Auto

by David Wailing

  “OI!”

  Harry’s voice booms through the house. “Ladies and gents, hope you’ve all enjoyed my little trick with your profiles!”

  “What did he say?”

  “Trick? What trick?”

  “You mean this is all your fault?”

  “Yeah, course!” beams Harry as all the guests swarm his way. “Just a bit of fun and games to get this party started, hope you’ve all enjoyed it!” Without turning his head or relaxing his smile, he mutters “Go.”

  “Eh?” says Nick, wincing as Harry kicks his ankle hard. He grabs Larissa and pulls her off to one side as people surge past him towards Harry.

  “What’s he talking about?”

  “What did you do, you little bastard?”

  “Hope you’ve enjoyed the stories I made up about you all!” Harry shouts. “Thought it might be a laugh!”

  “...Stories?” several people say hesitantly. “Made up?”

  “Yeah, course they’re made up, come on!” Harry’s broad shoulders perform a big shrug. “No way any of that crazy shit on your profiles could ever be true, could it?”

  There’s a sudden, total hush, as over a hundred people look askance at each other.

  Nick doesn’t see what happens next as Larissa drags him up the stairway. He hobbles along after her, ankle aching, past their bedroom and into the spare room. It’s piled high with boxes, crates and carrier bags, full of unpacked possessions from their old house. She yanks one of the smaller boxes aside, ignoring the tumbling crash of the others, and starts rummaging through it. He kneels down beside her on the varnished floor, waiting until she straightens and hands something to him.

  It’s a 100 Terabyte USB flash drive, a memory stick. This would be expensive even if it was completely blank, and he wonders just how much this cost Larissa, from the blackware merchants in the back-alleys of Port of Spain. It sits in his palm, a hard drive half the size of his autophone but with twenty times the data capacity. Its outer shell is polished chrome, reflecting Nick’s anxious face back at him. And there’s a weird symbol engraved on one side that he’s never seen before.

  “Will it work?” she asks.

  “It has to,” says Nick, and plugs the memory stick into his Samsung Nebula IV.

  The K8 app fires up, with screens that are surprisingly well-designed and professional. Very user friendly. Virtually idiot-proof. A child could do this, he thinks, even a child.

  It takes over a minute to install into Nick’s profile, an entire crawlingly-slow minute, since it is a huge program. Once up and running, he uses it to scroll through his Circle, selects Amit, and then taps the big round icon marked FAKE.

  Unusual symbols flash, rotate, vanish. Before long, Nick finds he has access to two profiles. His, and...

  Amit Chudasama

  Gender: Male

  Age range: 46-50

  Orientation: Straight

  Relationship status:

  Married/ Monogamous

  “God,” he breathes, half-impressed and half-repulsed. It’s a carbon copy of Amit! Everything about him – personal details, pictures, timeline, the whole lot. It’s looks like a fully functioning auto, giving him all the options that a normal auto does. Nick actually shivers slightly at the sudden sense of power. To be in the driving seat of someone else’s life.

  “Quickly!” Larissa insists, and Nick rushes to connect to the data centre network. No log-ins or passwords required, not with autos – they’re as good as a passport. The moment he connects as ‘Amit’, he’ll be able to...

  “Stop. This won’t work.”

  He’s startled by his own voice, and for a second wonders why he said that. Of course it will. So why has he stopped? What’s missing...?

  “...No friends,” realises Nick.

  It’s the one thing the K8 program hasn’t copied, and can’t copy: a profile’s Circle. The social connections between a person and everyone they know, around the world. The false-Amit’s profile is so detailed that Nick didn’t immediately realise they were missing. Their absence is far too suspicious – the firewall will flag him as suspect, instantly reporting to the police. Nick swallows down bile, terrified at how close he’s just come to getting prison sentences for them both.

  Bites his lip. Should he risk it. Might not work. Might backfire. Might ruin their whole lives. A fresh wave of shouting breaks out downstairs, Harry’s voice mixed in, making Larissa hiss with worry, and he makes his decision. He brings up the real Amit’s Circle, highlights every single name in there, copies them across to the false-Amit’s contacts list... and sends them all the same message.

  A friend request.

  For a long moment, there is nothing but the jackhammer of his own pulse in his ears, drowning out the chaos of the house and whatever Larissa is saying right now. Please. Please let this work. Please let me get this much right, you son of a bitch, just this once, please bloody work...

  Teresa Halloran is a friend of

  Amit Chudasama

  Obanjoko Asari-Dokubu is a

  friend of Amit Chudasama

  After the first few comes the flood. Dozens, hundreds of autos accepting the friend request... because, as Nick hoped, they had checked their Circles and found Amit already there. Of course they accepted the friend request. They already had a friend in common with Amit Chudasama: the real Amit Chudasama!

  The false-Amit’s Circle balloons rapidly before his eyes, filled with friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, and even –

  Namita Chudasama is married

  to Amit Chudasama

  “Oh, you BEAUTY!” yells Nick. That’s more like it! An auto by itself looks wrong – but an auto connected to a thousand other autos looks normal. Indistinguishable from the real thing... he hopes.

  Nick uses the false-Amit profile to access the TransDigital network. He’s hunched over his autophone the way he used to sit hunched over his Pentium home computer when he was a teenager, fist clenched round a six-button joystick, yanking it left-right-forward-back, finger stuttering on the trigger, gunning down monsters, running down corridors, jumping across chasms, dodging enemy fire, solving puzzles, fighting his way to the end of level, ignoring the sounds of grown-ups downstairs, the whole world shrinking to whatever graphics were being displayed on his old 14” monitor with the anti-glare screen stuck to the front, no room in his head for anything else.

  The firewall lets false-Amit in. Nick has no idea what noises he’s making, or how fast he’s breathing, as he quickly pulls up the environmental smart meters for the entire data centre, dances through the options, finds the power regulators, selects the four master overrides and configures them to close in sequence, and as they flicker from green to red one by one he gets the impulse to type a message across the top of the screen, BANG IT BANG IT BANG IT BANG IT!

  The final power relay shuts down. Even the emergency on-site electrical generator is dead. He imagines what is now happening at the Enfield facility: all the ceiling lights going off, racks of servers going dark, surprised shouts from the engineers in the sudden silence.

  ...And that’s when the vision hits him.

  Of it not working.

  Of him being locked out.

  Of more and more autos migrating through the open port, as everyone who received an invitation to Nick and Larissa Brady’s 10th Wedding Anniversary joins the party whether they wanted to or not.

  Worse. What if it doesn’t stop there. What if the autos keep going. What if they take over the other servers in the facility – all seven hundred of them. What if they spread across the internet. What if they share the secret lives of every single person in the entire world – !

  – Nick jumps as his autophone goes black.

  “Oh!” says Larissa, as the same thing happens to hers too. She touches it, but gets no response. Looks at him with wide-eyed hope. “They all gone? What happen to them? Did you... you turn them all off?”

  Nick nods, slumping with exhaustion.

  “Killswitch.
”

  Larissa throws her arms around him and hugs tight. “You’s my ‘puter warrior,” she tells him, making him smile and squeeze her back. He loves this crazy Trini girl so much.

  They notice it at the same time: the clamour from downstairs has stopped. Sudden quiet fills the house. It’s so unnerving that Nick and Larissa scramble up and go rushing downstairs, leaving their identical autophones lying on the floor side by side.

  The living room is full of people staring at each other vacantly, as if waking up from a deep sleep. They shake their useless smartphones, take off their Vades™. The music has stopped. The smartscreens on the wall are blank.

  For the first time in years, everyone is offline.

  Normally this would bring howls of outrage. But now there’s a feeling of relief so strong you can taste it. Relief, and... loss. A sudden funereal air.

  Harry emerges from the crowd, covered in blood and glass and bruises, like the survivor of a war. He rattles the smartphone on his wrist like it’s a broken watch, then looks around at the shocked, embarrassed, exposed people. Nobody wants to meet each other’s eyes. They know too much about each other now. They all know each other’s dirty little secrets. And you can’t block or unfriend or filter someone standing right in front of you.

  But there’s nowhere else to look, except at each other.

  Nick, Larissa and Harry share a glance... and burst out laughing.

  Everybody else stares at them, confused, unable to see what they find amusing, what’s so bloody funny about this? And that just makes it worse, setting off Larissa’s too-loud-for-her-body boom, Harry’s blokey belly-laugh, and Nick’s surprisingly youthful chuckling, like a teenage boy being tickled.

  Why is he laughing? Not sure he can put it into words. It just all seems so... absurd, all of a sudden. So many things kept quiet. It all seemed so important, so private, shhh, don’t tell anyone, have to keep it secret! And yet here they all stand, just as alive as they were before.

  Nobody’s world ended today, not really. They just changed. And now they all have to find a new way of dealing with it.

  He reaches out to some bottles on a nearby table, grabs the applegrass vodka that Harry had brought.

  “Right!” says Nick to his friends. “Who needs a drink?”

  Backup

  With the soft crunching sound of tyres on gravel, Janine drives slowly into the car park. It’s over half full, but there’s still plenty of space for a small car like hers. She keeps going past the chapel building, then spins the steering wheel and reverses her Mini Rocketman, slotting it neatly between two much larger vehicles.

  Before she even turns the engine off, her auto has updated her location details.

  4.47pm Saturday 24 June 2022

  Janine Kinglake is at Enfield

  Cemetery and Crematorium,

  Great Cambridge Road, Enfield

  EN1 4DS

  Her auto hovers wherever her eyes go, thanks to the Vades™ she’s wearing. It’s only been a couple of months since she replaced her old smartphone with them. She’s still getting used to relying on eye movements and vocal commands instead of touching and finger-swiping a screen.

  But what a time-saver! Janine has decided she loves her Vades™. It’s fantastic to have your hands free, and your online life displayed alongside real life. Especially useful while driving, getting constant updates about traffic delays, roadworks or accidents. Her auto also plotted the best route from her home in Muswell Hill, and started flashing up arrows and directions until she told it to stop.

  Janine has driven here a hundred times. Knows this cemetery all too well.

  She says “Show mirror.” Her auto taps into the nearest camera – the car’s internal security-cam – and she sees herself sitting in the driver’s seat. Janine tuts as she fusses with her hair, which is cut in a boyish bob that helps her look a little younger than 37. She tilts her rounded face back and forth, rearranges her cotton top, breathes in and checks the waistline of her jeans. Yet again, Janine thinks how lucky she is not to have kids. Her figure might be more curvy than it was, but half of her old mates are the size of houses these days. She likes to think of herself as more of a maisonette, brickwork holding up nicely thanks.

  She says “Show feed.” Janine quickly scans down the list of the most recent updates from everyone in her Circle, finding out what her friends are doing this sunny Saturday afternoon. Nothing especially exciting. The word IKEA pops up a few times. Although, what’s this... an invite to a party? Been a while since she had one of those! But when she notices that it’s a virtual party taking place in a sim-room, she declines it with the firm blink of an eye. Never really got into all that simming stuff.

  She says “Show messages.” There’s only a few genuine private messages since she lefthome, all the autoed ones having been filtered out. She reads the PM from Frank, her other half. Poor sod has to work today. Even if he didn’t, he wouldn’t come to the cemetery with her. This place ‘does his head in’.

  She says “Reply. No problem hun, I’ll be back in about an hour, so don’t rush. Stick the roast in if you’re home before me. Love you lots.” Blink. Send.

  Janine pauses for a minute, thinking about Frank. Tall, black, baritone-voiced Franklin Adoyo, the man she’s hoping to spend the rest of her life with. You’d never expect a giant like him to be nervous about things like asking Janine out for a drink. Or asking her to stay the night. Or asking her to move in with him. So sweet. But he’d been especially nervous when she took him to her family home for the first time, four years ago.

  Mum would have loved him, Janine knows. She would have made such a fuss of him, baking him cakes, giving him gifts, everything. Oh, she’d have adored him.

  But instead Frank could only meet her Dad. While driving there, Janine had put Frank’s mind at ease by telling old family stories. She had many, because for Janine’s Dad, it had always been April Fool’s Day. He was the sort of man who got away with silly practical jokes, who always made you laugh, the life and soul wherever he went. In his job as a London black cab driver, which he did for over forty years, he always tried to keep his passengers amused on their journey. Sometimes with jokes or chit-chat, sometimes with a verbal tour guide if they were from out of town. Not all of them appreciated it, he’d been the first to admit with a laugh - the grumpy old sods!

  Janine had explained to Frank how her Dad had a great poker face and could tell the most outrageous lies, or ‘porkies’ as he called them. He used to wind her up something chronic when she was young, forever getting her to believe absolute nonsense. Aeroplanes turned into spaceships when they got high enough. Spaghetti grew on trees in Switzerland and was harvested by hand. The biggest fish in their garden pond was the baby of the shark from ‘Jaws’. All cats were telepathic, but their powers faded when their bellies were full (oddly believable, that one). White dog poo was actually werewolf poo, made from the bones of their victims. They’d sold the house and were going to live on a caravan site, or in an underground cave, or on a desert island.

  One time, he even made Janine believe they had adopted a Chinese boy called Por-Qui, and that she was going to have a little brother. Since she was 10 at the time, this felt like the world ending. Dad kept it going for days, even telling her she’d need surgery to make her eyes slanted, so that people would think her and Por-Qui were related. She went mental, throwing a historic tantrum.

  Only when she was led by her Dad into the living room to meet Por-Qui, and finding a huge stuffed panda bear sitting there smiling at her, did she realise that Por-Qui was just one of his ‘porkies’. She actually called her Dad an “effing b!”, mimicking how Mum used to swear, which made him cry with laughter. In fact Janine had been too relieved to be angry, and kept the panda on her bed to that very day.

  Frank had laughed his head off at this story, and met her Dad with a big relaxed smile on his face. And of course, Dad had loved him too. He’d treated Frank like a bonus son, awarded to him in his last couple o
f years.

  Janine stares into space, thinking. Wishing Frank had come today. Knowing he never would.

  She says “Status update. Visiting my Mum and Dad.” Considers adding something more, decides against it. Blink. Publish. It’s only a few seconds before responses start appearing, the usual autoed messages of kindness, hugs, XXXs, hope you’re OKs. Janine’s own auto does the same whenever it detects a status tagged as ‘sympathetic’.

  Janine takes off her Vades™ , folding them away in her handbag. Picks up the large bouquet of flowers lying on the passenger seat. Opens the two-part car door, pushing outward, then forward, click-clack. Slides out through the gap then shuts it, clack-click. It locks with a beep, striplights and headlamps going dark, knowing there’s nobody inside. Janine does the car-owner’s thing of glancing back at her gleaming blue Mini Rocketman as she walks away. She bought it second-hand five years ago, but it’s still going strong. Frank often tries to talk her into getting something bigger, but new cars are so pricey, especially those auto-driven ones. She can’t see the point if it’s just the two of them.

  Her brown leather boots crunch on the car park’s gravel. There are plenty of people around, departing or arriving, and many carry flowers like she does. She glances up at the clocktower of the chapel (feels odd not to have the time permanently displayed in the bottom left corner), with the smaller crematorium building beside it. Then she turns and walks down the path that takes her towards the graves.

  The cemetery grounds are wide and green, making her feel like she’s in the country rather than a suburb of London. Janine walks beneath tall trees, along lines of bushes and flowers, past statues on plinths. There are memorials of every kind here. Rows of small white stone markers, names etched on brass plates. Wooden benches marked with golden plaques. And of course the gravestones, jutting up from the grassy fields, equally spaced in neat rows as if in military formation. There’s a sense of great age and decay, with some of the stonework crumbling or mouldy, but fresh wreaths and flowers add spots of colour. Janine breathes in the summery air.