This shit goes on fold after fold, scroll after scroll. How long was she writing? It helped tone down her horny urge, for a while at least. These itches are getting harder to scratch. More and more she’s channel-hopping an endless feed of online lovers; trolling pickup sites, especially Codr, the new dating site that’s exclusively for geeks. She picks and drops men with a porn-hound conviction that something better will come with the next swipe. Something perfect. Why it’s never slaked. Why she has to land somewhere soon or she’ll pop.
She hits Send. No reason the poor old Sambot shouldn’t get his morning oats.
She slides down in the bus seat and puts her feet up on the front rail, squeezing her warm phone into her chest with both hands. What she needs is neat transactional sex: the kind she can leave behind with no stray correlations; but it never goes that way. Things end up twisted and angry, especially with monkey_love – the only partner she goes back to over and again. She wonders who monkey is, what kind of person it takes to match her urgency. He never shares photos with her but she’s sure he’s a guy, and British from the words he uses for her pussy and his cock – but their encounters are so raw there are no other clues.
She wishes she had a good picture of Sam. The ones she’s found are too processed and professional. She needs to find the earliest images, from when she knew him at school. She ons the phone again and returns to Facebook where she rolls back into the past. As she gets to her earliest albums, she hits a cliff-edge and realises her mistake. Facebook wasn’t launched until she was up at uni. Her school life might as well not exist. She tends to forget Internet services haven’t always been there.
She opens the oldest album and there’s Dani the pale-faced fresher hanging with her tech-boy homies. Each was a way-mark. Those were wild years, before Gray – dipping fingers into zany tech and pipe-dream start-up concepts that never materialised; and into each other. She was this glorious geek-girl, costumes belladonna purple, her pale body a gift she gloried in sharing. She burned away uni light-starved in grotty basements, surrounded by the neutral blink of router stacks and the hum of cooling systems. All the hope then.
And if she got herself a reputation as another easy geek-girl (what Gray calls a wonk-bonk) it was pretty much deserved. These awkward boys were no pushover. Lord knows, it takes commitment to get a nerd back home at night – and even more to stop him talking long enough to get even the first thing done – but she felt a kind of love for them all. Each of them had, under layers of nebbish bluster, a timid sweetness she could unlock. And if many encounters ended prematurely, or didn’t really begin, one or two always managed to surprise her; and each brought the same delight that the abstractions they shared could translate into tenderness and physical release. They laid their fingers with awe on the cold milk of her belly and were kind to her soft skin. Kinder than she was.
This was before those first overwhelming online encounters with Gray.
With an instinct for how far the bus has staggered down the street, Dani looks up. They’re about to pass the burned-out Haggerston pub with flamingo stencils on its hoardings. She always tries to check it out as her bus passes. It’s inhabited by hobbity squatters she rarely manages to glimpse, but is fascinated by. Today she catches a violent situation at the half-open doorway. A man in grey suit and foreman’s anorak shoves a young white man with ginger dreads. Directly above them, level with Dani’s upper-deck seat, a bony girl shouts something from an upper window. Possibly ‘Don’t!’ – or ‘Cunt!’ She has a scarf round her hair in a wartime style. All Dani’s vision retains as the bus pushes forward is the blue moiré pattern of the scarf.
)) high shout ((
She twists her neck to see more but the angle’s wrong. She looks into first floor flats for a while, then turns back to her phone and the rough-shot images from uni. She looks happy there. But everything erodes, given time. Confidences leak out, condoms burst and promises pass unspoken expiry dates. When she graduated, and hooked up at last with Gray in the physical world, they found a more determined, constant rhythm. But she was already too committed to unsettling adventures, and was never true to him. Maybe she’s chronically impatient. She never wants any one thing long enough to make it real.
Her email chimes. That must be the reply from the Sambot. It took its time – this’d better be worth it. She skips back to mail. No, it’s just a purchase confirmation for the porn site.
Something occurs to her – something really, really bad that can’t be true. She taps on her Sent items. There it is. Ten twelve a.m. she sent that rambling mail to the Sambot –
No. Shit no.
She opens the mail but the bitter, vicious fact won’t change. The address she sent it to wasn’t sambot@local. It was [email protected]
She sent that mail – the mail of a sex-crazed drunken maniac – to Sam. Twelve minutes ago now. It’s been twelve minutes since the world came to an end and she never even noticed.
She can barely focus on the mail.
fuck you sam i think i love you
Somewhere between here and Shoreditch, she is going to have to kill herself.
¶TurdoftheDay
Modest and tidy, it slipped from me like a buttered potato.
Sorry. Sorry.
I did something bad. I can’t talk about it.
Four
‘I shouldn’t tell you any of this,’ said J-R.
Mark bent forward to set down a second milky tub for J-R and another tiny espresso for himself. He pinched the knees of his jeans and sat.
‘Because I’m from the craven private sector?’
‘No, no. I shouldn’t speak to anyone.’
‘All right, look.’ Mark made a fan with both hands. ‘Apart from we’re friends, my reputation rests on my ability to keep a secret. Whatever this is, you know it’ll stay between us.’
J-R took a steadying breath.
‘Yes. All right.’
And suddenly he found himself all business. He might have been making a report to Krish or Bethan.
‘So from what we can tell,’ he said, ‘this Giggly Pigglies virus started appearing on people’s computers two weeks ago.’
The corner of Mark’s mouth curled up a little.
‘But three days before that,’ J-R continued, ‘I received an email from Bethan.’
He wiggled the laptop out of his bag. Now he’d started speaking he was eager to reveal. It was like stepping onto a departing train, without looking back. He set the laptop on the table and spun it round so Mark could read for himself.
‘There,’ he said. ‘See?’
That, Sean, is a very generous offer. You do know how to please a girl! Here’s the goods. I’ve protected the files with your encryption thingy as you asked. (Tell me if I did it wrong . . .!!) Do with them what you will, fella.
Bx
Mark looked up from the screen.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘That does look—’
‘Yes,’ said J-R. ‘This was sent to Mondan’s CEO, Sean Perce.’
‘Yes, yes, sure.’
Naturally Mark would know who Perce was. In recent years his firm had romped through the British digital media sector, acquiring businesses like burrs on a dog. They’d recently crowned this growth with a shining new HQ. Just this morning, emerging from the Tube, J-R had looked up from the hustling City traffic to see the enormous digital displays wrapped round the pinnacle of 404 City Road. Impossible to ignore. They shone down Moorgate like a new sky, the width of a city block, running a constant loop of financial, commercial and celebrity news. Spattering data across the rooftops.
‘But why did she copy you?’ asked Mark, dimpling his brow at the email.
‘Bethany sent it to Perce’s home email address – and copied it to my Ministry of Technology address. Which appeared odd until I realised: when you type my name into our email system, it shows up as Pemberton, John-Rhys. And because I’ve mailed Perce a lot, I
happen to know how his work address appears.’
‘Perce, Sean?’
‘Yes. So my guess? Bethan meant to send this to Perce’s home and work addresses, but instead—’
‘Autocomplete,’ nodded Mark. ‘Pemberton. Perce. She got you instead of him.’ J-R decided he’d said yes enough times and stayed silent. ‘So – this is undeniably fascinating but I’m guessing you want something more from me than polite interest?’
‘Well, yes, there’s this attachment. I suppose I’d assumed –’
J-R was incapable this morning of completing a sentence. Mark filled the vacuum.
‘– that I’d be able to crack the encryption key and find out what exactly Bethany sent Mr Perce.’
‘Mark, I don’t want to believe she could be capable of – I can’t believe that. But you see, to access data on a Digital Citizen, you need two things: the original record stored by Mondan, and a unique double-lock code held by the ministry. Even if someone did hack our data, they would still have needed the double-lock code for every member of our target group before they could read their details. It’s a fail-safe, like a safety deposit box.’ Mark waved the details by. ‘This is why we’re so confidently saying we haven’t been hacked. Why some rag-tag bunch of hackers couldn’t possibly have used our data for the Pigglies thing. These double-lock codes are only accessible to a highly restricted group of people, including –’
Neither of them needed to finish the sentence. Mark picked up the thread.
‘But in spite of this, ten thousand people who gave you their data are still being spammed by images of those obnoxious pigs. Somebody has their data.’
‘This is why I didn’t sleep a wink last night. Knowing she sent this mail just days before this whole thing started. It can’t be coincidence. But on the other hand, why on earth would Bethan and Perce conspire like this? And what on earth could that have to do with cartoon pigs? I can’t make sense of it.’
Mark shook his head in slow motion. The expression taking over his face was exactly the one he used to assume when playing chess.
‘Do you know what I thought when I saw the story yesterday?’ he said. ‘I thought: why the Giggly Pigglies?’
‘Well, it’s some nonsense from these teenage hackers, isn’t it?’
‘Only if your data were actually hacked. Which I think you just said was impossible?’
‘All right, true. And so?’
‘The Giggly Pigglies is an eight-figure brand. Highly marketable, currently in the process of expanding from TV into toys, apps, online games and books.’
J-R smiled.
‘You seem to know a lot about children’s TV, Mark.’
‘I know a lot about who’s making money in digital. And who do we know who makes tens of millions selling data to marketing companies? And who, when the Digital Citizen goes national, will get data on every man, woman – and child – in the country?’
‘Mondan? That makes no sense. Why would they use our data to market a brand? Why now, just before we launch? Look at the news. This is a car crash for them, PR-wise. And for us.’
Mark shrugged.
‘Maybe it was an accident. A fat finger error. Maybe this Pigglies spam was something they were working up in R&D – proof of concept for a marketing tool that invades people’s computers and plants ads. Literally, viral marketing. A way to get their clients’ brands deep inside our computers, tablets and phones. Maybe this virus escaped from the lab? Maybe someone pressed the “go” button early?’
J-R found himself strangely angry at this conspiracy-making. He’d come to Mark for a sober perspective.
‘You’re clutching, Mark.’
Mark took a miniature sip, set his cup down and considered J-R for a moment.
‘Am I? Mondan keeps doing random stuff – and then refusing to apologise when it blows up in their face. They know they’re too big to fail. I heard one of your girl’s colleagues refer to them as a national asset the other day.’
‘Yes, the Cabinet Secretary said that. Neil Cullen. But that’s my point. The picture you’re painting is nothing like the reality.’
‘All right. Paint me a better one.’
J-R was taken aback. He’d forgotten how blunt Mark could be.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve been impressed. Revenues doubled in two years; data storage and processing for some of UK plc’s biggest brands; sixty-four data centres in Europe alone—’
‘That’s just facts. What have you actually learned – about their character?’
‘You mean Sean Perce?’
‘No, no, no. The character of the firm. Corporations have personalities, just like people. Why make the choices they do? Why, for instance, those data centres? Why so many?’
‘Because – they handle a lot of data?’
‘Pfft.’ Mark brushed that away. ‘Why not one big data centre? No, there’s a drive here for ubiquity. Look at that Babel of a building they’ve thrown up on City Road, like some great bird of prey looking down on us. 404 City, they insist on calling it. Did you know it actually takes up the even street numbers from 406 to 410? But Perce was so desperate to use that dorky name, he also bought and demolished the building at number 404. Turned it into green space.’
J-R had no notion why the numeral 404 should be so important – a lucky number in some astrological system, perhaps? – but he smiled as though he’d got the reference.
‘And those giant screens they’ve wrapped around its pinnacle,’ said Mark. ‘Blasting out constant information. So now we can see their point of view from every high window in London. Lucky us. And it’s the same beneath the ground. As above, so below. You know they’re gradually buying up all of London’s fibre-optic cable? All our Internet points of presence? I’m talking about the boring physical stuff here. Piping, conduits, routers – access to transatlantic and North Sea cables that connect us to the world. These days, if you want to provide access to the UK Internet, if you want to be found by a UK user, you pretty much have to go through Mondan. And then –’
Mark drained his coffee and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was on a roll, shifting on the bench seat with an urgent energy. This was a pet topic.
‘– then,’ he said, ‘there’s the slew of software start-ups they’ve acquired in the Old Street area.’
J-R sat forward.
‘Like Parley?’
‘Including Parley. Over thirty businesses in the last three years. And you know what all these acquisitions have in common? Apart from their physical location?’
J-R shook his head, though the gesture wasn’t needed.
‘They all have exceptional data sets. Really exceptional. Consumer demographics, purchase histories, behaviour. They buy them up and they move them wholesale into 404 City – or into one of five or ten other properties they’ve bought up around its skirts. Sometimes they’re only moving a company two hundred metres, but still they insist on having them inside the fold. They hook them all together on a single secure network, on cables running underground beneath the buildings, suck all their data into one data centre, three storeys under City Road. They have this need, this drive, to know everything, be everywhere – but keep everything to themselves.’
Mark sat back, having apparently exhausted himself. He picked up his espresso cup, glanced into it and replaced it on the saucer, disappointed; then looked around for someone to bring him another fix. J-R stared into the muddy surface of his own coffee.
‘I can’t say I’ve registered any of that,’ he said quietly. ‘This is a major government contract. We simply looked at the evidence in front of us.’
‘But that’s nonsense. You buy on chemistry. Let me guess: Mondan were up against Terasoft?’
J-R did his best to stay impassive. Mark grinned. Of course Terasoft was in the mix. The lumbering IT giant had its hooks into every part of government. J-R could not turn on his official laptop without their sober logo commandeering the screen for two or three minutes.
‘So,’ said Mark, ‘Terasoft would have brought everything to the table – aggressive pricing – desperate to stay supplier of choice to HM Government. But The Big “A” sold you the dream. Sean Perce would have been all over you; all over your minister?’
J-R shrugged. Mark nodded.
‘It’s what he does,’ he said. ‘And he’d relish the chance to drive a stake through Terasoft’s monopoly. He loves to be the punchy outsider. Loves to win.’
‘You think we made a bad decision.’
A creeping disappointment came over J-R. Why should he expect that he could call up a friend he’d not seen in years, out of the blue, and find him immediately eager to help? Mark seemed determined to crush the whole enterprise under the weight of his criticism.
‘I’m not saying that. But –’ Mark made a couple of generalised movements with his hand, groping for a thought. ‘Nobody ever knows what Mondan’s up to until they’ve done it. They’re obsessively silent. You rarely see Perce. He lets his divisional CEOs out to play – Jonquil Carter gets touted as ethnically diverse corporate cheesecake – but they’re always gagged.’
Remembering something, Mark put down his coffee cup and laughed.
‘Allegedly, Perce once told a leadership meeting, If media exposure is cocaine, you are my crack whores.’
‘He called his senior managers whores?’
‘Very much his style. I’m about to hear him speak, as it happens, at an event on Tower Hill.’ He checked his phone. ‘Here. Identity Crisis: Securing the Digital Transactions of the Future.’
Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle Page 9