by Toby Weston
“Sorry, Dad,” Ben tried again, momentarily distracted by a fly that kept bothering his ear. “Look, we’ve patched the breach. Amazingly, it looks like a mouse gnawed through a fibre line. You were offline for just a few minutes, but the hackers had a valid certificate and could use that time to override your avatar.”
“A mouse?”
“I swear!”
George held his pleading eyes for a full five seconds, then said calmly, “Ben, you’re fired!”
“What?”
“Seriously, you are fired.”
“Wait, Dad! Please, it really wasn’t my fault.”
“Ben, that’s the thing about responsibility. It’s my fault for putting you in charge of something clearly beyond your capabilities, and it’s your fault for messing it up!”
Ben just sat; mouth slack and open. Social reflexes already picturing him stripped of corporate title, private office and all the other crucial trappings of success.
George watched the resulting expressions parade across Ben’s face. “Oh, don’t be so pathetic! We’ll give you something to keep you busy! We can’t officially sack you without admitting something serious went wrong. We’ll just say some intern sabotaged your slide deck and asked some difficult questions...”
Ben did feel pathetic—more so as he experienced a swell of relief at the proffered golden parachute, which would at least leave a few shreds of his pride intact—until George completed his sentence.
“…Shaun is going to take over Clearing House.”
“What!”
“I don’t usually take things personally, Ben, but this time…”
“Really? You’re putting him in charge just to rub salt in my wounds!”
“You stupid child! I’m not taking things personally against you! Although, perhaps if I did, if I’d been stricter as a father when you were younger, you might take things more seriously now and we wouldn’t have to make ourselves look like a bunch of jabbering fools incompetent enough to be duped by a trouble-making intern. I don’t blame you, really. I blame myself and, of course, I blame him!” George locked eyes with Ben.
“The intern?”
“Not the bloody intern! Keep up! The intern is a fabrication! I mean Niato! He’s behind this, you mark my words.”
“Right, yes.”
“We need to show that his childish ideology is a fiction of dreams! I didn’t build up this company and spend my life buttering up those Forward arseholes just to have a big Nip clown and his gang of Pinko kids come along and knock it all down again! No, we are going to close this nonsense down, now! The Forwards are on board, Çin will be, too, once they see how effective a little public-private cooperation can be. Shaun has already authorised the first batch of intel packages.”
Ben tried again at an apology, his mouth flapping ineffectually for a few minutes. There may have been words, but Ben knew there was very little content. Eventually, George interrupted his floundering and cut him off, putting him out of his misery.
“Look, I’m busy. Go home. Take a few days. Take a holiday, for all I care. Focus on the ANZDS integration. I’ll transfer responsibility for the merger over to you while we look for something more, err, matched to your skills… Believe me, Ben, it’s for the best. Shaun is the right person for this job. You said yourself, he isn’t overly encumbered by sentiment. He’s a capitalist like myself. He understands that his future at BHJ is linked to his continued ability to deliver effective service. Whereas you, Ben, are my son, and seem to think that you can continue to presume on my sentimental weaknesses as a father!”
George vanished abruptly before Ben had a chance to reply, leaving him alone in the study, where he immediately felt like a trespasser. He quickly left, taking his barely nibbled pear with him.
Up on the roof, Ben hailed an auto to take him back to his flat in Wapping. Lifting above the houses, it joined a vein of traffic crossing the meander at Westminster. The tide was in. The Thames looked like a proper river. Blue sky and sunlight reflected from wakes and from the windows of hundreds of water craft making their way between its banks. Drones of every shape and size buzzed above and below; only the invisible stratum at two hundred metres, designated exclusively to auto traffic, was free of their frenzied swarms.
A Xepplin cruised overhead on its final approach to its mooring on the eightieth floor of Pritchard’s Tower at Southwark. Its massive tail flukes were motionless as it coasted up, bleeding its remaining inertia and making minor adjustments with its numerous pairs of fin-like wings.
Higher still, glints in the deep blue announced glider kites, soaring with the help of the sun, on their way to, or from, places near and far. Watching through the auto’s sunroof, craning his neck, Ben noticed a vapour trail appear; a blob of white, spreading as if a lifted brush had been dabbed back onto moist paper, leaving a blot at the start of an extending line—something, probably an intercontinental suborbital—returning from above the Stratopause.
Ben watched the city’s life, knowing that each body, box or bus moving through the Real was outnumbered a trillion to one by packets streaming through the corresponding realms of digital. Only a decade since the years of the Great Global Contraction and, despite the growing litany of forces working to tear the world apart, Çin, the Caliphate and the Forwards had resuscitated their ailing patient. The engines of global commerce were thrumming again—thanks, in part, Ben knew, to the armies of Sages and mOids running in BHJ’s datacentres, massaging opinions and preventing natural oscillations of public opinion from combining into swells of dangerous or destabilising proportions.
A glider kite swooped above the river. Dropping through layers of sky, preparing to make a delivery to some nearby roof or garden. It flared suddenly and briefly, becoming a glare of blue and green. Then, with a flash, which Ben had to blink away, its elegant form was punctured. The resulting ungainly mess collapsed and tumbled a hundred metres to splash onto the surface of the Thames. A small cluster of bright yellow Razzia drones were already converging on the spot where the silvery crumple floated on the river.
Ben tutted to himself. Some kid’s party weekend had probably been ruined; his order of wacky backy now waterlogged and sinking towards the muddy bed of the Thames. At some level, Ben knew he was trivialising things; subconsciously conforming to the narrative the Forward government worked so hard to maintain. The cargo might just as well have been crucial medication, or niche computer hardware, or art supplies, or virtually anything produced in one of the artisanal workshops or grey market Fabs hidden among the offices and factories of the officially sanctioned economy.
Ben was actually secretly happy to have been fired from Clearing House. He had been too cowed to tell George to his face, but he knew his mother would have thought snooping on customers and grassing them up to the Forward’s secret police was vulgar. He hadn’t derived any professional satisfaction from pissing on the fireworks of kids who would rather spend their days in healthy entrepreneurial commerce, than slumped under the weight of titillating fiction, acted out by legions of synthetic abs, arses and coquettish smiles, and pumped into unfocused eyes by propaganda-as-a-service vendors like Shaun’s Persuasive Technologies division.
Bastard.
Shaun, and people like him—certainly not Ben—were remaking the world as an antagonistic nightmare. Every iota of information—each Bit—synthetically evolved to abuse what might once have been elegant heuristics for plain roaming primates, but were now well-documented psychological vulnerabilities available for exploitation by corporations and governments keen to maintain control.
Some called it behavioural economics, others robot propaganda. To Ben, the family business had always been a silver spoon; but now, the base metal was showing through and it was starting to taste bad.
In the old days, whenever his job had made him feel momentarily unclean, Ben had displaced his guilt by starting an argument with Keith; trolling him with whatever fiendish new scheme BHJ had come up with to extract value from some yet
unexploited seam of social altruism. Ben had delighted in Keith’s outrage. It had made him feel superior and mature. But now, with his confessor selfishly gone—killed in a military ambush, only to return, like a Christ, or a vengeful ghost, to rescue a bunch of whores, before almost immediately dying again—Ben’s conscience was left to stew alone.
Tit, Ben thought to himself, affectionately remembering his old pal.
***
Back at the house in Kensington, George’s office, now emptied of physical and projected presences, dimmed its lights and locked its doors. The air conditioning spun down, fresh air routing to more densely populated locations within the sprawling Georgian building. The study was still. Only the predictable trajectories of settling dust motes, or the erratic movements of the flies patrolling the fruit—which had, apparently, been left for their sole enjoyment—broke the stagnancy. Later, after everyone had gone home for the night, the doors unlocked and a mAId entered the study. Walking with shy, short steps, its eyes permanently cast down, it meekly dusted and vacuumed, then removed the mostly untouched fruit, tipping the apples, pears and bananas into its rubbish bin/apron.
Tiny wings beat, lifting half a dozen startled fruit flies away from the disruption wrought by the mAId’s porcelain fingers. Some flew to sanctuary, hiding in the carvings of the antique fireplace, or alighting on the polished leather backs of the room’s chairs. A few, though, stayed resolutely attached to their fruit, eventually finding themselves dumped by rougher mechanical hands into black sacks.
With the first rays of a new day, a magpie alighted on the side of a skip. Its head tilted as it brought tiny black eyes to bear on a fresh mound of sacks, piled three high, in the skip. It hopped down, carefully pecking through the plastic on each, then settled on the skip’s rim to wait.
Stirred by the arrival of fresh air, and following faint chemical clues, a small swarm of flies left the warm, sweet sanctuary of the sack. They spiralled chaotically through the rubbish-scented air, eventually settling on the iridescent, strangely beckoning, breast feathers of the nearby magpie.
Preening flies from its feathers, pecking them down one at a time, the bird ate, satisfied with the tokens it was accumulating, displayed unobtrusively in its sensorium.
Micro-fluidic machinery in the bird’s stomach scoured cytoskeletal fragments for tell-tale ‘Start of File’ markers. For years, legions of flies, performing a selfless duty as expendable biological Dictaphones, had recorded audio from inside this site of interest. Their synthetic metabolism encoding sound waves as protein patterns on atomic-scale Tubulin tape-drives; smuggling the information inside their cells to accomplices, who would transmit it onward to the Mesh.
The magpie’s BugNet node was nestled in its chest, powered by the bird’s metabolism, projecting its biomechanical filaments through the animal’s flesh, like the fungal mycelia beneath a rotting log. It decoded and re-transmitted the information it gathered. Meshlet algorithms, working on millions of similar streams, filtered, analysed and classified petabytes of data every hour.
Because Spex communicated by directly stimulating the brain, rather than producing real sounds, most of the recordings represented only one-sided fragments of conversations. If one of the participants was remoting in as an avatar, their voice would be missing on the local audio; but sometimes, missing voices could be located in complementary recordings fortuitously gathered elsewhere, perhaps by other synthetically adapted organisms. In these cases, conversations could be reassembled, semantically parsed, highlighted, tagged, correlated, and anything with perceived salience shoved up the chain…
***
Threats, and unpleasant implications, began to form within affiliated Klan nodes distributed across the Mesh. Warnings were broadcast, Klan alerts escalated. However, for hundreds of the Kin across Forward Europe, any warning would come too late. Razzia raids, tipped off by project Clearing House, were already setting out before the magpie had even finished its daily meal of flies.
***
“There is unusual drone activity outside,” the Fab’s automation announced.
“Unusual how?”
“Many small UAVs, converging on this location.” The Fab avatar paused. “Update to that, I have just noticed two larger drones approaching. Engine noise and pings line up with bus-sized civilian vehicles, but I am also picking up network chatter consistent with military comms.”
“It’s the fucking Razzia!”
The Klan community centre was a repurposed carpark located under an office building. Employees had moved out two decades ago, early casualties of the Great Contraction. The top floors had been organically repurposed as more or less officially recognised housing. The ground and first floors played host to micro businesses dealing in a good random selection of what the grey economy had to offer—including, but not limited to, imported mangos, generic medicals, transportation services, biological cultures, recreational robotics, aquaponics and, of course, a wide selection of drugs and firearms.
It was 11 am on a Thursday morning. Outside, it was overcast and rainy. LED signs decorated the building’s façade, their colourful halos proclaiming the diverse goods and services offered within. The basement was a hive of both industrious and recreational activity. Kin played pool or sat drinking coffee. Some, partying in other time zones, danced to homegrown mukka, while others worked at benches, engrossed in the retro activities of soldering and coding, filling the already smoky air with the acrid tang of hot flux. Packages were being prepared for delivery. A big 3D printer in one corner was bashing out complicated topologies in carbon fibre. A cluster of twelve Kin, in head-enclosing Spex, sat near the printer. Isolated, separated from its rattling and hissing by physical helmets and noise-cancelling intelligence, they were happy to inhabit this unpopular corner.
A silent alarm flicked on. The dance floor’s lighting system, accompanied by the room’s less sophisticated lamps, flashed a yellow pulse. Spex blitted warnings to anybody immersed or overlaying.
Jak’s Spex blitted ‘RAZZIA RAID’. She was confused for a few heartbeats, surfacing from the flow state she had managed to reach a couple of hours earlier. She had been working on code for their Klan’s welfare FAC. Her Spex were now overlaying an evacuation map. A child appeared in front of her.
“This way, Jak!” the oid said, holding out a hand and edging off into the crowd.
Joe and Beth grabbed components off the bench and threw them into an antistatic bag. Joe looked scared. Jak tried to smile at him, but he was already following Beth and their own evac-oid.
Jak grabbed her bag and Companion and then chased after them.
The big, sliding door had started to open. Through the widening gap, they could see a line of Razzia in powered riot armour advancing down the ramp. The door creaked and squealed as its motors reversed. A few Kin had already squeezed through; they now tried to push back in, but the idea to reverse direction hadn’t propagated through the crowd and a clog of bodies resisted the closing door.
Panic grew.
A swarm of drones pelted through the gap. Inside, people began to swat at them with bags, umbrellas and anything else to hand. A few even had tennis rackets strung with piano wire, presumably stashed somewhere for just such an eventuality.
Two mechOids pushed between the door and the concrete wall. The ambulatory riot machinery carried loops of bright yellow crowd cuffs. Autonomous lethal force was illegal—but tactical, locally piloted, less-than-lethal enforcement, was acceptable. The mechOids would be operated by officers in a command and control vehicle nearby.
People now scrambled with renewed energy to get out of the way of riot shields and stun rods. The clot of bodies was dislodged and the door rumbled into motion again.
Inside, with too-fast-to-follow movements, the mechOids were pushing through the crowd, catching miscellaneous hands and threading them quickly into vacant yellow loops; pulling ties closed; readying the next loop and moving on. In their wake, they left a growing string of hysterical people
chained together with yellow plastic.
There were shouts; flailing; screams of pain and terror.
The Klan security was waking up to the situation. An alert had been broadcast and Kin were manifesting—remoting in to take over local systems. Defensive gear more advanced than tennis rackets was urgently retrieved. Balls of sticky riot putty began to thud into the mechOids—golf ball-sized spheres of fluid compressed within a fragile shell, along with an exciting mix of metallic shards and nano-filament fluff. The putty hardened when the shell ruptured, obscuring sensors and gumming up servos and joints.
Under electronic warfare attack, the door began rumbling open again and tear gas canisters began to bounce through. One mechOid was lying on its face, its knee and ankle joints jammed with gunk. A knot of well-coordinating Kin, wielding chairs and tables, had immobilised it against the floor and were flailing at it with whatever blunt instruments they had been able to improvise. Somewhere near—within the hundred-metre perimeter required by international law—its operator was putting up a game fight, but it looked like the mechOid would be out of action for the remainder of the operation.
