J-R abandons the screen.
‘Mark—’
‘No.’ Mark is already halfway to the door. ‘Sorry, but I’m not going to be the token poof in your pre-midlife crisis. I’m nobody’s Get out of jail card.’
‘But—’
‘I’ll find another way to get at Perce – without going through you. I’m sorry I messed you around – and if I led you on, I’m sorry for that, too. Email me as and when you feel like being a sane human being, OK? And we can have a beer. Until then—’
‘Mark –!’
But he’s gone.
¶Spotted
Anybody seen that Dani Farr lately?
Nine
Terry Salmon sneaks the underground to 404. She walks by phonelight. Packed above her, a thousand tonnes of muck and bones; the mess of lives from Boudicca to Boris baffle out the world.
One single fleeting bar of signal on Terry’s phone; but how could that signify? No one has her number, no one knows her name. Dani is insulated by Terry, hidden from the shit up above. Nothing makes it through into this tunnel.
Even Grubly can barely hear its own remote song. A tiny slice of location data makes it through the compacted earth. It’s enough.
Dani checks the screen for Gray’s directions, takes a right. Screenlight dances on mossy brick. The walls are sweating in the darkness but Dani’s in a perfect calm. Purpose moves her forward.
Up to now, before she chose any course, made any decision, she crowdsourced. Major and minor decisions alike she outsourced to an aggregate intelligence. Hivemind: should I take a left or right? Shag this guy? Go out tonight or stream Arrested Development? A hundred answers she could trust, ignore or laugh at. She doesn’t want to do that now. She’s clear on it.
Maybe Terry’s come on this mission and left Dani at home, asleep on the sofa. Would Dani have this focus? Could her soft arms have dragged a woman into a concrete basement? Would Dani fuck the boy she’s longed for? Terry acts in the world, so much more real than the sliver of white and purple Dani used to be.
Terry walks on through the dark. The weight in her bag slaps a rhythm on her back. Who wouldn’t be her?
¶sic_girl
Come out, come out, Sean, wherever you are.
Ten
Perce made directly for his desk, unlocked a drawer and fished out an ID lanyard and an A4 envelope. He looped the lanyard over his neck, stuffed the envelope into the pocket of his smooth grey jacket. J-R remained standing, pulse moving in his cheeks. He hadn’t budged since Mark left.
He cleared his throat. This manufactured man would think him ridiculous for pressing on, but what other course remained?
‘Mister Perce. Let me assure you, I am going to the Cabinet Office.’
Perce looked around the room.
‘Where’s your snotty friend?’
‘If you think you’ll pass the Fit and Proper test for the Digital Citizen contract –’
Perce grinned in artificial modesty.
‘Bit late for that.’
‘You can’t mean they know about this?’
J-R’s gesture took in the monitor screen where Perce’s supernatural software had been.
‘Funny. Of course they do, son. They know you’re here, don’t they?’
‘How they would know that?’
‘This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. What you just saw is what Bethany bought. It’s what the Digital Citizen is. Caveat emptor.’
‘Bethany would not allow this intrusive, inappropriate –’
Surely there had been a time when J-R was able to complete a sentence. Perce wagged a teacherly finger.
‘So you did click on it. I haven’t found the person yet who can leave that genie in its bottle. So: me prying? No. This isn’t for me, it’s for you. For the user. I get data, yes, and that’s extremely helpful. But you get experience: you get your life. You only had time to taste it. It can take you over. Everything About You, we call it. It’s for everyone.’
‘Anyone can see all that—?’
‘Fuck, no. You set your privacy. You think I’d piss on data protection like that?’
‘But you just tracked a government minister – I saw you!’
Perce snorted.
‘C’mon, we don’t let just anyone do that. I was in God mode. Listen, tell me something. The things you saw in there, when I was out of the room: did your friend not like them? That why he left?’
‘That is not your business.’
‘Exactly,’ said Perce. ‘It isn’t. What we have here isn’t for sharing. This isn’t cat videos or liking a band. This is you. You don’t want strangers seeing it, and probably not your friends. You might share tiny slices – some freaks will always want to share every time they take a shit – but mostly it’s for you alone. You got a friend in you. Why not spend quality time with him? Tell me honestly: didn’t you want more?’
J-R was taken up short. The only thing that had broken his digital spell was that Mark was about to see and hear things. If he’d been alone, he would not have wanted it to stop. From such a brief touch, this thing had the potential for profound addiction.
‘Listen,’ said Perce. ‘Fun fact. You want to know who wrote the code behind Everything About You? Dani Farr is who. From scratch. She’s that good. All we did is zhuzh it up. Grubly, everything, she wrote. And do you know why? Because she wants the network to know her. She wants to be in the cloud. This is people, J-R, what they want. I give it to them.’
‘But you know. You track everything people do.’
‘No, no. Well, yes, but so are yay many companies. And governments. What I’m doing is way cooler. I’m tracking everything they feel. Everything they want. Stop and think about the potential of that. Imagine knowing where everybody’s heads and hearts are, round the clock. Soon we won’t be targeting people by income, postcode, all that broad brush nothing. We’ll target their mood. Angry? Here’s Death Trap II for PlayStation. Ambitious? Self-help and executive leatherware. Horny? Porn. Highly tailored porn.’
A perfume advertisement scissored around the glass walls of the room, right across the giant screens.
‘What we have here is people’s stories. And when you have the story you can help to write it.’
He agitated for the door, an arm out for J-R.
‘C’mon. There’s someone we both need to see.’
J-R followed, feet barely lifting from the metal floor. As they crossed the sealed bridge to the lift lobby, Perce took another knight’s move.
‘Well, that was a great discussion.’ He clapped and rubbed his hands. ‘Thank you, I really appreciate your time today.’
‘I –?’ attempted J-R.
‘So, what are you thinking now?’
‘About –?’
‘I know this was a whistle-stop, but you get the picture. Could you work with all this?’ Perce placed a hand on J-R’s shoulder. ‘Help us get our message across?’
‘Across to –?’
‘Ha! To Westminster. To the world!’
He punched J-R’s upper arm in muscular chumminess. This glassiness of character: there must be a diagnosis for such a pathology.
‘As in do you want the job?’
As they entered the lift lobby Perce pulled the envelope from inside his jacket and slapped it onto J-R’s chest, then pressed the call button.
John-Rhys Pemberton. BY HAND.
‘We’ve cast it for now as Vice President, Government and Corporate Affairs but that’s up for discussion.’ Perce tapped the paperwork with one finger. ‘Salary will blow your public sector balls off. Don’t worry about that.’
The demos were over and the pitch landed. Perce’s whole attention was on J-R. This was one of the moments when one must rally one’s entire being, cut through the overgrowth; distil into a single potent phrase the insight that would turn events.
‘You’re – ah, sorry, I – what?’ said J-
R.
With a gentle bell-tone the lift slid open. Perce reached an arm to hold back the door.
‘After you.’
J-R couldn’t pull shut his slack mouth as he entered the lift. Perce pushed the lowest button from a long selection of floors.
‘Krish Kohli tells me you’re good. And be frank: do you have a job right now? Or will you by the end of the evening news cycle?’
‘But Bethany isn’t –’
Perce looked at his watch and raised one eyebrow.
‘You sure of that?’ he said.
‘How can you even speak like this, when you and she –?’
Bethany in those emailed photos. Abandoning herself to Perce, owned and encrypted by him.
‘J-R,’ said Perce, ‘I’m sure you’re a great guy, and you’ll be a terrific colleague, but a word of advice: steer the fuck away from my private life.’ The grin got broader, tighter. ‘All right?’
Floors ticked down on the display.
‘So, then?’ said Perce.
J-R bought time by flipping the pages on the offer letter. It included a contract.
‘You’re asking me to come and work here?’ he said. ‘For you?’
‘Was the general idea.’
Iron soaked into J-R’s bloodstream. He flapped the contract at Perce.
‘Forgive me, but why would I, after you stole private information from me and from thousands of people? Sabotaged the programme I’ve invested heart and, and—’
‘Sabotaged it?’
‘The Giggly Pigglies. Grubly. Regular, deliberate abuse of people’s privacy. But the thing that most gets to me is the arrogance. We know that supposed hack was just a cover-up. Did you really think you could walk in and raid these data and not be caught? Information will out, Mr Perce. You’ve wrecked your contract and in the process drowned a hundred-and-seventy-million-pound public programme.’
‘The hack? Me? Bullshit.’
The lift display hit zero and continued counting down.
‘I’m sorry?’ said J-R.
At minus three, the lift huffed to a stop and the doors pinged open. Perce led J-R into a blank hallway, pulled him aside by his upper arm. J-R breathed in his male scent: the lightly toasted smell of money.
‘Listen,’ said Perce. ‘We collared the guy responsible for the Giggly Pigglies hack on Thursday. He’s already gone.’
He turned and marched on down the corridor, still talking. J-R was forced to follow.
‘We deal with our mess. How about your precious department gets its own house in order? It takes two keys to hack that data. You think that data was used for the pig stunt up north? Well if so, whoever did it got to someone at the ministry, too.’
Perce was right. Only a handful of ministry staff had access to those codes. J-R had, of course, suspected Bethany – until he found out how much more simple, and human, her transgression had been.
‘If any of that is true,’ he said, ‘why not come out and say so? Why let sic_girl threaten your contract?’
‘Because someone –’ Perce stopped again. ‘Some. One. Is setting me up. Faking this hack. Raiding my data over and over to make me look culpable. Me.’
This was not staged. Perce felt this. He headed off again, a grey-suited rabbit for J-R to follow along the white tunnels threading below the city.
‘I’d love to report this to the Data Commissioner, like a good boy. But can you see them believing me when I say I’ve been stitched up?’ Perce gave a comic shrug. ‘I mean, I would say that, wouldn’t I? I do that and this somebody gets me. After what I’ve built, they get me and I lose the chance to do amazing things for so many people.’
He guided J-R down the passage.
‘Someone is out to fuck me, J-R. I don’t. Like it. I want you to help me fix this.’ Then another shift of tone: jaunty, matey. ‘And really, is what you’ve been doing up to now so damn inspiring? Why wouldn’t you want to be here – encouraging me to play the white man in all of this?’
Confoundingly, J-R found himself laughing as he trotted behind Perce.
‘Excuse me – the white man?’
‘Oh, is that not PC? White knight, then. See? Already you’re influencing me for the better.’
Perce was impregnable. J-R was pulled behind him. He couldn’t work here – of course not – but if he were to turn and head for home, what was waiting for him? Not Mark.
J-R turned a corner. Perce was already halfway down the plain white corridor.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Meet my other new recruit.’
¶Nightshade
so long everyone youve been the best
see you on the other side
¶sic_girl
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¶riotbaby
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¶TMI
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¶Spotted
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¶lolcatz
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¶tvjoe
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¶CelebFactor
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¶NewsHound
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¶bottomhalfofthepage
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¶therealnobody
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Eleven
That’s all her children safe. Dani stacks up the hard drives – ten slabs of intelligence, each the size of a paperback book – and wads them down with yesterday’s T-shirt. She zips up the bag. Next up, the DigiCitz drives: the disks Sam says will take Perce down. Evidence he’s been hacking people’s data left, right and centre.
‘Sam says’ makes it sound like she trusts Sam, which is interesting, because if you asked her she’d have said she totally doesn’t.
With another swipe of Gray’s card she unlocks the smoke-glass door of the next Meccano cabinet. Gray was right. The DigiCitz data is right next door to the Parley boxes. Easily close enough to have been hit by Perce’s killer magnet, if they’d had the chance to wipe the Parley disks.
This is way too fun. She needs to remember Leo died upstairs and police are swarming the place like bedbugs. But it’s good, too. She should be cornered and desperate; instead she’s invisibly rescuing her life’s work. Nobody knows she’s here, in this great white air-chilled data farm, deep beneath the pavement.
It takes less than five minutes to open the DigiCitz boxes and extract a hunk of magnetic information from the guts of each. She stows them in her bag, slings the strap over her shoulder and steps back to watch the serene hum of glass-faced cabinets. She wants to damage them. This is a beautiful thought, not an angry one. The calm is on her now. But it will give her simple, healing pleasure to fuck with every immaculate inch of this vault of captive data.
with all the careful she has terry slips the big steel pistol from her backpack and slides off the safety
dont ask how she even knows how to do that
facing the cabinets she sets her feet wide, weighs the weapon and purses her tongue, raises the iron and unloads seven rounds into the cabinets
the recoil staggers her back
the smooth white walls return a volley of sonic booms
The entry-pass system beeps behind her and the door swings open with a breath. In the real, she didn’t do any of that. What she pulled from the backpack was her phone. She steps back to take a picture of the empty rack, to proffer with the
She turns at the sound of footsteps. Shit: Sean Perce. Weirdly, he’s followed in by Pemberton, who replaces the door in its frame with a dark frown. He’s holding a wad of papers in his hand. He looks like a kid who’s just received terrible GSCE results. Perce strolls over to her.
‘Hey hey hey!’ he says, arms wide. ‘The gang’s all here!’
Dani gives him a look that could burn a hole in concrete.
‘You! You put me here!’
Pemberton hurries to her.
‘Dani, be careful. He tracked you here, from your phone.’
She looks at the phone in her hand.
‘Bullshit. This isn’t even my phone.’
But she thinks of what Gray said: You need to be worried about whether they can see you. She turns to Perce.
‘You have nothing. I bought this phone with a different name, different money: different everything.’
‘You did that? Amazing.’ Perce looks like a hyena on E. ‘Yet we found you. Logically, you must have given Grubly a correlation. And it matched you to the rest of Dani.’
The fingers of both his hands slide smoothly between each other. Terry into Dani, Dani into Terry. No, she’s been so careful. What data match did she give up?
Not so careful: she went on MeatSpace Thursday night, as herself. With Colin – but she doesn’t want to think about Colin. One lapse is all it takes to fall off the wagon of anonymity. Data are binary and unforgiving.
‘So you found me. Saves me finding you.’
She holds up her phone, starts to video. Clears her throat.
‘So why did you give my life to the trolls, Sean? Why are you wiping Parley?’
That’ll sound good, off camera, when she posts it. A tiny Perce jerks on the screen. She steadies her hand.
‘Now, Dani,’ he says, smooth as liquidised shit. ‘Does your presence here have anything to do with why Parley just went offline?’
She glances at her backpack, down on the floor. Perce registers and nods.
‘You could have asked me,’ he says. ‘I can give your Personas all the storage they could ever want.’
Dani’s hand wavers. That would have been easier than sneaking in here. Pemberton cuts in from out-of-frame.
‘I think you should answer Dani’s question, Sean. Did you smear her to the papers?’
Perce steps closer.
Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle Page 34