Perfidious Albion

by Sam Byers

  ‘Maybe this one’s the tester. They’re feeling it out. It’s a trial run.’

  ‘Deepa. Please. Do not go down this rabbit hole. Look. All the information is there. The masks. The appropriated faces. The snapshots of online behaviour. They’re reflecting back. We are your face. I mean, come on.’

  Deepa was eyeing Jess suspiciously.

  ‘What?’ said Jess after a significant pause. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘Because it’s very interesting,’ said Deepa.

  ‘What’s interesting?’

  Deepa waved a hand vaguely in the air.

  ‘This. This whole angle you’ve got here.’

  ‘It makes sense, Deepa.’

  ‘Yeah. If you’re you.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Deepa angled her head to one side and somehow implied a roll of her eyes without actually rolling them. Jess shifted position in her seat. This was something Deepa was uncomfortably adept at: the sudden pinch-to-zoom, the shift of focus from paranoid global hypotheticals to astute interpersonal specifics.

  ‘Your whole take on this thing,’ said Deepa, her tone suddenly gentler, more patient, ‘is that it’s about the essentially pretty toxic nature of our behaviour on the internet, right? The way we kid ourselves that our behaviour can be digitally contained when in fact it can’t, both in a literal sense, because we have no actual control over our data, and in a less literal sense, because that kind of shit has a way of always finding its way back. Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jess cautiously. ‘That’s … That’s basically what I’m saying.’

  ‘And you don’t think,’ said Deepa, ‘that that in any way says more about you than it does about what’s going on?’

  Jess felt herself slump a little.

  ‘Are you worried?’ said Deepa, not unkindly, but not so gently that there was any question of her indulging any bullshit.

  ‘No,’ said Jess. ‘God no. I’m interested. That’s all. And maybe this is their whole point, right? We project. We see our own face in everything. I mean, God, you only have to look at the thinkpieces this morning to see everyone finding their own reflections in the headlines.’

  ‘Maybe you feel guilty,’ said Deepa.

  ‘Guilty? You’re shitting me, aren’t you? Guilty about what?’

  ‘I’m saying: say, just for argument’s sake, that these Griefer guys actually plan to make everyone in Edmundsbury’s internet usage public. Say that’s really what they’re going to do: lay us all bare, possibly literally, in front of each other, so that we can all get a good long look at the people we are, the people we live with, the people we love. Right? Say for a second that’s what’s coming. I’m saying: imagine that moment. Imagine it all pouring forth. Imagine the end of secrets. And then imagine how you’ll feel. Horrified? Ashamed? Or …’

  Jess knew what was coming even before Deepa got to the word, and so finished the sentence for her.

  ‘Relieved.’

  Deepa gave her an open-palmed you got it gesture and sat back in her chair with an air of commingled satisfaction and concern.

  ‘Have you seen his latest column?’ said Deepa after a while.

  ‘Whose?’ said Jess, off guard, the question nicking at the edge of her skin. ‘Robert’s?’

  She had, of course, been thinking about Robert. Was it that obvious?

  ‘Real change of pace this time round,’ said Deepa.

  ‘In what way?’

  Deepa shook her head, then raised her hands.

  ‘Not going there,’ she said, standing up.

  ‘Great,’ said Jess. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ called Deepa in a sing-song voice from the corridor.

  There was still a qualitative difference between the way Jess navigated to one of Robert’s columns when she was logged in as herself, and the way she did so when she was logged in as Julia Benjamin, but Jess was unnerved at the distinction’s decay. Once, her feelings had stayed where she had put them. Jess had kept up to date with Robert’s work so that she felt in touch with what he was doing, where he was in his thinking, and so that she could discuss it with him later, over dinner, or half-watching a television show on the couch. Julia went there looking for weakness, for an opportunity to argue. Slowly, because of the gaps in Robert’s thinking Julia had been able to open up, Jess increasingly clicked through to one of Robert’s columns with trepidation, and read them with a slight wince. Now, something in Deepa’s grim tone had exacerbated that sensitivity. When Jess arrived at the piece and began reading, something in Robert’s tone blurred the lines between her selves even further.

  Robert had, for a long time, and certainly in the wake of his more recent success and visibility, dialled up a version of himself when he put a column together: a little sharper, a little more forthright, a little more perfectly positioned than he was able to be in person. The discrepancy – subtle enough to be detectable only to someone who knew Robert as intimately as Jess – had always annoyed her. Indeed, its existence in part explained her need to create Julia Benjamin in the first place. But she had always been able to detect one Robert in the other, and she had always taken a degree of reassurance from that, as if in continuing to recognise him a kind of anchor was established by which she was able to recognise herself. Now, though, Robert had widened the gap between the man he was at home and the mouthpiece he became in print to an alarming, chasmic degree.

  The truth, Robert wrote, is that Darkin simply isn’t cool. His plight ticks not a single one of the boxes necessary to ensure the fashionability of his cause. He is simply a man – an old, white man – who has given enough, paid enough, shared enough, but who now receives nothing in return because society has moved on, and no longer regards the Darkins of the world as a worthwhile cause.

  She sat back in her chair and allowed her computer to go to screensave. It was a state she wished she could access herself: awake, running low-level processes, but disconnected, and available to receive new information only if woken in the correct way. She didn’t want to think about this piece, she realised – didn’t want to consider its meanings and implications, or palpate the sensitivities it stirred in her. Which was worse, she wondered: being unable to recognise her partner in what she read, or recognising him all too well?

  She tried to imagine herself reading the piece as someone who had never met Robert, let alone lived with him, but doing so only returned her to the person she’d created in order to achieve just that: Julia. Everyone, she now saw, was doing exactly what she spent her time doing: donning a series of masks, creating convenient personalities they could inhabit. You were this person at work, this person at home, this person in print, this person digesting the ideas of another.

  She wanted to text Robert, or phone him. Or, even better, go home and confront him with the absurdity of what she’d just read. But of course, she thought, she couldn’t. This was the great side effect of Julia: she and Robert no longer argued. They had outsourced their disagreements, and in doing so created a space where they were happy, where the concerns that threatened their comfort were held at bay. The moment she went home and said what she thought, she would allow Julia into her home alongside what she now thought of as public Robert. Something would be irrevocably ruptured; some membrane would tear. The dark matter of their ideas would subsume them.

  She pushed back from her desk and picked up her bag. On her way out, she tapped on Deepa’s door and gave a little wave.

  ‘Back later.’

  Deepa, engrossed in her screen, raised a hand above her shoulder, but didn’t turn round.

  *

  ‘One thing we want to be clear on,’ said HR man number two as they steered Trina into the same windowless room she remembered from her induction. ‘We’ve looked at your performance here and we have to say it’s admirable.’

  ‘We’ve also looked at your personal qualities and we want to make it clear we feel those are admirable too,’ said number one as they took their
seats opposite Trina. ‘Not to mention your membership of certain minority groups, which although not admirable simply in and of itself does draw attention to the way you manage your membership of those groups and the unique challenges membership of those groups presents, which is admirable.’

  ‘Is this going somewhere?’ said Trina. ‘Because nice though it is to be admired—’

  ‘OK,’ said number two. ‘Here’s the rub: Trina, have you checked your phone in the past, I don’t know, thirty minutes, give or take?’

  ‘No,’ said Trina. ‘I was busy with work.’

  ‘What’s your notification protocol?’ said number one.

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Vibrations, sounds, alerts on screen, or total do-not-disturb blackout?’

  ‘All silent,’ said Trina.

  ‘OK. Good to clarify that.’

  ‘Clarify what?’

  ‘Clarify the fact that unless you have physically looked at the screen of your phone and actually, you know, gone through your alerts, you won’t know what has been happening, which goes some way to explaining why you haven’t done anything about it.’

  ‘Maybe you’d like to look at your phone now,’ said number two. ‘So we’re all on the same page with reference to what has been occurring.’

  Trina checked her phone. She had two hundred Twitter notifications.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said.

  HR man number two reached in his pocket for a phone and tapped around on it before turning its screen towards Trina. On the screen was a snapshot of her tweet about Hugo Bennington: #whitemalegenocide. Lol.

  ‘Is that your tweet?’ said HR man number two.

  ‘Yes,’ said Trina, who now felt not only sick but alternately hot and cold and intermittently short of breath.

  ‘Correction,’ said number one. ‘It’s actually not your tweet. It’s Hugo Bennington’s tweet of your tweet.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said Trina.

  ‘That’s approximately what we said,’ said HR man number one.

  ‘Approximately,’ said number two.

  ‘It’s my personal account,’ said Trina. ‘It’s not a work account. And for fuck’s sake, I didn’t even at him. He must have searched. And I put lol at the end. Only an idiot would think I was—’

  ‘Some kind of dangerous extremist threatening the English way of life?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘We’re quoting,’ said number two.

  ‘Quoting directly,’ said number one.

  ‘Quoting who?’

  ‘Multiple sources. On Twitter. On blogs. And, as of a few minutes ago, on a live radio phone-in.’

  ‘I’m being called an extremist?’

  ‘We’re not saying we feel that’s an appropriate term.’

  ‘We’re just quoting.’

  ‘But this is obviously bullshit,’ said Trina. ‘I mean, you can see that, right? Anyone who isn’t a moron can see that this is just—’

  ‘It is what it is, is what it is.’

  ‘Right. It’s very much what it is, and we have to take it for what it is.’

  ‘So let’s move on and tell you about our problem.’

  ‘Your problem?’

  ‘Do you recall,’ said HR man number two, ‘the conversation we had when you first started here?’

  ‘Oh fuck me,’ said Trina. ‘You’re not serious. You’re not seriously going to go there.’

  ‘Let’s make one thing very clear,’ said HR man number one. ‘We’re going to go everywhere.’

  ‘Right,’ said his colleague. ‘There is nowhere we are not now going to go in the name of getting this thing sorted out.’

  ‘When you joined us, Trina, it was necessary to have a conversation about your past.’

  Trina just shook her head, sicker than ever at where this was obviously now heading.

  ‘Or more specifically, about the contents of your past.’

  ‘Right. About your history of …’

  ‘Let’s say confrontation.’

  ‘Right. Confrontation. And physical violence.’

  ‘Which we are not judging.’

  ‘Totally not judging.’

  ‘Which we are dealing with strictly as a legal point of fact as it is noted on your record.’

  ‘Exactly. Strictly that.’

  ‘And which we have never had cause to bring up until now.’

  ‘Unless you include then.’

  ‘Right. Now and then. Those are the only two occasions.’

  ‘That has no relation to …’ Trina protested.

  ‘We’re not here to say categorically yes or no in terms of the relation between these two things,’ said number one.

  ‘We’re here to point out that when you started here, we explained to you that, given your background, there were certain circumstances in which we would be forced to take your history into account. And this is obviously one of those circumstances.’

  ‘Because what have we got here? We’ve got people saying, hey, HR guys, what is this Trina person like? Is this usual behaviour for her? Does this kind of outburst have any precedent?’

  ‘And obviously we’re thinking—’

  ‘What people?’ said Trina. ‘What people are asking about me?’

  ‘We’re thinking, possible threat alongside previous demonstrable history of enacting that threat.’

  ‘I don’t have a history of genocide, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘You have a history of violence.’

  ‘Violence against men.’

  ‘Let me ask you, Trina. Was your previous partner, the person you assaulted, a white man?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not a trick question.’

  ‘Very straightforward question.’

  ‘I’m not answering that question, because it is not fucking relevant. Jesus Christ, this is madness. Can’t you see what madness this is?’

  ‘We’re trying to establish some kind of precedent.’

  ‘If he wasn’t white it could really help you.’

  ‘Because then we could say, yes, OK, she does have some history of violence, but it’s not race-specific.’

  ‘Whereas if he was white—’

  ‘Fuck you both,’ said Trina. ‘Fuck you both completely. You creepy sanctimonious clones. You don’t even have names, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘We absolutely have names,’ said number one.

  ‘I’m actually a little hurt at the suggestion we don’t,’ said number two.

  ‘But we’ll probably let that slide because there are mitigating emotional circumstances.’

  ‘Mitigating emotional circumstances? Let me clarify with you, OK, dickhead twins? There are no emotional circumstances. There are factual circumstances. I’m being witch-hunted. I might be in physical danger. Green should be protecting me, instead of—’

  ‘We are protecting you.’

  ‘And us.’

  ‘No reason we can’t do both.’

  ‘Alright, alright,’ said Trina, who much as she may have been angry was not in any way irrationally so, meaning she was aware of the battles that would help her and those that would not. ‘What now?’

  ‘We suggest you keep your head down.’

  ‘That’s it? That’s your advice? Keep my head down?’

  ‘We think it’s good advice.’

  ‘Don’t you have some sort of plan?’

  ‘Well, obviously we can’t control what people say on the internet,’ said number two with what was either a wry smile or a patronising sneer.

  ‘Much as sometimes we might wish we could.’

  ‘Right. We might wish it, but we can’t actually do it.’

  ‘And even if we could, there would be the whole question of whether we should.’

  ‘Global tech company dedicated to free and safe use of the internet polices internet. You can see the inherent conflict there.’

  ‘How about global tech company dedicated to free and safe use of the internet and the safety of their staff takes s
ome sort of action, however small, to protect their employee from what is very obviously an attempt to curtail her freedom and safety?’

  ‘How about global tech company dedicated to free and safe use of the internet and proud of their human-rights record defends off-the-cuff call for genocide?’

  ‘Not really the same ring to it, right?’

  ‘No ring at all, really. More like a heavy, clanking thud.’

  ‘Why do I get the feeling that somehow sympathy is not really lying with me on this?’ said Trina.

  ‘Oh, we wouldn’t want to give that impression. We’re very sympathetic.’

  ‘You see our faces? These are sympathetic faces.’

  ‘But don’t tell me,’ said Trina, ‘your hands are tied.’

  ‘To a certain extent, yes.’

  ‘Sympathetic faces,’ said number one, running his hand down his face before raising his wrists in a handcuffed gesture, ‘tied hands.’

  ‘Am I being disciplined? I mean, what’s the position here?’

  ‘The position is that there is not yet a position.’

  ‘Right. No-one wants to rush to a position.’

  ‘Green are waiting to see how this pans out, basically,’ said Trina.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Green are thinking they want to fire me, but they’re also thinking what if the whole internet ends up coming down on my side and they just end up looking like the people who fired me.’

  ‘The situation is very fluid.’

  ‘Isn’t it just.’

  Trina stood up, calmer now, clearer on how things were going to be.

  ‘Are we done here?’ she said.

  ‘I think for the time being, yes, we are done.’

  ‘Right. Well, thanks for nothing, guys.’

  ‘Our pleasure.’

  *

  By lunchtime, Robert was widely shared. It felt like being famous. In many ways, he thought, scrolling through notifications and new follows, this was fame, because this was how celebrity now manifested: no red carpet, no fizzing pap flash, just the hum of alerts, the skin-tingle buzz of being noted by unseen eyes.

  Silas, who had already emailed with an update, was in raptures. He’d had to move an intern onto the comments thread full-time in order to keep up with even the rudimentary moderation system The Command Line employed. Quite what Robert felt about the fact that his piece seemed to have resonated especially strongly among people who expressed their enthusiasm solely through the medium of abusive messages and snuff imagery, he couldn’t really be sure. In a way, it didn’t matter. Resonance could no longer be neatly graphed along positive and negative axes. It was about volume, reach, impact.