hours, enhanced rate
Nick feels himself shiver. There’s a wind blowing in through the patio doors. Weather’s changing tonight, cold front moving in. He looks around at his guests, knowing they’re all feeling the same chill. All suddenly exposed.
He finds himself meeting Harry’s eyes, and this time they both decode each other’s expression. Nick walks past a half-sobbing Eleanor, shouting at all her un-friends, and meets Harry near the doors to the patio. It looks like there’s a couple of arguments brewing out there too, guests gaping at their phones.
“Mate. What’s going on?”
“I don’t... I’m not sure. It looks like some people haven’t set their privacy settings properly.”
“Yeah, but why’s it all happening at the same time? There’s stuff popping up on everyone’s profiles that wasn’t there before – oh hang on. Blimey, there’s timing for ya, now he rocks up!”
Nick looks round at the smartscreen on the living room wall.
11.55pm Saturday 28 May 2022
House visitor: 149
Gareth Barrable
Gender: Male
Age range: 21-25
Orientation: Gay
Relationship status:
Couple/Monogamous
He whirls back to Harry. “You have to leave.”
“What? No look, you’re gonna need some help here, Brady, half your guests are going ballistic, we need to calm them down – ”
“Harry, for God’s sake, Gareth can see what you’ve been up to!”
“You what? But I haven’t been up to anything!”
They spot him striding through the living room as if he’s seven feet tall. In fact Gareth is short and boyish, looking even younger than 25, with bright ginger hair and blue eyes in a round face. Eyes that are fierce behind his transparent Vades™. Eyes that don’t sweep the room looking for his boyfriend but are fixed on him, knowing precisely where he is.
Harry summons a grin and opens his brawny arms to hug his partner.
Gareth doesn’t slow down, slams his hands against Harry’s chest and shoves him backwards through the glass patio doors.
The CRASH is like a bolt of lightning striking the house. People scream, jump, spin round, electrified. Nick throws one arm up against the spray of glass, shards tumbling to the ground like spilled ice. Harry tumbles backwards, slams heavily on the patio decking.
For a second, everything is still except for jagged glass dropping out of the door frame. Then Gareth walks around Nick, slides open the other door, steps out onto the patio and kicks Harry in the stomach.
“Jesus, stop!” Nick shouts, but before he can grab Gareth, he’s already swung two more vicious kicks into Harry, who curls up into a ball. Nick wraps both arms around Gareth’s skinny body, lifting him away easily. “What the hell’s wrong with you!”
“Bastard!” Gareth yells shrilly. “He’s cheating on me! He’s been cheating for ages, the bastard!”
Everyone who was coming forward to help Harry suddenly pauses, looking at him suspiciously. Wincing, Harry slowly uncurls: glass waterfalling off his body, black hair sparkling with fragments, blood trickling from a dozen cuts. “Gareth... I haven’t...”
“Yes you have! I can see it! Everyone can see it! This past year, you’ve shagged over twenty guys, I can even tell you their names!”
Everyone swings their smartphones down at Harry, lying on his back. Nick dares not let go of the struggling Gareth, but he can imagine what they’re all seeing. Harry realises it too, and manages something like a laugh.
“Oh, you stupid... I haven’t been with another bloke since we met, I swear, all you’re seeing there are sim-shags! Just on the sexnets!”
“Yes!” spits Gareth. “Exactly!”
“But... they’re just sims! It’s just mucking about in playrooms, you know. It’s not real, I’d never – ”
“Of course it’s real! You’ve been with them behind my back, you’ve kept secrets. I knew you were up to something! All my friends told me you can’t trust a cont!”
“No! It’s just on the internet, that doesn’t count!”
“It’s still you!” Gareth cries, tears rolling down from under his Vades™. “It doesn’t matter where it is, it’s you being with suh-someone else!”
Harry’s big brown eyes look up, pleading. “Gareth... it didn’t mean anything, mate, it’s just fantasy, it’s not the same as you and me...”
“Then why did you keep it secret!” Gareth bawls.
Harry opens his mouth – but realises there is no answer.
Nick slowly lets go of Gareth, sensing that the strength has drained out of him. Just bitterness left. He stands there and sobs, like a little boy.
Harry picks himself up, glass tinkling, and reaches for Gareth – who bolts, back into the crowded living room, fighting his way towards the front door.
“Mi dispiace...”
But Harry might as well be talking to himself.
Around them, the voices of other guests start up again. But it’s not Harry and Gareth they’re discussing – it’s themselves. All worried about their own situations, their own profiles, their own lives. Music is still blaring out from the living room but the dancing has stopped, as tension ripples through the entire house.
Nick goes to Harry and asks if he’s okay, but Harry’s not even bothering to shake the bits of glass off his body, staring instead at the smartphone around his wrist. “My Circle’s shrinking! It’s dropping right in front of me. Holy shit, I’m getting unfriended left right and centre!”
“Gareth’s channel,” Nick reminds him. “He broadcasts everything he does through his Vades™, remember? All of his friends have just seen… that.”
Harry moans. “Half his friends are my friends too! Oh Christ, they’re all cutting me off, they all think I’ve screwed Gareth over, but I didn’t, I only… it doesn’t count if it’s… mate, what the hell’s going on? What’s happening!”
“It’s our autos,” says Nick.
“What about ‘em?”
“They’re talking.”
He realises the truth even as the words come out. Like he worked it out ages ago and can only now bring himself to say it. Or maybe he never dared let himself have these thoughts until now. “We’ve all… we all use our privacy settings to control who sees what, right? Let certain people see certain things, keep other stuff totally private.”
“You mean we’ve all got secrets,” Harry says miserably. “Oh man, we’re all just lying scumbags.”
Nick flushes, thinking of Beauty, and hopes his old friend doesn’t notice. “But our autos are the opposite! They’re programmed to be social, and share data, and break down barriers between us. That’s the whole point of them, to help us interact with the world.”
“Yeah, but they only do what we tell ‘em – ”
“But they learn!” Nick insists. “They learn to do new things, and they learn how to interact with each other. We don’t tell each other everything – but they do! Because our autos are all talking to each other even when we’re not! They don’t keep secrets because they’re all each other’s friends!”
There’s a look on Harry’s face, like he’s not sure if Nick has gone insane or is telling him the scariest thing he’s ever heard – but then he glances past him towards the house, and breathes “Oh shit.”
Nick spins round to see Larissa standing on the other side of the broken patio door, framed by splintered glass. Looking at him with tears in her eyes.
Tears, he realises, of fury.
She’s holding her autophone, identical to his. Raises it, arm stiff, to point directly at him. And Nick understands what it feels like to look down the barrel of a gun.
No no no, oh God what can she see? What has she found out! Panicked, Nick checks his own profile, but surely there’s no trace of anything, he was careful, she can’t know about –
Nick Brady
Event reminder
Recurring: weekly
Occur
s every Sunday 4pm to
6pm
Details: Team up with Beauty
Privacy level: Maximum
His stomach rolls as he realises how stupid he’s been, to use his stupid auto calendar to remind him of his stupid meetings with Beauty.
Nick looks back at Larissa. They know each other so well. Every expression. Every gesture. Every turn of phrase. He knows exactly what she’s saying to him right now, spoken aloud in the tightness of her jaw, and the way her dark eyebrows are knitted together, and the tension in her arm.
She’s saying “An’ who the damn hell is Beauty when she’s at home? Meeting up with her every time I’m at my book club? She your hornerwoman?”
He summons the breath to start talking, explaining, apologising... but then remembers what he’s been trying to find out all this time. It’s not him who should be feeling defensive! She’s the one who’s been cheating on him!
And maybe [Name withheld] can’t hide his name any more.
He whips up his own arm, autophone aimed at his wife, making her jump. Stares at the display like he’s looking down a target sight. Eyes narrowed, head forward, shoulders tight.
He’s saying “What about you, then? What about this guy you’re seeing? Who is he?”
Larissa Brady
Gender: Female
Age range: 36-40
Orientation: Straight
Relationship status:
Couple/Monogamous
Larissa Brady is in a
relationship with Diego
Ollivierre
Diego Ollivierre.
The man having a relationship with his wife.
Nick’s mouth falls open, grunting like Harry did when he was kicked in the stomach. He takes a step to steady himself.
He’s saying “Oh my God.”
Diego Ollivierre
Gender: Male
Age range: 36-40
Orientation: Straight
Relationship status:
Couple/Monogamous
Diego Ollivierre is in a
relationship with Larissa Brady
It’s the fact that he’s from Trinidad which hurts the most. Already closer to Larissa than Nick could ever be. The profile picture shows a handsome Caribbean man in his late thirties: caramel-brown skin, wide angular jaw, short black hair, big white smile. He looks lively. Intelligent. Confident. Mature. Physical. Outgoing. A man of the world. Nothing like Nick at all.
His wife’s lover. The guy she really wants.
Nick scrolls back through Larissa’s timeline with his thumb, feeling sick as he sees just how many times the name Diego Ollivierre appears. The details blur past, but his name is constantly there, alongside hers. The times they spent together. The places they went to. The events they attended. The hundreds of private messages back and forth, thousands of exchanges, so many XXXs... Nick can’t focus on the actual words, he’s blinking too much to properly read the sweet nothings between them.
He goes further back in time, finding the first occasion of the name. It’s two whole years since they met, on one of Larissa’s trips back home to Trinidad. Two years, she’s been seeing him. Two years! Nick looks back up at Larissa, eyes wide, mouth still hanging open.
He’s saying “How could you do this to me?”
Larissa rocks back slightly, knowing what he can see. She looks shaken, a little confused. But then he sees her refocus, harden her gaze, tilt her head to one side and thrust her phone at him again.
She’s saying “Never mind about me, don’t you give me the maljo, you tell me who this Beauty character is right now, you hear me? How long this been going on then, eh? How friggin’ long!”
And the answer, Nick knows she will discover, is two years.
Nick Brady
Event calendar
Sunday 19 July 2020 4pm to
6pm: Team up with Beauty
Sunday 26 July 2020 4pm to
6pm: Team up with Beauty
Sunday 2 August 2020 4pm to
6pm: Team up with Beauty
...
Larissa’s shaking her head, long hair curtaining her face, taking in the secret meetings logged in her husband’s private calendar.
She’s saying “Every Sunday... every time I was at my book club, you and this Beauty... you bone her every stinkin’ Sunday!”
Nick can’t bring himself to say anything, his voice no longer works. Instead he retaliates, digging through her timeline, her calendar, her photo galleries. Finding more evidence of her relationship with Diego, her meetings with Diego, even images of her and Diego, so happy for the camera, his arm around her, smiling and laughing on beaches and at parties and on the sofa. The yellow three-seater sofa. The sofa with the broken spring on the left seat. The sofa he’s sat on a thousand times. He chokes on his own breath.
He’s saying “Jesus Christ, you brought him back to our home!”
Nick tries to imagine Larissa and Diego in their old ground floor apartment, doing the things he and his wife used to do when they lived there. Walking barefoot on the varnished floorboards. Perched either side of the breakfast bar in the small kitchen. Sprawled out on the yellow sofa in the living room. Taking turns crossing between the narrow bathroom and the even narrower toilet next door, as they get ready for bed. Tumbling together on the old wrought-iron four-poster.
How many times did he come to their apartment? Whenever Nick was at work, or on an overnight training course, or away at a weekend corporate seminar?
Then he checks Diego’s profile again and finds it’s worse than that. He’s still there. He’s there right now.
Diego Ollivierre
Current location: 1 The
Orchard, Montpellier Road,
Ealing, London W5 2QW
Status update: Quiet weekend
in looking after Joshua
Ollivierre.
Still there in Nick’s old home, waiting for Larissa to visit him and... Joshua?
Joshua Ollivierre
Gender: Male
Age range: 0-5
Birthday: Friday 8 October
2021
Son of Diego Ollivierre and
Larissa Brady
The primary-coloured profile of a young child shines on Nick’s autophone, burning a hole in his hand like a red-hot coal.
Diego and Larissa’s baby boy.
He’s got her eyes.
Nick feels tears boiling up like lava, from his guts through his chest and throat on their way to his eyes, unable to fit it all in his head, the beautiful little boy Larissa is cradling in her arms, being lifted up high by an overjoyed Diego, swaddled between them on the yellow sofa in their old home, the baby she always told Nick she never wanted, she said it didn’t matter how much her family nagged, she didn’t want children and was glad that neither did he, happy with just the two of them, that’s all they needed, but now she has a son, oh God his wife has a secret son, he’s right there with the father that isn’t Nick, it’s not Nick’s kid, he’ll never be little Joshua’s daddy...
“’Ang on a minute,” says Harry.
Nick’s distantly aware that his friend has been standing beside him, swinging the smartphone on his wrist back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. “This don’t make any sense, mate,” Harry tells him. “I reckon this is bogus, it’s gotta be. How can she have got pregnant last year without you noticing?”
Nick blinks, like someone just flicked cold water on his face. He looks back up at Larissa. She’s shaking her head gently, and now her eyes have a pleading slant to them.
She’s saying “Can’t you see? See why I been acting so vikey-vike all this time?”
And in an instant, he does.
“It’s those two wossnames, innit?” realises Harry. “The dodgy programs!”
The two K8s. The illegal programs installed into Larissa’s auto. They aren’t masks for Larissa, they’re profiles for people who don’t exist at all.
A fake partner... and a fake son!
&
nbsp; Nick once again scrolls back through Larissa’s timeline, and realises how many impossibilities there are: times when she’s somehow in two places at once, both with Diego and with him. The day she went into labour, giving birth to Joshua, was the same day her and Nick flew to Berlin to visit their friends Sabine and Katja. And he recognises some of the photos – because he was originally in them! Cropped out and replaced by Diego, so expertly that even he was fooled.
He skim-reads all the messages and conversations with Larissa’s family, her mother, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins. All remarking how much they like Diego, how good he’ll be for her, and then how much they adore baby Joshua, desperate for her to bring him over to Trinidad. Nick’s never had any of that from the Caballero family. He’s always known they never approved of Larissa’s decision to marry an Englishman. He can remember the guarded looks in their eyes when she took him home for the first time, over ten years ago. Looking up at him with suspicion, as if fearing this foreigner was going to snatch their beautiful girl away from them. Which he did.
He imagines her, visiting Trinidad in 2020. Heading into Port of Spain, asking around, making contacts, finding someone who could sell her two K8 programs. Using the first one to create a man she knew her family would approve of: a local man, a Trini man, a man who even has (oh it’s so obvious now) the same name as her home town, Diego Martin. She set her profile security settings so that family and friends from Trinidad only saw this new relationship with Diego Ollivierre... Nick Brady was never mentioned again, and none of the Caballeros ever wondered why, too glad to see the back of him.
Then after a year of faking a relationship with Diego, of interacting with a profile that she had created herself, Larissa faked giving him a son. The second K8 – Joshua.
And her family loved it. Loved their new baby cousin, nephew, grandson. Loved the lie.
Nick doesn’t know whether to laugh with amazement or break down and cry... but instead finds himself frowning, his logical brain kicking in. This can’t work forever. It’s easy to fool people living thousands of miles away, but it can’t last. Larissa’s family must already be demanding to see little Joshua in the flesh, and if anyone was to look more closely, they’d realise that legally she is still Larissa Brady, married to the Englishman they hate, with no official record of a child. There’s no way she could keep this up for long.
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