by James Goss
What I’m saying, the reason why I’m telling you this, is that on the one hand, Sodobus did a reasonable job of mundane tasks. But on the other hand, Sodobus ran the country.
Sodobus was everywhere. When we talk about Skynet in Terminator, we talk about an omniscient, cunning cyber presence. But really, Sodobus wasn’t particularly clever. It just knew all the dull things about you. If you bought some daffodil bulbs from them, they’d have your name, number and postcode. They’d know from trying to deliver if you were likely to be in during the day time, which would match with whether or not you were receiving disability or unemployment benefit or were simply unable to find a job because you’d just come out of prison or hospital, all of which would count against you the next time you tried to renew your credit card, get health insurance, change broadband provider, or apply for a job which went through one of their screening systems.
Sodobus had spent years snapping up unconsidered trifles to make itself a king of shreds and patches. That’s a high-faluting way of saying it owned you. The thing is, you could try very hard to sidestep Sodobus, but they’d still get you. They didn’t run a bank, but they did run a network that processed contactless payments for a range of supermarkets and chemists. Which meant that they knew exactly how much you drank before you lied about it to your GP.
As you’ll have guessed by now, my last victim wasn’t a person. It was a company. And there was a good reason for it.
• At the risk of sounding like a nutter on the Tube, Sodobus were behind everything. Even me. At first glance, I was a lone crackpot, driven on by Amber and her friends. It was as simple as that.
• Only... Hold up the prism, turn it a little, squint, look at it another way. There was a different story to be told. Imagine you were one of those smart data-driven news sites that cover current affairs through pie charts and Venn diagrams and infographics. If you checked my career in killing for coincidences and overlaps, then another picture emerged. Little dots of information were joined up to spell out a name. Sodobus.
At first I thought I was clutching at straws. When I ran away from Amber’s wedding, I felt like I’d just been dumped by the world. “I think we should see other people,” humanity had said, trying to be kind but also eager to finish its drink and get along home.
SO ANYWAY, THERE I was, running out into the night with nothing. Literally nothing. Even my cat was staying with neighbours. And I couldn’t very well turn up and reclaim it. I may not be being watched by a global conspiracy, but surely by now the police would have worked out what was going on. They didn’t deal with a world of fantasy. They dealt with evidence. That’s how you caught stupid people.
That night I was staying in a bland hotel. There wasn’t even anyone on reception to lie to. I went up to my bleak little room and flailed around it in despair. Then I went down to the grim corner-shop opposite and bought a hideously expensive bottle of bad scotch. I didn’t even really like scotch. I just figured it’s what you drink when you’re having a breakdown.
I sat sipping it from the already-cracked plastic tooth mug and I went through the file Amber had given me. At first I just denied it all. I’m not sure any fact has ever changed its mind simply because it’s been shouted at. But that’s what I tried first.
Then I went through the paperwork again. And that’s when I spotted it. At first I pushed it to one side. Because I was aware of how mad I now was, I just didn’t trust any thought I had. After all, it may have been put there by a ninja. Or the tooth fairy.
But I carried on going over the paperwork. I put the exciting glimmering notion to one side and just worked through the paperwork—what amounted to Amber’s confession. She was, it had to be said, pretty thorough. It was all carefully ordered and scrupulously filed. She’d even kept accounts. No wonder she’d been so freaked out when I’d gatecrashed her band’s gig. She’d never even considered she might be caught, so she’d taken no steps to hide the evidence.
The thing is, the more I went through that evidence, the more a name emerged. Sodobus. Eventually, I allowed the penny to drop, to listen to how it sounded. And it sounded good. What if there really was a conspiracy after all?
What if Sodobus had been controlling me? Not since the start, but pretty much, nudging Amber’s scheme along, gaming the results. They’d not directed every hit. But more than you’d think. Fast Eddy, for example, had been the whistleblower on one of Sodobus’s dodgy database contracts. Jackie Aspley had written up a bad profile of their CEO. Vampantha’s husband was one of their regional sales executives. And Henry Jarman had warned everyone about them. The stupid fool had been right all along. I still didn’t know how, and I didn’t know why. But they were involved.
I drank some more scotch and I swiftly emptied the KillFund. I was on my own now. I knew what I’d had to do. I’d found my last victim.
I WAS NERVOUS. But that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that it was a nice, lazy sunny morning in the plaza. People pottered in a self-important way between shiny offices and expensive coffee shops, occasionally loitering to make phone calls while puffing away on electronic cigarettes. Everyone was ignoring the chugger. Especially when the drone turned up.
As a marketing campaign, the small remote-controlled helicopter was a bit of a failure. It flew above the square with a banner that said ‘#SodobusOwnAllOfUs.’ Some people noticed it. Most of them worked for Sodobus. A few people wondered if marketing had really got their head around the hashtag as a concept. No one actually used it. A spate of people tried to scan the QR code, after a PA had pointed out that no one ever used QR codes, and that she’d once won a holiday purely on the basis that no-one else had bothered entering the competition. Those that scanned the QR code found that nothing happened—but then, it was quite small on a moving object a bit away, so it wasn’t really surprising.
One person noticed the helicopter and groaned. It had made a bad day that little bit worse. His name was Ray, and I’m going to tell you all about him.
RAY RICHARDSON LIKED to tell his colleagues that he was the only person from around here. It was stretching it a bit—the estate he’d grown up on was about half a mile away—but it had been pretty much the same. “I remember when this was all burning cars,” he was fond of saying. He’d always thought the area was a dump. It didn’t seem much better now. The idea that people were fighting to pay half a million to live in one of the same grim boxes his family had grown up in appalled him as much as it made his mother laugh. He marvelled that people would want to live somewhere like here, where, for all the coffee shops and sandwich bars, the streets were still full of drunks with dogs. Only their flats were now worth a fortune, because they were ‘just half an hour from Liverpool Street.’
ONCE HE’D EARNED enough, Ray had run in the opposite direction, to a charming village that had made an earnest point of how accepting it was of a gruff-voiced black man and his endlessly smiling “yes, yes I am white” wife.
Ray Richardson was the head of Marketing & Communications at Sodobus [UK]. He was the man I’d come here to meet. I tried stopping him as he crossed the plaza. “Good morning! How are you today?” I beamed at him.
“Well, you can sod off,” said Ray and went in to work.
“Have a good day!” I said. I knew he wouldn’t. He’d be back.
RAY WAS MY new best friend. I’d got to know Ray very well without ever meeting him. It was actually really easy. Amanda was now at that stage of pregnancy where she felt too bloated to go to work and too miserable to stay at home, so she spent most mornings in the village cafe, swiping her iPad and cursing the sluggish wifi. She was in the mood for a distraction, and that was me. I found her through an article in PR Week on Ray’s appointment.
A year ago Ray had quite a nice job in technology journalism. Then Amanda had got pregnant and Ray had realised the time had come to use his contacts and get a better-paid job in PR. After casting around quite hard, he’d been approached by Sodobus. He’d wrinkled his nose slightly, b
ut nothing better had come along. At one of several interviews he’d asked, “But why do you want me, exactly?” It was the most tactful way he could think of saying, “Is it because of the colour of my skin?” Certainly, for a supposedly global company, the people he’d seen so far looked not just white, but pale.
The crisply Swiss woman interviewing him had assured him it was for his contacts. Really? Surely a vast multinational like Sodobus needed someone more experienced? There was a shrug. Of course, he was told, Sodobus itself was a vast international conglomerate, but the UK branch was little more than a cottage industry. “Practically a jam factory,” the Swiss woman had told him, with a laugh that afterwards had struck Ray as peculiar. Journalistic instincts firing, he’d asked, “Is there anything bad I should know? Anything brewing?” The Swiss woman had shaken her head.
One month after his appointment, the tax scandal had broken. All of the problems of the world suddenly landed on Ray’s desk. There was an ‘unwitting’ double-charging fraud in a hospital contract. And then the revelations of the ‘completely accidental’ leak of data between two legally unlinkable databases which resulted in thousands of people being denied home insurance because of things they’d declared on a dating website. On the long train journeys home to Amanda, Ray would switch his phone off mid-ring and leaned back exhausted in his seat. He was hopelessly out of his depth.
“HE’S BEEN SET up,” Amanda told me. We were sitting in the village cafe. I’d got to know her by mending the wifi on her iPad. “Are you good with these things?” she’d asked me. I’d done my best. All part of my helpful personality. I’d created the air of someone “taking time out,” renting a mobile home on a nearby farm. Maybe I’d had a breakdown. Maybe I was writing a book of country walks. Maybe I was a reclusive millionaire.
I liked Amanda. She was fun. She was comfortable being comfortably in her late thirties. She was pushing a cake around her plate. “Being pregnant is great,” she enthused. “Everyone goes on and on about the eating, but there are so many other advantages. There’s not bothering to dye my hair”—she pointed to the fetching flecks of grey—“and then there’s the farting. It’s blissful. I’m like a whoopee cushion, and no-one every suspects it’s me because I’m a pregnant woman. We’re like saints.”
As I said, I liked her. I even told her my real name. After all, it didn’t matter anymore.
We’d bump into each other, for a gossip and a natter. She didn’t find me threatening. “Frankly, if you were wanting to have an affair with me when I look like I’ve swallowed the Hindenburg, well, good luck to you.” And I think she was also a bit bored. “Being this pregnant—well, I’m waiting for a really important, painful kettle to boil.”
Fairly soon we were talking about Ray’s problems. “Basically,” said Amanda, “They hired Ray because they were looking for someone to blame. They knew all this was going to come out. Sodobus will let him try and deal with it. Then they’ll say the problem is with the job he’s done of it, not with whatever they’ve been up to. Then they’ll fire him very nicely. If we can just cling on till we get a juicy settlement out of them, it’ll probably be okay, but I’m applying for jobs that start about a week after I’ve squeezed this one out.” She patted her bump and then slurped at her decaf coffee.
Amanda’s suspicions had been proved grimly correct. Within a fortnight of joining, Ray had noticed the few competent members of his team were ‘rotated’ out to other tendrils of the Sodobus spider, replaced with gawky interns or the kind of PR women who set feminism back about four hundred years. On the other side of the fence, he’d always laughed at posh, dim blondes running events. Now he had an office full of them. Was there a collective noun for them—An Activia? A Pimms? There was one dismal product launch where the entire gaggle had all worn the same t-shirt and Ray had been confronted by half a dozen identical blondes with the same hair, height and make-up, all drinking the sparkling water meant for the journalists while talking excitedly about their next skiing holiday. Ray had never been on a skiing holiday and felt a bitter resentment that people who worked for him could somehow afford them while his idea of luxury was to get the Jamie Oliver meal deal at Boots.
SUCH WAS THE personal misery of Ray Richardson the morning I turned up chugging outside his office. I was fine with him ignoring me. I’d see him again later. That was all part of the plan. Ray was a good man. It had taken a while to find one. And I wasn’t going to let him go.
SHALL I TELL you what Ray did that morning? He endured a lot of pointless meetings, he wondered about the drone buzzing past his window, and he blamed it on the blonde petting zoo they’d replaced his marketing department with.
He flung open the glass door to his glass office. “Who did that?” he said, waving behind him at the helicopter. Of course, it had now gone, so his bemused team looked up to see Captain Angry pointing at the empty sky.
WHEN RAY RICHARDSON left the building at lunchtime the helicopter was still circling. “Sod you,” he snarled to it. He looked again at the text on the banner, and tried futilely zapping the QR code as it zipped close to him. His cameraphone clicked and then connected to the wifi zone at the nearby coffee shop in order to bring up a web page. Eventually the browser admitted defeat, ‘Page not found.’
“Stuff your granny and your dad,” growled Ray. Trust his team to launch an awful social media campaign and then not bother to build the website to go with it. He stalked off to Boots to get his meal deal, and the helicopter drowsed past him as Ray neatly sidestepped a chugger. Ray hated chuggers.
“Have a great day,” I said, smiling to myself.
AT SOME POINT that night, while Ray was asleep, he received an email. It moved swiftly from his unread to his read items and he knew nothing about it until two days later when he was going through his post.
THE NEXT DAY the helicopter was back and so was I, chugging away. Mostly I was watching the electronic billboard dominating the plaza. Ray’s predecessor had launched it as an exercise in ‘Profile Raising Through Living Social Media.’ It rotated various Sodobus adverts and occasionally fed through some tweets (the tweets were carefully screened after it had first gone live and been swiftly spammed by people delighted at the idea of putting swearwords up on a digital display). Today the screen appeared to be slowly playing through a series of extraordinarily bland mission statements that someone in Internal Comms had fed through to it.
‘Sodobus: Together is better’ went alongside a picture of a tiny child smiling at a well somewhere in Africa. Ray found this objectionable for quite a few reasons. Sodobus’s only interest in Africa was in ‘Law Enforcement Protective Equipment Upsales.’ Also, the photo of the child at the well had nothing to do with Sodobus. It was from an online photography site. It still had the watermark slapped through the centre of it.
I watched the billboard, and I imagined Ray, up in his office, opening his post. It was 11am. From what I’d learned of his routine, he’d be getting to it about now.
HE’D OPEN THE envelope. A set of black and white photographs would slide out, along with an eBay invoice. The top picture was a reasonably innocuous black and white photograph nearly a century old. It was of three pretty girls, perhaps about twelve, dancing around their smiling mother in sailor outfits.
The next few photographs saw the dancing continue, but with less clothes. After a while the dancing stopped, but the activity didn’t. And all the while the mother continued to smile. And then she helped out. He would stare at the pictures with a horrified fascination. From lettering in the background, he could guess the studio was in Germany, and the clothing scattered everywhere suggested the 1930s. As did the swastika. Historically, the prints were probably fascinating... if you liked collecting vintage child pornography.
Perhaps someone would come in to ask him an inane question, probably about the building being on fire or something. He would hastily slap the photos face-down on his glass desk, praying they weren’t reflected somehow.
When they’d gone, he�
��d examine the eBay delivery slip, and then stumblingly check the Gmail on his phone. He’d find the original email showing that he’d ordered the photos and then notice with horror that it had been read. The original listing seemed innocent enough, but if you read it knowing what it really contained, then the wording was laden: ‘A series of intimate family portraits... revealing childhood passions... experimental studio prints... will arouse more than academic interest... a peep into Weimar home life...’
Ray would sit back in his chair and work out if there was a way he could possibly claim that he’d bought Nazi child porn by accident. And then he’d realise that no one would believe him. Especially not his wife.
He could send a furious email to the eBay seller, but that would involve engaging with them. Perhaps he could complain to eBay. But that would be bolting the stable door after the horse was on fire. He’d been set up and he was in a corner.
I knew exactly what he’d do. He’d curse (“Granny’s tits”), he’d stuff the photos into a cross-shredder, maybe post them abroad, and then he’d go outside for a proper cup of coffee and a think. I checked my watch. 11.20am. He’d be due out about now. I hoped.
‘SODOBUS: A FRIENDLY Eye’ said the billboard against a picture of a young woman walking alone down a rainy street at night. There was no sign of Ray. I felt a moment’s worry that it had all gone wrong—but no. There he was. He stalked past me, his face screwed up with fury.
