack at the lovebot, chiselling its generic voice into a simplistic scrape of Sam.

  She’ll call it the Sambot. It’ll speak to her, even when he won’t.

  Thirty-five minutes later her work is done. The Sambot is up and live on the web server in Dani’s airing cupboard – the one whose constant expelled heat keeps her towels and knickers dry.

  She tabs to her email and types a message to the Sambot.

  hey sam

  i see you inside my eyes when i close them

  i see the line along your jaw when the muscles tighten

  i want to tear that muscle with my teeth

  dani xoxox

  She presses Send. The reply takes less than a second. Ping.

  Oh Dani

  I love it when you hurt me. I want you to hurt me more.

  Sam xxx

  Contact. It’s almost like touching. It’s what she needs. She presses her thighs around her left hand and goes in again, typing with her right.

  hey sam

  you know what? ive been thinking about you

  have you been thinking about me? haha i know the

  answer to that

  you havent have you? fuck you sam i think i love you

  Wednesday:

  Trusted Third Party

  ‘Those who value freedom over control must do all in their power to release information from the strictures of cold Authority, even where this means disregard for the law of the day. The law will be forced to change; or we shall step around it.’

  —Elyse Martingale, The Electronic Radical:

  or Why Information Will Be the Dynamite

  of the Next Revolution

  Zero

  I’m speaking to no one. It’s a fascinating conversion.

  Two dozen stray personalities, detached of their hosts, are plotting riot and disorder. Aren’t we something? But not one of us is actually here. We shout and overrule and I sit alone and watch the city morning rise.

  When did it become so normal to speak to words instead of people? Maybe when the names for the act began to multiply. I’ll message you, DM you, proffer, tweet, post. When we started to speak through channels owned by someone else.

  Or maybe in 1876, with the words Mr Watson, come here; I want to see you. This sentence barely made it to the next room before it was owned by the black box on the workbench. I’ll call you, phone you, bell you. We depend on these wires – property Western Union, Marconi, Bell. I’ll cable you, telex, fax.

  Since then what have we cried into the wires but a billion variations on that plea? Come here. I want to see you – but there’s always another veil to pass through before we can see it all.

  Which brings me to the absent, fragile sic_girl. You want to see her? Here – some clickbait for you to share.

  This fictional character thinks she can bring down a minister with words. Find out how.

  ¶justwannahavepun

  Beth in Venice

  The Pig Lebowski

&
nbsp; Mo’ Bethany Blues

  One Swine Day

  The Lehrer of the White Worm

  Pork the Line

 

  One

  Hell has many doors. So does the Cabinet Office. Bethany and Krish took a discreet off-Whitehall entrance, where media were seldom seen. A triple-lanyarded staffer swiped them along a back channel through interlocking buildings. After six or seven doors their path was blocked by three black security pods.

  They placed keys and phones in a tray, then each stepped into a scanner. Bethany glanced through the glass at Krish, as electronics juddered round her. He hadn’t spoken to her since she arrived. A particularly Scottish form of intensity knotted every inch of his six foot three.

  Released with a Star Trek hiss, they followed more blind corridors and climbed a narrow stairway. A young staffer in shirtsleeves shouldered past without a glance. This was the one place in the country Bethany could walk without drawing a glimmer of attention.

  She understood Krish’s exasperation. Clearly he thought she’d been deliberately late this morning. She should have explained but had instead been brusque. The backstory was far from ministerial. On her way out of the house this morning, she’d paused to help negotiate an ailing and unwilling Jake into his school gear. As she tugged up his purple uniform trousers, some gastric reflex had kicked in and he’d been prodigiously sick down her front. No choice but to change her suit and blouse: she hadn’t looked – or smelled – like Downing Street material. The productivity of Jake’s drum-tight little stomach was incredible. As she dumped her soiled clothes in the bathtub, the gag-inducing stench had overwhelmed her. She prayed Peter would remember to send Agnieska to the cleaners with the Betty Jackson, else she’d have yet another impossible task for her ever-mounting to-do list: buy new suit. She’d been rotating the same five smart-but-quirky outfits since the day she took office. Four would be too few.

  The staffer tapped on a door, opened it without waiting for a response and held it open for Bethany and Krish. From behind her desk Karen Arbiter looked up briefly over reading glasses but continued to write. The pair of them took to the two leather-upholstered upright chairs and sat in silence while Karen finished. So: it was to be the headmistress routine. Bethany longed to take a peek at what Karen was writing. She had a hunch she’d see All work and no play makes Karen a dull girl, repeated two dozen times down the page.

  Krish’s eyes were fixed on a portrait of some formidably moustached Victorian. Bethany didn’t look at him but she could hear the muscles clench in his neck. An unfortunate tell, that. For her part, Bethany was calling on every astanga session she’d ever taken to maintain her breezy poise. She recrossed her legs and directed a Zen smile at the Number Ten chief of staff. She trusted Karen found this suitably irritating.

  Karen rested her fat pen on the page.

  ‘Apologies,’ she said. ‘I don’t have long. The PM needs me at eight. Crime stats.’

  ‘Well, it’s your meeting,’ said Bethany. Bright. Smiling. Relaxed.

  Karen gazed back in surprise. This was a standard Arbiter mind game so Bethany kept smiling. The blue of those eyes was so intense; the brows so sharp; the red crimp of hair so forthright. A dull rumble came from somewhere beyond the walls, as though the building was fired by a vast engine room nearby.

  ‘I take it then,’ said Karen, ‘you don’t have anything new for me to take in to Simon?’

  Bethany, who indeed had nothing new, chose to stall.

  ‘Oh, God, Karen, this is so stupid. It’s only made the nationals because of those ridiculous pigs. We shouldn’t rise to this. Or we’re going to look ridiculous, too.’

  ‘I hope you’re not suggesting that the security of citizens’ data is not a cause for our concern?’

  ‘Obviously I am not saying that. But there’s no proof any data has been compromised. Our homepage has been defaced. That’s all we know so far.’

  ‘So you don’t have anything for me to take to Simon?’

  ‘Well, we’re working closely with—’

  ‘With Parley, yes, I’ve read the press statement. I meant real information?’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Bethany, ‘I have lots of information. I’m the Minister for the Internet.’ Krish coughed quietly: go easy! ‘What sort of information did you have in mind?’

  ‘We only need to know one simple thing. I don’t think we’ve asked you anything else for the last twenty-four hours. Did you receive any information from your technology supplier about a security breach, before Oral Questions last Monday?’

  ‘I think the Answer I gave the House makes that pretty clear.’ Bethany pantomimed a sudden shocking thought. ‘Unless you’re suggesting my Answer was inaccurate?’

  Karen looked at her for a moment. Was she going to point out that Bethany hadn’t answered her question?

  ‘But you see, Beth, this is where I have a difficulty, because –’

  Karen began to rifle through her papers. Bethany sniffed – what was that smell? Or not so much a smell as a delicate burning of her nostril hairs. It took her a moment to place it: child sick. Somehow she’d failed to clean off all the filthy stuff and was carrying a trace.

  She dared a peek and saw a growing damp patch on her Agnes B shirt, just beside her left breast. Oh, shit, it must be on her bra. She should have changed that, too. She coughed and shifted in her chair, closing her jacket as much as possible. The piss-yellow patch was starting to make the cotton transparent. What bra did she put on today? Was it showing? She twisted to the side to avoid giving Karen or Krish a view, then realised this must look shifty. Trying another tack, she crossed her arms unnaturally high across her chest and turned back to face Karen, who had produced a single sheet of A4 and was looking over it in distaste, glasses back on.

  ‘In the email you sent yesterday,’ said Karen, ‘to myself and the Cabinet Secretary –’

  Ah, that bloody email. Here it came.

  ‘– you said, quote, Mondan had informed me of a number of incidents where customer data was accessed in error by their data mining tools but I’m assured these incidents were quickly resolved and the data was certainly not used to send spam to our pilot group.’

  ‘Yes. As I explained to Neil, we now know of some, well, minor data handling issues.’ Those were the words her civil servants had given her – with any luck Karen wouldn’t ask for details. ‘That’s serious of course but it’s got nothing to do with a hack. We don’t have any reason to think we lost data or caused people to get pigs in their computers. I don’t see—’

  ‘But the use of tenses here is interesting, isn’t it?’ Karen was still scrutinising the email. ‘You sent this in response to a question from the Cabinet Secretary. Neil had asked you to clarify your Answer. Yes?’

  Surely everyone could smell the sick by now? As Bethany got hotter, the patch gave off ever more pungent fumes. She refolded her arms higher. A bit Clare Short but better than the alternative.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘And so in this mail, which you sent in relation to Monday’s Parliamentary Questions, you tell Neil that Mondan, quote, had let you know about a breach. Not, they have let me know. They had. Now – why would that be?’

  ‘Karen. Are you not letting your linguistics degree get the better of you? You seem to be reading a lot into what the meaning of the word, had, is.’

  Was that even English? Krish shifted and coughed like a mild consumptive.

  ‘You are aware this email is discoverable?’ said Karen.

  ‘As one of the ministers responsible for Freedom of Information I understand how it works, yes.’

  Go on, you steely cow. Threaten me or shut up. Krish coughed again as Karen took off her glasses.

  ‘Beth, we’ve known each other how long?’

  Bethany could have said, eight years since you joined my constituency team – as a bloody researcher. But Karen didn’t wait for an answer.

  ‘I naturally want to look out for you here. But w
e need to be comfortable you haven’t made a bad decision. There are people in the Party who—’

  ‘– who want my job.’

  She meant Andrew bloody Carpenter. Snapping at her heels ever since she was appointed over him – claiming she’d only got the post to make up gender quotas, the little sneak.

  ‘– who question certain of your decisions. No I don’t just mean Andrew. Would you like me to write you a list? I’ve had Dan Fowler on the phone already this morning, for one.’

  ‘Sorry, hold on, Karen. Why would the Security Services Minister be concerned about my public utility programme?’

  Karen’s nostrils flared and she dropped her voice to a near-whisper.

  ‘Nobody wants to see your errors scupper the whole Party. With an election looming none of us can afford to see a flagship policy derailed. This is a fragile time.’

  Because you’re losing your hold on backbench votes, thought Bethany, holding her smile in place.

  ‘Which,’ said Karen, ‘calls into question your choice of a relatively untested supplier like Mondan.’

  ‘As opposed to?’

  ‘As opposed to – a more established HM Government provider.’ Yes, this was Andrew talking, with his cozy consulting contracts and non-exec post with Terasoft. ‘Beth. You must recognise, at this point in the cycle, there are only two choices. You come up with something concrete, and fast, or – well, you’ll need to put careful thought into your options.’

  So there it was; and with it Bethany’s last ounce of patience dissolved. Perhaps it was because the sick-smell was rising ever faster and all she wanted was to escape to the ladies and mop down her front; but mainly, she was a junkyard dog when cornered.