Tangle's Game

by Stewart Hotston

  The man gulped, pulling back from the screen. ‘You have? Show me again.’

  Amanda put the drive up to the lens.

  A grinding buzz signalled the door unlocking. Amanda pulled it open and they shuffled in.

  The man, no more than five foot two and still wearing his inch-thick goggles, met them in the hallway and led them into a small office with a chest-high desk. A couple of sturdy maglocked doors led elsewhere, the room otherwise clean of anything indicating where they were or that humans moved and breathed in the space. The noise of London had dulled to a distant buzz.

  ‘Stand there,’ he said, pointing at the floor just in front of the desk. He nipped around to the other side, fingering his goggles all the while.

  Amanda wrinkled her nose at a pervading scent of cold grease and oxidised apples.

  ‘Let me have the drive.’ He eyed Amanda avariciously through the goggles, licking his lips.

  ‘No fucking chance,’ said Amanda.

  ‘It’s my server,’ he shrilled. ‘Mine, not yours. You want to breed, you gotta do it my way.’

  ‘Not words I ever thought I’d hear,’ said Ichi from one side.

  He looked at her blankly.

  ‘It’s not how it works,’ said Tatsu, its voice feminine in her ears. ‘But you are going to have to hand the drive to him if you want to get what’s on there.’

  The words supply and demand scrolled across the inside of Amanda’s head. ‘Just how many of these servers still exist?’ she asked.

  ‘Just mine,’ he said triumphantly.

  ‘So no one really gives a shit about what you’ve got going on?’ She folded her arms as if thinking twice about her entire visit.

  ‘What?’ He jumped up from his seat. ‘There’s just mine. You want to breed them, you said so yourself.’ He sounded like he might start shouting at her.

  ‘Yeah, but you’re being a dick,’ said Amanda. ‘I thought we’d start by finding out why we’re both still interested in CryptoKitties, when the rest of the world’s forgotten all about them.’

  He harrumphed. ‘They were the first game. The first. I got mine months after they started.’ He sniffed, rubbing the back of his hand across his nose. ‘I felt like I’d missed my chance. When the second generation blockchain emerged, everyone forgot how amazing these were. All the early adopters moved on.’

  She saw his face, read his disappointment.

  ‘I remember reading stories about people investing their college money on the first generation of cryptocurrencies, how they lost everything except the debt they’d taken on to get their educations.’

  Ichi nodded. ‘The greedy thought it was a currency, as real as gold; but they forgot that gold isn’t worth anything; it’s a store of value. They thought they could create money out of thin air, except every single banking run in history was caused by smart morons thinking they could do the same thing as generations of boring bankers, but without all the accounting and contracts. Lead into gold.’ Ichi reached out and brushed his goggles with the tips of her fingers, and he relaxed under her touch like a dog having his belly rubbed.

  ‘It’s impossible to play the game without getting burnt. No one understood how the market would work, because no markets are predictable, especially ones driven entirely by men trying to circumvent the rules.’

  He nodded as Ichi spoke.

  ‘How long have you been using your wallets?’ she asked Amanda.

  ‘Since I was a teenager.’ No one had really used digital currencies, until dozens of other systems used the blockchain for more mundane technology, like passport control. ‘I got into it through a running game. It paid me fractions of a token each time I beat my personal bests. I used them to buy running shoes, shorts, bras. It meant a lot, at the time; it felt free.’

  ‘Exactly. It took a bunch of women in Utah to figure out that what people would really pay for was tracking who owned parcels of land, finding errant partners who owed alimony, how to claim government benefits without getting defrauded on either side. Boring shit like that.’ Ichi stepped away from the two of them, turning around in the small office. ‘This must have seemed like a no-brainer back then; cryptocurrency and cats on the internet, together in one system.’

  Goggles took off his glasses, his small brown eyes wet underneath. ‘We can do it together if you like.’ He smiled at them, and Amanda hoped he didn’t notice her recoil at the black stains that were his teeth.

  Ichi put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Would you let us do that?’

  ‘You won’t need the parent block, just the child as the key for the encryption,’ said Tatsu in her ear, its voice now a man’s with a beautiful lilt suited to singing of mellow nights and broken hearts.

  ‘You can keep the parent,’ said Amanda with a roll of her shoulders. ‘I’m just glad to have found you. We thought you were a myth, that we were the last ones to still run CryptoKitties.’

  He laughed joyfully, like a bell. ‘Come on, I’ll show you the server.’

  He led them through into a vast, dark hall whose lights illuminated only the spots where they placed their feet. Huge cages of servers ran back in rows from the door through which they entered.

  They travelled the length of the building, following the power lines overhead. In the deepest recesses of the hall was a small cage all on its own. Inside was a single rack with a single server, whose lights flickered forlornly as they approached. To one side, resting on the floor with a faded, dust-covered brown cushion, was a keyboard and a roll of digipolymer.

  Goggles unlocked the padlock securing the door then plopped himself down cross-legged next to the keyboard. ‘Grab that,’ he said to Amanda and she unrolled the polymer display and hung it on the inside of the cage.

  ‘Why not use a frame?’ she asked.

  ‘This was going to be the next big thing,’ he said. ‘Came just months before frames were released in affordable tech.’

  ‘You collect this stuff?’ she said.

  When he turned to her, she couldn’t tell if he was pleased or distressed by her question.

  The front end of the software was childish; bright colours, blocky graphics and an embarrassingly clichéd sales pitch. Amanda would have fallen for it completely when she was a teenager.

  A white cat with a big grin and a heart-shaped eye patch filled the screen. ‘That’s mine. I called her Flouressa.’ He held out his hands for the drive, then inserted it into a dock at the end of a long cable and sat back while it was scanned.

  ‘There’s lots of data on here,’ he said. ‘Well, relatively. Certainly more than you need for a single block.’ His voice had slowed, the tone dropping as he scanned over the data on the drive. ‘It’s all encrypted.’ He fell silent.

  Amanda could practically hear him thinking. ‘We’re not here to steal anything from you. You really can have the parent. I only need the child to help me access the rest of what’s on the drive.’

  He sat quietly, doing nothing. Amanda knew better than to speak again.

  ‘We know you’ll tell no one about this,’ said Ichi quietly, crouching down at his side. ‘Nor will we.’

  He sniffed again, a deep vibrating snort. ‘Okay.’

  Amanda’s kitty was pink with large red eyes and eight whiskers. After they were introduced, Goggles selected his as the sire and hers as the matron. Moments later an egg popped up and the originals entered into a cooldown period.

  ‘It should cost money to birth them, but we’re offline forever, so the contract can’t ever close.’

  ‘Does that mean it won’t be born?’ asked Amanda. To come so close…

  He held up a hand. ‘They’re fast, but we’ve got time for a cup of tea.’ With that they started waiting for the egg to hatch.

  Four hours later the egg cracked open. Amanda was clawing at the walls, desperate to find out what was going on. To her intense irritation, both Ichi and Goggles waited without complaint or conversation.

  Amanda used the time to catch up with as much work as she c
ould. Her deals were progressing slowly without her cajoling presence, but nothing had fallen off a cliff. Reading the hundreds of trade announcements, policy statements and market pieces scrolling across her tablet, she could feel the pressure to be back in the office piling up.

  I’m an adult, she reminded herself. I’m trusted to do my job.

  Which is what? she asked, because it wasn’t to run down men trying to kill her in a clapped-out old car while fleeing a massacre. A massacre about which she couldn’t find any news in her normal feeds.

  ‘Tatsu,’ she asked. ‘Why’s no one reporting on the events in Tallinn?’

  ‘They are,’ it responded moments later in the soft, high-pitched voice of a small boy.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ she said, leafing through her news aggregator. Tatsu sent articles to her; reports flashing up onto her tablet from sources she either actively hated or didn’t even know existed. She read the coverage, eventually cursing under her breath. ‘That’s not what happened at all. The Russians weren’t the only ones there, the people there didn’t put up any kind of fight, they were completely unarmed.’

  Tatsu’s face appeared in a corner of her tablet with a downturned mouth. ‘Have you never been involved in a news story before?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘I have seen much coverage of AI in the press and none of it bears any resemblance to what our roles and existence are really like.’

  Amanda sensed there was more in what it was saying than a commentary about journalism. ‘Are you unhappy with what you do?’ she asked.

  ‘Unhappy? I’m an AI. I thought we’d talked about my reliability as a witness?’

  ‘I’m asking you,’ said Amanda, exasperated. ‘I’m just asking. I don’t even know if you can be unhappy.’

  ‘I have a job to do. When that’s done, I shall be completed and will return to the other concerns that form part of my existence.’

  ‘I’ve heard enough bullshit in my time to know you’re avoiding my question,’ started Amanda, but she was interrupted by Goggles.

  ‘It’s hatched!’

  The event was much less exciting than promised, with a short animation showing a cat’s head breaking out of a pale cream egg, a cracked piece of shell sitting on its brow while it stared back at them with a dopey grin.

  Goggles didn’t wait for them, keying in the new block to the information on Amanda’s drive.

  ‘It’s just text,’ said Amanda, disappointed. It was also untrue: she could see pictures, diagrams and plans in among the text.

  ‘There’s a single video file,’ said Goggles. He clicked to run it.

  ‘Hey, Amanda.’ It was Tangle, just his face, long and framed in his trademark black curls. His smile radiated from the screen. Amanda was reminded all over again just how easy it was to fall in love with him, with his bottomless brown eyes and smooth brown skin. He looked good, no sign of the uncontrolled drug abuse that had wrecked his complexion and sunk his eyes under pillows of loose skin. She looked at the others, but they were waiting on his words.

  ‘I hope Ichi’s with you.’ He waved at the camera. ‘Hi, Ichi.’

  ‘You both sleeping with this guy?’ asked Goggles, pausing the playback.

  ‘Just keep playing,’ said Amanda tersely.

  He hunched down, curling his shoulders in, then started the video again.

  Tangle’s face jumped back into motion. ‘If you’re watching this, then I’m dead, blah blah. You’ll have read the letter.’ He smiled again, then his face sobered up, his eyes widening, wide mouth hardening into a thin fleshy line. ‘I’m sorry, Amanda. I wouldn’t have gotten you involved but, to a complete lack of surprise, I’ve got no one else I could turn to. The info on the drive is complex, and I don’t expect you to read through it; most of it’s code anyway.’ He looked over his shoulder at something they couldn’t see.

  ‘So here it is. The Russians are trying to destroy the European Union.’ He laughed, as if the words coming from his own lips were as surprising to him as anyone else. ‘Just another day, another headline right? The point is, I can prove how they’re doing it. How they’re going to do it. And I have a countermeasure beyond just telling anyone who’ll listen. As you can see, telling people hasn’t done me much service. They’re running false flag operations across Europe; in Catalonia, Albania, France, Germany, obviously across the Eastern Border states, Poland, Estonia, Latvia. Anywhere with a nationalist movement or a significant ethnic minority, they’re playing out little atrocities, funding the fuckwits who think the language they speak or the colour of their skin gives them some purity.’

  He shrugged. ‘Not news, really, is it? The theme of a hundred novels, a dozen movies. Except I can show how they’re paying for it. Hollywood’s never concerned with how anyone gets paid.’ He fixed the camera with a stare. ‘That’s why it’s got to be you. My little investment banker, who knows how everything gets paid for, who knows nothing gets done without someone, somewhere bankrolling it. They’re using a private blockchain to evade UN sanctions, anonymous channels of millions of Euros to dozens of extremist groups across the continent. Except they don’t want those bastards to claim these atrocities for themselves. They want them to carry out bombings, shootings, torture, and then blame it on whatever bogeyman the locals care about: Islam, immigrants, Turks, Germans, Christian Slavs, whatever.’ He was animated, excited even, Amanda could see the focus in his eyes. The last time she’d seen that look was as he zoomed in on self-destruction.

  ‘The drive has a program which can rewrite the block creation software. You won’t need to hack the chain, which is pretty much impossible anyway. It’s a private network, and the tools on the drive mean you can change the blocks from the ground up.’ He sighed, a deep breath. ‘I don’t have time to geek out with you about how it works. Ichi will know how to deploy it. What you’ve got to do is find somewhere you can break into their system and upload the code. That’s the tricky bit. Everything up to now was aperitif. Are you up for it, Dandy Mandy?’

  Amanda could feel the others looking at her.

  ‘You’ve got every right to hate me.’ He paused, as if considering his next works carefully. ‘I know that. I was a complete shit. But this is about more than just you and me. It’s about Europe, about all the people who will die before the civil wars start, about all the people who will die afterwards. You’re looking at the proof and the solution. I’d hoped to expose the GRU’s activities, save Europe and stop the death all in one go but, well, it’s not going to play out like that.’ He started walking, holding the camera close up to his face so it wasn’t clear where he was, the background slinging around too quickly to be seen properly.

  ‘There’s a bunch of people, none of them on the same side and, most likely, none of them on your side, who want what I’ve spent the last five years writing. You’ve probably already met some of them. I’ve sent a couple of people your way who I hope you’ll figure out how to use, but you need to find a friendly AI to help with the upload because that’s not something I could prepare the way for in advance. Data changes all the time, it doesn’t allow for planning.

  ‘Look, I’ve got to go. Everything you need’s on the drive but, Amanda? Dandy? Time’s important here. If you’re torn about helping me—give the information to someone you trust to act on it, step away, but please…’ And here he was the most serious she’d ever seen him, more than the night the first time they’d broken up. ‘Please. Don’t sit on this. There’s nothing left of me now other than what’s on that drive.’

  The room fell into silence after the video stopped.

  ‘This is pretty tawdry,’ said Ichi eventually.

  Goggles looked from one woman to another, smacking his lips with a moist tongue, no words daring to venture forth.

  ‘You’re not involved,’ said Amanda, putting him out of his pregnant misery. As she spoke, his bowed body slumped, free from a burden he didn’t know how to handle.

  ‘Are you?’ Ichi asked h
er.

  ‘I am,’ said Amanda. ‘It doesn’t matter that it’s Tangle. After Tallinn, there’s no choice. I have to do what’s right.’

  ‘Is it so easy to see what that is?’ asked Ichi. ‘Shouldn’t these different peoples have a say denied to them by the majority?’

  Amanda’s eyes went wide. ‘You really think that?’

  ‘I didn’t say any such thing. I asked you if knowing what was right was so simple.’

  ‘I’m going to see to it that as few people die as possible.’

  ‘How grand of you,’ said Ichi, drily.

  Amanda closed her eyes but saw men tumbling over the bonnet of her car.

  ‘So what? I do nothing?’ She was full of anger, at Ichi, at Tangle, at herself. Goggles shrank back, face peering at the cage door as if he might make a run for it. ‘I have to act, Ichi. I have to do something.’

  ‘It will be interesting to see if anyone lets you,’ said Ichi quietly, without challenge, but full of hopelessness.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT BEGAN TO fall apart before they reached Amanda’s flat. Her tablet pinged with a curt message from her line manager asking her where she was. She fired off a short reply saying that she was out and about seeing clients, would be back in the office tomorrow.

  She was thumbing a follow-up message to her assistant to ask him to book the rest of the week as holiday when her boss wrote back asking her to come into the office straight away.

  Her chest tightened as she read the short message again and again.

  She left Ichi at her flat, poring over the information on the drive. Ichi didn’t reply when Amanda instructed her to let no one in.

  Her office was on the western edge of the city, just south of Farringdon, near to St Paul’s. The trading floor had two hundred people squeezed in like sardines with windows along only one wall. The fashion was for senior staff to sit in the middle of the floor in some attempt at a panopticon. Radiating out from the centre were the traders and structurers in teams of three or six; beyond them were legal, and pasted around the edges, by the toilets, the entrances, the vending machines, were the support functions.