A message thread becomes highlighted on her profile. She’s pointing out something to him, a conversation from last year between her and Teddy Caballero. Her dead grandpappy. Telling him all about Diego, and then all about Joshua. And his auto responding:
Baby girl, you make me so
happy! Your beautiful boy make
me so happy! The Caballero
family will go on, ent? On and
on, nah? Yes I think so.
There’s another message, from Scotiabank of Trinidad and Tobago, confirming that the estate of Teddy Caballero authorised the transfer of funds to Larissa Brady’s account on Monday 5 December 2021.
My God, he thinks – Larissa’s windfall!
The mystery money she’d been so cagey about, the reason they could afford their new Paddington home... this is where it came from, an inheritance from her grandpappy. Something she should have received years ago but was blocked by his auto, managing his estate after his death. Blocked until she gave Teddy Caballero what he always wanted: a Trini grandson.
That’s what the whole deception was for. Not to fool her living family, but to fool a dead man’s auto!
And now, if what Nick’s reading is true, his wife owns three properties in Port of Spain, and has five times as much in her bank account as he does.
Beside him, Harry whistles with appreciation, seeing what Nick sees. “Man, I gotta say, that was seriously clever shit. She faked it to make it, mate!”
Nick and Larissa are still standing rigidly, aiming their phones at each other the way gunslingers do in a Mexican stand-off. But now Nick’s shoulders slump, and he tilts his head, wiping his eyes with his other hand.
He’s saying “I didn’t know. You should have told me. How was I to know?”
Larissa also looks sad, but then jabs her autophone at him again, like it’s a dagger. Her jaw re-hardens. She sniffs, blinking.
She’s saying “Tell me about dat Beauty girl. You tell me everything right now.”
Nick takes a deep breath and tells her the truth.
Beauty
Gender: Male
Age range: 16-20
...
Larissa lets out a gasp at the profile that Nick is calling up. She looks horrified. Her glare flicks between him and Harry.
She’s saying “Beauty’s a BOY? Ahh, I always knew you and him spend too long together, he make you a mama man too? You on boysin scene now?”
“Woah, hang on Brady,” says Harry nervously, “don’t tell me you actually...?”
Nick says nothing, knowing they’ll soon realise this isn’t an auto. This is a profile generated by a site that has to be manually logged into – there’s no auto connection to it, so it never shows on Nick’s timeline. It’s old school. Very old school.
QUAKE II REDUX
Part of Online Retro Arenas
Solo Games
Multiplayer Games
Tournament Games
Capture The Flag
Other games
...
Nick types out his login name: KILLSWITCH. His game character appears, an armoured futuristic marine bristling with weapons – shotgun, rocket launcher, hyperblaster, railgun, BFG. There are a number of saved games, each showing the marine fighting monsters and other soldiers. The graphics look ridiculously primitive and blocky, nothing like the photorealism of modern sims, because this is the actual original game, from the late Nineties.
The other players have a wide variety of names: Bloodbath, Demonkiller, SuckMyShotgun, OneShot, Splatterpunk. Beauty. Nobody uses their real names, because these games are being played off-auto. Technically illegal under the Internet Regs, but none of the users of this site give a damn about that. They just care about making it feel the way it used to, when you could fire up a game and kick arse with total strangers.
Nick’s never met any of them. They live all over the world. Beauty’s one of the few from London, the teenage son of a computer enthusiast, obsessed with the ancient PC games his dad used to play. He chose his nickname because every time he guns down a troop of Stroggs using a quad damage booster, or frags an end-of-level boss into giblets or something like that, he types OH YOU BEAUTY!!! across the top of the screen. He also frequently quotes his favourite song while he’s blazing away: BANG IT TILL THEY ALL FALL DOWN, BANG IT BANG IT BANG IT BANG IT! Many of the retro games allow players to send in-game messages, like prehistoric status updates. And that kid is a grandmaster at every one of them: Doom, Duke Nukem, Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Heretic II, Soldier of Fortune. Every week, he becomes Nick’s gaming partner, and they run around side by side shooting aliens and monsters and gangsters.
Nick hangs his head in shame.
He feels so stupid.
Never grown up. Never changed inside. Still cack-handed. Still hopeless at just about everything. Still the same sad kid locked away in his bedroom, hunched over in front of his computer, playing game after game after game. He shouldn’t be doing this any more, he should be a grown-up. But Beauty’s mad enthusiasm grabbed hold of the teenager hidden inside Nick’s body and brought him back to life. Impossible to resist.
He had to keep it quiet. Had to. Larissa knew he was a geek, of course, but he was scared she might one day realise how bad he was. What if she decided she’d made a mistake? What if she abandoned him and went back to Trinidad, to find a proper man? So of course he kept it quiet. Face flaming with shame after every Sunday gaming session, making himself lie when she came back from her book club.
And now she knew, now everyone knew, what he was really like, what he –
“Brady, you sad twat!” Harry’s hand slams onto his shoulder. “You ain’t stopped playing those stupid computer games from when we was in Manchester, have you? And this is it, isn’t it? Your big secret?”
Nick gapes at Harry’s delighted face and can only nod. Harry laughs. “Mate, I bloody love you, you know that? You’re such an innocent!”
Larissa says “Yes.”
She lets her arm drop, aiming the phone away. Steps carefully through the shattered patio door. Walks up to Nick, her eyes on his. Her slim, cool hand takes Nick’s stupid giant sweaty malformed nerveless bear-like paw, God she makes him feel like he’s made of clay. And she laughs along with Harry – a booming laugh he never imagined could come from this petite girl.
“You still such a mooksie!” she tells him, holding his hand.
Nick folds his arms around his wife as hard as he can, like she’s the only real thing in the world.
“Don’t deserve you,” he says into her hair.
“Ah think so too,” she agrees, “but you going nowhere, doux doux.”
The intense relief feels... oh, like a shiveringly-clean waterfall, gushing down inside his body, washing the fear away.
It’s only Harry’s worried voice that brings the rest of the world back into focus. “Guys, sorry but this is looking really bad. Everybody’s...” He struggles to find the word. “Mortificato!”
Nick and Larissa pull apart and take in the wreckage of their anniversary party. Everyone who isn’t wearing Vades™ or Spex™ is waving a smartphone around like it’s a loaded gun. Some shout with anger. Some cry with disbelief. Some look scared. Some just stand there, shellshocked.
Nick, Larissa and Harry all quickly check their own phones, seeing the same thing happening on everybody’s profile: the private becoming public.
Everyone has something they keep quiet. Every time you downloaded porn. Every time you met someone on the quiet. Every medical record, every embarrassing ailment, every pharmaceutical prescription. Every penny spent feeding your addiction to drugs or gambling or sim-rooms. Every sexual encounter, even the ones you’ve forgotten, even the ones you pretend never happened. Every person you ever unfriended or blocked without telling them. Every one-to-one conversation, every piece of gossip. Every time you told someone in your Circle something private about someone else. Every put-down and abusive remark you ever made. Every time you lied.
&nb
sp; Secrets, crawling out from the darkness into the light.
Larissa sucks air through her teeth. “So wrong. This all wrong. Nobody can live like this, all open.”
“Mate, what can we do?” asks Harry. “There’s gotta be some way to stop this, hasn’t there?”
“We have to protect ourselves!” Larissa insists.
Nick clicks his fingers. “Yes, I can protect us! I can cut off our autos! I moved both of them to my private server at work, so I could... anyway, if I shut that server down, that will prevent any access to our timelines and data. We’ll lose our autos, but at least it’ll stop anyone being able to see us.”
“And Harry. You can get him on there too, nah?”
Harry looks surprised. “Yeah? Really?”
“You’s in enough trouble as it is, mama man,” Larissa tells him with a smile.
“I’m on it.” Nick snaps his autophone out to tablet mode, suddenly energised. He can do this. He’s useless at everything, but he can do this. He can protect the three of them from the madness. Harry’s auto is a Microsoft Curator too, so migrating him should be just as easy as Larissa’s was. He can bloody well do this much!
He logs back into his TransDigital account, giving him entry to the data centre’s network. Accesses the BBX4001 server –
– which is at 12.4% capacity –
“What?”
Nick blinks at his autophone, like he’s hallucinating. The folder structure of the server should only have two items in it. But it has dozens!
“Where did they... how could...”
“Brady, what’s going on?” demands Harry. “Talk to us, fella!”
“It’s the BBX... the server. It should only have mine and Larissa’s autos on it, it’s meant to be empty, but it’s got... a hundred and fifty-one? How can that be? There’s one hundred and fifty-one autos on my server!”
“That’s how many guests we got,” says Larissa quietly.
12.08am Sunday 29 May 2022
House visitors: 151
“Oh Jesus,” moans Nick, “I think... I think all this is my fault.”
“Mate, come on, how can it be? You didn’t – ”
“I left the port open. On the server, when I migrated Larissa’s auto onto it, I had to open a port, it’s like a hole in the firewall...and it’s still open. That’s how all these other autos got in, because I didn’t close the bloody door!”
“Wait wait wait, there’s gotta be more to it then that, they don’t move around the internet by themselves, do they?” Harry’s brown eyes get even bigger. “Do they?”
Nick knows the answer is no. An emphatic no. Definitely not. But he can’t bring himself to say anything emphatic or definite right now, because his heart is pounding too fast. The evidence is right there. The 151 autos on the BBX server. They’ve all – he draws breath as he thinks it – joined the party.
“It’s like I told you,” Nick gabbles, “our autos all talk to each other, they’re all friends with each other, and this party, everybody in our Circles who checked in here tonight, their autos have checked in too, like the server is our house... they’re just mirroring the real world!”
“And now they all limin’,” nods Larissa. “Like they’s all shit-a-wiped.”
“Yes! Like they’re drunk, all sharing too much! The filters that keep our Circles and subCircles separate have come down. Maybe privacy settings just don’t work on this server? It’s an experimental model, there could be some weird OS code that’s conflicting with – ”
“Geek-out later, mate, can you stop it?”
Nick taps on his autophone’s keypad, telling the server to close down all external ports.
Command error.
BBX4001 port N01 open.
Data transfer in progress.
Current capacity: 17.8%
“Still migrating,” he says with disbelief. “The port can’t close ‘cause there’s autos migrating through it... over two hundred now! Where are they coming from, there’s not that many people here.”
“But we invited more,” says Larissa. “Lots more.”
“How many invites did you guys send out?” asks Harry slowly.
Nick shares a sickened look with his wife. “About a thousand.”
“And how many autos d’you reckon can fit on this server of yours?”
“About a thousand.”
“Shit the bed.”
They all look through the broken patio door, at the shouting, arguing, crying people filling the house. Nick feels like he wants to run away from home. This is a nightmare, a total mess, and he hasn’t got a clue what to do next. He wants to hide in his bedroom and hope it’ll all go away. He wants to do what he always does, and let it go.
Larissa’s body language tells Nick that she’s on the verge of rushing indoors to calm people down, comfort them. That’s very her. Unable to stop herself when somebody needs help. But she doesn’t budge, one hand still tight around his arm, like he’s her lifebelt in this storm.
She isn’t letting go of him.
“All right,” says Nick, “I’ll call my staff. They can unplug the server, and we can move everyone’s autos back off it later.” He holds up his autophone, and is about to tell it to call the Enfield facility when Larissa suddenly snatches it off him.
“Eh eh! Don’ do that! You crazy? You can’t tell dem about this! They think it all your fault!”
“But it is my fault!” says Nick. “If I hadn’t – ”
“No no no, this whole jhanjat not your fault! But they will think it is and then your career in the toilet, nah? If they think you raaff everyone’s autos, then you – ” She draws a line across her throat with his autophone. “ – kkkkkkkk!”
Nick hesitates, realising she’s right. When TransDigital find over two hundred autos illegally stored on the BBX server, a server only he has access to, they won’t just fire him. They’ll prosecute. Auto piracy is a severe crime under the Internet Regs. Not to mention the potential lawsuits from each auto’s owner, filing for damages: defamation of character, loss of earnings, misuse of private security settings. They’ll all be looking for a scapegoat.
And what will his defence be? That the autos all did it themselves? God, he thinks, I’m going to prison forever.
Harry’s reading Nick’s mind through his face again. “Whatever you do, mate, you can’t leave any evidence. They’ll bang you up for life if they reckon you did this.”
Nick takes a deep breath. “In that case, we need Amit. He’s the only one with the authority.”
“To do what?”
“Kill the power.”
“To your server, you mean?”
“To the whole place. Shut down the entire data centre.”
“That’s more like it!” grins Harry. Larissa nods with relief, handing Nick his autophone. “So where’s Amit? He’s here, ain’t he? Shall we go find him?”
Nick remembers seeing Amit bolt out of the house as if rabid dogs were at his heels, gibbering to his wife. “Um, not sure. I’ll call him and – oh.”
Amit Chudasama
Torture Garden – the UK’s
foremost fetish, body art and
BDSM club
Username: Lady Latex
You have been tagged 74 times
on the TG Summer Ball photo
gallery.
You have 29 private messages
on the TG sexnet.
Your premium membership will
expire on 12/01/23.
“No Amit,” says Nick, “he’s gonna be tied up for a while.”
Harry exhales explosively. “Surely you can do it? You’re senior techie wossname manager, you must be able to pull the plug?”
“If I was there, yes, but it’s in bloody Enfield!” Nick snaps. “It’s an hour’s drive at least, by the time I get there that server’s going to be full! We can’t call any of the staff because then they’ll know something’s up, and I don’t have remote access to the facility support systems, my security permis
sions aren’t high enough, to get my hands on those I’d have to be Amit.”
Sheepishly, Harry starts to apologise. And then yelps with pain as Nick gives him a gigantic bear hug. “Harry, you’re a total genius and I am lucky to know you!”
Larissa looks confused. “What? What I miss?”
Nick’s grinning, like he’s just had the best idea of his life. “Didn’t you hear what I said? To get to the power systems, I’d have to be Amit!”
Larissa scowls – then gasps.
She says “K8?”
He says “K8!”
And then his wife grabs his hand and runs.
Nick breaks into a sprint, knowing how ungainly he looks as Larissa drags him after her into the house. Harry follows, jumping through the shattered glass door, black hair still sparkling with bits. They charge into the living room where the noise of over a hundred people hits them, louder than the music. Over a hundred enraged, upset, devastated, gobsmacked, disbelieving people. Eleanor is on her knees, bawling like a baby. Leo and Diane are bellowing directly into each other’s faces. Three men are holding Drake back from punching one of his close friends. Quon is fending off two guests threatening to call the drugs squad while a third is demanding to score some crack off him. Niu is holding her Vades™ in both hands and screaming at them like a banshee, repeatedly telling someone it isn’t her fault she’s lost all her clients, isn’t her fault, isn’t her fault.
“Nick! What’s going on, man, what’s happening!”
“Oh my God, Larissa, where have you been?”
“Hey! What’s the deal, soon as we walk in here our autos go mental, what have you done?”
Nick and Larissa are dragged to a stop by sheer weight of bodies. A circle of faces, closing in, demanding to know what the hosts have done, what sort of party is this, is this some kind of blackmail thing, how can they stop it –
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