Read Online Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle by Matthew Blakstad - Free Book Online Page A

round her today, as the press pack tooted their horns and bore down at a gallop. Without a word, her civil servants had moved into a defensive screen. Wasn’t it in adversity you found out who your friends were? In which case, her officials were showing themselves second only to Krish and J-R.
    Speak of the devil – there was Krish now, on her BlackBerry.
     
    Krish pulled J-R onto the line.
    ‘Up at this hour, too, J-R?’ asked Bethany. ‘You boys need to lay off the lattes.’
    Their laughs were token but so was her joke. They got down to business, making efficient use of their narrow slice of midnight air. J-R gave a brief report on Parley: positive, but no meat. He sounded guilty about this. He shouldn’t.
    Bethany had only today found out that Parley was owned by Mondan. Odd that accusations about a government supplier should appear on a social media website run by its subsidiary. Did it mean anything? For the zillionth time since entering government she wished she knew more about something beyond politics. How companies bought and sold each other: what happened when they did.
    Krish and J-R were talking about Parley’s artificial characters – the Personas . J-R reeled off stats on the elusive sic_girl.
    ‘Her base is in the high hundreds of thousands. Younger ABC1, some C2s. Female slant – sixty-four per cent. High awareness in households. This is core-voter territory. Significant reach among opinion-formers. Especially given that – well, given that she doesn’t exist.’
    Bethany didn’t understand how Parley worked. She’d asked Hugo to explain, at lights out. He was nine and found this stuff as natural as chocolate – he was a digital native. Bethany was more of a digital shipwreck. All he told her, though, was It ’ s silly, Mummy, which rather reinforced her initial perceptions. Talking to pretend people for entertainment? She could get that in the House of Commons.
    It seemed it was up to her to ask the glaring question.
    ‘But if she’s an artificial, um –’
    ‘– synthetic personality,’ said J-R. ‘A sort of robot without a body.’
    ‘Then she can’t be to blame for these attacks?’
    There was a long enough pause for Bethany to realise she was several miles behind the curve. J-R found a way to be polite about it.
    ‘Exactly! That’s the conclusion we’ve come to, as well. Everything sic_girl says has been said before, somewhere online. So the team at Parley are scouring the Internet right now, looking for the original.’
    ‘Which we’re guessing,’ said Krish, ‘was put up by this TakeBackID lot – the ones who did in the website.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Bethany, ‘I saw it’s still down.’
    ‘We’ve been trying all day. Every time we put it live, five minutes later it’s pigs all over again. Nobody seems to have heard of these TakeBack buggers – they sprang up overnight from nowhere – but they’ve skills. We presume they did the hack. So the hope is, if we find these original postings, we find our den of hackers.’
    ‘We need to get the website back up asap,’ said Bethany. ‘We can’t have a national launch without a website.’
    Again, silence. Both men would be thinking, how can we have a national launch at all, after this? But Bethany wouldn’t have that. It was going to happen, on Friday, as planned; or she was utterly screwed.
    Krish broke the crackling silence.
    ‘On that, Beth? We do need to get onto Number Ten. The meeting.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, please.’
    There was another stretch of dead air before Krish spoke again.
    ‘J-R? Would it piss you off mightily if I dropped you from the call just now? I’m sure you could do with some sleep.’
    Another pause before J-R replied.
    ‘Sure, Krish. Wilco. Ah. Hope all goes well tomorrow, Bethan.’
    ‘Thanks, J-R. Thanks for it all. Good night.’
    The line produced a guttural sound as J-R dropped.
    ‘He’s doing good there, Beth,’ said Krish.
    ‘I don’t want Parley to think we’re