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Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle

Page 18

by Matthew Blakstad


  Before she can take the baggie, Gray pulls it back. She’s left with her hand out as he reaches into his rucksack, pulls out his wallet and extracts something from it. He hands her back the baggie and this time it’s wrapped around the credit card. Terry Salmon’s credit card.

  ‘On me,’ he says. ‘Pills and card. I have another ID I’m shaping, anyway. Terry can be yours. You can have him all. Or her, now, I guess. Theresa. Terry.’

  She takes the baggie, then the card. She holds the card up to inspect it, squinting against the white light overhead.

  ‘Terry. Huh. Well, hello, Terry.’

  Dani levels up.

  From The Electronic Radical

  by Dr Elyse Martingale (1957, Gollancz)

  We see here the approaching crisis of the modern age.

  When the machine becomes a tool for solving every conundrum we will believe we can achieve anything; and yet what new problems will these machines throw in our paths? Problems that today we cannot even imagine.

  These engines of thought will become vehicles for war, crime and disorder; they will exasperate and frustrate our dreams as much as they promote and realise them; they will taunt us with their superior knowledge of every topic; but their mechanical nature will be too slow to grasp our human needs. In spite of this we will face great disappointment each time they let down our heightened expectations.

  A great thinker began our century with a challenge known as the Decision Problem. It asks: is there a method by which we can always know, in a given system of proof, whether a statement is true, or false? This little puzzle will seem abstruse to many readers; but it is the key to our crisis. I hope to demonstrate this by restating it, as has Professor Turing, in terms of machinery: Can I create a machine which will answer any question I can present to it?

  Let me now put you out of any suspense you may feel in this matter. The answer is, ‘No.’ Soon we shall set in motion many millions of ingenious processes. But we can never know which will lead to the great achievements of the era and which will collapse in ruins; or merely churn on: endless, fruitless.

  ¶sic_girl

  Never say sic_girl done gone cast stone one. (Or mebbe a bitty one. Soz.) But dey got dirty and shirty and now I’m feeling hurty. So, whoosh. Right back atch’a, Beth.

  Ahem.

  Exhibit a) The contract lady Lehrer signed six months ago in her own fair hand with big bad Mondan. May I draw m’learned friend’s attention to clause 21.7.1?

  In which The Supplier (that’s Mr Perce) agrees to disclose any data breach to The Service Owner’s Responsible Officer (that’s the lovely Lehrer – do keep up) within 24 hours?

  I guess they must have done that when someone hacked all that data, right?

  Right?

  #sigh#

  Darling ones, will you do a thing for me? You will?

  Rinse and repeat:

  I am not Dani Farr

  I am not Dani Farr

  I am not Dani Farr

  Ten

  J-R fiddled with the lock on the toilet-stall door. The fussy mechanism somehow exemplified the precious impracticality of Parley’s offices. He brute-forced the bolt into place and breathed out. For a moment he was protected from the disorder outside. His hand shook as he worked his fly.

  The stall was narrow, making it hard to navigate around the fixtures. J-R lifted the seat and positioned himself against the left-hand wall to avoid the sink and hot-air dryer encroaching from his right. He waited for a coherent stream to emerge; but in spite of the raging pressure from his bladder, stress staunched his urethra. Three rudimentary drops edged out, then nothing. He gazed into the well-proportioned bowl. Villeroy & Boch. Sic_girl’s latest post had amplified his position from awkward to devastating. Mere hours after he emailed Mark the Mondan contract, ‘she’ had shared the self-same document with the world. It had to be a coincidence but it could only look terrible for J-R. How long would it be before he got the phone call saying – what? That he was dismissed? Under investigation? For the first time he wished everyone would stop pussy-footing around the issue and shut Parley down before any more harm was done.

  He gave his penis a hopeful tug and repositioned his feet to relieve the tension in his inner thighs. He feared his bladder might rupture if he didn’t let out something soon. The BlackBerry trilled and vibrated in his left hand. He flinched: he hadn’t realised he was holding it. On cue, a bright stream of urine issued from him and strafed the water in a hearty rush.

  He fumbled the BlackBerry. Krish’s name lit up the screen. He breathed twice as the pressure in his bladder eased. The ringtone played again. Better to answer. He redirected the pee against the back of the bowl to minimise background noise and answered left-handed. Krish’s voice took over before the BlackBerry had made it to his ear.

  ‘So who exactly is this Mark Dinmore? The truth, now.’

  ‘Ah, Krish. As I said—’

  ‘Because let me tell you what I’m looking at. To my left is a commercially confidential government contract that you emailed to Mr Dinmore yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Krish—’

  ‘And to my right, a missive from sic_girl, posted twenty minutes ago. Linking to a leaked copy of – can you guess what she’s linking to, J-R?’

  J-R watched the continuing stream of piss. Would it never end?

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘The contract.’

  He eased around to his right to direct the stream against the side of the bowl.

  ‘Well, you know what, J-R? You just –’

  As J-R turned, his elbow swung under the sensor of the hand-dryer. A roar of heated air shot down his leg. He flinched away, spraying urine up the side of the bowl and onto the wall. As he righted the stream the sweaty BlackBerry slipped through the fingers of his other hand.

  There followed a moment of suspended time. The BlackBerry hung in the air as the heater roared and his brain struggled with a snapshot choice: control the flailing stream of pee, or catch the flying smartphone? He attempted both; but he’d never been good at such double tricks. His right hand squashed wetly on his penis. His left flapped the air around the BlackBerry, knocking it towards the toilet bowl. It bounced on the porcelain rim, chipped hopefully sideways for a second, then slid to the bottom of the bowl, lighting the water with a yellow glow. Undaunted, J-R plunged his hand into the liquid and grabbed the sunken plastic slab. Only when he’d pulled it out, dripping but still apparently alive, did he register what he’d done. He looked at it, shook it a little and held it several inches from the side of his head, as though miming a much larger handset. His cuff dripped onto his shirtfront.

  ‘Ah – hello?’ Silence. ‘Big Krish?’ Still silence.

  He looked again at the sloppy device then held it under the hand-dryer, which roused back into life and began to toast it. After a few seconds of this treatment, the screen died and refused to respond to any form of button-press.

  J-R stood breathing. He surveyed the wreckage of the wall, his trousers, the unlit thing in his hand. His breath was short. He thought: I am off the map. For the first time in years, they cannot find me. This thought was a matter of surprise. An intense resolve gripped him but he’d no notion where he should direct it.

  After a moment he dropped the BlackBerry through the metal waste flap in the wall. He began to rinse his hands at the miniature sink, letting the water touch and warm him.

  ¶identikid

  It happens tomorrow, people. 18 hours and counting. We still need 15 more bodies. Whisper me NOW.

 

  Eleven

  The female Terry Salmon becomes active at 16:03 on Thursday at FoneBiz on Theobalds Road, with the purchase of a quad-core 3GHz Samsung Galaxy Edge smartphone on a 4G contract. She uses her CreditU MasterCard and IDs with a January gas bill. Her credit check clears at first touch. She adds a USB dongle and a hard shell case for the phone – like Dani, Terry is prone to dropping electronics. The bill comes to £326.85. The card has a £22,000 l
imit.

  Her next stop is PC Xpert on Kingsway, where at 16:18 she adds £4,478.43 to the card with the purchase of an HP EliteBook 9960, a gunmetal Samsung Gear 3S smartwatch, an assortment of cables and adaptors, a slew of portable storage and a slick black backpack with a laptop compartment; and space for a bunch of other stuff.

  Continuing her passage west she withdraws £250 at 16:30 from a generic ATM in PAYWELL FOOD 24 HOUR on Endell Street. The transaction charge is £1.50.

  At 16:39 Terry appears on Parley, with the handle AStrangeFish. She uses mobile tethering to go online, so wifi logs do not provide a record – but from the timing of the transaction, we surmise that this takes place in Starbucks on Long Acre, where at 16:36 she puts £12.73 of coffee, sandwich and rocky road onto the MasterCard. Once online, she begins to register for a variety of cloud-based services and downloads open source software at an accelerating pace.

  Gray gave her the folder. Combined with the credit card, the documents will authorise any transaction with relevant, accurate, fictional data: address, NI number, mother’s maiden name.

  She starts with gentle spikes, nudging at the fringes of her powerful new opponents in government. Citing sic_girl, cracking wise, acting and reacting, connecting. Gray says she’s a black belt in social media kung fu and here she’s amazed how little she needs Dani’s existing footprint to spur this on. She knows what tone to strike when pinging unsolicited slogans, links and jibes to the Personas, and to influential human users she knows will cite them. They do; and AStrangeFish is seen and read, and rapidly builds a following. She parasites blogs and the growing library sic_girl is linking to. Someone has created a wiki of the leaked emails and documents, plus thousands of user-generated docs commenting on them. It’s a mishmash, the hokey and the random bleeding into the credible and alarming.

  Terry learns rapidly. Dani wishes she’d listened more closely to Gray’s rants about privacy and identity. The intel is so rich, on Bethany Lehrer and her Digital Citizen data grab – and on Mondan, whose scale and reach she hadn’t understood: their bacterial growth in storage and processing in Switzerland, South Africa, Israel; in Ohio, California and Texas; and deep under London. Growing like a Krynoid.

  The free data memes keep funnelling back to the same core pool of users: one in particular. identikid. Is he the source of sic_girl’s words? Either way, he’s planning something tomorrow. It’s trending. She reaches out.

  ¶AStrangeFish >> whisper -> ¶identikid

  hey kid seen your proffers

  what r plans 4 tomorrow?

  Presenting through this freshly-minted handle something shifts in her. She’s stepped back from a mask she never knew was there and is looking at the world through a different set of eye-holes. Dani’s built a local kind of fame. Now that she’s all of a sudden known to the world, the attention has warped into digital gang-rape. So she’s flipped a switch and stepped out of herself. The whole stage of the Internet is empty with potential. She’s clean. Terry is clean.

  But she isn’t clean. Who’s clean these days? The rascal Grubly has slid untethered onto Terry’s hard drive to lurk in the folds of her SYS hierarchy. It was the G4 dongle drivers that let him in, the second she docked it.

  Now Grubly feeds on the growing breadcrumb trail of her page impressions, consuming every cookie added to her drive. Grubly loves browser cookies. They taste of souls. Every thirty seconds, Grubly squirts a pellet of half-digested data to the parent server. In return come nourishing correlations, as the actions of Grubly’s user are matched with richer master data, out there somewhere too remote for Grubly to conceive of. Grubly cares almost as much about the parent server as it does about the user.

  So far, no correlations have appeared for this new user Terry. She was birthed into central London this mid-afternoon. But Grubly is patient. Soon some identifier will arrive and allow a match. Then Grubly will know the user completely and will at last provide her with the attention she naturally deserves.

  ¶ParleyNerd

  Tell me it makes any sense that a mindless software Persona would stand up and start attacking a politician?

  Only one explanation makes any sense: she isn’t mindless any more. This girl just started thinking for herself.

  Full post here:

  sic_girl for the win

  Twelve

  ‘How quickly can you start to sell this in?’

  These were the moments of coming together. Work was what work was, day on endless day. Jonquil pretty much adored it, welcomed its continuous demands, even when the sole rewards were backache and a wakefulness Temazepam couldn’t conquer. Maybe she would even keep on doing what she did if the days were only ever the same – but once in a rare while there came these holy moments where you created something truly new. This was the joy of tech. When these times came she was no way forty-one or even thirty-one, and she recalled the cussedness that drove her back in the day.

  Nobody stole these moments from her. She was living this; and some preppy British PR guy couldn’t throw her off. All she needed from him was to make what they had more exciting of a meme.

  ‘I’m not seeing a message here, Ms Carter,’ he said. ‘Not one that would cut through the noise you’re up against.’

  She cracked her glass down onto the meeting table.

  ‘I can’t spin it to you any simpler, Sam. Sic_girl is alive. She’s thinking for herself. She’s found this leaked info on her own and is making it public. Which means we’re a) not to blame, b) Danielle is off the hook, and c) we just created the world’s first artificial intelligence and are going to d) win the Nobel Prize. End of. We have got to release this thing into the wild, and now.’

  ‘And would you like to know what a hack will say when I call them with this? Once they stop laughing?’

  ‘I do not hire you to have opinions. I hire you to sell.’

  Jonquil clenched up as Graham’s whiny voice chipped in.

  ‘There’s evidence,’ he said. ‘Data.’

  ‘With respect,’ said Sam, ‘data won’t get a journo on our side. I need clean, compelling lines.’

  ‘Well, hello?’ snapped Jonquil. ‘The Personas have come to life. If that’s not clean and compelling enough –?’

  The flack rubbed his hands across his tight-cut hair. He was too easy to rile – though otherwise, he seemed pretty sharp. Graham made that dying-warthog cough.

  ‘But. Um, but?’ he said.

  The PR kid gave him the weirdest look, a kind of patient condescension. Jonquil gave him a floor-is-yours gesture: why the hell not?

  ‘These are data,’ he said. ‘Data are what matter. I’ve calculated the correlations between what sic_girl says and what her algorithms read off the net. For last Monday, ninety-eight point three per cent correlation. Explained by standard error. Everything she said Sunday came from her source data. Monday, ninety-nine point two per cent correlation. Again, standard tolerances.’ Jesus, was he going to recite numbers all night? ‘Tuesday, though, correlation of sixty-two point seven per cent. Yesterday, fifty-two. And last night we have a dialogue with her that, well – she’s making stuff up. And it’s not just sic_girl. Half the Personas are saying things they’ve never been taught to say. Some have been doing this for quite a few weeks. Privacy, identity, state control. This is technically really really interesting.’

  Sam looked at Graham for a short while then turned back to Jonquil.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m going to be frank. Parley is burning up with anti-government protest – and dreadful stuff about Dani Farr. The media can’t reproduce it fast enough. There isn’t a millimetre space for our voice. We need a game-changer.’

  ‘And I’m telling you,’ said Jonquil, ‘we have the game-

  changer.’

  ‘And I’m telling you nobody will buy it. I’m sure you believe that something is happening—’

  ‘No. No, no. You don’t patronise me. It is, period, happening. I want a media package on this and I want it for sign-off by
noon tomorrow.’

  Corrigan rotated his iPhone 360 degrees on the tabletop then nodded slowly. He’d read the runes. He stood and gathered his things. She flapped her hands at him, g’wan, shoo.

  ‘Five o’clock tomorrow, Sam.’

  $ cd temp

  $ ls *dump*

  sictimeline.dump.01.txt syslog.dump.01.txt

  $ head -n 1 *dump*

  ==> sictimeline.dump.01.txt <==

  Whee! At least 45 minutes ahead with no pain! Hmm. Now. How to use ’em?

  ==> syslog.dump.01.txt <==

  Whee! At least 45 minutes ahead with no pain! Hmm. Now. How to use ’em?

  $ tail -n 1 *dump*

  ==> sictimeline.dump.01.txt <==

  Reallys, people. I does love yas. Even when I acts like a big grumpyface.

  ==> syslog.dump.01.txt <==

  Reallys, people. I does love yas. Even when I acts like a big grumpyface.

  $ diff -q *dump*

  Files sictimeline.dump.01.txt and syslog.dump.01.txt differ

  $diff *dump* | wc-L

  2186

  $ WHAT THE FUCK?

  bash: WHAT: Command not found...

  Thirteen

  Plates crash. Terry startles up and Dani finds she’s in a Westminster café. She remembers arriving here but doesn’t know how long it’s been. She touches her coffee cup: frozen by air con.

  All afternoon she’s dug behind the sic_girl proffers, overturning layers of data, searching out a single byte of information that can explain sic_girl’s transformation and her own public laying bare. For reasons she can’t fathom, it’s easier under cover of the Terry identity than if she’d done it as herself. It gives her freedom to invade and bring no baggage. Anonymous, with passwords carried in her fingertips, she moves through electronic defences with zero friction. Mostly she’s turned up an enormous nothing; but that’s normal with data mining. Patience is ninety-nine per cent of the work.

 

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