Perfidious Albion

by Sam Byers

  ‘It’s not enough just to make Green’s life inconvenient,’ said Trina. ‘By doing this, they’re undermining Green’s whole business model, their standing, their brand value. Everything. They’re saying: we made you. We can unmake you and remake you as we wish.’

  ‘We are your face,’ said Bream.

  Everyone took a moment to consider this, or, Trina thought, to look like they were considering it while in fact taking a few moments to second guess the ways in which everyone else might be considering it. Ordinarily, Trina would have found this uncomfortable. Thanks to her role in what was effectively a glorified HR position in an organisation dedicated to all but erasing any need for a discernible HR structure, she rarely knew anything worth noting, and so spent much of her time cultivating the appearance of concealing what she knew so as to more effectively conceal the fact that she knew very little. Today, though, Trina knew something she was reasonably sure could not be widely known, namely that Tayz, the MT, had gone semi-dark and was, probably right at this moment, engaged in odd and unknowable activity. In Trina’s mind, there was no question as to the importance and relevance of this information. The question instead was whether she should tell anyone now or simply run with it on her own. This, she thought, was the self-defeating ideology of gamification at Green. There was no way to progress by co-operating. What you needed was a crisis, and when that crisis came you needed to withhold the solution from your colleagues for as long as possible in order to, with luck, solve it single-handedly.

  The problem was that she had already flagged Tayz’s suspicious activity, raising the very real possibility that Bangstrom, in his rather unsettling determination to keep angling his lines of inquiry towards her, was not so much trying to find out what she knew as testing her to see if she planned on sharing.

  ‘This may or may not be relevant,’ she said, slightly experimentally, ‘but the other day I flagged an MT. His activity was weird.’

  Bangstrom gave no indication whatsoever that he had checked the flag, leading Trina to conclude that either she’d been right to assume he was sizing her up, or nowhere near strong enough in her estimation of just how ineffectual and determined to cover his own arse he actually was.

  ‘Weird how?’ said Holt.

  ‘Essentially idle. But with sub-activity I couldn’t monitor.’

  ‘So why not upstream it for checking?’ said Bream.

  ‘Exactly what I did by flagging it,’ said Trina.

  ‘And the upshot?’ said Bream.

  ‘Haven’t heard yet.’

  ‘You didn’t think it might be important?’ This was Bangstrom – already, Trina thought, manoeuvring to deflect and apportion blame.

  ‘I tried to raise it with Norbiton,’ said Trina, ‘but he was—’

  ‘He was being Norbiton,’ said Bangstrom.

  ‘This is a long-standing MT?’ said Holt.

  Trina nodded. ‘One of my best.’

  ‘Aw,’ said Bream, ‘she says my like he’s one of her kids.’

  ‘Fuck you, Bream,’ said Trina.

  ‘Alright,’ said Bangstrom. ‘Trina: work on that.’

  ‘On it,’ said Trina. ‘But I’ll need more access.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Bream. ‘That’s it? You’re just going to—’

  ‘I’m just going to let the only person in this room who has even the remotest chance of getting somewhere go ahead and maybe get somewhere,’ said Bangstrom. ‘I mean, crazy, I know, but what can I say, I’m a maverick.’

  ‘And meanwhile, we just—’

  ‘Meanwhile, you two pricks take a few moments to reflect on your total lack of contribution to the situation, and then maybe a few further moments to reflect on how things might play out if your positive contribution levels continue to flatline, as they have thus far, at around about the fuck-all mark. How about that?’

  Trina looked over at Bream, who was looking back at her with naked hostility. In the half-second that Bangstrom’s head was turned, she shot Bream a wink.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Bream.

  ‘Fuck who?’ said Bangstrom. ‘Because if that fuck you is in fact a fuck me, then let me tell you, Bream—’

  ‘It’s a fuck her,’ said Bream.

  ‘Right back at you,’ said Trina, unable to swallow the grin that had suddenly pressed upwards from her chest and burst open across her face.

  ‘Meeting adjourned,’ said Bangstrom.

  They bottlenecked at the door, Bream bumping Trina with his shoulder. She turned to face him, staring him down, daring him a little.

  ‘Have a nice day,’ said Bream, pushing past her and through the door.

  Safely sequestered in her No-Go room, in the brief seconds of heightened pause while her terminal booted up, Trina allowed herself three energetic fist pumps in quick succession. This, she thought, was it. This was everything she had so carefully constructed coming to fruition. It was the Beatrice system; it was her determination to grab herself a No-Go room; it was the endless hours and days pitch-shifting the parameters of faceless workers, calibrating, observing, waiting. It was her design, her plan, her hope.

  She fired up Beatrice and clicked around in the dashboard. There was Tayz, still pulling traffic, still dropping down the levels. She wondered if, with the increased access that was either coming or perhaps even already enabled, she might be able to get into the specifics of what Tayz had been doing. The system, she knew, allowed it, but that kind of data had remained, until now, locked off to her. She pulled up his user profile, started graphing his history. Information unfolded in neat columns in front of her. Bangstrom, she thought with a little thrill, must have gone straight back to his office and unlocked her privileges. The temptation to now waste time exploring her own boundaries was immense. How far did this new-found reach go? she wondered. All the way? She shook her head, defogging her brain of misdirection. If Bangstrom had been so quick to grant her access, she thought, he’d be watching to see exactly what she did with it. He was almost certainly, right now, at his own terminal, in his private office, pulling up all her click trails, mapping her routes through the system, monitoring all the things she was about to monitor in relation to Tayz. Somewhere, probably, someone Trina had never encountered was watching Bangstrom watch her watch Tayz.

  She got back down to it, scrolling, clicking, reordering. At what point, she wanted to know, had the change in Tayz’s behaviour begun? She ordered his history by productivity, looking for the peak and the drop-off. The decline was more sudden than she remembered. He’d tipped into a new level, unlocked higher pay, then slumped. Maybe, she thought, it was something in his personal life, some kind of complication or distraction. But that didn’t explain the activity. He was still, after all, working. She pushed into his packages, the individual microtasks that had been parcelled out to him, looking for the last thing he’d successfully fed back, finding a filename that looked like all the others – twenty or thirty digits of seemingly randomised upper-and lower-case letters – but with an extension she didn’t recognise: .fld. Against the listed files in front of her gaze, she overlaid another list in her mind, a scrolling index of familiar file types: .c; .sh; .bak. Coming up blank, she clicked on the file, wondering if she could, from here, go into it and unpack it or if she would need to find out where it came from and access it that way. The listed files shunted decisively leftwards, replaced by what was now a blank screen. Cursing, she clicked back. Her system, glitching, didn’t respond. She clicked again. A pop-up centred itself on her screen: Thank you for contributing. Click to acknowledge.

  She froze. Her fingers, resting on the keyboard in front of her, began to shake. It was a mistake, she told herself, a system glitch. Bangstrom hadn’t properly delineated her access levels. The system thought she was pushing beyond her remit and had locked her out. She’d clarify, get herself unlocked. It was fine.

  She clicked on the pop-up. Her screen blackened, returned to a log-in state. She put in her password. It came back u
nrecognised.

  She stood up and jerked open the door of her No-Go room, already fuming at whatever bullshit was unfolding. Outside, the two HR men from her induction were stood side by side, waiting for her.

  ‘Hello, Trina,’ said HR man number one. ‘If we could just borrow you for a minute?’

  People were looking up over their terminals. The room echoed with the click-clack of urgent IMs being fired off and opened. She felt hotly visible, exposed in the transition from her private room to the glare of the floor.

  ‘Can I ask what this is—’

  ‘Won’t take long,’ said the HR man.

  ‘Literally no time at all,’ said number two.

  ‘Do I need someone with me?’ she said.

  HR man number one shook his head.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere until I—’

  Bream appeared behind them, inexplicably absent from his own No-Go room, doing his best to shape a face approximating sympathy.

  ‘Word of advice,’ he said. ‘It always goes better if you don’t fight it.’

  *

  To say that word of what was happening in Edmundsbury had spread quickly was something of an anachronism. All word spread quickly, regardless of any inherent urgency. But even by the standards of a high-speed time, it was noticeable that The Griefers and their odd, ad-hoc protest, if that’s what it was, had been seized upon by opinionists up and down the country almost immediately. A collective nerve had been touched. Opinions kept on standby were suddenly and deliriously discharged.

  DeCoverley’s little gatherings had helped, as had Hugo Bennington and, probably, Robert’s columns about the estate. Not so long ago, Jess thought, Edmundsbury would have been far enough off the commentarial radar for most people to think twice before unholstering their thinkpieces. Now, it occupied a tantalising hypothetical position. It was recognisable enough to the intellectual and political set that events taking place within the town seemed notable, but not so familiar that many of their readers could securely challenge anyone’s interpretation of those events, meaning any columnist who’d once hopped on a train and spent two hours wandering around could now claim a unique level of insight. It was a perfect storm of opportunistic interpretation. Something no-one yet understood had taken place in a setting with which only a privileged or irrelevant few were familiar. All known yardsticks of veracity were therefore abandoned. If no-one knew what something meant, anything anyone said about it could be true.

  For Jess, sitting at her office computer studying the chatter of comment, the available responses were predictable largely because the people offering those responses were so depressingly familiar. Here, for example, in a longish piece for a neoliberal, corporately sponsored web-rag called The Non-Believer, was none other than Ziegler, he of the misappropriated data and thinly veiled misogyny, putting forward the opinion that The Griefers, with their interchangeable white male faces and drably businesslike attire, were staging a protest not against the internet, but against the tyranny of identity politics.

  For Rogue Statement, The Griefers’ faces and uniforms, the quasi-military overtones of their arrival in a van with blacked-out windows, conveniently hinted at a fascistic aesthetic that the Theory Dudes were keen to exploit. As always, though, the simple recognition of observable fascism was not enough for a group still riding high from a recent, heavily circulated piece about the fascism of selfie-sticks, and so they had spun from their loose observations about The Griefers an overblown and frankly dangerous riff on the inherent fascism of public events in general, and, by extension, all protest, implying, although Rogue Statement didn’t quite say it, that conformity was the last truly radical act.

  Jacques DeCoverley, meanwhile, was worried less about fascism and more about what he termed the encroachment of the contemporary. What was happening in Edmundsbury, he said, was emblematic. The modern world could no longer be escaped, even in parts of England that once could have been relied upon to act as a haven from, one presumed, all the things DeCoverley had grandiosely left London to escape. Edmundsbury, he contended, had to defend its connection to what he slightly incoherently called the ancient, unchanging real. It needed to resist not only the encroachment of technology, but the encroachment of the discussion of technology. It needed to get back to a sense of place and belonging. It needed, he said, to finger once again England’s visionary soil. How could it do that if not only technology, but protests against technology kept worming their way in?

  ‘Catching up?’ said Deepa, entering with her usual enervated energy and casual disregard for knocking. ‘I’ll spare you the trouble: the masters of the dude-iverse have not excelled themselves.’

  She flopped into Jess’s spare chair, tried three different arrangements of legs and arms, then gave up and stood again, wandering over to the window of Jess’s office and peering out at the car park.

  ‘Deepa,’ said Jess, turning from her screen and fixing Deepa with a stern over-the-shoulder stare. ‘Have you … slept at all?’

  ‘What?’ Deepa was back in the chair again, folding her hands, then unfolding them, then biting her nails, then seemingly noticing something about the nails that concerned her and studying them intently. ‘No. Sort of. I mean, a bit. But mainly no.’

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’ve had four coffees.’

  ‘Do you want to maybe—’

  ‘Take the edge off? No. I mean, thanks. But no.’

  Deepa set strict limits around relaxation. She knew when she needed it, knew what she needed to induce it, but rejected it out of hand when thinking was required. For her, thinking was not contemplative. It was not even particularly focused. It charged and sprawled. Connections fired, multiplied, then dwindled.

  ‘Everyone’s focusing on the wrong thing,’ she said. ‘I mean, they’re looking at the thing itself and not the thing that the thing is supposed to direct people towards.’

  Jess nodded.

  ‘People are like, oh my God, The Griefers. But they should be like—’

  ‘Oh my God, privacy.’

  ‘Right. They’re looking for meaning in the masks but there isn’t any meaning in the masks. The whole point is that everything of any significance in that event was already available. It was taken from elsewhere.’

  ‘They’re wearing a composite image. We are your face.’

  ‘Right, this is you. This is your picture on the internet. This is the email you sent. This is all the shit you thought was private but isn’t.’

  ‘Or is but soon may not be.’

  Deepa shook her head.

  ‘That bit I don’t buy though. The whole threat angle. The blackmail possibility. I mean, they haven’t even said what they want.’

  ‘Or what they’ve got.’

  ‘Right,’ said Deepa. ‘Some pictures? I mean, I’ve got pictures. Everyone’s got pictures.’

  ‘You could have put together that little spectacle just as easily,’ said Jess.

  ‘I could. But, I mean, better, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Deepa had extended her hand level with the floor and was now rhythmically flexing and clenching her fingers.

  ‘Cramps?’ said Jess.

  ‘Partly,’ said Deepa darkly.

  ‘Partly?’

  ‘The cramps are the symptom. They’re not in themselves a diagnosis. It’s like when people say, Oh, I’ve got a cough. Yes, but why? What sort of cough is it? Maybe it’s bronchial. Maybe it’s cancerous. Maybe it’s fucking airborne, you know?’

  ‘That’s your mouse hand, Deepa. You’ve got trackpaditis.’

  ‘My question is,’ said Deepa, treating Jess’s inexpert diagnosis with the disdain she clearly felt it deserved, ‘what do they want? Or, no, actually, that’s not my question. My question is, do they even want anything at all?’

  ‘And if they do, why don’t they just ask for it?’

  ‘Maybe it’s ideological,’ said Deepa.

  ‘Maybe the screening was one big
public-information film. Like, Remember, kids, the internet can be dangerous.’

  Deepa rolled her eyes. ‘That’s so corny though. Like, OK, they’ve appropriated the whole Griefers and Trolls idea from online and brought it offline in order to make everyone think about what certain behaviour actually means or the ways in which context has been allowed to determine morality, as in, you do this online, or you accept this online, or you are this online, none of which you would think is OK in some sort of offline, so-called real-world setting. Fine. But if that’s their thing, then what separates them from all those yoghurt-weaving crusties trying to cast off their devices and get back to nature? Or put it another way: what’s their alternative?’

  ‘What if we’re getting confused by the medium? And what if that’s exactly the point they’re making? What if they’re saying: it doesn’t matter that all this shit you do is online, it still exists, and it’s still you, and one day someone, anyone, can remind you of it, meaning, basically, remind you of who you really are. Hence: We are your face. We are you. This is you. This is all of us. And the cosy little box we’ve all fashioned to pour our ids into isn’t as secure as we thought.’

  ‘You know what I’m thinking?’ said Deepa.

  ‘Honestly, Deepa? No. I don’t know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I’m thinking: false flag.’

  ‘Oh, Deepa, Jesus Christ. Seriously? I mean, do we have to—’

  ‘Think about it,’ said Deepa.

  ‘I don’t have to think about it, Deepa. There’s nothing to think about.’

  ‘Say you’re the government.’

  Jess hung her head in her hands.

  ‘No, hear me out,’ said Deepa. ‘Say you’re the government and you want to force through, like, utterly draconian internet measures.’

  ‘They’re not from the government, Deepa.’

  ‘Not from the government, no. But—’

  ‘But what? You think the government of England just, like, selected a small town in England, where literally no-one actually lives, in order to stage some sort of, I don’t know, art happening, which was seen by like tens of people, in order to instigate some national programme of—’