Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle

by Matthew Blakstad

  ‘Yes, Bethany’s speaking there as well. I wrote her speech.’

  ‘It’ll be a good crowd. People like me tend to hang on Sean’s prognostications.’

  The use of the first name pricked J-R’s attention.

  ‘You know him?’

  Mark shook his head.

  ‘Met him a few weeks back, at an industry junket in Spain. He just about acknowledged my existence. Think a Burnley Steve Jobs, if such a thing is possible. Hugely impressive. But the kind of guy who’d try anything – anything he thought he could get away with – to conquer another parcel of land.’

  He trailed off. The café buzz echoed around them.

  ‘And so?’ said J-R, discreetly checking his watch.

  ‘So all right,’ said Mark, leaning forward to click and mouse about on J-R’s laptop. ‘Sure. I’ll have a go at decrypting your mail attachment.’

  Stupid gratitude flooded J-R’s chest.

  ‘No guarantees,’ said Mark. ‘If Perce gave Bethany the tool to encrypt this file, it’ll be high-grade. But the file is big-ish. That’ll help. More pattern to exploit.’

  Mark pulled a small device from his pocket and inserted it into J-R’s USB socket. The intimacy of this action made J-R shift in his chair. Mark stopped and looked directly into his eyes.

  ‘But whatever I find,’ he said, ‘I’ll give it to you straight.’

  J-R nodded. He desperately wanted an answer; but he only wanted it to be favourable. Else he’d rather bury it deep underground.

  ‘I’m choosing to believe that this is nothing to do with the hack or the Giggly Pigglies affair,’ he said. ‘Maybe somehow some teen hackers have cracked Mondan’s codes. Or maybe you’re right and Mondan are doing something fishy with the data. I’d actually prefer either thing to be true, than to know that Bethany has done – I don’t know what. Either would make more sense.’

  ‘Not so unusual for a politician to collude with a private business.’

  ‘Mark, I don’t actually think that’s true.’

  Mark pulled the USB stick out, closed the laptop and handed it back to J-R.

  ‘Really,’ said J-R, taking the computer. ‘Why would Bethany do such a thing – after everything she’s put into this programme?’

  Mark shrugged.

  ‘I still say, look harder at Mondan. At what’s in it for them. You’re giving them all this data to add to their already vast collection. What are they doing with it? What are they allowed to do, legally? Do you know what’s in your Ts and Cs?’

  ‘Terms and Conditions?’

  ‘What do your so-called “customers” sign up to?’ Mark made air quotes around the word. ‘Ask yourself: when did you last read the Ts and Cs for a piece of software? I suggest you read your own. Or –’ He weighed something up. ‘If you want, I’d be happy to look over the legals. If you don’t mind sharing them?’

  J-R swirled the foamy soup at the bottom of his cup.

  ‘Is that wise?’ he said. ‘You’re already looking at that mail attachment.’

  ‘Wise for me or you?’

  ‘I don’t –’ it didn’t seem right to mention Mark’s blog. ‘This would be between us?’

  ‘Of course.’ A business card had appeared in Mark’s hand. ‘Here. My professional email.’

  J-R knocked back the dregs of his coffee and stood, hitching up his backpack. Would any other spad even blink before sending sensitive information to a private sector contact? He paused for just a second before taking the card.

  ‘I’ll email you later today. And, look, Mark, thank you.’

  He held out his hand. Mark, still sitting, took it.

  ‘Anything for a mate.’

  He gave J-R an easy smile.

  ¶riotbaby

  Have you heard from this guy, children? Be his devotee

  /now/.

  >>cite ¶identikid

  We have one chance to stop this government stealing our anonymity and our freedom. Two days to stop them invading our lives forever. Don’t let them take away your privacy. Don’t open your life to state-sponsored snoopers. Don’t let them launch the digital citizen.

  Listen to the kid. Friday’s the day.

  Five

  Identikid proffers like none other. He’s primed to push the button on TakeBackID. Epic to ride this breaker with riotbaby citing him and his devotees ballooning. Usually it tends to zero likelihood you’ll get cited by a Persona even once but there it is, for the fortieth time since he cracked the DigiCitz homepage and added the pennant. A twelve-year-old could have done that exploit on their shitty government SSL set-up. But they didn’t. It was identikid.

  He didn’t birth the pennant, either – but he owns it now and it’s trending, invading searchspace, daily favourites, RSS: building, building. And whenever he adds the Pigglies meme as well, it goes turbo-shareable. Those little pigs are smoking clickbait.

  None of his network knows who actually swiped the DigiCitz data or did the Giggly Pigglies stunt but whoever it was they’re some kind of genius. You’d have to be a ghost to walk through Mondan’s defences and jack all that data off them. And the Pigglies trojan they got onto all those people’s PCs was a sweet hack for sure. Word on the security boards is nobody can get the damn thing off those devices. They strip it off, it automagically rebuilds itself in the system registry and there it is back again, like wiggly wiggly wiggly.

  Whoever did that hack, they’re OK by Leo – by identikid, that is. They helped make him what he’s turned into since only yesterday: a player. No more script kiddie hustling for a zero-day hack.

  The Flamingo is quiet this arvo but Leo knows from static on the boards how fast things are moving. He’s edgy. Maybe because of that property guy was on their dicks again this morning. But more, too. Something the whole squat knows is coming.

  ¶identikid

  So pumped about takeback Friday.

 

  He gets more cites, more devotees, when he proffers what he feels, not just what’s happening.

  Perched on a flock-covered stool, Leo types fast enough to rub off his fingerprints. In the dinge of the saloon his MacBook bleeds blue light on the knife-etched countertop. On the wall above the row of empty optics, a Warholed poster of Elyse Martingale shouts . . . or we shall step around it . . . in fraying lower-case Courier.

  Identikid is Leo when he’s off the wires. His whole thing goes on here in the Flamingo. This peeling barroom is the smaller of their two public spaces. At night they use it for pop-up shows: club spots, comedy, micro-burlesque. It raises serious coin for their other activities. But by day it’s quiet and the perfect hub for identikid’s oppos.

  Wifi and electricity they gank from the next-door supermarket, but they need to keep the usage down. If the fluorescents dip in the shop, the three big Pakistani lads come round to tell off the Flamingo crew, but they’re mostly chill if Leo and his mates don’t take the piss. So during the day it’s lights out. You’d never know it wasn’t night, except for what cracks in through the window boards. Reynard can’t power up his PAs while the shop is open so the only sound is the ambient drone of Kingsland Road and the sub-bass of the trucks.

  Leo proffers.

  ¶identikid

  We have work to do.

  How to make a citizen understand what’s been taken from her? Someone steals her wallet, she feels a loss. Bankers lose our billions, we’re mad as hell. Someone takes away my privacy? Never mind, I got a discount on this fifty-two inch plasma. Someone steals my identity? Big whoop. I got five free downloads.

 

  Leo types up a quarrel, pushing a dread from his eye. That’s right, Mum, he thinks. Still got those awful dreadlocks. She rang yesterday. Why’d he have to answer? First thing she says is, she goes, Have you still got that hair? He’s never going home. She goes, You’ll never get a job interview with all that going on up there. She doesn’t know what’s going on. There’s things more important than proper j
obs. She goes, Your father is ya ya ya ya ya. What did they ever give him?

  He angles the screen of his graduation MacBook to get a sharper image and keeps telling the people: soon, soon, soon. Doors bang about upstairs. That’s Winter. She’s not forgiven him for when they had words before. She’s doing what she does when she’s mad, i.e. storming the pub rooms, cleaning up cans, pulling paper and bottles out the rubbish. Stuffing them in the recycling sacks. Passive aggressive, like. Blaming. It’s cool to be green but that girl can be this total recyclopath.

  And what did she want to get so pissed with Leo for, this morning? It was because of that fascist bailiff. OK Leo had, to be honest, let the situation in the street get a little out of hand, but it was the guy who started in with aggro, after Leo tore up the notice he was sticking to the door. And maybe Leo spat, but not at the guy. He’d been handling it. Fuck, what did Winter need to start screaming out the window for? You call a guy a cunt, he has to get back at you. That’s logic. Now he’ll be back for definite and he won’t be alone. Screaming blue shit at people solves nothing. Leo trusts in subtle. Winter always wants a brawl.

  What Leo’s working up today you’ve got to say is super-subtle. For once identikid has something to throw. He sees the noise from the groups, knows what’s going down. On the street outside, citizens walk past talking their shit to each other. They have no idea. They don’t know where to look, or how to listen. Identikid knows.

  Friday is just a couple days away. Then TakeBackID will be more than just a meme.

  ¶identikid

  404 City, watch your ass.

 

  ¶techwave

  Here, everybody. This:

  >>cite ¶thegrays

  Everyone worries about losing they’re privacy but they don’t hesitate for a nanosecond before giving credit card details to Murdoch or Bezos or Perce

  Six

  The M&M came to life. The plastic figure had been standing inert on the desk, right arm raised in a solidarity salute. Then without any obvious cause came a bong and a whine of servos as the arm chopped sharply down and up. A sweet popped green and immaculate from a dimpled hole in the smooth belly, to land in a cupped hand. Graham reached for it, tossed it in the air and caught it in his mouth like a feeding fish.

  ‘So that was a cite,’ he explained, munching sugar.

  ‘A sight? Of –?’

  ‘Cite. Citation,’ said Graham.

  On his screen he called up a Parley continuity, as J-R now knew to call it. He pointed to the spot where one of Parley’s software characters – or Personas – had quoted someone called thegrays.

  ‘See, here,’ said Graham, ‘that’s me – thegrays. Techwave cited my proffer about, well, you can see. Which comment was pretty sharp, though I say so.’

  J-R read the ‘cite’ – a quoted comment from thegrays. From Graham.

  ‘Yes, I see. Isn’t Sean Perce ultimately your boss?’

  J-R shuddered to imagine publishing a similar comment about a minister. Graham shrugged.

  ‘And I have this Parley app,’ he drew a rectangle around the screen, ‘wired up to MC M&M here. Every time I get a cite from one of the Personas, my little plastic friend dispenses me a reward.’

  For the first time in the conversation, Graham turned from his screen to look at J-R, grinning widely at the ingenuity it had taken him to achieve this pointless outcome. How they fetishised these soulless ‘Personas’.

  ‘So everyone using Parley,’ said J-R, ‘is aiming to be quoted by an artificial person?’

  But Graham had returned to his screen and for a moment he didn’t reply. J-R accepted the silence and looked around at the genius mayhem of equipment, cables, cardboard boxes and shuffling boy-men filling the artificially lit, low-ceilinged space. This was the Geek Farm, the engine room of Parley’s techie elite. The untended walls were the dirty blue of a faded tattoo, giving the room a nighttime flavour. A grey hum filled the air and there was a sharp smell of freshly unearthed truffles – the distinctive odour of men who’ve spent the day surrounded by overheated equipment.

  J-R’s BlackBerry buzzed. A text from Krish.

  So we survived Karen this am though I’ve now two choices where to shite from. Stay at Parley. Keep head down and eyes peeled for media interest re Parley or Mondan. Come to me first.

  Or in other words, do nothing. J-R put the phone away.

  Graham flicked between windows, clicking and typing in gnomic bursts. He had an angular, ancient face, wiry glasses, a scraggy bunch of hair pulled through a scrumple of yellow rubber. His wispy half-beard and waistcoat gave him a nineteenth-century air. Beneath the waistcoat a crown device and capital letters decorated his red T-shirt. J-R did not understand the motto on the shirt. In the style of the popular wartime slogan, Keep calm and carry on, it read:

  USE BINARY

  AND

  CARRY ONE

  His concentration was absolute. Parley’s ‘Systems Ninja’ – as his business card described him – never seemed to do just one thing at a time. While giving J-R a guided tour of Parley, he was also mining a massive base of Internet data, called up overnight, trawling for some trace of Bethany that might have been used to form sic_girl’s infamous messages.

  For a while J-R assumed his question had passed unheard. Then Graham spoke.

  ‘See, it’s a bigger thing getting cited on Parley than on other social networks, by people. When you get cited by one of the Personas, you’ve cracked the algorithm. You’ve decoded what the Personas are thinking at that one moment. What the Internet’s thinking.’

  ‘And that’s a more interesting challenge than working out what a human being will respond to?’

  ‘Um . . . yes?’ said Graham, turning to face J-R with genuine puzzlement. ‘I mean, who knows what people are going to do and say?’

  J-R chose not to respond. This was only his second day at Parley, but he’d already heard as many different explanations of Parley as he’d had conversations. Nobody agreed why this gaggle of artificial personalities was worth spending time among; or why people were so eager to disclose such intimate thoughts to them.

  Truncated names and inexplicable messages flickered past on Graham’s screen.

  ‘I was wondering,’ said J-R. ‘Why the archaic words? Proffer. Parley. Is someone a historian of language?’

  Graham looked at him with disdain.

  ‘They have more Google-juice than modern generics.’

  ‘Ah –’

  ‘Uniqueness in search space.’

  ‘All right. And this is probably a stupid question, too, but –’ Graham looked back with lidded eyes, as if that were a foregone conclusion ‘– how do you tell the Personas from the – ah, real users?’

  Graham sighed deeply, his fears confirmed.

  ‘Personas in grey, users in black,’ he said.

  Ah, yes. J-R had noticed the different shades of text but had assumed they were random. Perhaps nothing in this online Babel was truly random.

  ‘Mondan,’ J-R ventured next.

  Graham gave no sign of having heard.

  ‘You work for them now,’ said J-R. ‘Since Parley was acquired, what, two years back? Does that mean work with them? What’s that like? They have something of – ah – of a mixed reputation in the sector?’

  Graham gave an adolescent sigh and glared at his screen. J-R had noticed the same aggression in other software people: an intimate rudeness, like the bickering of long-married couples who no longer care that their squabbles are on public show. Charm was irrelevant to getting the job done. J-R knew many people like that in Whitehall, too.

  ‘I’m there once a week,’ said Graham. ‘For meetings and stuff. Tech integration. Bulk data handling, email. Obviously I hose my soul down afterwards.’

  He turned to offer J-R a grin that was more a simian snarl.

  A female voice cut through the male hum.

  ‘So how are you planning to get all those processed, Fatnav? There’s shi
t-to-the-power-of-N gigs to crunch and you fucking know I have Jonquil on my arse.’

  This could only be Dani Farr. J-R swivelled on his chair and saw where she’d landed in the room like phosphorus in water. She stood in a cluster of software engineers who were feeding at a screen a few desks along. At its centre sat Graham’s assistant, Colin – a man seemingly unaware of how a thin cotton T-shirt looked when draped across two generous man-breasts and a great dome of stomach. Known as Fatnav to his colleagues because of his droning computerised voice; and his shocking girth.

  ‘We’re doing the whole set in parallel batch,’ said Colin without pausing in his typing.

  ‘Jesus shitting Christ that’s farting in a fan. Use your brain, you obsessive anal zombie.’

  Colin appeared to take active pleasure at this abuse. He hunched over his keyboard and did something that resembled J-R’s mum’s terrier, Granville, choking on a plum stone; but which was presumably laughter.

  ‘OK, twats, give me admin rights on this domain.’

  Dani requisitioned the next-door computer. The installed programmer near-leaped from the chair.

  ‘And someone get me a re-up of storage.’

  ‘Hey! Use your own machine!’ said Colin.

  His sudden anger was territorial: evidently this was his fiefdom.

  ‘Superuser me now,’ said Dani.

  Colin gave her a furious US Marine-style salute, leaned over and made a short rattle on her keyboard before shoving it back to her.

  ‘Thank your fucky stars I’m in a hurry,’ she said, laying her smartphone beside the keyboard and starting to type, ‘or I’d shove your head so far up your arse you could french-kiss your liver.’

  J-R was soaked in the wake of Dani’s anger. This was not play-acting: not entirely. She was edgier than she’d been yesterday. As she worked, she checked her phone obsessively for something that never appeared.