Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle

by Matthew Blakstad

  ‘Yes, all. Now come on, Madame Minister, we have mebbe five minutes’ grace before the hacks spot the car.’

  She let his outstretched arm guide her to safety.

  Ten

  ¶sic_girl

  Hello Mummy. Whoo. It’s been, yikes, ages.

  ¶Nightshade

  im here now sic. you ok?

  ¶sic_girl

  I’m sore, Ma. Sorry sore. Seriously.

  ¶Nightshade

  sorry to hear that

  can we talk?

  ¶sic_girl

  Sigh. Let ’em talk. They all talk. At me to me through me. What’s a poor girl to do?

  ¶Nightshade

  lets start with bethany lehrer

  what do you know about bethany lehrer?

  ¶sic_girl

  Ask me anything. I just wanna be your teacher’s pet.

  ¶Nightshade

  tell me about bethany lehrer

  ¶sic_girl

  Bethany is a town in the Bible. Whoo ain’t I the clevers? Lazarus lived in there. Sorry. I ain’t meant to show off. Oh.

  ¶Nightshade

  concentrate sic.

  tell me about bethany lehrer. the politician.

  ¶sic_girl

  Ma, I want a rat. If you loved me you’d buy me a rat. Or two. I could have two rats. Or a mouse. Or a moose.

  Why do I hurt#

  The dialogue fractures under Dani’s fingers, a clay pot shaking apart on the wheel. Arse, arse and more arsing arse. Jonquil pulls back from her position flanking the chair and begins to pace and stretch, while Dani once more tries and fails to coax sic into common sense.

  The thing about a semantic dialogue is it’s an art not a science. You can’t rush it. Three hours ago a bunch of Parley high-ups filed up to the Skunkworks expecting Dani to be ready to roll. And, in fact, the first time, it seemed it was going to run OK. She’d typed, hello sic its mummy – the dumb code-phrase Gray set up for Dani to ID herself to the Personas. At first, sic had been on good behaviour: but she quickly spiralled off the axis of the conversation, falling into word association and random sidelines. You realise how tentative the thread of meaning is; how easily it falls into chaos.

  Since then, most times Dani’s tried to run a semantic, sic_girl has stayed indoors, locking them out with the message Shh. I’m sleeping. The team peeled off one-by-one while Dani fiddled with settings. Gray had tried to help her debug the session but he kept giving her sideways bullshit about sic evolving or taking on a mind of her own or something she had no time to even think about; and eventually she snapped, ‘Who wrote this fucking code?’ After five more minutes of spatting he left, too. Now it’s her and Jonquil. Who has been pretty quiet; but now she speaks, making Dani lose her place in a long array.

  ‘Danielle?’

  Because this is Jonquil, Dani bottles the swear and swings the chair round.

  ‘Remind me. You and Graham. Were you still an item when you worked together on Parley?’

  Dani shifts in her chair. This is a very un-Jonquil line of questioning. One of the things she likes about her boss is her total lack of concern for anyone’s feelings. Touchy-feeling from a boss is very much a no.

  ‘When the project started, kind of,’ she says. ‘Not by the time we launched.’

  ‘Uh huh. It’s OK, though? The two of you working together now?’ This could seem almost sympathetic. ‘Because looking at you I would say it is not.’ No, not sympathetic.

  ‘He doesn’t like me being the boss of him?’

  ‘See if there’s one thing I won’t tolerate in the workspace it’s seething hormones and bulging crotches. Get over yourselves and get on with the job. Yes?’

  Dani rotates slowly and silently back to her keyboard.

  ‘So. I have somewhere to be.’ Jonquil forces her tablet into her undersize handbag. ‘Just focus, OK? And this time, text or call when you get something. As soon as. On the telephone, OK?’

  She waves her phone like a rattle before tucking it in her bag, which she shoulders before marching from the room.

  The Skunkworks is quiet at last. All that’s happened since yesterday, it feels like a week. But here’s Dani, back where it started, and the calendar’s ratcheted forward just one day. Time is so random.

  Deciding the best route forward is drink, she hops up to raid the Skunkworks drinks cooler: shit, only Miller. She gathers five in her arms and trots back to the desk before the fridge-wet bottles can slide from her grip.

  She codes.

  ‘Hello?’

  Silence. She tries again.

  ‘Hello?’

  She’s sure she heard someone moving about in the stairwell. She should go and check but all she wants is to get the semantic running and then go home. She returns to her debugging.

  She’s being paranoid. Ever since she sent Sam that idiotic fucking mail, everything’s been spooking her. She’s been hitting Refresh on her inbox every thirty seconds, yearning for and dreading a reply – but nothing. Every email that’s come in has made her jump like a car’s backfired. And something strange has started this evening. A ton of weird Your details have been changed mails keep dripping in from social sites and blogs. She hasn’t had a second to check them out. Also that Grubly lurkware she thought she’d killed from her laptop – this evening it popped up again. And earlier, three missed calls and voicemail alerts – but when she checks, there’s no messages.

  She’s had no time to follow up any of this, but it’s odd. Like her data’s taking on life and breathing back at her. Some kind of software meltdown out there somewhere, presumably. A question for tomorrow.

  She pauses typing and flexes her fingers. The semantic is taking forever to configure but she’s close. She slugs beer to keep her rolling. She’d barely got through the first of these pissy American beers before she started feeling woozy – jet-lagged from yesterday’s all-nighter – so she popped her last two pills to keep the edge on. Now she has to keep the beers going to stop the jangling yanking her attention from the screen. She types and laps at the bottle.

  What was going on in Sam’s head when they met? He sure as hell didn’t come onto her, like he did to Mary at reception. What does Dani look like to him? A mess, presumably. No wonder he’s gone completely mute. He’s so sleek. None of the men she’s been with would even know where to buy clothes other than jeans and logo T’s. What kind of girl would he go for? She can see him leaning over to coo on Mary, in her retro dress and precision make-up. Where do girls like Mary go for clothes? How do they compile a look? Dani can only see clothes. She can’t reverse-engineer an outfit. These girls knew where to find all these separate elements and fuse them together with some kind of chemistry. Whatever Dani wears, as soon as she puts it on, is anti-style. People probably think it’s deliberate.

  The semantic session is ready. Dani chugs dregs from the final bottle and fires it up. This time right away she’s talking to sic_girl, with no going HAL every thirty seconds. But as Dani speaks through the text stream to her little girl, heat starts pumping inside her collar. There’s more to sic than usual. Something more present.

  ¶Nightshade

  whats happening sic?

  ¶sic_girl

  Ach, I’m yummy, Mummy. I’m itchy stitchy.

  ¶Nightshade

  are you ready to tell me about bethany lehrer?

  ¶sic_girl

  Ahh. The divine Ms Lehrer. Yis, I got a thing or two to say about her . . . oh.

  ¶Nightshade

  where are you getting hold of this stuff about her, sic?

  ¶sic_girl

  Yoosh. I dunno. A liddle here, a liddle there. It’s because I said yes to it when I . . . I mean, holy jeebus, Ma. Where does anyone get anything?

  ¶Nightshade

  ok so where are you copying the information from?

  ¶sic_girl

  Oh, I hears things. Chit-chat. Pitter-pat.

  ¶Nightshade

  i dont understand how you’re doing this but you have to
stop

  this is getting people in trouble

  ¶sic_girl

  Trouble? I got trouble in mind ’cos nobody knows the trouble I find.

  ¶Nightshade

  that blog with the emails from bethany lehrer and sean perce – how are you using that?

  who set up the blog sic?

  ¶sic_girl

  Erm . . . oh. Sorry. You can’t get on my blog, Ma. See, I’ve got more. To come, that is. Tomorrow, probs. Sorry. All righty?

  ¶Nightshade

  whos helping you proffer, sic?

  what are they telling you?

  ¶sic_girl

  Nobody helps a poor sick girl. Dontch’a see, Ma? I dun it. Me. On my ownsome.

  ¶Nightshade

  have you found some other way of getting information?

  are you pulling source from somewhere new?

  ¶sic_girl

  I think I gotta go now, Ma. Meds time.

  ¶Nightshade

  wait

  are you there?

  sic?

  ¶sic_girl

  Yes, Ma?

  ¶Nightshade

  sic listen

  this is a little crazy can i just

  talk to you?

  no more bethany lehrer

  i promise

  ¶sic_girl

  Crazy day. Crazy times. We’re all a little bonkers here. Have you even seen how the others are acting up?

  Gotta vamoose, Ma. Trulies.

  ¶Nightshade

  ok

  bye sic

  ¶sic_girl

  Overer and outerer, Ma. Laters.

  Dani keeps on looking at the blanked screen.

  ‘What the very?’

  By the keyboard is a neat row of empty bottles. The pinprick lights at the edge of her vision flow in dancing forms but when she turns to look at them they vanish like grandmother’s footsteps. She’s exhausted. Did she imagine that conversation?

  Then she hears it, for sure. A door slamming, out on the fire exit stairs, a loud thump and footsteps crashing down the steps. Her heart already racing from the semantic, she leaps up without a thought and runs the expanse of the Skunkworks. By the time she makes it to the door the footsteps have gone silent. She stands a while at the doorway looking into the glaring lights of the stairwell. The lights were already on when she opened the door. They’re on automatic sensors: they take time to flicker on. Someone was out here just seconds ago and triggered them. She isn’t imagining this.

  But why wouldn’t someone be here? This is a software house. She’s not the only one to work late. Or it’s the cleaner. She isn’t thinking straight. The weirdness with sic, and the pills and beer. She needs to chill the fuck out.

  Weaving back towards the glowing screen, she stumbles. That screen just gave life to a character she grafted from words. Did she imagine that? She leans over the desk and calls up the log file. There it is, in hard-edged monospace black-on-white. It happened. Blood pulses and popping lights dot her screen. She’s proper drunk. She sits. What happens now?

  There’s only one person she wants to share this with right now and that’s Sam – but then she remembers the email for the zillionth time and gets the same gut-knot. Even pissed, she knows better than to mail him again but still she calls up her email, in case he’s replied to her Crazy-Jane message.

  Still nothing – or nothing from Sam – but what there is, is odd. A heap of mail from total randoms. She skims the subjects. Common words leap out: enquiry, question, please call. She calls up one of the earliest, from a someone she’s never heard of called Will Samber. Subject Questions re blog.

  Hi Dani

  Long time no see. You may remember me from the New Social Directions conference. We talked about Me All Over and you said I should get in touch? It would be good to speak with you about this and also your exciting blog. I’m very interested in all the work you are doing. Do give me a call on –

  She closes it. Me All Over? Where the fuck did he get that? It’s Jonquil’s dweeby name for Dani’s pervasive sharing app-in-progress. Only thing: she never talks about Me All Over in public, and certainly not at some hipster-infested conference. Who is this guy? She reaches for her satchel and pulls out her phone to check her address book for this alleged old mate. The lock screen says 37 missed calls.

  Thirty-seven.

  Dani never uses her phone to talk to people. Months go by without a call. Now thirty-seven. She surfs the call log. Withheld; Withheld; some unknown mobile; Withheld; a couple of 0207s; Withheld.

  She looks at the phone a long time but no course of action presents itself. Then it starts vibrating in her hand.

  Withheld.

  She turns it off fast, as though it’s burning her, and puts it back in her bag. For the longest time she sits alone in the semi-dark.

  Thursday:

  Creepshots

  ‘A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.’

  —Mark Zuckerberg

  ‘But the spirit of our time is firmly focused on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only.’

  —Milan Kundera,

  The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes

  Zero

  Sorry to break this to you. Your new computer in its slim brushed-metal case? It’s the least efficient creation ever sicked up by the bald inventive ape called man. At any moment 99.99% of that overheated wafer runs to waste. If it was an orchestra it would be playing a sonata for solo triangle while the strings and horns sighed through a twenty-million-bar rest. You were sold a pup. We’ve built an instrument to move at electron speed, quadrupled its clock rate every third New Year; then wasted all but a sliver of it on a central processor that can only do one thing at a time. And you think men monotask?

  You’re no better. When did your focus get so narrow? Ever since you washed up on these digital shores you’ve been learning to navigate safe passage through a daily storm of data. Along the way you’ve grown insensitive to the noise. You funnel your attention to the slimmest of channels. You outsource your choices to some algorithm in the cloud. You see the things it decides you want to see. How loud does something need to get to take your attention?

  Too late to undo what’s already done. This business is a lobster pot. Once you’re in it there’s no getting out.

  ¶TMI

  Did I ever tell you I have a thing for chubby girls with genius IQs?

  Check out these awesome pictures. Chick’s name is Dani.

 

  One

  ‘Cyber leaker is online sex addict’

  Bethany read the headline out loud and looked around the meeting table.

  ‘Does this not answer your questions, Detective Sergeant?’

  She threw the Express back onto the pile. Almost all the second editions had the story, though most had missed it in their first. When her car arrived in Battersea this morning, the stack of papers waiting on the back seat still seemed to be running with yesterday’s story, about the emails between her and Sean. They’d pretty much all bought the argument that the emails didn’t prove anything about the hack; none put the story before page five. It gave her hope the thing might already have lost momentum – until she came on the red-top, tucked at the bottom of the pile by a discreet staffer, bearing the first story about this wretched-looking girl and the first of these garish photos. She’d noted the byline – Will Samber – then dropped the tabloid back onto the car seat and started yoga breathing as the Prius dragged towards Westminster Bridge. The press were an infestation, returning in a new wave every time you smoked them out.

  By the time she’d made it into the office, a dozen other titles had picked up the lurid new angle and moved the story to pages one or three. Now every one of the damn things was spread across her office table in a patchwork of sleaze. DS Raeworth picked up the Express and glanced politel
y down the page as if it was the first time he’d seen the story.

  ‘We’re looking into it, Minister. This can only be speculation at this point.’

  He placed the paper back onto the pile.

  She’d chewed it over with Krish before the policemen arrived. This new angle pulled them back up the news agenda. More worryingly, all the papers had picked up on a word from the original article: LEAKER. Rather begging the point that something of substance was being leaked by sic_girl. Or rather, by this girl Dani Farr.

  ‘Surely, though, you should pursue this?’ she said. ‘I understand you and one of your men already interviewed Ms Farr? Shouldn’t you be crawling all over her computer right now?’

  Raeworth exchanged a look with his mute detective constable.

  ‘We’ll be speaking to her,’ he said, ‘but –’

  Krish coughed but said nothing.

  ‘– you may recall, Minister,’ continued Raeworth, looking directly at Krish, ‘your own office asked us to withdraw from Parley on Tuesday morning. To allow you to carry out your own investigation?’

  Bethany, too, turned to Krish, who cut in.

  ‘Well, careful, Detective Sergeant. The emails were actually posted on this overseas blog. The messages on Parley only linked to them. We’ve no evidence Parley is to blame.’

  For the first time, Bethany had a prickling sensation of Krish working across her.

  ‘You do know, Mr Kohli, we can have a digital forensics team in there in a matter of hours. Crawl over every inch of their servers if we choose. And Ms Farr’s equipment.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Krish. ‘Well.’