The fire door’s wedged open with half a breezeblock. Dani peers through the gap and calls Gray’s name. The only reply is a moan of air con. She turns and walks to a set of discoloured garden furniture by the iron fence, sheds her satchel and sinks into a chair. Her phone nudges her buttock. She takes it out, spins it around a few times, toggles the screen on, off, on, off; puts it back in her pocket. She hasn’t proffered in hours.
Something rustles behind her. A dog, a big one, snuffles on its rounds on the other side of the corrugated iron. How much of its life is spent shut in with its own mess? Does anyone remember it’s there? She stares at the clear blue rectangle overhead. Not even a plane. Just you and me, Fido.
‘Dan?’
The fire door grinds on concrete. Gray stands at the door in a green T-shirt with a celtic knotwork design that reads: CNUT | THE ANGLO-SAXON CONNECTION.
‘It’s weird to actually see you.’ He walks to her. ‘You’re everywhere this morning but it’s a thin version I don’t know. Hallo.’
‘Hi.’
She stands to hold him. He’s awkward in her grip but she keeps on squeezing until she’s sure she won’t cry. She lets him go. He drops his backpack on the plastic table and lodges himself in the other chair.
It was an email from Gray that ended it, late one working night at Parley, in the heat of some long-forgotten crisis. It’s lurked in her inbox for the past two years. She used to read it so often she can almost recite it.
You know, sometimes I think this has really always been just an online relationship. Here we are now, feeding our VDU tans four storeys apart while all sensible couples are out in the world enjoying actual physical contact.
The thing about Gray is he can’t let a thing lie. He needs to drag it out and thrash it until it’s only a husk. Five words Dani long ago gave up saying to him: Yes, Gray. I get it.
Like any online relationship, you and me got to know each other very quickly on the surface, and also very deep. But what we didn’t have is what’s in between. We had 1) surface banter, and 3) deep intimacy. Magic and sheer fucking fun. But did you think I’d missed out 2)? No, Dan. We never had 2).
Also: always with the numbered lists.
The bit in between is what I don’t believe we’ll ever have – body language, touch, scent, sheer physical stuff. If you get to know someone first in the real world, like human beings used to do, you find out pretty fast if it’s going to gel. Online, you don’t – but you still go ahead and bond, deeply and painfully. Just ask the groomed thirteen-year-old girl who finally gets to meet ‘julie2001’, in a layby cafe on the ringroad.
I’m saying, not good.
And the crashingly inappropriate metaphors. Who was grooming who, in this delightful image?
I think that’s what’s up with us. Are we any more than avatars for each other’s avatars? It’s been like this a long, long time. I think we’re kidding ourselves. I’m not sure we always like each other very much, away from screenlife.
Why do you think we’re having this conversation by email? Or I’m having it. No idea what you’re doing.
Reading this?
There at Parley, four a.m., Dani read the mail straight through – all seven scrolls – then shut the lid of her laptop and cried unconsolably in the dark of the empty office.
She and Gray still made the code-drop deadline, though. They were pros.
‘You’re in a swarm, Dan.’
‘Storm?’
She pulls on the beer. He’s carried out four in his backpack, licked with condensation. She’s working on her second, he’s tending his first.
‘No, swarm intelligence. A thousand arseholes, each doing their arsehole thing. None of them smart enough to land one on you alone. But today some organising principle is working through them. A thousand individual arseholes swimming in the same direction.’
Another charming image. She wants to walk away and leave him talking. Shit and she needs him, though.
‘There’s an army of these cunts,’ she says. ‘An army.’
‘No.’
She bristles. This is the Gray she used to call Robot-Boy. What it was like to be with him – every word contradicted until she just gave up.
‘Not an army,’ he says. ‘There’s no structure. It’s more like – think of a bot attack on an IP address, OK?’
He’s miming this with his hands, holding the bottle by its neck. Not that you can mime a bot attack.
‘A distributed denial of service. Tens of thousands of dumb clients turning as one on the same website. Each no more harmful than an ordinary user. Together, they bring it down.’
‘So in this scenario I’m a website?’
He’s nodding.
‘Individually dumb. Together, a hive mind. Emergent intelligence. Swarm.’
She drinks from the nearly empty bottle. A connection clicks into place.
‘Like the Personas? You told me last night, just before the crazy started. You said some kind of intelligence might be emerging from sic? Maybe you were right. She was being – strange.’
‘Forget sic.’
‘No, I thought it was BS when you said it, but now—’
Gray snaps back.
‘Just, just leave it, all right? sic and the others are – I think they’re just confused. I’m looking at it, OK?’
His left leg jiggles when he’s thinking. Why is it that, when things get too random to handle, this is the guy she needs to speak to? When did they stop ranting at each other till three in the morning like a pair of street crazies? Their thoughts used to rebound like pachinko balls, in random surges and beautiful colliding patterns. But she can’t go back there.
‘Something happened last night,’ she says. ‘After you’d gone.’
‘All right.’
‘I started getting calls, mails, from total randoms who said they knew me. This journalist Will Samber was one. It was click! Something turned them onto me – and suddenly they had all this – well, you’ve seen it.’
‘Something or someone turned them onto you?’
‘Exactly, exactly,’ she says. ‘Sam says it’s the government trashing me.’
‘Sam says?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sam.’
‘Oh, fuck, Gray, yes. He’s this PR Jonquil made me talk to. But you met him before, in Greece that time? On the beach?’
‘Sam.’
‘Jesus H. Bollocks. Stop that. Stop now. You do not have the right.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Being a jealous cunt. What gives you—?’
‘I’m not being. Leave it.’
‘It’s me coming here to you. I. Need. You. All right? You. Do not try to own me on top of this.’
‘OK. God.’
Robot-Boy is back. Processes a moment. Speaks.
‘Let’s roll this back. A swarm of trolls has got hold of your docs. Proffers. Pictures.’
Dani ducks her head, yes.
‘My lovely trolls. What do I do to get them off me?’
‘You can’t.’
‘Oh, for fuck—’
‘You can’t just turn them off, Dan. These are persistent self-selecting shitheads. They don’t have a switch. Only option: turn yourself off, until this thing dies on its own. This is a lobster pot, you know? A one-way circuit. There’s no reversing out. You got to switch the machine off until it cools, then boot it up again.’
‘Switch off?’ says Dani. ‘Like no Internet? Like some hacker on a control order? Ha to the power of ha. This is me, here.’
She swigs her beer but the bottle is empty. She bangs it down and beckons for the last.
‘Not necessarily switch off altogether.’
Gray fusses the bottle open with his Swiss Army knife. His beard is crazy wild. Does he have anyone to look after him these days? Because it doesn’t look like it. He’s working on saying something. She takes the bottle and necks it, eyes still on him.
‘Look, um,’ he starts. ‘Do you have any other identiti
es?’
On the other side of the fence, the dog barks, very close. They flinch.
‘You mean like on my blog? Like pimpmyhide?’
‘Nah, that’s not – I mean, everyone knows that’s you.’
‘No, people don’t. It’s a blank slate. I need it to be separate. That’s why I have it.’
He digs in his backpack.
‘OK, lesson for the day,’ he says. ‘How long did it take these journos to find that porno from your blog?’ He’s got his laptop out. ‘Your identities aren’t separate. Look –’
He spins the screen for her to see, then reaches round to google her. First hits are all today’s media. Gray picks a link from the third page – a site called 123peoplelink. It sparkles with animated banners. DANIELLE (DANI) FARR is splashed across the top in 72-point Arial. Beneath, a bento box filled with random slices of Dani.
This is your average aggregator. Nothing sophisticated, fully automated. It noodles the net and ties stuff together around an identity. All it needs is a common identifier: an email address, social profile, shared contacts. Normally these automated profiles are narrow, professional; and this is the kind of stuff at the top of the screen: that promo shot, CV stuff, conferences she’s spoken at. Top right, tagged shots from Facebook and other social sites, garish enough to have made her wince if she hadn’t had a thousand times worse shoved in her face today. But below that, porn. Glimpses of the wild stuff. Insertions. Images from the anonymous Flickr she uses for club stuff. Private, personal – together. Not possible.
‘These datasets are walled,’ she tells the screen. ‘Different emails. Different profiles.’
She clicks and opens windows. They’re full to the horizon with every intimate part of Dani.
‘It’s found something to match you up,’ says Gray. ‘One data point does it. Dominos fall.’
‘No, but some of this is behind a login – look, there’s – oh.’ She closes the new tab as fast as she can to hide a stream of MeatSpace sex chat with monkey_love.
‘Oh, Dan,’ says Gray. ‘Dani, Dani, Dani.’
‘What?’
Did he see the MeatSpace chat before she closed the window?
‘You, of anyone? You gave them a key. Now they’re doxing you.’
‘Nobody’s bastard well doxing me. That’s what hacktivists do to corporations.’
Gray sighs again.
‘Pulling together latent content from across the net to humiliate you. What else is this? They’re using our tactics against us. This always happens eventually.’
Our tactics? Who is our?
‘How far has this gone?’ he asks. ‘They have your social media, your blog. What about your mail? Is there anything in these news stories that could only have come from your email?’
She gazes across the yard, then turns to stare at Gray.
‘Holy shit,’ she says, ‘that guy Samber. In his mail last night he said he’d met me at a conference. I knew he hadn’t but he almost convinced me because he said I’d talked to him about Me All Over.’
‘Your life-blog thing?’
‘And that’s work-in-progress. I haven’t put anything out on it. Only Parley email.’
‘OK, so work email.’
‘Or, what about the people here?’
He frowns at her.
‘No,’ she says, ‘listen, listen. I heard something last night. While this was kicking off. Someone was here, in the building.’
‘There’s people here twenty-four. Concentrate on digital and don’t be a paranoid. Anything else online? Unexpected mails or whatever.’
That wave of alerts, last night. Online billings, cloud accounts, voicemails vanishing. She rattles them off.
‘So shall I clean you up?’ asks Gray. ‘Can I do that for you?’
Dani nods and he passes her his laptop so she can log into webmail and forward him the offending mails one-by-one. She gives up account details, passwords, everything. Almost everything. Not MeatSpace. He takes back his PC and spreadsheets her life online. It’s like letting a doctor force her open and probe her, his face hanging steady between the stirrups.
As Gray types, she curls in the plastic chair and looks for answers in the flyblown tarmac.
gray stops typing. She looks up and pulls her legs to her chest. It’s cold in the afternoon shadow. He pulls a wallet from the backpack and roots through it.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘I’ve closed off everything. Doesn’t look like anyone’s pulled money from your accounts is the good news. But we can’t assume anything is secure. I want you off the grid. Look. Here.’ He slips out a credit card, places it on the table with a flourish. ‘What do you think of that?’
Dani glances at the card. It’s from some through-the-door direct bank she’s never heard of.
‘I think – I think it’s a credit card,’ she says.
‘Look closer.’
She unfurls herself from the chair and inspects the tacky swirls of green and blue.
‘The name,’ he presses.
She picks it up and reads it.
‘Terry Salmon.’ She looks at Gray. ‘Who the frick is Terry Salmon? Are you lifting plastic now?’
‘He’s me. I’m him.’
He’s fumbling in the backpack again. Out comes a translucent purple file. He undoes the popper and pulls out storecards, a council tax statement, bills. All Terry Salmon.
‘Terry is a safe harbour. He took me eighteen months. I started with a stray voter registration card that – found its way to me. I called up a birth certificate, then applied for things. Bought things. Each transaction made the next easier. Terry has a dynamite credit rating. He does stuff, buys stuff I don’t want associated with Graham. Or might not want associated in future.’
‘Like?’
He shrugs.
‘For serious, though?’ she says. ‘A secret identity?’
‘A public identity, but unconnected to the one you know.’
Thought she knew. Dani looks at the card in her hand as though it’s dropped from another dimension. Can someone really do this?
‘He’s my humanoid shield,’ says Gray.
She looks back at him.
‘Who are you, Gray?’
‘I’m – preparing. That’s all. Some day soon, the greatest luxury you’ll be able to buy is privacy. The haves will be the ones who can afford to segment their identity, hide parts of it. The have-nots will be who they are and nothing more. Anyone who knows one thing about them will be able to find out everything else. Click, click, they’ll be owned. Like you’ve been owned today. But me? If they’re tracking Terry, they won’t know anything. And vice versa.’
The yard stays silent.
‘But I don’t have anything like that,’ says Dani. ‘I’m just me.’
‘Yeah. You are.’
‘I can’t just turn myself off. I don’t think I want to turn myself off. I want to kick every troll on the Internet in his tiny nads.’
Gray starts scooping up the documents and tucking them away in the folder.
‘You’ve been out there, Dan. It’s not for you today. You need a zero-knowledge system. If you leave a single chink they’ll be on you in a nanosecond.’
He never looks her in the eye when he’s confronting even a bit.
‘And what would you know about it, Robot-Boy? What the shit use is this to me?’
She chucks the card at his face. It bounces off his glasses and lands between his hands. He slams the laptop shut as if he wants to break it.
‘Well, so aren’t you lucky you have so many exes in town? Why not go ask Sam for help if Sam is so smart?’
She stares at him. That wasn’t Robot-Boy, not at all. He stows the laptop and documents.
When she was with Gray, all she ever wanted was to provoke a reaction. It never worked and all she got was furious. Then it started to work too well – but that was an age ago. She’d forgotten what it was like to see him turn like this.
He puts the bag on the ground and brea
thes, head down. Then he looks up and to her amazement he’s grinning.
‘So Dan?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Have you ever actually been to a trendy Soho sex party?’
A jolt of laughter escapes her.
‘I had sex in a wardrobe once at a party in Holborn. Does that count?’
‘I actually do not want to hear about that.’
‘Yeah. Sorry.’
They listen to the dog scratch and scuffle then catch each other’s eye.
‘So Dan?’
‘Uh huh?’
‘Do you think we might have got together again if we hadn’t –? I mean, this place –?’
‘Oh, fuck, come on!’ she says.
‘No, OK. Sorry, too, I guess.’
But they’re good now. She studies his face. He’s bonier, more drawn about the eyes.
‘Do you still deal out here?’ she says.
He sizes her up before answering.
‘Not so much. Since The Big M moved in, it’s harder.’
Dani nods. Things have changed since Mondan adopted Parley. Emails monitored, tiny cameras appearing in high corners.
‘But do you have anything now?’ she asks.
Gray looks at her for a moment then unzips a pocket concealed inside the strap of his backpack. He pulls out a little Ziploc, weighs it in his hand and holds it out for her. It’s the ones with the little Reebok logo. She never knows if they’re a bad knockoff of the Nike ones, or it’s a pill factory with a sense of irony. But they’re actually pretty good.
Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle Page 17