The Gomorrah Gambit

by Tom Chatfield

  Let’s tell a story. It’s April 1982, and war is kicking off on a South Atlantic island nobody in Britain had heard about a few weeks earlier. The Argentine invasion of the Falklands is met by a force cobbled together from desperate pride and political expediency, eventually amounting to one hundred and twenty-seven ships. Somehow, by 14 June, the Brits have prevailed, and the Prime Minister is counting her patriotic blessings. These details are important. Accuracy matters with lies you’ll be telling for years.

  It’s late June 1982. A little boy in Streatham, South London, is sick—very sick—and nobody thinks he is getting better. His dad is off somewhere, gone for over a year. His mum is wrecked by work and stress, cleaning in St. George’s Hospital, her mum helping out when she can, but nothing will rescue this situation, because little boys don’t recover from this kind of cancer.

  Except, in Azi’s new story, this one does. A small box is buried under a stone in Tooting, joined nine years later by mum in a bigger box beside it, but this can safely be ignored. Life goes on.

  The 1980s are now in full swing, greed is good, and James Denison is going to school. He moves around a lot, attending places that have since closed, or that have changed beyond recognition. An account registered to James’s shiny new Gmail address populates websites and forms with a path winding through primary school, eight GCSEs, A-levels in art, French and maths—and then, to everyone’s surprise, a degree from the University of Birmingham. Psychology, lower second class, documented by a certificate purchased online from a service that makes it look better than the real thing.

  After his father’s death in 1999—the father who never got in touch, who drank himself into a carefully researched grave in Coventry—James is an orphan, on the cusp of adulthood. His student life makes no ripples. Time passes. The millennial wave breaks and subsides, the world’s disquiet turns digital, terrorist-haunted, muttering its fear on loop. James is now going by Jim, and Jim is starting to show a denser data trail: past employers, residences, a stalled career in office accessory sales. He travels a lot, but only in the UK: major cities, big enough for anonymity. He is nobody, but he’s a nobody you can look up.

  It takes Jim a long time to get into the social media revolution, but once he does he is like a new man. He has a face that’s made for media, his thinning hair bleached blonde, his angular cheeks and chin lovingly blended from stock images by Azi. Jim looks good for his age. If you squint—and if you grew up watching television in the late 1990s—he looks a bit like Spike from “Buffy.” Handsome people attract more attention, but they also command trust and respect, and Azi is only too glad to cash in some of that white male currency for his own purposes.

  On Facebook, Jim has one hundred and twenty-three friends who also don’t exist. They talk about politics, football, food, music. They’re bots: algorithms shouting at algorithms, following, liking, regurgitating borrowed words. Azi reckons there’s only one way to tell bots and people apart online, and that’s that robots actually pay attention to what other robots are saying. In fact, the bots’ appetite for relentlessly targeted banter is a winning strategy all round—responses without learning, repetition without understanding, the perfection of an echo chamber in which everything is said, and nothing is heard.

  As for Jim, his politics have turned a nationalistic flavor of libertarian. He hates outsiders meddling in this country that hasn’t cherished him. His attitude to women can be divided into three categories: those he wants to protect, those he wants to teach a lesson, and those who need a good seeing to. The boundaries between these categories are not strictly patrolled. Jim is angry about almost everyone it is possible to refer to as “them.” He is tailor-made for Defiance.

  Actual people start following Jim, start getting in touch: kindred spirits. On 6 July 2013, over sixty people wish him happy birthday—and a quarter of these people actually exist. Behind the scenes, Azi is busily crafting details beyond expectation. Content flows across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn. Less is farmed out to bots, more is written by Azi himself as he steps into this second skin, tightening it across his own.

  In August 2013, Jim starts to buy bitcoins with a credit card that can’t be tracked. He runs an old laptop with the hacker’s operating system of choice, Kali Linux, on it. He has a fake postal address in an empty building, where mail is collected irregularly from an empty hall. He uses the Silk Road marketplace on the Tor darknet to procure the final pieces in his personal puzzle: a driving license and passport, faked to a good enough standard to fool expert eyes (fooling expert machines is another matter).

  Jim exists. The world looks, and there he is. Weapons, drugs, they’re all his for the asking. An intimate knowledge of these things is necessary for Jim to become who Azi needs him to be. It’s easy if you know where to look in the darkness, in the place that understands you have a right to obtain whatever you can afford. One ounce of marijuana, Caramello: $215. One gram of cocaine, Colombian fishscale: $97. One gram of MDMA, white Mitsubishi: $37. OxyContin by the ten-pack: $248. One pack of Adderall: a wallet-friendly $6. All prices clearly stated alongside today’s bitcoin conversion rates, seller ratings, user reviews and feedback. Capitalism loves an honest marketplace, and this is one of the few places Amazon won’t be disrupting any time soon.

  Other people behind false faces chat with Jim for hours about weapons, hacks, movies, politics, who they would most like to fuck, for how long, and with what tools. Jim and Azi play their parts, and it’s amazing to Azi what you can say when it comes out of somebody else’s mouth. Whores and faggots and buttholes, fucking and fisting and murder and suicide; wanking and weeping; tits and arses. Memes involving cartoon characters cracking Holocaust gags, pulling in a younger crowd. Azi thought he was a pretty cynical guy, but with every conversation, he is learning new things he doesn’t much like about other people, and himself.

  Some days, it feels like the filth has lodged behind Azi’s eyeballs, tainting him with stains no shower can shift. On other days, worse days, he barely notices the friction between life and screen.

  It’s September 2013. Jim now claims to sell a few items as well as buying. His reputation is becoming solid, backed by carefully choreographed actions and evidence. He’s becoming trustworthy—and trust is the killer app when it comes to twenty-first-century tech. Any script kiddie can hack machines. You can download ransomware and set it running armed with little more than a search engine and contempt for humanity. What Azi does is hack minds, faith, belief. He fools the world into whispering him its secrets.

  October, November, December, a new year is born. The face on the fake passport and driving license, handsome with its perfect jawline, is easier to find and to believe in than Azi’s own. Jim has friends on Facebook, likes on Instagram, endorsements on LinkedIn: places Azi doesn’t exist in. He is a shadow, distant behind the noise.

  The world trusts few things more deeply than appearances. And this is just as well—because Azi is counting upon its ignorance. Jim is tall, white and drunk on the superiority of his race. Azi is light brown, lean, running a pavement circuit most nights, until his mind has settled enough for sleep. When Azi hits the 2 a.m. streets, people either step fast to avoid him or ask if they can buy drugs. When Jim struts his stuff on social media, ordinary decent citizens line up to applaud. Jim and him, they’re a perfect twenty-first-century team.

  What I want, types Gareth from Blackpool, movingly, is a fat Asian chick to let me cum on her face. Jim commiserates. Azi swears under his breath, chews a last cooling mouthful of chicken, and tries to turn the conversation towards more practical matters. U see that thing I wrote?

  Azi knows that Gareth saw it. Everyone saw it, because by the standards of the group it was a masterwork to stand alongside Don Quixote, War and Peace and The Da Vinci Code: a rhapsody to the white, bright future coming their way once Defiance makes its strength felt.

  Gareth turns serious for a moment. Your the man Jim gonna stand up for whats right. Azi can almost s
ee the tears of patriotic pride streaking Gareth’s cheeks, and reaches for a matching solemnity. Someone got to say it right lol, someone got to tell truth about kike fags. Azi stares at the screen and, nauseatingly, catches himself feeling pretty proud of his composition. He came up with four hundred words of barely coded fascist invective, drawing inspiration from a noted white supremacist style guide that included such gems as “multiple enemies can be confusing, so always keep it simple and blame the Jews” and “it’s okay to say that Jew feminist bitches need raping as long as you don’t threaten to do it yourself.” Jim’s final few reflections on traditional Christian values resonated especially well with Britain’s core Defiance outposts.

  Azi draws breath, types a fond farewell—later u wanker lol—and logs off. It’s almost time. Gareth and others have made introductions, discreet recommendations. Jim checks out on paper, and the organization’s more senior members have become aware that he has some tech skills, ways to get hold of things, a lot of issues he doesn’t want amicably resolved. He’s sent them scans of his documents, his history, doctored images of his attendance at rallies. He’s legit.

  Another few weeks. That’s all Azi needs. That’s how long he has to keep going.

  Three

  Like mountaineers, hackers take on challenges simply because they’re there. The more precipitous the target, the better, with added kudos if you’re the first person to plant your flag. Azi has pulled off several firsts in his time, but a personal favorite remains the casino he and Milhon cracked wide open via a fish tank.

  Milhon has a special interest in gambling tech: she’s told Azi more than even he cares to know about the industry’s inner vicissitudes, and she was the one who suggested the target. But it was he who zeroed in on the vulnerability: one born not from the usual vectors of outdated software, disgruntled staff or sloppy networking, but from the casino’s hunger for shiny new toys.

  The fish tank in question was extremely shiny. Its fifty thousand liters of water were home to five hundred tropical fish, including two hammerhead sharks, plus a great deal of painstakingly grown coral and one sunken pirate ship. It girdled the casino’s entrance in living blue, inducing the kind of childlike wonder designed to make losing lots of money feel fun. The fish tank also employed the very latest in water-monitoring sensors—which, Azi delightedly discovered, were about ten years behind the very latest of everything else in security terms.

  It had evidently never occurred to either the people making or purchasing a really big, incredibly gaudy fish tank that someone might assault their system—or that it might be a bad idea to operate its sensors via a computer connected to the casino’s main network. It was an open door, just waiting to be pushed.

  From the comfort of his shed, Azi crept into the sensors’ tiny minds in the guise of a water oxygenation crisis—and from there into everything else. He and Milhon worked through the night, debating the casino’s comeuppance, steering clear of anything as crude as criminality. By the next morning, every screen in the building was advising visitors that today’s gambling came with a money-back guarantee and two free fish. Forums and message boards across the world were alight for weeks with talk of AZ’s latest triumph.

  This was back in 2012: the early days of the Internet of Things, before scammers started to hijack vulnerable devices in their hundreds of thousands. These days, thanks to the assumption that connecting everything and anything to the internet is a Good Idea, the world is a wasteland of under-secured “smart” devices, including televisions, showers, fridges, washing machines, printers, plug sockets and children’s toys. Azi has a rule of thumb when it comes to this particular vision of the future. If someone describes an internet-connected fridge as anything other than a futile blot on the technological landscape, they’re talking out of their arse.

  Azi isn’t sure if he has become more cynical in the last few years, or just clearer about the stuff that makes him angry: strong people kicking the metaphorical shit out of weak people, big companies exploiting the metaphorical shit out of everything they get their hands on, London’s wallet-warping gentrification failing in any way to enhance Croydon’s town center beyond a choice of Starbucks or Costa. What Azi does know is that he loves a challenge—and that a challenge with the fringe benefit of disrupting racist pricks is almost impossible to resist.

  The neo-Nazis remain poised to give him admin privileges but, until they do, all is quiet on the white Western front—except for the banter his alter ego needs to post several times a week.

  Then, out of the blue, a new request arrives. And it comes from a familiar source.

  Hey AZ u up for a challenge? Help me out?

  Azi grins. Sigma is welcome to distract him any time.

  Always for u, Sigma. Time to put on our capes, DDOS against injustice?

  Not this time. Looking for a serious favor. Fair warning: it’s dark in there. Fine by me if you run a mile.

  AZ and Sigma have been hanging out for a year, give or take, but it feels longer. Time is different, online. Intensity matters more than duration—and they’ve been through a lot. Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks, conducted and defended against. Spammers and bot-herders brought to their knees. Civil unrest facilitated. Child pornographers exposed. Pop cultural references traded at whim. Inasmuch as he trusts anyone, Azi trusts Sigma to be what her actions suggest—skilled, reliable, idealistic on the near side of fanatical. She’s also unlikely to say she’s in trouble unless she really, really means it. He hesitates only long enough to seem serious.

  For u, sure. I’m going nowhere. Send and share. How bad can it be?

  This last question is bravado, because they both know it has only one honest answer. No matter how bad you can imagine it being, there’s already something worse out there. When people think they can get away with anything, they try to get away with everything. That’s the rule.

  You asked for it. This one’s bad news for the world, and worse news for me. Don’t take too long.

  Azi takes a deep breath, pours himself a fresh coffee and positions his cursor over the link Sigma has just sent. Outside his shed’s one window, unwatched, the last twilight sinks towards darkness.

  Investigating Sigma’s research safely means hopping into a virtual machine—a simulated computer running inside the real one, identical so far as software is concerned, but without access to anything that could be assaulted or subverted. It’s like, Azi always thinks, putting someone inside a prison that looks the same as their house while they’re sleeping: until they start rattling the windows, there’s no way to tell the difference.

  A dozen files unzip: far fewer than he expected. At the top is a text file created by Sigma, presumably containing her conclusions. Azi leaves it for last. He wants to form his own first impressions.

  The next file turns out to be a PDF of the special Ramadan edition of a propaganda magazine from the Islamic Republic. It’s shockingly inoffensive, given its subject matter: the format bland and glossy, the tone relentlessly proselytizing. Articles alternate between scriptural justifications for jihad, heroic depictions of warriors, and idyllic images of daily life in the Republic itself. It’s almost dull, if you ignore the incitements to murder.

  Much more entertaining are the next five files: email and message logs containing frustrated exchanges between the magazine’s editors and their superiors. Halfway through an especially irate multilingual debate about their audience’s level of education (make it simpler, seems to be the basic message, because many foreign brothers are idiots), Azi realizes what he’s dealing with.

  The files belong to a famous dump of documents released in mid-2013 from inside the Islamic Republic. The assumption at the time was that they came from a disaffected insider. Various security services (alongside every curious freelancer in the business) extensively probed them for revelations before deeming them minor news: useful only for sarcastic meme-making about a terrorist state’s internal wrangles. Azi went through a few himself, fascinated by the
details it was possible to infer from Microsoft Word version histories. Then he moved on to Jim, neo-Nazis and the incremental abandonment of paid work.

  The last few files in Sigma’s collection, however, are different. At first, Azi can’t see why anyone would be interested. All his screen shows is some incomprehensible junk, presumably encrypted, followed by a brief comma-separated list of names and numbers. Sardar Kerr, 975000. Mahmud Harrison, 850000. Ziad Hussein, 1255000. And so on. Why do some of them feel familiar?

  A minute, then he figures it out. They were all featured in the magazine he’s just been scrolling through: dead soldiers, snipers, suicide bombers singled out for praise. In total, the comma-separated document lists fifty names. He double checks, dashing between search boxes. Each of them died at some point in the previous year, and each of them is accompanied by a six- or seven-figure number.

  Picking up speed, conscious that time may be short, Azi opens the final few files. These are different again. They look official, gathered and combined from a variety of sources: electoral rolls, telephone directories, public record offices. This must be something Sigma has put together herself, over many weeks. Why?

  On impulse, Azi brings up another search box and starts typing. Sardar Kerr. Mahmud Harrison. There are multiple hits for each name, appended to page after page of official documentation: images, contact details, up-to-date links. Sigma has got hold of scans of things that you don’t just find lying around, and meticulously cross-referenced them with her earlier research. French and German passports, names, addresses. The names are different on the official documents, but the faces are the same—and, as Azi keeps looking, the connection finally becomes clear.

  Fifty Islamic martyrs have returned from the grave. Their deaths were widely publicized. Yet the conclusion her research asks him to believe is that this was nothing but cover—and that they have been quietly embedded in the heart of Europe. It’s absurd. Yet she has provided the links, connections to her evidence in government databases, electoral rolls—the stuff that even his own expertly crafted alter ego, Jim, doesn’t have. Azi types some of the new names into a variety of official websites, one at a time. They’re real.