Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The problem is, no one understands all the code any more. That’s what people don’t get, about the international banking system. No. One. Understands. The. Underlying. Code. Imagine the most beautiful skyscraper in the world, all thrusting steel and shining glass, a tower like The Shard, sleek and elegant and a mile high, like some award-winning Zaha Hadid fantasy out in the UAE or somewhere. Now take that graceful, elegant mile-high skyscraper with all its high-tech climate-controlled atmospheres and its precision-tooled electronic systems – and back that thing up to the labyrinthine, crumbling brick sewers of Victorian London. That’s our banking system.

And I do mean literally – miles and miles of ultra-high-speed fibre optic cables, information travelling at the speed of light, laid alongside shit and piss and medieval pipe butts. Beautiful, isn’t it?

OK, remember the RBS fallout of 2015, when a misapplied software patch reduced half the cashpoints in London to useless lumps of metal on expensive real estate? Nah, that was probably before some of you script kiddies were even born. The great flash crash of 2027, when three different automated trading algorithms misfired in a cascade that wiped half the world’s pension funds off the face of the planet? No one knows how to tame this beast.

We dance around hulking monsters of legacy systems that no one quite understands how to manage, because their designers, working on room-sized mainframes fed with punchcards and reels of magnetic tape, are all dead, or crapping themselves in old age homes, still dreaming of moonshots. These nightmares are too important to decommission, and too expensive to replace, so we are forced to work around them, adding on more and more layers of high-tech confectionary on top of these festering swamps of legacy code.

Like… remember Old Venice? Before the floods took it? I went there once, when I was a kid; it stank to high heaven. Those baroque mansions with their gothic tracery and gingerbread facades were all propped up on dense piles of logs from trees that were growing when Charlemagne was charging about Europe. The legacy systems are those logs. No one knows what they even do any more! But if you remove them, bad things happen. I don’t mean bad things happen like your boss gets cross or the Venture Capital paying your vastly overinflated salary yells at you. I mean, bad things happen like five billion pounds disappear from market cap overnight.

Because it’s all so complicated, people have this conception that computer programmers are utter geniuses. Here’s another secret – most programmers have no fucking clue what we’re doing half the time. There’s this public image, mostly created by big American movies depicting programmers banging out lines of code like writers of mid-20^th-Century detective stories banging out page after page of manuscript on a vintage Remington and a tumbler of whisky, that a programmer’s job is to write. Bollocks. What most programmers do is go on CodeHub or StackRepository, copy out a clump of code written 7 years previously by someone called something like SausageCat69, and tinker and poke and change one command here, and another variable there, until you smash the “run” button in your compiler and it finally fucking does the trick.

But hey, don’t bash SausageCat69, I’m sure some of that bloke’s code is in the software you’re using to read this right now.

And that’s before we even get into the newer, machine-scripted code. That’s the super hip thing these days. I’m sure it sounds glamourous, partnering with an army of tiny AIs to create software of unimaginable complexity and utility. But you think women are hard to understand? Try talking to machine intelligence some time. It’s not even “Computer Says NO!” It’s more like “computer says System Error 3344KX076 in line 2754 – reticulating splines.” I take apart their code, line by line, sometimes, just to see what the little buggers are up to. Of course the VC scream that’s a waste of time, who cares what it’s doing, so long as it works, so long as it delivers results – by which they mean, delivers return for investment.

But the way machines think – it’s simply inhuman. It’s like you ask a small human child to go to the shops and pick up a pint of milk and some bog roll. That small human child might go down the stairs, or it might take the lift. It might go the long way by the road, it might take a shortcut through the park. It might even ride a bike, or perhaps a bus if the shops are some distance away. Humans aren’t logical, but they are super predictable.

You ask machine learning to fetch a pint of milk, and it will shrink itself really small, and go down the kitchen pipes, backwards, work its way down the sewer, up the Thames, find a random cow in a field somewhere, fly it across to Southeast Asia – I mean, the whole cow, not just the pint of milk – to get it milked and pasteurised in a combination dairy plant/slaughterhouse, fly back to London, hop into the sewer at Ebbsfleet, swim up your pipes, and pop out of your toilet holding a pint of milk and your loo roll. VC love it, because it’s fast, efficient, cheap and takes only picoseconds. You don’t have to pay AI anything to develop code but the electricity they run on. (Though let’s be real; that cost can be substantial.) But do you really want to drink that milk?

VC don’t care; they’re cashing out their exit plans and selling the toilet milk on to some other sod.

It’s impossible to guess what’s going to be hard for them, capricious little buggers. Problems that are merely a question of scale: add and subtract and multiply 7 petabytes of compound interest payments on 2 billion different accounts across 4 continents? That’s a doddle. Drive a car around the block without hitting any old ladies, cats, or tramps, then parallel park behind some double-parked Voltvo outside the coffeeshop? Now do it for a right-hand drive car? They’re still working on that one, aren’t they. It’s fine when it’s the DLR, jobbing up and down beside the Ratcliffe Skyway like a glorified horizontal elevator. But add humans into the mix? I don’t think humans and machines will ever truly understand one another. And it’s definitely us that’s the problem.

Chapter Text

Ritesh made Jules drive as they left the Wharf’s underground parking garage in a state-of-the-art mobile monitoring environment roughed up to look like a tradesman’s white van. Whenever Ritesh drove, they invariably got stopped and questioned on the way out, as well as the way back in. But with the posh white kid driving, they’d get waved through without even checking their ID or Vaccine Passes. But that morning, they got stopped anyway, though as the security guard scanned their smartcards, he smiled and nodded at Jules.

“You guys want to be careful crossing the bridge. There’s an eMerge protest kicking off just the other side.”

“Well, they better be quick about it – tide’s coming in quick, unless they mean it to be a floating protest,” Ritesh observed wryly.

“Ha!” barked the security. “They could probably do with a wash. Filthy buggers, the lot of them.”

Jules held his tongue with a stormy face, saying nothing as he drove the van off the estate, across the narrow retractable bridge into the ruined hinterland of Tower Islets.

“What.” said Ritesh after a few minutes of silence.

“I need to drive carefully. I don’t want to hit any of them.” Dispersed along the other side of the overflow channel, they could see a ragtag group of climate protesters gathered atop the embankments, ready to rush down at passing cars. Protests were such a regular occurrence outside the Wharf that Ritesh no longer even saw them.

“Oh, I forgot. You agree with them, don’t you.”

“Don’t you?”

As the van nudged gently forward, the protesters launched themselves forward en masse, banging on the windows and screaming slogans about melting ice caps and extinct butterflies as Jules did his best to drive through the crowd without any serious collisions. Ritesh thought for a moment, along lines he tried not to – his mother still woke in the night sometimes, screaming and wailing about aunts he’d never met, cousins he’d never know, gone, gone, in a wall of dirty brown water. It was hard to get worked up about a fucking butterfly in the face of that wall of dirty brown grief.

He laughed dryly. “Climate’s been getting worse and worse for as long as I can remember. Hardly think it qualifies as much of an emergency now London floods twice a day.”

“There’s still time to stop it reaching 3 degrees,” Jules asserted in a jaunty TikTok voice. In the rear-view viewscreen, a shiny black Merc emerged from the Wharf behind them, and the protesters duly peeled off the van to wave their placards at the wealthier vehicle.

“And that leader of theirs – Billy Babbles or whatever his name is – he’s right Fash, he is.” Ritesh folded his arms across his chest for the familiar office banter.

“Billy Barbel,” corrected Jules. “Is not the leader. Climate eMERGEncy is a decentralised, grass roots organisation run via semiautonomous cells,” he parroted, as if reading from the Wikipedia entries that comprised his memory. “The BBC only like to get him in the studio because they know he makes great theatre when he kicks off. The general membership is a lot more sensible, more pragmatic.”

“You sound like you’ve already joined them.”

“I might, if I didn’t need a clear security pass to live on the Wharf. Hang on, have we missed the seal-up… ah, no, we’re still good. I should go through the tunnel now, right?”

“Yeah, let’s get over the other side as quickly as possible. We can drive around the block a few times when we get to Deptford, then see if we can get caught in the queue trying to get back North at Rotherhithe.”

“Like that’s not going to look suspicious,” laughed Jules. “Every other fucker in the Narrows is trying to get out, and here’s us actually trying to get caught in a four-hour traffic jam.”

They made it through the tunnel alright, Jules maintaining the required speed despite the queue of angry commuters building up behind him. Buzzing like hornets in their electric vehicles, the commuters were anxious to make the high ground of Shoot-up Hill before the tide came in, but traffic was snarled south of the Thames.

As the car inched forwards along the long, narrow spine of what used to be the Greenwich peninsula, Ritesh unbuckled his seatbelt and climbed into the back to proudly switch on the banks of blade servers, smartphones and battery stacks that comprised his monitoring equipment. With all of the machines running, he could spoof anything from the electronic murmurations of a flock of yummie mummies in Voltvos, to the communications profile of a battleship moored up by the Wharf.

When he emerged, carrying the pair of laptops that controlled the whole operation, he found Jules impatiently tapping the steering wheel and fiddling with the radio before landing on the frothing fury of LBC. Caller after caller seemed intensely worked up about the collapse of some pile of old stones out in Wiltshire.

“Come on, man. Is this really necessary?” muttered Ritesh as he docked the laptops into the van’s dashboard and powered up the Hackintosh before booting the Grid backend on the Dell.

“It’s good to stay informed,” Jules said.

“This,” said Ritesh, pointing at the radio. “Is the opposite of information. This is just noise, emotion and outrage designed to distract and deflect attention away from any actual information about what’s truly going on.”

“You’ve been working data even longer than I have,” countered Jules. “And you haven’t worked out yet, that sometimes, noise is the signal you’re looking for? This Stonehenge thing is big, man. Nothing – not even the Covid plagues – has ever united both the Left and Right in this much fury since, well… ever?”

“It’s a distraction,” Ritesh insisted as he clicked on the screen to open a map, and zoomed in on their area. The blinking coloured lights of London’s Denationalised Grid resolved into the long, snaking trail of the A2, every generator, every car battery, every smartphone or other Grid-enabled device broadcasting out its operator’s location, if you knew how to skim the data. “Come on, my dude, we can probably pick up Radio Free Peckham from here?” Jules sighed and turned over, and the juddering throb of deep bass filled the van as a woman spit verses over the top. “No way, man, is that a Kraftwerk sample? Aw, I gotta tell Xie that Lo_Rez is using Computer World on the new jam. Xie’ll love that.”

“Hang on, Ritesh, can you check – is this road still clear?” asked Jules, peering down a narrow side-street into the ruins of old Greenwich. Surprisingly, there were a couple of people, on foot, carefully picking their way up through the flotsam with a rusty shopping trolley: an old man, gaunt, almost painfully thin, his ragged coat buttoned all the way up despite the late summer heat, and a child (grandchild?) of about 10, so obese as to appear sexless.

Ritesh dragged his eyes away from the mudlarks and zoomed in on the blinking blips. “Nah, mate. I can see cars pooling at the bottom as they stop and turn around. Go the long way, round Blackheath.”

From the heights of Maze Hill, they could see the devastation across Southeast London. Brackish water pooled and deepened, the saltwater plants fast recolonising their ancestral marshland, interspersed by the ugly brown smears of industrial pollution where even the hardiest seagrass refused to grow. Occasionally, a row of hollow, half-roofed houses poked up like broken teeth through the rising tide, but for the most part, the buildings had been bulldozed where they lay. The long, snaking rubble-mountains had been flattened off and tarmacked to form the Narrows, a series of road-topped dykes that channelled the worst of the water away from London’s wealthier western districts.

“Fuck the houses, build more roads – that’s the Tories for you.” Ritesh could make the political party’s name sound even more like a slur than a genuine swearword. “Here, this one is clear. Straight run through to the bridge.”

Wrinkling his nose, Jules turned off the highway with its regular filtering and air quality monitoring stations every half mile. “Close your window, please?”

Ritesh hesitated only a moment before complying, and was rewarded with a wave of the toxic stink that seeped off the flood zone. Despite the cleansing waters of the rising tide, it wasn’t a healthy, ocean smell of salt and seawater. It was the sour, beer-cellar smell of something dead and rotting, decaying wood and fungus. Before Jules could flip on the van’s own air filters, their eyes and nostrils reacted almost instantly, flooding with mucus to wash away the black fungal spores that caused devastating infestations in kids whose immune systems had been rotted away by Covid-19, Covid-25 or Spirovid-31.

“You never get used to the smell, do you,” muttered Ritesh. “Hang a left up by that junkyard.”

Big mistake. At the bottom of the lane, water was already pooling, and in the murky, muddy floodlands, it was hard to tell if a pool was only ten centimetres deep, or a sinkhole cavernous enough to swallow a lorry.

“Bloody hell,” swore Jules, curses always sounding almost comical in his posh-boy accent. “We should turn back. I guess we can do our monitoring on the A2.”

“Nah, mate. We should push on – look, I just saw two cars and a moped make it on the scanner a moment ago, and they’re at the bridge already.”

Jules gritted his teeth and slowed the van to a crawl, nudging it gently into the mucky water, sending two plumes of filth cascading behind them. Despite Jules’ white knuckles on the steering wheel, they made it through, the water barely reaching the hubcaps. On the other side, Jules gunned the engine to shoot ahead, the electric motor whirring its protest, but they were one of the last vehicles to make it across the rising Ravensbourne before the approaches flooded and the bridge closed.

They drove on for a bit, through the odd mishmash of heavily fortified ex-Council estates and newbuilds on stilts, following the red Porsche ahead of them until they hit gridlock. The streetlights and surrounding shop windows were already flickering and dimming, a sure sign that the power was about to go. When the streetlights went out, traffic hit a complete standstill.

“Perfect,” said Ritesh, even as the red Porsche ahead of them hooted a couple of times in irritation, then reversed and did a U-turn to crawl back the way it had come, alongside the long trail of traffic until it, too, hit flooding and had to stop. There was always one, wasn’t there. All around them, engines were cutting off as the cars rooted down. Newer models were automatic, magnetic cables snaking to the voltholes by the side of the road, while some drivers on first and second generation EVs still had to clamber out of their vehicles and lock in manually. The monitoring van had an automatic mag cable, but Ritesh liked to climb out and cast a surreptitious eye over their companions in the car jam. Hunched over the monitoring screen, it was easy to forget that the endlessly shifting and reconfiguring microgrids were made from people and not just machines. Some were placid and content to answer emails or browse spreadsheets while ‘Working From Vehicle’; others were angry and impatient, furious with the tides and the waters and the other drivers, raging down their mobiles about being ‘stuck in traffic’ as if not understanding that they were the traffic.

He scanned the surrounding buildings as the lights started to pop back on, dimmer and yellower on the microgrid’s lower power, taking stock of the turbines pushing up and unfurling from building-tops like mushrooms after the rain. Sniffing slightly, he tasted the air and noted that someone was clearly running a filter. High tide usually brought a good wind with it, but the drizzle was picking up, so he climbed back into the van to find Jules peering at the monitoring screen as the temporary microgrid flickered to life around them. There seemed to be a step-up transformer nearby, as the power was coming up strong and steady now.

“So who are we locked in with for the next four hours?” he chuckled. “Anyone interesting?”

“The usual,” shrugged Jules, exchanging the Grid monitor for the Hackintosh. “Mostly city boys and a smattering of commuters. Which program are we running?”

“Ah, only a choice selection of my favourite honeypots,” Ritesh laughed as they compared screens. One showed the truth, a single white van buzzing with kitbashed spoofing technology, but the other showed an assortment of tempting vehicles in various states of lax security: a brash, impatient City Boy in a Tesla who had left a sloppy data-path open for his Bloomberg trading feed; a distracted middle class family in a Voltvo with all their kids’ entertainment ports flapping to the wind; and his personal favourite, the little old lady in a snazzy Kia greedily sucking up micropayments and leeching out data like a leaky drainpipe.

It didn’t take long for the electronic feelers to sweep them, though they knew that clever hackers would often wait until the end of the jam, when people were distracted and cranky and liable to get careless in their impatience. Easier to get away, too, once the flood waters started to recede. Ritesh and Jules watched, and they waited. They were very used to waiting.

Overhead, a drone buzzed by, monitoring the miles-long jams for the signature emissions of idling engines, the occasional petrolhead in some vintage machine, but more likely some poor sod who couldn’t afford the upgrade to a cleaner vehicle. They didn’t even register on the Grid, but sometimes they could see smartphones winking on and off as they accessed the traffic information or the automated payment systems for tunnel tolls or street parking. Poor sods. No one idled for fun, and if you couldn’t afford the battery life, what made the Council think they could afford the fines?

“You got anything?” asked Ritesh.

“Nah, but it’s a juicy jam. I’ve already made nearly a Kiloclick refuelling that impatient Porsche.”

“Ooh, I’ve got a tentacle going after the Granny. Hackers just love that honeypot…” He watched as the attack launched, rubbing his hands together in glee at the elegance of it. They thought they were getting such a bargain – sucking up data, financials, clearcodes – but the packets were all marked with an electronic pulse as distinctive as red dye. Totally useless for anything except tracking the trickle of clicks through illicit channels. And here he was, recording the whole thing, capturing IP address, DN Grid location, chaintags, grade A tribunal-submissible evidence that could shut down their accounts or even get them banned from The Grid for up to five years. Two smartphones and an Ampere Rechargeable, it looked like. Fucking Ampres, only cunts and hackers ever drove Ampres.

As if realising something was wrong, the tentacle retracted, severing the electronic connection after only a pathetic haul, but as he glanced across to Jules’ screen, he could see that the pulse held, and their chaintag was now sitting there full of dirty data broadcasting their location.

“What do you reckon? Should we shut it down now, or wait and see if big fish eat the little fish?”

Jules shrugged. “I’ve passed the chaintag back to the office for Xie to run it and see if it pings, but my gut says this is small fry.”

As he spoke, a message popped up at the bottom of both their screens, Xie telling them it was barely worth the packets to report it to The Grid’s internal Quality Control. Damn, xie was fast.

“Ah, fuck it, I’m feeling mean. Sling it over to QC.” Ritesh tried to imagine the scene somewhere up the jam, as two flash boys in a souped-up Ampre found themselves ceremoniously ejected from the Grid, stranded for hours in the traffic jam with only the charge on their battery and no way of paying the tolls. After a gratifyingly short wait, the blip showing the attempted hackers flashed briefly, then dimmed and went dark. “Cunts.”

For the next four hours, it was an extended game of cat and mouse. Any other hackers in the microgrid had clearly seen the Ampre go dark after tangling with the Granny, so the tastiest honeypot was clearly burned. Still, there were flickers of interest around the City Boy and the Voltvo, but nothing latched on tight enough for either of them to get a reading. As the tide finally turned, the microgrid throbbed with energy as water-driven tidal turbines joined the wind harvesters, clever battery-owners racing to fill their tanks as the surge pricing dropped.

“Well, this has been a waste of time,” moaned Jules, stretching and rubbing his hands across the muscles of his back, knotted from hunching over the monitors. “Should have stayed on the A3. The Rotherhithe tunnel unseals in 20 minutes – shall we try to get up the queue?”

“Wait, wait,” urged Ritesh. “We’ve been getting too many complaints from Grid users being stung in this stretch. I want to know what’s out there.” The red Porsche had turned around and was driving the wrong way back up the street, prompting cascades of hooting horns and swearwords lobbed out windows, as various other drivers disconnected from the Grid and decided to chance it, but Ritesh kept his eyes glued to the screen, even as blips went dark around the honeypots.

“Come on, we’re going to be the last in the queue at this rate,” said Jules.

“Got ‘em!” snarled Ritesh, as a tentacle unfurled and latched onto the City Boy, snaking in fast and riding in under the Bloomberg signal so smoothly an ordinary Grid user might not even have noticed. “Here we go, here we go…” Jules had snapped to attention and was flicking furiously through the screens, trying to find it on the system. “They’re in!”

“It’s not a car,” observed Jules. “I think… the electronic signature is different. Inverted, somehow. It might be a producer not a consumer?”

“That’s unusual,” Ritesh said, throwing open all the channels as wide as possible, sucking down as much data from the hacker as he dared. “Christ, they’re good. They’ve clearly done this before – their clearcodes are obscured and they’re using a chaintag that switches encryption every five milliseconds. Sheeee-it… these guys are professionals. They’re ignoring the easy money in his Grid account and powering in through the Bloomberg to try to drain his share funds.”

“Hang on, hang on, can I get a crawler on…? Yes. I’ve managed to send a virtual infocrawler up the stream. Crap, I think they’ve realised something is wrong – they’re detaching now, but that should stay hooked. We can trace it if they move.”

“If it’s not a car, how’s it going to move?” Ritesh took his eyes from the screens for a split second to glance around the surrounding buildings. Was someone running this thing from a flat, a temporary office piled high with Grid connectors? If they were a producer, perhaps they were hooked up to one of the vertical turbines that sprouted from the buildings the way that phone masts used to in the pre-5G times. But at least that narrowed it down to a geographical area. The jam stretched from the Deptford Narrows across to the Bermondsey Ridge. “Hang on,” he said. “This is a rat run.”

“Well, we sure feel like rats stuck in a run here.”

“No, I mean, this is a rat run between the Wharf and the Square Mile, avoiding the Congestion Supercharge and the endless security sweeps on the Ratcliffe Skyway.” Ritesh zoomed out on the monitoring grid to show the surrounding riverscape, then zoomed back in. “This jam was rammed with City Boys – traders – remember that red Porsche so desperate to get the fuck out of here?”

“Everyone’s desperate to get the fuck out of Rotherhithe, to be honest. I mean, look at it.”

“No, but remember? That search tentacle, it ignored hundreds of thousands of clicks in the Grid account. Like it was searching for a Bloomberg. And once it found one, it was straight into the trading gateway software. It’s here, because the City Boys are here. This whole section of the Narrows is a honeypot for traders…”

“What the fuck is that?” Jules suddenly blurted out.

“What the fuck is what?” Ritesh dragged his eyes back to his screen.

“Can you see that on Monitoring?”

“See what?”

Jules turned his whole Hackintosh to show Ritesh a stream of numbers flashing across the lower portion of his screen. “That!”

As Ritesh looked back to his monitoring grid, an unexpected glowing red line appeared at the bottom right of his screen, not the familiar unfurling scrolls of an attack tentacle, but a strange, seeking, branching line, growing from the tips like the roots of a tree or a mould colonising a block of cheese. As it hit the van, he almost expected the vehicle to shake, to rock, to explode with a bang, but the Hackintosh’s firewall held, protecting the monitoring equipment as the red fuzz surged around the van in an uncanny bubble.

“Are you recording this?” Jules almost shrieked.

“I record everything.” Ritesh gasped as a grasping branch of the red fungus colonising the screen lashed out and reached the car in front of them. Quick as a flash, the whole seething mass withdrew from the monitoring van and leapt to the car ahead of them, then the root-tips latched onto the van ahead of that one, wrapping the both of them in a writhing, pulsing mass of fuzz for a few fractions of a second, before surging down the mag-cable into an adjoining building, where it disappeared from the screen.

“What the fuck was that?”

Ritesh checked the recording software to make sure it was still running, then tested the firewall again. Everything was normal. “Was that our City Boy hackers?” he asked.

“Not a chance,” panted Jules, who looked like he was sweating around the roots of his hair. “Their electronic signatures weren’t even remotely similar. I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t a virus, it wasn’t malware, it wasn’t even remotely like the usual grid-hacker tentacle – I’ve not a Scooby-Doo what the blazes that thing was.”

“Maybe it was just a glitch,” Ritesh shrugged.

“Do me a favour and run the recording? Then it’ll be pretty clear if it’s a glitch.” But the glitch, whatever it was, had turned up on every piece of recording equipment, exactly the same.

“A spook. A genuine spook.” Ritesh clicked back through the recording to play it over and again in slow motion.

The attack started as a single thread at the bottom of the screen, its pulsing, growing tip slowly writhing in an obscene circle, like a vine’s shoot seeking the sun, until it touched something. Then it grasped, and latched on, and seemed to pull itself up like some creeping serpentine being. The branching root-tips grew, dividing and sub-dividing into a fan of squirming, pulsating worms headed towards the monitoring van, seeking blindly like fingertips until they found purchase, then the larger mass of the whole thing leapt across the thickening connection. Watching the Hackintosh’s firewall repel them, like the undersides of fat, greasy fingers flattened against a glass window, made him feel distinctly queasy.

But when it leapt to the poorly defended car ahead of them, it was even worse. The blindly grasping fingerworms oozed their way across the car, penetrating its ports and infiltrating its I/Os with an almost indecent hunger, enveloping the car, engulfing it, swarming across it like tiny maggots burrowing their way into every node and pore of the car’s onboard electronics. And yet, despite the creeping sensation of unease, Ritesh had to admit that at times, the onrush of fungus was oddly beautiful, maybe even sexy, like pornography from another planet, all the delicate filigree tendrils and their clinging, filmy embrace as they slid into orifices like an alien lover. The detail revealed itself only in nanoseconds; the whole attack was over in seconds. Slowed down, the unheimlich thing looked like a growing root system, but sped up as he rewound it, it looked terrifyingly like a lightning strike.

Ritesh’s eyes glittered as he leaned in ever closer to the monitor. “Coooooool!”

Chapter Text

Littlemore was trying to focus on drone footage from the Guardian liveblog of the Stonehenge tunnel collapse, when his fraying attention was diverted by two strangers in dark business suits striding purposefully across IPRA’s office floor.

Something in the back of his mind flagged up “huh, that’s weird” as he zoomed the drone in closer to marvel at the giant sarsens uprooted and flung into the yawning sinkhole like children’s toys in a sandbox. But he was so distracted by the archaeological carnage that it took him a moment to work out what was wrong. Then it pinged, exactly like the notification that should have sounded in his headset, but hadn’t. Ripping off his noise-cancelling headphones, he turned around, and called out to the office manager, “Hey, Dollie – did you get a security alert from the front door?”

Dollie barely glanced up from her scrolling and clicking. “Nuh-uh. Why?”

“Then how’d those guys get in here?”

“What guys?” Dollie shrugged, flicking an incoming call notification into the call centre queue with her fingertips. Littlemore pointed, and she peered over her monitor at the strangers, who had crossed the office floor to arrive at the programmers’ concentration pods. “Maybe they caboosed on someone coming back from the khazi?”

The strangers stopped outside Xie’s pod and rapped on the door. Oh crap, why did they have to pick Xie to bother? A distracted programmer was not a happy programmer, and as manager of Technology, unhappy team members were invariably Littlemore’s personal responsibility to fix.

“Dollie, do me a favour and pull up the door logs?” Clambering to his feet, he headed over, dodging past stacks of old laptops and leaping over a small crate of disembowelled CPUs. “If someone just let these goons in, we need to administer more security training.” Tucking in his shirt and brushing lunch crumbs off his lap, he cut them off right as Xie opened the door to the pod, blinking and perplexed at the disruption.

“Excuse me, can I help you?” Littlemore interrupted, before either party could speak.

The smaller of the two goons swivelled her head to meet Littlemore’s gaze, and bared her teeth in a smile that didn’t reach all the way to eyes half obscured by digital glasses. “Please relax sir, the situation is under control,” she said in a bland mid-Atlantic accent, carefully pitched and toned to be calming and reassuring.

“I’m sorry, but who are you, and what do you want with my staff?” Irritation peppered Littlemore’s voice.

“Don’t worry, sir, please return to your seat” said the woman, drawing back her lips as she and the other man produced small black wallets from their pockets and flashed badges and ID cards too fast for Littlemore to catch the details. Her voice protocol training was very good, it was a struggle to hold onto his irritation hard enough to push the confrontation, fighting his urge to return meekly to his desk.

“This is my office, and my operation. If you want to speak to a member of my team, you need to clear it with me first,” insisted Littlemore, shifting his feet wider apart and trying to centre his weight to lend gravity and authority to his voice. He was not naturally an aggressive or territorial man, but with the welfare of his team at stake, he steeled himself to go to bat, especially for one of the younger data-scies.

The other goon, a tall, grey-haired man, took his gaze off Xie for a moment, and turned to address Littlemore. “We need to talk to your operative about some activity reported from the IP address of this pod.” His voice training was nowhere near as good as the woman’s, but between his power stance and the tell-tale bulge in his jacket, his authority didn’t need much enhancement.

Inside the pod, Xie looked back and forth, confused, between Littlemore and the two goons. Rolling xir eyes, xie raised xir hand to xir ears and flicked a switch to engage xir implants, then reached for xir assisted communication pad.

“Do not engage technology, keep your hands where we can see them!” barked the man, his hand twitching towards the bulge in his jacket, but Littlemore thrust his hand protectively between them.

“It’s cool, Xie needs it to speak,” he assured them.

Xie rolled xir eyes and tapped one of the programmed buttons on the device, which purred to life and jauntily chirped, “I am Deaf. I require the pad to communicate. I am profoundly Deaf. I require the assisted communications device to communicate.” As the automated message played, Xie caught Littlemore’s eye and subtly signed ‘arseholes’ with xir other hand.

For a few seconds, the strangers stared at the pad, like robots thrown off their programming, their heads swivelling together as they exchanged meaningful glances and silent data packets through their digitally enhanced glasses. “The IP address matches, though,” said the woman, looking Xie up and down, taking in xir faded U-Bahn T-shirt, xir Neubauten tattoo, and xir purposefully dishevelled pink-orange-purple hair. God only knew what suits like them would make of neopronouns. “Does anyone else use the pod?”

“This is my pod, I am the only one who uses it,” chirped Xie’s pad, the words clipped and even and electronically neutral, though the sound flickered with the irritation of xir tapping fingers.

“I strongly doubt you have anything like the authority to access The Grid’s backend financial system and download five terabytes of micropayment trails,” scoffed the man, and all the voice protocol training in the world couldn’t hide his disdain.

Littlemore sighed deeply and put his hand to his forehead, trying to massage the throbbing vein back into place. Clearly, if the DPO found out about this, there would be another two hours of mandatory legal training about staff not misusing their security clearances to pursue personal obsessions.

“As a governmentally sanctioned regulatory authority, we naturally have access to The Grid’s security protocols. Now, again, would you like to explain to me, who you are, and why you are harassing my staff, or am I going to have to call in Legal?” Littlemore asked in what he hoped was a reasonable but slightly intimidating tone of voice.

To his huge relief, at the sound of her title, the head of Legal drifted over and appeared at his elbow, as silently as if she’d glided in on greased wheels. “May I be of some assistance here?” offered Damilola, her voice dripping with an assured command that had seen even protocol-trained QCs step back and snap to attention at Tribunals.

“Your staff member downloaded five terabytes of confidential data relating to Eat Light, Ltd and we need to know why,” blurted out the tall man, almost as if he hadn’t intended to.

Eat Light? What the hell were protocol-trained goons like this doing digging into a simple, two-bit consent-to-charge violation like the Eat Light Diet Plan, thought Littlemore, but thankfully Damilola had stepped forwards, crossing her arms firmly across her immaculately cut pre-trial suit.

“I’m sorry, but I’m sure you realise that we cannot possibly discuss active investigations with external parties…” she almost purred.

“So you are actively investigating Light Eaters, Ltd?” the woman interrupted, but Damilola brushed her off like a fluff of lint from a pressed shirtsleeve.

“I cannot legally comment on that matter, at this juncture. But if you would like to raise a formal FOIA request through official channels, we will endeavour to provide the legally required information within thirty working days.”

“Ah. We were hoping to avoid official channels,” said the woman delicately, turning her face fully towards Damilola and pushing her glasses up her nose with a distinct electronic click.

“I’m sure you were,” muttered Littlemore under his breath, narrowing his eyes. Only twats used data-enhanced glasses; the deeply unfashionable accessories were banned in half the buildings on the Wharf as a surveillance risk.

Damilola smiled placidly but firmly. “I sincerely hope that you are not suggesting I do anything… illicit. The paperwork, if you were to suggest such a thing – I’m sure you understand…”

The taller man let out an exasperated sigh and turned to his colleague. “No, if they want formal requests and official channels, then we’ve got to follow protocols, Judy.”

Gesturing graciously, Damilola suggested “Allow me to show you out.”

“We can find our own way out, thank you,” said Judy, her vocal register absolutely flawless.

“I insist,” replied Damilola with a steely but polite tone as she shepherded them out of the room. “My card, if you wish to be in touch.” Littlemore noticed that the goons did not respond with the offer of their own as they disappeared off down the corridor to the front door.

He turned to find Dollie staring at him with a perplexed expression on her face. “Who the fuck were those guys?”

“No idea,” said Littlemore. “Cops?”

Dollie shook her head knowledgably. “Cops could never afford suits like that. Handstitched. Natural fibre. Up to the minute Gangnam line tailoring?”

“Financial Conduct? MI5?” suggested Littlemore. “Private security?” He wouldn’t be surprised if The Grid had started running its own internal investigations, given how many heavy financial interests either wanted in on their action, or actively wanted them gone.

“I pulled the security logs, chief. No one’s come in or out that door in about twenty minutes,” Dollie told him, brandishing the data on her palmpad.

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” sighed Littlemore. “Better let Jay know – she can run diagnostics and see if there’s a bug.”

Littlemore pulled out his phone and fired off an email to the sys admin. Although he craned his neck to peer into the Technology and Analysis Department, he could see that she was not at her desk, so he took a detour into the kitchen.

After pouring himself a mug of delightfully strong coffee, he helped himself to a caramel Krispy Kreme from a box that the social committee had left open on the countertop. The idea behind all the free food and drink was to encourage the different teams to hang about the break room together in the hopes that they might exchange intelligence. Mostly, it worked, though the conversations were as likely to be spoilers on the convoluted plot of the latest binge-watched epic Chinese historical-martial-arts-romance on Sinoflix as work-related topics.

The cheerful, welcoming space was full of fruit bowls and pots of live salad, and the tables were dotted with magazines, colouring books and picture puzzles, as if the room were meant to house curious toddlers rather than highly trained data scientists and cyberforensic investigators. The comfy café-style booths at the back were usually occupied, as was the low coffee bar along the glass wall that faced north, offering a bird’s eye view of the bustling central plaza of The Wharf. And in fact, there, sprawled across a low, comfortable booth, was the rest of his team.

“Because there we were, in the middle of the rat run between Deptford and Rotherhithe, and you will never believe what we found?” Ritesh, the equipment engineer, a thin, rangy guy who still looked deceptively young despite the silver streak in his beard, bent forward, and lowered his voice, his large brown eyes wide.

“That stretch of the Thames, I would believe almost anything.” Jay, the sys admin, was a tall, slightly rotund older woman with basement-pale skin, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and scuffed purple Doc Martens she seemed to have been wearing for at least 30 years. “Ghost sightings, unidentified lights on the river and in the sky, cryptid activity on the seafront, you name it. The Deptford Narrows have been the sight of some seriously weird paranormal activity for decades now.” She stretched and yawned so wearily that Littlemore reached over for the coffee carafe and topped up her mug. “Thanks, too much blood in my caffeine system.”

As she sipped, Ritesh dragged the conversation back to the morning’s monitoring exercise. “We were out there monitoring reports of suspicious activity, and yeah, we thought we had found a hacker raiding mobile trading terminals – when suddenly, out of nowhere, this unknown… entity – super weird shit, like an electronic fungus from another planet – just oozed up out of the nearest Volthole and attacked our van. Fortunately, our firewall held, but if it hadn’t?” He made a brief gesture across his neck.

“Another planet, you say?” Jay snapped to attention, gesturing excitedly with half a glazed doughnut. “You think this was alien intelligence of some kind?”

“Well, as we all know, there’s no intelligent life in Bermondsey.” Ritesh nudged her and winked. “But this was the freakiest shit I’ve ever seen. It seemed self-directed, like it wasn’t attached to any Grid account that I could detect.”

“Aliens?” Jay nodded sagely as she popped the last of her doughnut into her mouth and licked her fingers. “I mean, if extra-terrestrials were going to try to communicate with the earth, I reckon they’d think vehicles were the dominant form of life in our cities.”

“Nonsense,” snorted the script kiddie from across the booth. Jules, the youngest member of the team, was an implausibly good-looking posh kid with a sportsman’s physique and a prow of wavy blond hair that bounced as he walked. “It was entirely terrestrial and all too human. It’s almost certainly some new kind of hacker attack, maybe a botnet? We’re going to have to add its signature to the monitoring database, see if we can detect it again with our automated sweeps, work out what it’s doing.”

Jay shook her head and rumbled her disagreement as she pulled himself to her feet. “Deptford Narrows? Everyone knows it’s a hotbed of paranormal activity. Bet you a kiloclick it’s not human.”

“Well, I look forward to your report when it’s written up, Ritesh,” concluded Littlemore, trying not to make it too obvious that he was nudging them gently back to work. “And you’re right, Jules. It can’t hurt to keep an eye out if there’s a new kind of bot crawling about. Add it to our automated sweeps.” Littlemore finished his doughnut and took a swig of coffee, then looked hopefully towards the leftover doughnuts.

Jay shrugged and shoved the box back towards him. “Here, take another of these before I scoff the lot.”

Littlemore’s hand hovered for a moment over the box of doughnuts, but then he glanced down at the waistband of his jeans and decided not to risk it. “Anyway, as you’re headed back to your desk, check your email, I’ve sent over a bit of a mystery for you.”

“Ooh, you know I love a good mystery!”

“I think we might have a problem with our staff security training again. Folks getting a big lax.”

As she rinsed her coffee mug and poured herself another cup, Littlemore’s mobile pinged. He pulled it out of his pocket, to find a text message from GoogleDeals. “Does your IT Team need security training? Firepit offers intensive courses in InfoSec, Firewalls, Chaintags and Encryption. Kaspersky certified! Click the link now for a special deal: 3 users for the price of 2, quote code $p00ks for discount.”

Littlemore frowned as he deleted the text. “I swear to god, this thing is listening to me.”

“Watch it,” teased Jay as she strode off to the server room. “Soon you’ll be as paranoid as me.”

He was about to slope back to his own desk, when Damilola reappeared round the corner with a face like a public relations officer whose client had been shopped buying illicit electrics round the back of the Peckham Archipelago.

“Littlemore – conference chamber, now. And grab Xie on your way. Five terabytes of data! I should have been alerted. Now who’s the lead investigator on the Eat Light case? Sheena? Paul? I’ll go and bring them in, too.”

He made his way back to the programmers’ concentration pods and flicked the lights gently to get Xie’s attention. Opening the pod door, Xie looked at Littlemore sheepishly and signed, “Am I in trouble?”

Littlemore wasn’t fluent in BSL by any stretch, but one phrase he definitely knew how to sign was “Yes, big trouble.”

Chapter Text

“Now, correct me if I’m wrong,” said Damilola in a voice that made it clear she would never need to be corrected. On a screen behind her head, Littlemore was distracted by the news still running with the sound down, displaying a live feed from the Stonehenge collapse, where an old man with long, silvery hair and beard, a hi-vis hard hat jammed incongruously on top of a druid’s robes, was gesticulating wildly at the devastation behind him. “But isn’t the Eat Light case something like a priority five? Low pricing point, only a smattering of complaints, why would your team even be digging around in their micropayment trails? This hardly seems the most worthwhile use of our highly limited time and resources?”

As Xie typed away on xir pad, composing and recomposing xir response, Paul stuttered into the gap as he shuffled through his papers. “We’ve not had a particularly helpful response to our RFIs. Eat Light say they contracted a third party, Light Eaters, Ltd, to run promotion and manage their subscriptions. Oh, not to mention, for proof of consent, they’ve literally given us nothing but an excel spreadsheet with our own information copy/pasted back into it.”

All eyes turned to Xie, who pounded the screen on xir pad and signed frustration. “My own Grid account simply will not balance, on account of that *disallowed phrase* Eat Light charging error. I *disallowed phrase*-ing hate it when my account does not balance. It literally pains me. Pattern sensitivity is such a *disallowed phrase*,” the pad chirped as Xie elegantly signed some very rude gestures.

“The Grid reports that they have refunded all their consumers,” Damilola said, very slowly and very clearly, for the benefit of Xie’s cochlear implants.

“No,” chirped the pad. “No, no, no,” it stuttered as Xie mashed the button over and again. “They charge 500 clicks at start of month. Refund only 475 clicks at end of month. Grid statement out by 25 clicks all month. Nothing balances. Infuriating.”

“What’s the exchange rate running at right now?” She checked her Apple watch and rolled her eyes. “That’s about 10p, Xie,” Damilola enunciated.

“We think it’s a service change for the refund from somewhere up the value chain,” explained Paul. “If it were a higher priority investigation, we could pursue that – but it’s only 25 clicks.”

“Look, if you are short of money, speak to Finance. We can reimburse you for the difference,” suggested Damilola.

“No, no, no,” blurted Xie’s pad, as xie signed ‘you don’t understand’ over and over. “Not about money. Account doesn’t balance. *Disallowed phrase*!”

Littlemore shrugged, raising his hands palm up as the druid above Damilola’s left shoulder made a distinct pointing motion that seemed like he was indicting everyone at the table for the sacred monument’s collapse. Damilola eyeballed him back and sucked her teeth as she thought it over.

“Alright. Xie can be a right pain in the backside, but xir instincts are good. You’ve got until next Monday to prove any kind of malfeasance, then I want you to drop it. And this better not intrude on any of the other case work.”

“Next Monday is Bank Holiday weekend,” Littlemore reminded her.

“Until next Tuesday, then. Right, team. Back to work. And Xie? Stay the disallowed phrase out of The Grid’s back end unless you clear it with the Legal Team first, you hear me, child?”

“Thank you,” chirped the pad, though Xie’s face stayed sullen.

“Come on, Xie, it’ll be fine. You’ve got a week to work on it, if anyone can untangle five terabytes of data in a week, it’s you.” Littlemore did his best to hearten xir as they walked back to their desks together.

But Xie had that dogged, terrier-like expression on xir face that increased his already considerable confidence in his unconventional employee. During one particularly complicated fraud case, Xie had been caught logging on to the server remotely at 3 in the morning to try yet another Fourier Transform on a particularly troublesome set of mobile phone signal data. They had won the case, but HR had asked Littlemore to have a word with his staff about the importance of work-life balance, something none of the geeks under his supervision seemed to understand. That was the problem with employing exceptional quants and techies: their exceptional lifestyles.

Littlemore, on the other hand, was exceptionally average. He was neither tall nor short, neither skinny nor obese, but almost exactly the mid-point of the English Male in both height and weight, 5’8” with a small paunch that exposed his love of a pint of mild. He had medium brown eyes, and medium brown hair that was neither fair nor dark. He was precisely the middle child of a close-knit lower middle-class family of five spread out across the West Midlands. He hadn’t had a spectacular academic career, but he had slogged along, and surprised his whole family by assiduously working his way into a law degree and a job in the burgeoning world of information technology, even though he grew up in a home whose DVD player kept blinking 12:00 right the way through his late 90s childhood.

But he was smart enough to know that the way to succeed in technology was to hire weirdoes who were smarter than he was. It wasn’t that Littlemore wasn’t bright and competent, but occasionally, talking to Xie or Ritesh, it was like he suddenly saw an enormous gulf opening up between his understanding of the world, and their complex, multi-layered, four-dimensional-chess conception of maths or physics or neural net machine intelligence. But he trusted that the view was clearer on their side of that gulf. Even if some of them couldn’t quite tie their own shoelaces or occasionally turned up at work having forgotten fundamental basics of hygiene because they were too busy thinking about tesseracts in the shower.

When Littlemore got back to his desk, Jay was already perched at the workstation next to his, tapping away at one of about half a dozen monitors that littered her desk. “So those spooks of yours, that visited the office while I was in the server room?”

“Did Dollie show you the security log? The sodding Goon Squad just sauntered into our office like a pair of hobbits walking into Mordor, and not a squeak on the log.”

Jay cackled at the reference. “One does not simply Goon Squad into IPRA. Dollie only has access to our copy of the security logs, which are filtered to show only our registered users and guests. Hang on, I’ll log into The Wharf’s own security records and show you what they have to say on the matter.” A few seconds of furious typing on a wireless keyboard. “Look, there are your spooks. One tapped in at 14.22.07, the other at 14.24.51. Interesting – that means one of them had nearly three minutes to poke around unaccompanied, tsk tsk, our security is slipping.”

Littlemore scooted his chair over to stare at the stream of data. “No names, no ID number – how?”

Jay shook her head as she paged down through the data, as the expected names tapped in and out of the office – Damilola letting someone out, Ritesh and Jules signing back in from their monitoring run, Jay coming back in after a vape break. “Security override? You know, they use it if the police, or firefighters, or Wharf security need to get into the individual offices.”

“So they are cops.”

“Or they managed to convince the doorman that they are – Dollie said they had badges? Did you see what they said?”

Littlemore shook his head, cursing his poor eyesight. “They had badges, and I’m pretty sure one of them had a dropstick. Do you know what kind of permit you need to bring electrics like that onto the Wharf?”

“That’s pretty heavy,” agreed Jay. “Did you notice anything else unusual about them? Apart from the whole spooking straight into our office thing?”

Closing his eyes, Littlemore pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and kneaded his nose right between his eyes, trying to remember more about the encounter. “Digital glasses,” he supplied. “That struck me as odd.”

“Proper old school,” Jay whistled. “Probably even harder to get clearance to bring a pair of those onto the Wharf than the dropstick.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen kids threatened with arrest simply for filming their eScooter tricks too near JP Morgan or Deutsche Bank. The heavy hitters round here take their surveillance pretty seriously.”

A mischievous smile spread slowly across Jay’s face. “Do you want me to pull the recordings from the security cameras, see what I can see?” she said in a sing-song voice. “You never know who they could be. Could be MI5 – or MI6? GCHQ?”

“I doubt they were GCHQ. I know guys at GCHQ. I mean, I have contacts.” Littlemore was quite proud of that. “My guys… they’d have shown me the respect of at least a courtesy call before popping round.”

“Could be international? The Americans – or the Russians? Did they have an accent?”

Littlemore squinched his eyes shut and thought back. “Bland, Mid-Atlantic. They were voice protocol trained, though.”

“Could be private security…” Here she lowered her voice. “Could be Men In Black? You know, I’ve always thought Xie was a little… you know… alien.”

For a long moment, Littlemore wrestled with his conscience. He knew what Legal would think of this idea. He also knew that Jay wouldn’t stop pestering him with conspiracy theories until she had seen the badges for herself. “You are one paranoid fuck, and I know you won’t rest until the rest of us are as paranoid as you are. Go ahead.”

“I wouldn’t be good at my job if I wasn’t paranoid,” laughed Jay, and immediately logged into another part of the Wharf’s security system she probably wasn’t supposed to have access to.

Chapter Text

If there is one thing that drives me absolutely batty, it’s the way people talk about Algorithms. People discuss them like they’re some kind of sorcery. Yeah, yeah, I know – any technology sufficiently advanced basically magic, blah blah blah, whatever. But even the press uses the word ‘algorithm’ as some kind of catch-all terminology for new data technology, almost always bad. Algorithms crashed your car. Algorithms stole your girlfriend. Algorithms are going to hack into your body and delete all your bones. I’ve heard every kind of insult and taunt and preposterous claim imaginable. Just… no.

An algorithm is a set of instructions. That is all. Instructions. Ordered, logical instructions.

OK, think of it this way. English weather is infamously changeable, right? What do all English people do before they leave the house? Look out the window. Check the weather forecast. Stick your head out the door and see if it is raining. This is your most fundamental, basic building block of an algorithm. Check the conditions. Then, you build a set of instructions, for what to do under certain conditions. Is it raining? Take an umbrella. Is it raining and windy, too? An umbrella’s not going to cut it, take an anorak. Is it windy, but not actually raining? Take a windcheat or a jumper. Cold enough that you can see your breath, but also raining or even snowing? Parka. That is an algorithm. That’s it!

The thing about designing a software algorithm is, you have to get it into a specific logical order, otherwise the computer will check only the first condition, merrily equate rain to umbrella, and go marching off without having checked the wind conditions and your umbrella will be blown inside out without half a mile. So the code should be logically ordered to sort your dependent conditions into something sequential like:

case
when [England].[Weather] = (wind + rain + cold)
            then ‘Parka’
            when [England].[Weather] = (wind + rain)
                        then ‘Anorak’
                        when [England].[Weather] = wind (without rain)
                                    then ‘Windcheat’
                                    when [England].[Weather] = rain (without wind)
                                                then ‘Umbrella’
                                                else ‘Jumper’
end;

You can never go wrong with a nice jumper.

The hard part isn’t coding – as you can see, the words themselves are pretty simple, there is no language beyond the reading capacity of a 12-year-old. In terms of actual scripting, there are almost no special skills beyond simply learning the lingo. The hard part isn’t the grammar, it’s the logic. It involves working out what all the conditions are, all of the unusual special exceptions – I mean, what if you look outside and it is sunny? In England these days, a complete rarity, I know, but it can happen, and you need to get out the SPF50 because it’s suddenly a blazing 40 degrees. The really hard part is putting them in the specific logical order where all of the multiple conditions and edge cases are considered in turn. Usually, you have to run through it a couple of times, mentally or in test mode, to get it right.

Now, with Machine Intelligence, you train an algorithm to do the same thing, but you don’t tell it the rules. You give it all of the data, and it has to work out what the rules might be, from the observed behaviour. You give it a set of weather conditions, a set of clothes, and a huge, multiple year dataset of what humans wore, under certain weather conditions, and they use that data to work out what the rules were. Snow means parkas, rain means umbrellas and sun means SPF50. That’s Machine Learning. That’s what people usually mean, when they say AI.

Now substitute “the world economy” for “weather conditions” and “financial instruments to buy or sell” for “clothes to take off and put on” and that’s what I teach algorithms to do. Or at least I try.

This is what I mean, when I say machines think in ways that are not human. You feed all that same information into a neural net, and it will notice that when the sun shines and the temperature goes up, shops suddenly sell a lot of SPF50. Yes, shops sell a lot of sunscreen when the weather is fair and it stops raining – but an AI can quite easily come to the conclusion that it is the increased sale of SPF50 that drives good weather rather than sunshine, and rewrite all of its algorithms accordingly. This is what data scientists mean, when we say, “Correlation does not imply Causation.”

Minorities are always crying about that one. For example, a few years ago, HR executives had the bright idea to train algorithms to select the most qualified applicants for highly technical positions, so they wouldn’t have to waste their time interviewing idiots who can’t tell their arrays from their backends. You feed an algorithm a pile of 200 years’ worth of CVs from the most respected engineers in Britain as training data, and say ‘find us more CVs like this’. Turns out, for 150 of those years, there were no black people working in engineering because black people didn’t arrive in Britain until the 1970s or whenever, so the majority of working engineers were understandably white, in fact most of them were Scottish. So machine learning notices how many of those respected engineers were called things like Stephenson and MacAdam, and starts sifting for white men with Scottish names. Understandable, right? The machine picked “sunscreen” when we were looking for the condition “sunshine”. But people start howling that the machines are racist. How can a machine be racist? It’s just bad programming.

I mean, it’s lazy, isn’t it? Blaming bias when it’s bad programming. Garbage in; garbage out.

Here’s the irony: when I go looking through CVs for people to hire, I go looking for the women, I go looking for the people with the unusual, likely ethnic names. You want to know why? You see, I am totally a feminist. I listen to what the chicks in STEM fields say – they’re constantly complaining that they have to work twice as hard to get half the credit and 70% of the pay. But how motivated does that show someone is, if they have succeeded under those conditions? If I’m looking at two CVs with similar credentials, but one has a female name – if I can get someone twice as good for 70% of the money, why wouldn’t I take that opportunity? It makes good business sense. You get some bloke with an unpronounceable name like Srinivasa Ramanujan, you know that guy has to be exponentially better than James MacAdam III, just to get in the door. That’s not racism; that’s just economics, sweetheart.

Chapter Text

Littlemore was trying his hardest to stay glued to the emergency Stonehenge hearing, live from Parliament. The BBC’s coverage cut back and forth between various furious-looking MPs for Conservative strongholds out in Wiltshire launching verbal barrages at the Prime Minister, and the ever-growing mass of druids, hippies, new age types and climate protesters gathering around the fences screening off the ruined pile of stones on Salisbury Plain. But his team kept bothering him, with bits and pieces of various disconnected strands of work that were starting to grow into an almighty headache.

First up was Jay, almost jiggling with excitement over the images she had sourced from the security cameras and spent all evening de-pixellating and enhancing. “You are not going to believe this,” she crowed triumphantly.

“There is an army of bards and druids threatening to march on London. Try me, I might just believe anything at this point,” sighed Littlemore.

“Look,” said Jay, and turned her monitor round to show Littlemore two grainy photos of security badges. “Our spooks.”

Littlemore promptly burst out laughing, causing the rest of the team to look round and crane their heads to catch a glimpse of Jay’s monitor. Ritesh, also approaching middle age, burst out laughing too, while Jules and Xie simply looked perplexed.

“Richard and Judy?” said Jules. “I don’t get it?”

Xie was already tapping away on xir pad, before looking up with a quizzical expression. “Richard and Judy were daytime television chat show hosts from around the turn of the century,” the pad read out from Wikipedia or GoogleFacts or somewhere.

“You guys don’t remember Richard and Judy?” asked Jay, ever so slightly aghast.

“Before my time, grandma,” teased Xie, signing ‘just kidding’ with xir other hand.

“I don’t understand. Why would two television chat show hosts want to talk to Xie about the Eat Light investigation?” asked Jules, apparently in all seriousness.

“They wouldn’t,” supplied Jay. “Our spooks are working under codenames. Who uses codenames like that? MI5? MI6?”

“MI7?” countered Ritesh. He and Jules looked at each other for a split second before they both burst out “MI Heaven?”

“Fuck off,” laughed Jay and threw an ancient Windows 10 branded promotional data stick at them.

“Aw, Jay, we know you’re completely crazy and we love you for it,” teased Ritesh.

“We do not use the C-word word any more,” tapped Xie. “It’s ableist.”

“What do we call paranoiacs, then?” asked Jules in all seriousness.

Ritesh thought for a moment, before supplying. “They’re not crazy, they’re just Reality Challenged.”

The team hooted with laughter, even Jay, before she recovered her sangfroid, and protested, “Hey, if I’m so paranoid, explain this, huh?” Digging in her pockets, she produced a small metal-clad box, then extracted a tiny gadget. At first glance, it looked almost exactly like the matte black rings of Velcro they all used to control the endless cabling that spiralled around the office, except for the fact that an iridescent silicon web curled around the inside like a dark mirror, and a SIM card and miniature battery pack were attached to one end.

Littlemore stopped laughing, and reached out to take it, turning it over in his hand. “What the hell is this?”

“I’m not entirely sure, but on the security video, Richard managed to attach it to an ethernet cable in the conference room during the three minutes he was wandering about unescorted.”

“Shit, you think it’s surveillance? Would they be able to get onto our network with something like that?”

Jay shook her head. “We were incredibly lucky – the conference room is on a separate network with its own firewall, because we’re always letting visitors plug in their laptops or pads or whatever, to give their presentations or check their email. Were there any meetings in there yesterday afternoon?”

Racking his brain, Littlemore checked the room’s calendar and breathed a sigh of relief. “Fortunately, only the social committee. That was a close call. I’m glad you found that before we had a Judicial Panel Review in there or anything.”

“Yeah, see, I’m not paranoid. I’m threat conscious. We all need to be threat conscious in this business.” With a curt nod, she thrust it back into the little metal box and stuffed it into her pocket. “I’m trying to think of the worst place I could dispose of this. You know, like a camgirl’s line, or a boiler room operation.”

Littlemore laughed, but before he could turn back to the Stonehenge hearings, Xie started tapping away furiously at xir pad. “Hey, boss. This Eat Light thing gets weirder and weirder, the more I dig into it. Can I talk to you about it for a minute?”

“Sure thing. Though wouldn’t you usually rather send an email?”

Xie looked slightly cross as xie signed urgency. “Already sent you two this morning. And about a dozen Teams pings. None of which you have responded to.”

“Sorry, I’ve just been really busy – haven’t got to my email yet,” Littlemore lied. In truth, he had been faked out by too many excited emails from Xie that had been marked as urgent, but when opened turned out to contain nothing but links to some new U-Bahn single or some as-yet undiscovered Kraftwerk rarity pulled out of a bunker in the drowned Rhineland.

But Xie raised a sarcastic eyebrow and flicked xir eyes pointedly at the internet feed, still displaying Prime Minister Morgan’s face as he traded barbs and banter with the Leader of the Opposition, and, increasingly, members of his own party.

“OK, OK, what have you got, Xie?”

“The Light Eaters mischarge, that was no glitch. It was systematic.” Xie plonked xir sticker-plastered laptop down on Littlemore’s desk and paged through page after page of spreadsheets. “It is much bigger than we thought, too.”

“Well, five terabytes of data indicate a much bigger scale than we initially understood.” Littlemore shook his head as the numbers flew by, astonished by Xie’s ability to process that much data effectively overnight.

“Every single number,” Xie insisted. “They hit every single active account on The Grid. 25 clicks here, 25 clicks there. Nothing that anyone would notice. But every account.”

“Wait, what? Did they systematically go through and charge every single account number from 001 to… how many users are there on The Grid now, anyway?”

“They recently celebrated their 50 millionth device in England-and-Wales earlier this year,” supplied Jules. “There might be ten times that on other microgrids around Europe? But London has the largest integrated system in England-and-Wales.”

“Surely the system would flag it, if someone hit every account sequentially,” Littlemore pointed out.

“Yeah, I remember we had a case like that about a decade ago – someone hit every SIM card on Vodata with a £2.50 charge for sexual entertainment services.” Folding his arms behind his head, Ritesh leaned back in his chair. “So we were getting all these calls from people wondering why their intelligent food-ordering fridges or the navigation systems for their cars were racking up pornography charges on their bills.”

Xie burst out into uncontrolled little pants of laughter, before reaching for xir pad again. “Can you imagine what kind of pornography a car’s navigation system would want to look at? Germany’s most erotic autobahn tunnels?”

“Or fridges,” wondered Jules. “Talk about food porn!”

“Literally. Aw, man, look at the gams on that frozen ham,” cackled Jay over the top of her monitor.

“But I know we issued a whole legal directive on that – all the major providers agreed to implement systems that would shut down any operator that bulk charged accounts in sequence,” Littlemore insisted. “They get flagged up, like an automated circuit breaker switch kicks in and shuts it down until a human can look into it.”

“They did not charge the accounts sequentially. They worked through the system nodally. Here, let me show you the Data Viz.” Xie switched windows, and opened up an animation. “Look, each of these large red dots is someone who encountered one of the original Eat Light adverts online. They got the full charge, and the refund when people started complaining. Like my account. Like Ritesh’s monitoring phones. But look what happens next.”

Xie zoomed in on a small section of the screen. Each of the red dots put out tendrils, then the tendrils expanded, growing from the tips, splintering into branches and dividing and subdividing as a growing red mat of glowing lines covered the screen more and more quickly. The mass seemed to pulsate and shift, pulling away from branches that led nowhere and expanding rapidly into areas of more and more dense connections.

“Oh fuck, the Facebook model?” said Littlemore.

“Worse than Facebook,” tapped Xie in a flurry of excited fingers. “On Facebook, you connect only with friends, family, colleagues, people you know. The Grid much bigger because designed to incentivise altruism. Incentivise sharing, not hoarding.”

“It’s based on the Chinese social credit system,” Jules supplied helpfully.

Littlemore shot him a slightly confused look. Some of the concepts that the younger members of his team routinely tossed about made him feel about a million years old. “Can you spell it out for the senior citizens on the team, how that differs from Western social media?”

Jules pushed his floppy blond hair out of his face. “Well, in a social credit system, you’re rewarded for acting communally, and penalised for acting selfishly. Sure, you can try to game the system, but it’s pretty robust. The only way to game it is to… act unselfishly, and connect and share with as many different users as you can.”

Xie nodded enthusiastically. “That is the point of The Grid – incentivise collective action.”

“Well, that and tax avoidance,” quipped Ritesh, rolling his eyes.

“Look, you know I’m no fan of the Prime Minister,” protested Jules, furrowing his brow into what Jay called his Professor Wikipedia face. “But such a colossal, scalable decentralised power system could never have been built so quickly without Morgan’s massive tax relief for Green Energy.”

“Lads,” interjected Littlemore, holding up his hands before Ritesh could leap in with a rant about politics. “Lads, can we save it for the next general election? I really want to hear from Xie about this model of xirs.”

Ritesh backed off, and Jules smiled sheepishly as Xie glared back and forth between them, tapping furiously without even seeming to look at the pad. “It is much denser than Facebook connection model. On Facebook, you connect only with people you know. The Grid, everyone trades with everyone, whether you know them or not. You move from one microgrid to the next – some are bigger, some smaller. At high tide you can be stuck on an islet with a dozen cars, then at a lower tide, you can be connected to half of London.” Xie pointed to one of the smaller clusters of small dots at the corner of the laptop screen with one hand, while the other still tapped away the pad. “Someone from Hull drives down to London for a meeting, connects to London Grid… when they drive back, their Hull contact network gets hit with charges in a cascade effect. Someone in Hull has contacts in Leeds and York. Off it goes.”

As the visualisation ran, a strange, seeking, branching line of red reached out from the smaller Hull cluster, growing from the tip as it overran the Leeds and York clusters in a pulsing, fuzzy red blob.

“Truly viral,” noted Littlemore, remembering the contagion maps from the early days of the Covid plagues.

“Hang on, run that again, Xie?” asked Ritesh, staring at the screen that had now turned completely red. Xie tapped, and the screen went back to the small red dots, slowly branching out, then picking up speed as the growing tips hit bigger networks. “I have just seen something remarkably like this, very recently.”

Jules snapped his fingers and pointed at the screen. “The monitoring glitch!”

“It could only be an artefact of the Data Viz, since we reuse a lot of the same graphics modules,” tapped Xie.

“Nah, come and look at this. It’s a pretty distinctive signature.”

Xie velcroed the pad to the side of xir arm, and moved round to the other side of the bank of desks to look at Ritesh’s screen, with Littlemore close on xir heels.

“See, this is the attempted hack we recorded near the Deptford Narrows. It’s pretty sophisticated in its encryption, but we’ve seen this kind of MO before.” On the screen, the pale tentacles attacked the decoy Bloomberg, then retracted. “However, this?” He fast-forwarded through the recording until the red fungus appeared, then slowed it down to 1/100^th speed. “I’ve never seen an attack like this before. But it looks kinda like your nodal transmission model, yeah?”

Littlemore stared at the weird, branching, lacelike pattern pulsing across Ritesh’s screen in slow motion. When he’d heard Ritesh and Jules talking about some kind of electronic fungus, he’d pictured some dark, ugly smear like a damp stain in a flood-wrecked house. But this sinewy, snaking pattern, it was oddly beautiful, even as it was slightly terrifying to watch it leap from vehicle to vehicle as if firewalls and antiviral protection software weren’t even a thing. Something about its sheer elegant impossibility gave him an unpleasant tingling sensation at the back of his neck.

Xie nodded slowly. Taking the mouse from Ritesh, xie played the recording backwards and forwards a few times, speeding it up, slowing it down, cocking xir head as if intrigued. “Do you have the underlying data for this graphic?”

“Well, yeah, but it’s… well, it’ll be transmission packets and information flows. Nothing you can put in a spreadsheet or anything.” They had all worked for so long on a decent graphic representation of the unintuitive data flows underlying Grid monitoring, that Ritesh felt almost paternally protective of it.

“I don’t want to put it in a spreadsheet,” tapped Xie.

“What are you planning to do with it, then?” Ritesh crossed his arms defensively.

“Listen to it.”

“Have you shown this to Legal?” asked Littlemore.

“Not yet. I wanted to isolate and clean up the Bloomberg hack first, put some feelers out there and see if I can catch the crawler’s signal anywhere yet?”

“Maybe hold off showing it to anyone else until…” Littlemore grasped for a reason for his caution, beyond the creepy feeling at the top of his spine.

“Until we know what the hell it is, and what planet it came from?” suggested Jules.

The top of Jay’s face appeared above her monitor again. “Did I hear someone say planet? Told you, if this thing is extra-terrestrial, you owe me a kiloclick.”

“Well, at least let Xie take a gander at it and see what xie thinks,” countered Littlemore diplomatically.

“Alright, I’ll dump the source files into your shared folder. They should be in there by the time you get back to your desk. Oh, and Xie?” Xie turned around. “Did you know that the new Lo_Rez track has a Kraftwerk sample on it?”

Xie’s face exploded in an excited grin that even the blank, unemotional voice of the communications pad couldn’t contradict. “No way. Have you got a Soundcloud link or something?”

“I can do better than that – I’ll dump the MP4 in your shared folder, too.”

As his team walked away back to their own desks and pods, Littlemore’s mobile buzzed again in his pocket. Thinking it was his wife asking him to pick up something for dinner on the way home, he pulled it out and looked at it. No, it was another marketing message from Microsoft Promotions. “Hi Littlemore! Would you like to spice up your Data Viz with Animations, Live Data Refreshes and Clearcode connections? Upgrade to Power BI Platinum now and get 20% off the first 18 months. Click here for details (some restrictions may apply).” Narrowing his eyes, he deleted the message and resolved to disable Siri at the soonest opportunity.

Chapter Text

Xie picked up xir laptop and made xir way back to the concentration pod through pools of sunlight and cool deep shadows where plants had grown across the windows. A past office manager maybe ten years earlier had once had a bit of a mania for potted plants: aspidistras, succulents, cacti. Over the previous decade, they had grown and tangled together to form a pleasant tracery of lush greenery that shielded Technology and Analysis from the bright, busy hum and chatter of the call centre. And the occasional whiff of geranium or orange blossom was a welcome relief from the acrid, too-dry tang of The Wharf’s heavily filtered air.

If xie squinted, xie could pretend xie was in the calm, soothing treetops of a tropical jungle, and not twenty-five stories up, suspended above The Wharf in a thin tower of steel, concrete and glass that displayed a front-seat view of the wall of water that rushed up the estuary twice a day, pushing debris, dead animals, even the occasional unfortunate car into the tidal zones of London. On stormy days (and since the climate was steadily worsening, stormy days were a lot more common) it really didn’t bear thinking about when the wind howled, and the rain lashed down outside and the building creaked and groaned and sang its eerie metal fatigue music to itself.

Climbing inside the pod, xie pushed xir laptop into its dock, and closed the door behind xir, flipping a switch to turn the glass to opaque and lower the lights. The pale pink tone of the low energy dimmer was calming, the faint pulsing hiss of the air supply slightly less so. Kicking off xir shoes, xie reached up behind xir ears and flicked the implants to off. Relief, sweet blessed relief. Xie loved xir office, loved the job, adored xir colleagues and their bright, chattering minds, but my god, the noise of them drove xir insane sometimes.

In the early days, xie had been back and forth to xir audiologist several times, complaining about the balance in the implants, asking if maybe the filters could be adjusted, the volume turned down on other human beings. But after batteries of tests and a few sessions of counselling, xie had been told that no, xie had to learn to live with it. That was simply what people sounded like. Ceaselessly, carelessly noisy. The rustling and the shuffling and the breathing, even when they were at rest. So it was a relief to sink into the soft, cushioned silence of the concentration pod, left alone with the faint, white noise rushing of xir own bloodstream for company.

“Does the electricity in the walls have to be so loud?” xie had once asked an audiologist, shortly after getting the implants fitted, and the doctor had looked at xir as if xie were a tiny alien, and not an exhausted child worn out from all the noise. Apparently genotypicals didn’t notice that electricity had a sound. What was it even like, to move through the world without caring about all the awful buzzing and humming and the stomping of passing feet?

Opening up the laptop, xie checked the shared folder, and sure enough, the information packets and data flows had landed there in a giant .zip file, right next to the promised MP4. Of course xie went straight for the Lo_Rez track, flicking xir implants back on to listen to it over and over on xir headphones, delighting at the calm computer voice repeating “Business, Numbers, Money, People” in a loop over the pulsing electronic beat of Lo_Rez’s rap about squatter life in the Peckham Archipelago. It was supposed to be the most dangerous place in London, an illicit hive of crime, smuggling and drug abuse, but Lo_Rez’s lyrics somehow made it sound exciting and real, a far more vibrant place than the cool, marble-white halls of The Wharf.

After listening through the track three or four times, xie dragged xir attention back to the .zip file and extracted the data to get down to work. Xie opened it first with a text editor, trying to get a sense of the shape of it, but it was as if notepad couldn’t make sense of the information, some formatting error, transcription into the wrong character set, producing rows and rows of nonsensical text, mixed together in letters, numbers and punctuation.

Xie exited the text file and scraped the raw data, then flipped it into the audio conversion software on xir communications pad, and as it converted, xie pulled out the connector cable, extended it, and plugged it very carefully into the input jack behind one ear. Turning the sound all the way down, xie pressed play, then slowly brought up the volume until the faint hiss resolved into intelligible sound.

Wow, OK, now that was interesting.

For a moment, Xie wondered if xir colleagues thought xie was joking when xie said xie listened to data. Perhaps they thought xie was making some kind of metaphor, an analogy or a simile or whatever it was that genotypicals used to make sense of their tangled thoughts. Xie didn’t really get metaphors. Well, xie understood them intellectually, got the general gist of what they were supposed to be for, but in practice, xie was always the last person to laugh at any joke, stopping to contemplate what, exactly, it would take to make pigs fly, until the laughter around xir flagged up that xie had got the ‘wrong end of the stick’ again. That dreaded conversational stick always seemed to have a thousand ends, most of them wrong.

But no. Xie listened to data.

It had been an accident the first time. Well, no, the very first time, it had been a bit of a joke, maybe even an experiment. The implants bypassed xir badly damaged and decayed auditory nerve and went straight into the speech processing centres of xir brain. When xie had been very young, there had been endless training tapes, electronic files to be played directly into xir brain to train xir what sounds were, what speech was, how to recognise it. It had been a painstaking process, learning to hear, not as a baby, but as a schoolchild. So one day, excited by the bass vibrations coming off the pop radio station playing on the kitchen Spotify, xie had jokingly grabbed the extension cable to the speaker, and plugged it directly into the implants. That was the day that xie had discovered that music was the absolute best thing in the entire world, the way it jiggled and shimmered and sent pulses of the purest pleasure up and down xir entire brain.

It had been another five years until xie discovered that data, too, had its own music. Xie had installed a customised converter software for the communications pad, that transformed text files or PDFs or documents into digitised speech xie could listen to. And one day, xie’d accidentally dropped in the .csv of a spreadsheet xie had been working on, and had been astonished to discover xie could understand and even scan files directly with xir brain that way, not even as numbers, but a distinctive electronic soundwave that seemed to engage directly with xir pattern-sensitive mathsbrain, without the need to engage language.

Xie had searched scientific papers for any literature or research on the technique, to work out how to refine xir technique from reading and scanning to performing mathematical calculations on what xie heard – and discovered that apparently, xie was the first cochlear implant recipient to discover such a hack. Upon realising xie was the only one, xie got scared and decided to keep it to xirself. Clearly, it was either something that everyone could do, but no one ever talked about, like masturbation or micturition – or else xie was a complete fucking freak who was breaking the rules to do something impossible. Better to stay quiet about it than be dragged back to the doctors to be poked and prodded any further, in case they took it away from xir.

But after years of learning to discern balls from bowls and cots from carts, Xie’s brain had become very, very sensitive to subtle differences and similarities in cadence and tone and rhythm. Listening excitedly to the Deptford Spook’s datawave, Xie opened up chat and pinged Ritesh.

xie: u got a moment, ritesh?
ritesh: hey cyborg, any luck?
xie: haha staying with the trouble as the divine ms haraway would say
xie: but ur right
ritesh: s*** i hate being right
ritesh: right is usually bad in this line of work
ritesh: (what am i right about?)
xie: the electronic signature of the two data sets is exactly the same
xie: i mean, despite the different file formats and systems?
xie: the data *sounds* exactly the same
ritesh: what do you mean it ‘sounds’ the same
xie: like, you know when u hear a kraftwerk sample?
xie: even before ralf hütter starts singing
xie: you can just *tell* it’s kraftwerk: the synths, the beats, the vocoder
xie: even if it’s just a 2 second loop in the back of a lo_rez track
ritesh: oh yeah, instantly recognisable
ritesh: imitators don’t even come close
xie: the light eaters data is like that
xie: i listened to the deptford spook and i can hear it’s the same thing
ritesh: r u sure? can you put this into evidence?
ritesh: coz i can’t take a hunch to a review panel
xie: oh sure, i did a proper mathematical analysis too if you want that
xie: the latency, the decision paths, the frequency range, all identical
xie: i know there’s no chaintag on your deptford narrows spook
xie: but i would put money on this being the same actor that hit eat light
ritesh: so you think our diet company are involved
ritesh: with the City Boy Rat Run heist in Deptford?
xie: no, for once, i actually think the perps are not lying about being duped
xie: i don’t think this is anything to do with eat light
ritesh: f*** me – what is it then?
ritesh: we better talk to Legal

Chapter Text

Here’s the thing: when I go looking for new technology to develop, Silicon Valley is the last place I look. Total hivemind of spoiled arseholes. They don’t notice bad programming, because they’ve all been to the same five universities, they’ve all been taught the same five things, and they don’t have a clue how to think. No wonder they come up with such terrible software design. I went to university in the States, I know how they operate. Groupthink.

I studied Philosophy at Columbia at first, because I thought it would be properly rigorous. They would surely teach me how to think logically and consistently, right? Wrong. It was all bullshit ideology, trying to teach us that men were women and women were robots. Or ‘cyborgs’, or whatever fashionable cultural relativism was passing for ‘Queer Theory’ or ‘Critical Race Theory’ at the time. So I switched to Economics at the University of Chicago, thinking that would be more rigorous, because surely there was some actual proper maths and serious scholarship underneath? Wrong again. These people couldn’t program a spreadsheet. It was pure liberal ideology dressed up with a few equations.

So that was how I ended up in programming, after a couple of years as a junior trader in the Securities department at UBS. Those jackasses were a gaggle of Ivy-educated idiots, all bravado and peer pressure, like the whole securities market was another game of lacrosse at their Connecticut prep schools. I was bored stiff; a robot could have done that job. So in my spare time (not that you get much spare time on the trading floors; 70 to 80 hour weeks were pretty standard in New York) I programmed an algorithm that skimmed their emails and the Facebook groups of their alma maters, and predicted their groupthink before they even thought it.

Problem was, my algorithm was a bit too accurate, and I was hauled in front of some ‘ethics’ committee to explain why my results were too good. I was fired, of course, due to some absurd breach of ethics. Insider Trading, they called it. But I knew what it was. Tall poppy syndrome, you know?

Not two weeks later, I was hired by a competitor, not for the trading floor, but the IT department. I was thrown in with a bunch of quants and told to duplicate my infamous algorithm within a hair’s breadth of legality. You ever met any quants? Serious fucking weirdoes. I mean, they’re obviously very smart people, but when you meet people that brilliant, I mean, literally up in the genius range of IQ, perfect SAT scores and all that, it’s like their astonishing mathematical capacities are some bizarrely swollen but disconnected appendage, totally unrelated to the rest of their shrunken, nerdish personalities.

But boy, did I learn a lot, from that den of girlfriendless genius losers, and I don’t just mean the dialogue to every series of Star Trek that ever drivelled out of Hollywood. I learned enough about what programming could and couldn’t do to trade up from that investment bank to an even bigger one, until I was headhunted by Picosoft to head up a Systems Analyst team working on bringing nanosecond-fast quantum computing to the London Stock Exchange.

What did I learn? Innovation doesn’t come from more or better or faster of the same thinking. Innovation grows in unexpected, lateral leaps that don’t seem logical – or even possible – the first time you encounter them. And it doesn’t come from insiders. It doesn’t come from Ivy Leaguers or impeccable ‘rock star’ programmers with glittering CVs. It comes from the unpredictable, insane outsiders, the funky-smelling weird kids who sit by themselves at the back of the lunchroom. And most of the time, it doesn’t even come from tech – or even from banking. The number one driver of like 90% of the new tech you are probably holding in your hand right now? The military.

Who invented the Internet? IBM? No. JP Morgan? No. Cambridge University? Hell no! It was DARPA, a branch of the US Defence Department, funding a bunch of hippie PhD students in California to fool around and invent a new technology that would profoundly change society. Who commissioned research into mobile computing devices? The military. Track pads and touch screen? The military. Facial recognition software? The military. The GPS you rely on to operate the location app on your mobile phone? The military. Silicon Valley invents almost nothing. All they do is watch for the latest kit coming out of the military and try to think of ways they can use it to ‘disrupt’ someone else’s livelihood.

So when I left Picosoft and struck out trying to develop my infamous algorithm, where did I go looking for the technology to make it happen? Where do you think.

At a university in the heartlands of German Technik at Tübingen, I discovered that in the mid-teens, the US Military had collaborated with a professor of contemporary literature to use literary novels as a kind of early warning system for predicting conflicts, civil disturbances, and outbreaks of war, up to five years in advance of the violence. And then the project, going by the unlucky name of Cassandra, was abruptly cancelled in 2020. Not for the obvious reason of the first outbreaks of the Covid Plagues, but because, like my illegal algorithm to out-groupthink the groupthinking traders, it had been too good. Cassandra’s analysis of the United States’ own culture wars, then still being enacted in print and literary criticism rather than semiautomatic weapons, revealed that the US itself was headed for civil war within 10 years, an estimate which, if anything, proved to be a little too conservative.

I knew I had to get in touch with this professor. Because what else is War, but the ultimate outbreak of Economics?

It wasn’t difficult to get him to talk. I think, if anything, he wanted to be unburdened of the guilt of being a true Cassandra. Getting the code off him was a slightly more difficult proposition. I spent months trying to back engineer it off his published research papers and tantalising glimpses from our long, circular email conversations. It wasn’t only what books were published that was important; it was what books were deemed too risky to publish. It wasn’t just the language that was used in the books, inflammatory or conciliatory; it was the discourse and the language about the books, and the critical conflict that the books inspired. What books were banned, which were debated, and which were seen as so obvious as to pass without comment. The conflict over ideas revealed where conflict with arms would follow.

Because there is no war in this world that is not at heart an economic conflict. Oh, sure, they dress it up in religious terms or cultural, which amounts to the same thing, because religion is an expression of culture, not the cause of it, no matter what your Richard Dawkins types like to proclaim. But war is economically hugely costly. No one enters into one unless they are pretty certain there is something economic at stake.

That’s something I learned back in my trader days in NYC. All those macho brokers pumped up on testosterone and machismo always going on about the trading floor being a battlefield – they were half right. Economics isn’t a battlefield; war is just a form of economics.

Think about it. The Siberian Petrostates? That wasn’t a war of independence, it was a war over mineral rights. Come on, they even call them Conflict Minerals when they’re talking about Central Africa. In countries facing desertification, it’s water rights. And what does an island nation like England traditionally go to war over, from the 12^th Century all the way up to Brexit? Cod! There’s always a financial incentive behind every war, and if you really want to develop long-term profits, you have to scout out what that financial incentive is, and get in there, before every other investor cottons on.

The race to develop intelligent algorithms is a war alright, due to the amount of money at stake. It’s always been half a dance with military intelligence, to see who could develop the predictive tools first. In the early days, I stole some of my best ideas from Five Eyes; in return Five Eyes and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s own proprietary Venture Capital fund, nicked some of my best analysts and data scies.

So I trained my botnets to go out and search the web for ideas in conflict. I sent them scouring through Wikipedia. Come on, it’s supposed to be the sum repository of all human knowledge? What it truly is, in point of fact, is an intellectual warzone where armies of editors clash over the most trivial of tiny differences that reveal the conceptual faultlines that humans will expend hundreds, even thousands of hours of manpower to defend. Who invented hummus? That one’s harder to get to the bottom of, than the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. Social media arguments; hotly battled and contested thinkpieces; what people amusingly used to call ‘trollumnists’. The car crashes that human eyeballs cannot stop gawking at or driving straight into. I programmed vast dragnets that would go out and learn from those car crashes, to predict where future economic conflict would be most likely to develop.

And it worked. It genuinely worked. I downloaded terabytes of archive data, of Wikipedia edits, Guardian and NY Times thinkpieces, tabloid newspapers, fleets and fleets of twitter storms and Facebook threads for the historical years 2010-2015. I spent two years training my algorithms on that time period, right at the dawn of the Socials. Then, running a simulation analysis, using Tübingen-inspired material as training data, my intelligent algorithm foretold the future: Cassandra correctly called both the 2016 US Presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum. Not only that, but she correctly predicted nearly 80% of the stock market reactions to those pieces of news in New York, London, Tokyo and Shanghai, based on the previous week’s positions. It was almost uncanny.

Then the predictable happened: I ran out of seed money. Now I knew that I had a good product. I knew that if I could start training it on more recent data, within a few years, I would be making solid, actionable predictions of good long-term future economic investment. But I didn’t have a few years; I barely had the rent on the cloud storage for the next month. I re-mortgaged my home to carry on paying my coders and my analysts, and my wife left me, taking our daughter back to New York. I knew I was in serious trouble, but if I could just make it through the next few months, it would be smooth sailing once Cassandra came online. So I did what I swore I would never do.

I sold my soul to the devil. I enlisted Venture Capital.

I screened them so carefully. I knew that the vultures were circling – I even got a lucrative but skin-crawling offer from In-Q-Tel to sell them my algorithms and go work for them with members of my old team – so I knew I had to be very careful. I downplayed the Cassandra Algorithm’s capacities. I managed expectations that this was a long-term investment, that it would be 5, 10 years before the algorithm’s predicted investments would start to pay off. I warned investors, that this was a marathon, not a sprint. And I thought I chose wisely.

OK, I had to make one or two concessions. The VC made a big deal about sticking his name on the marquee, and I made a big show out of giving in to him, though to be honest, I didn’t really care. My name was on the code and its copyright, which was what counted.

Almost overnight, the situation completely turned around. I paid off my mortgage. (My ex-wife did not return from New York; bitch had Met Someone Else.) I bought a Tesla Office-On-Wheels. My operations centre moved from a scuzzy, low-rent office above a shoe shop in Croydon to an Incubator on The Wharf. The facilities were astonishing! Ultra-high-fast fibre optics and 5G connections. Unlimited Cloud storage. Up to the minute firewalls and encryption. And free utilities! Do you have any idea how much power it takes to train AI? Training the first-generation Cassandra took the electrical equivalent of 125 round-trip flights from New York City to Beijing. VC simply gave it to me!

But there was a price. There was always a price. FFS, I had worked on other projects, and seen how destructive VC could be, with their demands for more, faster, higher growth. I’d seen the havoc wreaked by rapidly encroaching exit plans, as business goals that had been dependent on 7-year steady growth were suddenly demanded within a 3-year window, so that the VC could cash out and get their Return For Investment as quickly as possible. And worst of all, I’d seen promising young start-ups with brilliant Intellectual Property bought out, then asset-stripped and bankrupted, because their new owner had decided to back their competitor.

It was not going to be me. I was tough, I was battle-hardened, and I had relentlessly ensured that Cassandra was the undisputed leader in the field. She and her algorithmic sisters were brilliant, hungry, ruthless and dedicated to efficiency, mercilessly cutting costs and maximising profits in their search for economic perfection.

I had learned nothing. Tall poppy syndrome. Sometimes a product can be too good.

Chapter Text

Littlemore massaged his forehead gently, trying to wrestle his throbbing vein back into place, then rifled through his drawers to pop a couple of paracetamols followed by a handful of Rennies. It was ten minutes until an emergency convocation of the Judicial Review Panel to discuss the sudden new intelligence on the Eat Light case, and Xie was nowhere to be seen. Even the comical sight of his newsfeed displaying a cavalcade of druids and bards marching up the A303 towards London couldn’t calm his nerves or assuage his rising sense of panic.

“Well, I just don’t think it’s right,” intoned the druid, leaning forward and giving a faintly grandfatherly smile through the incongruously modern bifocal spectacles perched on his pointed nose. “There are so many of us.” Here, he turned and pointed to the ragtag flock of hippies and villagers that had started to join the cavalcade. “And so few of them, so why do they get to make all of the decisions?”

The camera suddenly cut to an elderly woman in a pale pink tracksuit, emerging from a bungalow with a pot of tea and some mismatched china cups on a tray. “Well, he’s such a nice man, isn’t he? Of course, I was a little… dismayed when all these bleeding hippies turned up and started marching through the village. But when one of them knocked over one of my flowerpots, he actually came over to apologise and talked to me for a few minutes, and… well, he’s such a nice man.” She blinked, disoriented, as the reporter tried to ask if this was a political movement, then shrugged. “Well, he’s got a point, hasn’t he? The government’s smashed up rather more than a flowerpot, this time.”

Littlemore dipped his cursor down to reveal the computer’s clock in his toolbar, but it was inching closer to the hour, and there was still no sign of Xie. Xie was never late. Littlemore had no idea how xie did it, given xie didn’t live on The Wharf, xie lived out somewhere safer, on the slope of the North Downs, well past the tidal zone. But for the past three years, xie had popped through the door every morning at precisely ten to eight, carrying the same brand of eco-coffee and the same flavour breakfast muffin. Xie even jumped up from xir desk to go to lunch at exactly 12.00 with such punctuality that the rest of the office had taken to using xir as a signal to end or begin meetings. Calm down, Littlemore told himself. Xie is a Big Boy. Girl. Human. Whatever. Xie can take care of xirself.

Checking his smartphone for messages or missed calls, he resisted the urge to phone xir, as xie never answered the phone anyway. Instead, he consulted the tide height – coming up to low tide, absolutely fine – and the status of the Jubilee Line. Pumps at full pressure, everything normal. Seven minutes until the emergency JRP. Where the disallowed phrase was Xie?

An email from Dollie dropped into his inbox, a routine security announcement from Wharf security, alerting tenants to yet another threat of protests or demos or actions aimed at the various avatars of corporate England-and-Wales that peppered the Wharf. The warnings were issued several times a month, so he paid about as much attention to them as to weather reports. Like most workers in central London, he’d grown as inured to protests as to floods and the eternal traffic jams. But something about this email caught his attention.

As part of our security monitoring, we are aware of unconfirmed reports that eMerge linked activists will seek to infiltrate office buildings in the City and on The Wharf over the course of the current action, in part by dressing in corporate attire.

While it is possible that activists will be well presented, it is more likely that activists will wear clothing inconsistent with the standard business attire generally seen on the Estate, potentially including:

-Ill-fitting jackets or waistcoats, dresses/skirts and/or trousers
-Shirts and blouses with unusual designs, colours and patterns
-Black or dark coloured jeans or casual trousers in place of suit trousers or skirts
-Black or dark coloured sneakers, boots or casual shoes in place of business footwear

eMerge linked individuals have previously also obtained casual employment at their targets as part of their attempts at covert infiltration

Littlemore knew that Xie tried so hard to fit into the regimented business casual of IPRA. The first few weeks xie’d been in the office on a trainee apprenticeship scheme, he’d seen xir stalking about the office, staring at people’s shoes and legwear as if trying to memorise a code. Yet when he tried to picture Xie in his mind’s eye, his memory produced an odd mishmash of all kinds of signifiers, like a space alien assembling a facsimile of business attire, the cut right but the fabric wrong, Doc Martens and pinstripe suit trousers topped with a tweed waistcoat and a blouse in an old-fashioned floral pattern accessorised with a clashing paisley tie. Xie didn’t look like either a corporate banker, or a standard data sci in a Facebook grey T-shirt and hacker hoodie. Xie always looked like the Wharf security’s idea of a protester.

Grabbing his smartphone, his ID and his vaccine pass, he called out over his shoulder as he headed for the door. “Jules, can you please go with Ritesh and present Xie’s findings to the ERP? I have an emergency…”

“Wait, no,” protested Jules. “I can’t! I don’t fully understand Xie’s data myself.”

“Well, just stall Lola, then! Jay, where’s the protest?”

Jay looked up with an almost comical expression of faux innocence. “I have absolutely no idea why you think I might know where a riot would be likely to be kicking off on the Wharf.”

“I think Xie’s caught up in it. You know Xie turns xir implants off when xie’s on the Tube because of the noise. Xie won’t have heard any announcements if xie didn’t check xir email, and… oh, fuck. Just tell me where it is, please, I’m begging you, Jay?”

Jay rolled her eyes and tabbed through a few pages of Darkweb sites, Social feeds and security camera outputs she probably wasn’t supposed to have access to. “Round the back of JP Morgan. Looks like Security have been diverting them off the DLR as they arrive, and are kettling them between Bank Street and the quay.” Turning her monitor round, she showed him a security camera feed displaying an angry mob penned behind high, soundproofed privacy screens.

Littlemore nodded his thanks and ran for the lifts. The ground floor was all sealed off, the security staff waiting by the windows, anxiously peering out as every door was locked except one, and security were checking IDs on the way in and out. He showed his credentials and headed off at a jog towards JP Morgan, wheezing a little at the unaccustomed exercise. Despite the ugly scenes on the security feed, the pleasant green centre of the Wharf continued, buzzing and business-like, city boys in expensive suits barking buy and sell orders into their headsets as they queued at the latest hip street food joints, all carefully licensed and vetted by the Estate, of course.

Around the corner, and along South Dock, he started to hear muffled chanting, then he spotted the ‘privacy screens’ erected in a long, blue wall along the side of Heron Quays. With what he hoped was a confident smile, he tried to remember his long-ago voice protocol training as he approached the security guards at the narrow entrance.

“I’m sorry, sir,” called out the guard as he approached. “We’ve got a small situation going on. If I let you in there, I can’t let you out.”

“I don’t mean to trouble you, but I believe you might possibly have mistakenly confined one of my staff in there?”

The other guard shook his head. “No staff, only protesters. Hippie scum. We checked for any staff, we asked for security cards and vax passes.”

Littlemore took a deep breath and did his best to smile. “Xie’s deaf, and might not have heard you ask?” The guard simply looked at him stupidly, so Littlemore dug out his smartphone and started flipping through pictures. Yes, there was a short video of him and Xie presenting data at an infosec conference, xir hair dyed a muted rose-gold rather than its current rainbow of shocking pink, purple and orange.

The guard peered at the videoclip for a moment, then shook his head. “Sorry, sir, they all look like that. These protests are always full of solarpunks and ambi trash, you know?”

Pulling himself up to his full height, Littlemore frowned and gave his best shot at voice protocol. “Do you think I could speak to your superior?”

The guards exchanged looks, rolling their eyes at his pathetic attempt at mind games.

“Alright, yes, I fully admit. I completely suck at voice protocol. I work in IT, you know?” Littlemore admitted defeatedly, then tried a different tack. “Look, I gotta level with you. We’ve got a super-important meeting in about five minutes, about this ridiculously technical program – heck, I don’t even understand it. The only person who understands this bit of programming… I think they’re in there, trapped in that mob. Xie’s a bit of a weirdo – programmers, you know?”

It seemed to be working, the officers nodded appreciatively. “Oh yeah, the lad who does IT at our precinct? Absolute nutter.”

“He’s about 12 years old,” agreed the other. “And it’s all 5G this and chaintag that. Don’t understand a word that comes out of his mouth.”

“Precisely.” Littlemore nodded furiously and smiled apologetically. “But if we fuck up this meeting? Oh my god, have you ever had to tangle with MinTech when they’re brassed off?” It wasn’t entirely a fib; IPRA were nominally overseen by Ofcom, who were tangentially attached to MinTech in the last cabinet reshuffle.

It was a gamble, but the policeman blinked and seemed to feel sorry for him. “Alright, them MinTech types give me the shivers, to be honest. Williams, take him up to the viewing platform and see if the Sergeant has a moment.”

Littlemore let out a sigh of relief as he followed the guard up a set of stairs to a long balcony overlooking the kettle. The guard gestured for him to wait halfway down as he went off to a cluster of slightly more frightening looking police with even more badges and chevrons dusted over their shoulders standing at the other end. But at least the delay gave him a chance to look over the crowd and try to catch sight of Xie. Unfortunately, the guard had been right – there were several people with brightly coloured hair and mismatched business attire – but finally, Littlemore caught sight of Xie, crouched against a far wall with a hangdog expression and xir shoulders slumped, hands pressed over xir mouth and nose as xie focused very intensely on the floor.

“Xie,” he tried to call, but of course – xie had xir implants turned off. Instead, he tried to attract the attention of a couple of the young women standing nearby. “Can you get xir attention for me?” he pleaded, gesturing towards the person crumpled on the floor. The first girl ignored him, rolling her eyes and turning her back, but fortunately, the second went over and patted Xie gently on the shoulders, gesturing up towards the balcony, until Xie shrugged her off violently and looked up in sheer annoyance. Littlemore waved maniacally, and xie finally noticed him, acknowledging him with a grimace and a desperately signed “help”.

Stretching the limits of his memory of BSL, Littlemore signed “Turn on your ears,” or at least he hoped he had said something like that.

“No – too noisy here,” signed Xie back.

Fortunately, the scary policeman with the extra chevrons on his shoulders was coming over. Littlemore did his best to look professional, tucking in his shirt and straightening his back as the officer strode over and greeted him.

“What seems to be the problem?” asked the scary over-policeman.

“You have one of my staff members down there, who I desperately need to give a presentation to an emergency Judicial Review Panel oh, as of five minutes ago,” said Littlemore, with all the authority he could muster.

“Meeting with MinTech, he says,” added the original guard suspiciously.

“MinTech has been based out in the Chilterns since Lambeth flooded,” the over-policeman announced. “And MinTech never comes to us. They make you go to them. Security protocols and signal-free Faraday Chambers up at their offices. Awfully long way from the Chilterns, aren’t we?”

“Look, I’m Chief Technological Officer for the Internet Payment Regulatory Authority,” explained Littlemore as he produced his ID card and waved it about like a talisman. “You may remember us from cracking the Xixion spyware ring?” A blank look. “Also, the GetFit subscription service scandal? That was our first million pound fine!” He was practically bouncing with pride at the memory of it, but Williams and the over-policeman exchanged shrugs and puzzled expressions. Scratching the back of his head, he racked his brains. “What about the DPD premium-rate skype-back scam. Surely you remember that one? People get a message saying to skype this number, coz they’re due a delivery, but if they do, the device gets hit with a massive charge? We caught those miscreants, shut them down. That made it onto Watchdog and everything. Damilola even got interviewed on the telly.”

At that, the over-policeman’s face lit up. “Ah, why didn’t you say! I remember the DPD scam – my missus got stung for forty quid on her tablet! You lot forced them to repay it, after months and months of complaining to Vodata. Williams, fetch the staff member. Can you point him out?”

“That one,” Littlemore supplied. Pointing down at Xie, he gestured for xir to move over towards the door.

“With the pink and orange hair, sir?” grumbled Williams. “We searched that one. The Affect Flagging Algorithm dinged that face as displaying a critically inappropriate expression the moment he stepped off the DLR. No ID card to speak of – not even a vax pass. Not sure how he made it onto the DLR in the first place.”

“Fetch him,” the over-policeman repeated, a little more firmly.

After some jostling and a few attempted breakouts by other protesters, Xie was finally produced, signing xir fury and indignation as Williams brought xir over. “Xie, what happened to your ID?” sighed Littlemore.

“Nicked,” signed Xie sullenly, glaring at Williams, and making a few more signs that Littlemore didn’t understand.

“Where’s your communications pad?” Littlemore looked xir up and down to make sure xie was still in one piece.

“Nicked,” signed Xie again, with a rude gesture towards Williams. Littlemore turned and joined in xir glare.

“Look, now, we had to search the perps for electrics.” Williams stood up very straight and pulled a serious face. “Standard practice since the Tottenham Rent Strikes. You wouldn’t believe the technology we’ve been up against in lawless shitholes like Peckham, excuse my language, sir. Then these troublemakers try to bring electrics onto the Wharf? Not on, sir. We took three dropsticks and a disruption ring off that lot. If that one was carrying electrics…”

“No, no. It wouldn’t look like electrics at all. It looks like a cross between a palmpad and a Ouija Board.”

“That would definitely have been confiscated, sir,” said Williams. “Communications devices are evidence. We take those straightaway or they’ll be messaging all their mates, warning them about the kettle, posting details on the Socials. Can’t have that, now.”

“Well, maybe you can unconfiscate it?” Littlemore suggested. “After all, if any lawyers found out you’ve been illegally seizing mobiles from protesters to sell on… I mean, come on. If I check PoliceBay tomorrow, and I find a load of our phones…”

“No sir, seizing them for evidence, sir,” countered Williams. “There’ll be paperwork if we have to confiscate them and then unconfiscate them.”

Littlemore pulled out his mobile. “Are you really going to make me have to requisition IPRA gear back off PoliceBay? Because if you want paperwork… Have you ever seen MinTech paperwork? Their requisition PDF is over 600 Gig, even before attachments. Trust me, you do not want to get hit with one of those.”

The vein in Littlemore’s forehead must have been twitching something fierce because the over-policeman actually flinched. “Sod the paperwork. Consider the files lost. Fetch the electronics for the good man,” he ordered with a placatory gesture towards Littlemore. “And then you can be on your way back to your MinTech lawyers, so you can stick to catching your bad guys, and we can stick to ours.”

But as soon as Williams shuffled off to a nearby table to retrieve Xie’s pad, the protesters realised that the exit was now unguarded, and several of them made a break for it, racing out past the privacy wall and dodging round a corner.

“Hang on, you lot…” howled Williams, and took off after them. Seeing the disruption, a larger group of protesters started to surge out through the gap, then a section of the metal privacy wall started to wobble and give way, crashing down under the weight of the assembled bodies.

Xie dashed over to the table of pilfered gear and seized xir pad, hastily velcroing it to xir sleeve as xie tapped, “We need to get out of here, now!”

“I agree, but why didn’t you just ask to speak to the officer in charge, get yourself out of there?” Littlemore grumbled. “You need to learn to stick up for yourself, Xie.”

Xie glared at him. “I did. See, you are a cis white dude. When you ask to speak to a manager, you get to speak to a manager. I’m an ambi. When I ask to speak to the manager, they call me a Karen and laugh at me. That is when that *disallowed phrase* took my pad.”

“Alright, alright, point taken,” sighed Littlemore as they rounded the corner, quickly overtaken by a line of police marching briskly down the street in single file, riot shields at the ready. “But where’s your ID, your vax pass?”

“Stolen. They are not eMerge,” xie tapped as the pair of them dodged behind a row of bottle-throwing protesters and ducked down the path to their building.

“Then who the fuck…” Littlemore stopped as they reached the door to their building, and the security guard strode forwards.

“Anti-vaxxers,” xir pad stated calmly, belying the panic on xir face.

“Fuck!” swore Littlemore. “Fuck fuck fuck – think, Littlemore, think!” For a moment, he paced back and forth before the door, then he brightened. “There’s a testing station in the shopping centre, down on floor -2, next to the Boots. You get tested, and we can both get a booster shot there. That’ll at least give you enough documentation to get in the building while we try to get your ID replaced.”

“But my ID,” Xie protested. “They have my ID. Anyone could pretend to be me.”

“Double Fuck with fudge on top. We gotta warn someone!” Taking a deep breath, Littlemore walked up to the security guard and started to explain, showing his badge and somehow sweettalking him into letting them in. Standing at the front desk, he asked them to cancel Xie’s old badge and issue a new temporary pass, at least for the afternoon. But the security guard typed into the system and shook his head.

“How do you spell that?”

“X-i-e… Xie, like Xmas. Or it might be under Christy – C. H. R. I. S. T. Y. – Christy Imai-Evory?”

The security guard typed that, brightened, nodded, then abruptly frowned and shook his head. “Sorry, the security system is showing that Christy Imai-Evory entered the building 45 minutes ago.”

“Fuck! Ring Dollie – tell her to put the office on lockdown?”

“Trust me, I’m on it, the whole building’s gotta go on lockdown until we find them.”

Littlemore turned on his begging face. “Please, before you do that – please can you let us nip downstairs to the vax clinic on minus two? Xie’s just spent 45 minutes in a kettle with a gang of vicious anti-vaxxers.”

The security guard made an appalled face. “Yikes. You want masks while you go?” he offered, producing a pack of disposables before waving them back out the door.

Half an hour later, the pair of them were sitting in the isolation area of the vaccination clinic while they waited for their test results, both of them sporting fresh bandages on their upper arms. Honestly, Littlemore had been meaning to get round to a booster, he just hadn’t realised that he’d been due for one three months ago. But it felt like the safest place to be, at that moment – with hundreds of anti-vax protesters besieging the Wharf, it was pretty clear the one place they’d never go was the local vaccination centre.

“Xie, you’ve got to keep your implants on,” he was patiently berating xir. “You might miss an announcement, or…”

“There are hearing loops in the Tube. I always stand by one, unless some genotypical *disallowed phrase* is blocking it,” xie protested.

“Look, I know you think it’s too noisy with the ‘Horrible Hum’ and all, but it’s for your own safety. Listen to me, it’s technologically impossible. 5G does not hum.”

“It is not the 5G that hums – it is the nanoparticle filtration systems.  They hum like an angry wasp in a beer bottle,” tapped Xie, then sighed loudly, trying a different tack. “What happened with the JRP? Was Ritesh able to present my data? Will the case be reassessed?”

“I’ve no idea. Damilola must be furious with me for missing the meeting. Shit – I should call her. Excuse me for one moment.” Pulling out his smartphone, he rang her office number, praying the meeting would be still in progress so he could leave a message instead of having to explain directly.

Unfortunately, she picked up on the first ring. “Littlemore. Where the devil are you?”

“I’m currently at the vaccination centre with Xie, waiting for our test results. How are you?”

“I’m in lockdown, unable to leave the office, because that damned fool of an analyst refuses to get an implanted ID like the rest of us, and let someone steal xir damned ID.”

Littlemore was quite glad that 25 floors of concrete plus 2 or 3 subbasements were currently shielding him from Damilola’s fury. “Xie doesn’t want the implant due to sensory issues. Pattern Sensitivity is a listed disability, and you know we have to make every concession we possibly can to people’s disabilities,” he explained calmly. To be fair, Littlemore had so far managed to avoid getting an ID implant, but that was less to do with pattern sensitivity and far more to do with the horror stories that Ritesh delighted in reading off The Register, regaling his colleagues with tales of programmers in top secret Chinese research facilities, who’d fallen prey to the terrors of Face-Miners, or worse, had their hands chopped off by rival corporations to gain access to their implanted ID codes.

“You don’t need to lecture me on employment law.” Damilola’s voice abruptly softened. “How is Xie? That must have been quite a traumatic experience, being robbed and then detained.”

“Xie seems OK mentally, albeit a little… indignant.” He risked a smile at Xie, who glowered back.

“Understandable.”

“We’re waiting to hear on the tests. But what about the JRP? Did Jules and Ritesh show you the data viz? Were the Panel able to reach a decision?”

“I can’t say I understand the connection between Ritesh’s monitoring and Xie’s case, but the data viz on the new charging flow is quite convincing. We’re bumping the Eat Light case up to a Priority Two.”

“Only Priority Two?” protested Littlemore. “It’s entirely possible that this shows a fundamental bug in the entire financial system of The Grid. The Panel thinks that’s only a Two? It’s pure blind luck that so far, only one person seems to have exploited it…”

“That we know of,” interjected Xie.

“Only one person that we know of has exploited it,” he quickly corrected. “This should be Priority One. This should be Priority Level Zero!”

“Littlemore,” tutted Damilola. “May I remind you that we are currently down two members of the Investigations team, and we are still short one lawyer. We do not have the resources – or the money – to pursue this fully right now, on intelligence that could mean anything, and some strange glitch in Ritesh’s monitoring equipment.”

“It’s not a glitch,” Littlemore protested, even as he realised he was sounding as reality-challenged as the rest of his team.

“Well, making it a Priority Two buys your team the time to go out and perform more monitoring, and gather more evidence to support whether it’s a glitch or something we need to pay more attention to.” Damilola paused. “We’re so short-staffed, I suggested to Ritesh maybe he should call in some favours from his Infosec mates, see if the boys at Kaspersky and Symantec have any opinions on what kind of glitch it might be.”

Littlemore groaned audibly, massaging his forehead with one hand as he signed “Shit!” at Xie. “Sorry, Damilola, but that is the worst idea. You know what Kaspersky’s like. The Russians have been… weird about data since they lost the Siberian Cyberwar.”

“Well, we are out of other options right now. Discuss it with Ritesh when you are able to get back in the building. Be seeing you.”

“What?” asked Xie as Littlemore hung up, but at that moment, seeing him off the phone, the nurse tapped on the window, then donned her mask and came in.

“You’re in luck. You’re both negative,” she chirped, as she handed an updated vax pass to Littlemore and a new one to Xie. “You’re free to leave now, but Mx. Imai-Evory, you need to come back for another test after four days, and I would suggest you mask up if you are in an enclosed space with anyone until then. Now, legally, I cannot compel you to comply, as per current regulations, but…”

“It is OK,” tapped Xie, getting up to go. “I will wear masks.”

As he followed xir upstairs, he eyed her curiously. “I swear to god, you actually like wearing the masks, don’t you?”

Xie nodded and he could see the tell-tale lines of a grin around xir eyes. “When you mask, no one can get mad at you for producing the wrong facial expression for a joke or sad news or getting off the DLR at rush hour or whatever. Phatic conversation with genotypicals is so much easier in masks.”

They tried to get back upstairs, but their building was still closed while stairwells and basements were checked for intruders. Littlemore’s phone buzzed and he jumped, but it was only a text from GoogleDeals, suggesting ‘Hi, Littlemore! Just had your vaccine topped up? You’re probably low on blood sugar. Why don’t you pick yourself up with this DigiCoupon for the GreenTreats stall at Jubilee Place.’

“Damn, I would kill for an eco-coffee from GreenTreats – if only we could get across the Plaza…”

Xie licked xir lips and brightened. “Food? Let’s go,” xie signed and headed off down another set of escalators to the large open space of a marble-tiled shopping centre. Doggedly, xie led them past several expensive boutique shops and a Marks and Spencer’s Food Hall that never seemed to suffer the same food shortages as Outer London or The Provinces. Down another level below that, and there was a fancy food court of takeaway restaurants with brightly dancing video signs depicting sizzling syn-meats, right by the exit to the Tube station, but Xie dodged out through a set of swinging doors into a far less fancy concrete stairway. Down another two levels, and they emerged into a long, dimly lit, low-ceilinged corridor. The walls weren’t properly finished, and clumps of thick cables hung in loops along the ceilings.

“Where are we?” asked Littlemore, a bit disoriented as they passed row after row of small hexagonal doors at staggered intervals several layers tall.

“Sleeping pods,” Xie chirped, and kept going. “I have to use them sometimes when I get trapped here by the tides. Expensive, though, for what they are.”

Littlemore stopped and peered into a slightly ajar door, and was shocked to see a tiny space, little bigger than a coffin. The air was drowsily warm, and smelled faintly but reassuringly of chamomile and lavender. “No bedding? That seems a bit rough.”

“It is all padded vinyl. Has to be automatically washed down with antivirals between users.” Xie gestured with xir head to keep going. “Come on.”

They trudged on, past showers, storage lockers and a laundry room, as Littlemore realised how easy it would be to live on the Wharf for weeks at a time without going aboveground.

Finally, they stopped at a pair of thick double fire doors at the end of the corridor. Xie looked surreptitiously up and down the corridor a couple of times, then signed “You want to see something cool?”

“Sure.” Littlemore never knew what to expect from Xie’s idea of ‘cool’.

Instead of going through the fire doors, Xie led them down the stub of an adjacent dead-end passage. Near the end was a substantial grey metal door that had been propped open with a fire extinguisher. Gently, Xie moved the door just wide enough open for them to see through. As he moved closer, Littlemore noticed all of the cables in the hall were converging towards this corner. Inside, the cupboard’s walls were lined with cables coming in from all directions. Near the floor, the cables all merged together, and thickened to clumps a few inches across, gathering into a solid bunch the size of a tree trunk before abruptly disappeared into a lump of solid concrete set into the floor.

“This is like a bridge anchorage,” Littlemore whistled. “What’s it for?”

Xie crinkled xir nose in amusement beneath xir mask. “How do you think data gets into our building?”

“Is that fibre optics?”

“The whole of the Wharf’s data goes through that hole. Cool, huh?”

Littlemore stared at the treelike coils and branches of wiring. “Shouldn’t this be – I don’t know – secured, or defended, or off limits in some way?”

“You would think.” But Xie was already pushing on. Another pair of double fire doors, then a tiny room with the entrance to a lift. It took several minutes to arrive, then it stopped somewhere in the middle of the complex to admit a man in a wheelchair. But another short ride, and they suddenly popped out by the Tube station on the other side of the Wharf, next to the GreenTreats stall. As the man in the wheelchair backed out, another alert pinged across Littlemore’s smartphone, offering a two-for-one deal on the shop’s baked goods.

Five minutes later, Littlemore had splurged out on two cups of eco-coffee and some very rich, very indulgent vegan brownies studded with genetically recreated maraschino cherries. As they sat on a mound of artificial grass, sipping their coffee, robot dogs rounded up the last of the rioters behind them, helicopters circling overhead and the occasional police horse breaking ranks to pursue a runaway through the sculpture park at their backs.

“For once these stupid alerts proved useful, huh?” He pulled the bamboo cap off his eco-ccino to suck down the last of his foam. He wasn’t sure what the stuff was made of – soybeans, chickpeas, maybe even some kind of edible bamboo for all he knew – but rich with the taste of organic arabica, it sure was delicious. Yet as soon as he sipped, Littlemore’s phone buzzed, and he rolled his eyes. “What are they trying to sell me now?”

Fortunately, it wasn’t another offer, it was a security announcement saying that the intruder in their building had been caught, and the security lockdown would be released soon. They gazed across the park at the building, until finally, there seemed to be some movement, as an armoured van pulled up outside, and through the glass, they saw two security guards manhandle a tall, androgynous protester with ultraviolet hair towards the disabled door.

Xie got up to rubberneck at xir erstwhile doppelganger as security dragged him towards the van. “You’re all fucking sheep man,” he howled in rage and alarm. “You don’t even know what they put in those vaccines. They’re microchipping all of us. Like animals. They’re microchipping us like fucking animals!”

For a moment, they stood almost face to face, as Xie looked up at him curiously. “Do you carry a mobile? A smartphone?” xie tapped.

“Of course I do, I’m not a total Luddite!” he protested.

“What the *disallowed phrase* do they need to microchip you for, if you carry a SIM card with you everywhere you go?”

“It’s the 5G man, I told you it’s the 5G,” he ranted as security bundled him into the back of the van. “It’s fucking with our brains – right through The Grid! I read it on Darkweb, they don’t want you to know the truth man, you can’t handle…” The van drove off slowly with the man still ranting inside, as Xie slowly shook xir head.

“The thing that is so perplexing about these people is, they are half-right about everything, but in all the worst possible ways. Which seems to be worse than being completely wrong,” xie tapped, signing confusion.

“In what way do you think they’re right?” Littlemore was a little shocked that Xie could find any common ground with such loons.

“Well, we are being reamed, but not through vaccine companies – we’re being reamed by privatised medicine. And the internet is a massive *disallowed phrase*-ing threat to our security – just not in the way he thinks. We are being tracked, everywhere we go, and everything we do, but not by shadowy government agents – we are being tracked every minute by surveillance capitalist giants trying to sell us shit. I bet he even has a Facebook account and buys his hairdye on Amazon.”

“Oh, Christ, don’t I know it – my smartphone seems to eavesdrop on every conversation I have, and sends me bloody coupons based on every text message or email I send or receive.” Littlemore subconsciously checked his phone to see if any new messages had come in, but it seemed content with the GreenTreats purchase for the time being.

Xie peered at him sceptically, shifting xir coffee to the other hand to tap out a reply. “Intermittent reward training.”

“What, like rats in a lab being trained to press levers. How did that work, again?”

Xie nodded. “If a rat gets food every time it presses a lever, it will only eat until it is full, then stop. If a rat never gets food when it presses the lever, it gives up pretty soon. But if you put the food on a randomiser, so the rat never knows if it is going to get food or not when it presses that lever – it will press that lever all night long, to the exclusion of sleep, sex, playing on the rat wheel, or anything.”

Littlemore let out a slightly self-effacing laugh of recognition. “So you’re saying I’m a rat who needs to play on its treadmill more.”

“No, I am saying that you are training your algorithms to pester you night and day until you never get any sleep.”

Littlemore laughed fatalistically. “Yeah, we program our machines, and our machines program us. But if you start thinking down that path, you’ll end up as bad as Jay, refusing to use Facebook or WhatsApp or Amazon, and ending up a total social pariah.”

“We are not paranoid,” chirped the pad, in an uncanny echo of Jay. “We are just threat conscious.”

Littlemore laughed, and the pair of them entered the building, walking up to the security desk to find a more familiar face working. “OK. At last. This is the real Xie. We’ve got xir a new vax pass, but can we get that new security ID?”

“Hold up, hold up,” warned the guard, though a faint grin seemed to lurk behind his extremely serious face. “I gotta do a quick security question to make sure this is the real Christy Imai-Evory.”

Xie looked suddenly panicked, glancing around wildly. “Huh?”

“Who would Xie say is the best band on the planet?” challenged the guard with a poker face that nearly made Littlemore burst into laughter.

Xie seemed to consider this very seriously, trying to stroke xir mouth through the mask as xie looked about, as if the answer might be written on the ceiling of the glass-fronted atrium. “OK, so the best band in the history of popular music would, without a doubt, have to be Kraftwerk. But I am not sure the real Xie would say that at present, because xie is pretty obsessed with Xian Grenze at the moment, so xie would probably say U-Bahn?”

The guard burst out laughing. “That’s the real Xie alright. Here’s your pass, and for the love of god, child, don’t let that out of your sight again?”

“I am not a child, but thank you.” Bowing xir head to loop it around xir neck, Xie sheepishly accepted the ID and the pair of them made their way upstairs to regroup and try to catch up with the rest of the team over the ERP’s decision.

Paul, the investigator on the case, met them at the door, and pulled them off into a meeting room. “Are you alright?” he asked, peering at Xie concernedly as they all sat down. “I saw videos going round the Socials, of the riot when the mob tried to force their way into the MHRA. It looked horrendous. I hope you didn’t get caught up in that!”

Xie nodded gravely. “I am fine. I was in a kettle for most of it and it was pretty chill. But it is probably my fault that they got out to attack the MHRA, though.”

“It’s not your fault the police are incompetent,” Littlemore soothed.

“They are not even real police,” Xie tapped. “The Wharf has its own private security force. But can we talk about the Eat Light case now? Were you able to understand everything about my data viz, Paul?”

Paul shuffled the papers on the desk in front of him, looking through the figures. Thirty years of the supposedly ‘paperless office’ and everyone at IPRA still printed out the infopacks to read them.

“I’m only trying to get a few things straight here,” he mused. “So you’re saying that Light Eaters Ltd. managed to harvest 25 clicks from nearly all of The Grid’s 50 million devices, using this nodal hack – that’s got to be, what? Couple of million pounds in currency?”

“At least,” tapped Xie.

Littlemore whistled. “I knew that The Grid had got big – it got super big, so fast that no one seemed to have noticed exactly how huge it’s become – but the idea that it’s got so big that several million pounds could simply disappear from it without anyone really noticing? You are kidding, right?”

Xie shook xir head. “And they did not do it just the once, they did it every month – for at least six months. That is all the data I could grab in one go from The Grid before the connection maxed out,” Xie threw him an apologetic sign. “Sorry about IPRA’s data charges this month.”

Littlemore’s face lit up. Or maybe someone had noticed! Protocol-trained goons didn’t turn up investigating just any kind of two-bit consent-to-charge cases. He leaned forwards and suggested, “Can you at least put a stop on the Light Eaters account?”

“Yes, we’re ahead of you, there,” said Paul. “We’ve been in contact with The Grid and put a freeze on their account – no more money goes in or out. But… unfortunately, the account is empty.” He paused and looked over at Xie. “Any ideas where it went? Millions of clicks? Someone must have noticed that. Least of all, a taxman?”

“No, that was the whole point of Morgan’s Green Energy deal.” Littlemore jerked to attention as a theory coalesced in his mind, and the vein in his forehead started throbbing in sympathy. “Users don’t have to pay tax on money that stays sloshing around The Grid – that’s why everyone with any kind of mobile device anywhere near England-and-Wales suddenly started signing up and treating it as their own private PayPal, and it took off in a way that Operator Billing and even ApplePay never seriously did. Money you earn on The Grid is totally tax exempt. No income tax, no VAT, nothing. But once it exits into local currency, any profits become taxable, right?”

“In theory, yes,” said Paul. “In practice, they don’t really bother anyone under four figures – unless they’re trying to nail them for something else. People are constantly trying to use Grid Clicks for illicit payments – you know, electrics, sex work, drugs – especially in dodgy hotspots like the Peckham Archipelago.”

“But millions of clicks… that’s well over that limit. Where’s the tax trail?” Littlemore thumped the packet of papers in front of Paul.

“I followed that,” tapped Xie. “They exited into an offshore in the Caymans, then went straight into Crypto. The trail went absolutely cold.”

“Fuckers,” snapped Littlemore, slapping the table. The paracetamols he had scoffed that morning were starting to wear off, and the eco-coffee only seemed to exacerbate the throbbing vein in his forehead. “Do we have any information on the device itself they used to register with The Grid?”

“Ritesh is supposed to be working on that. If you can pull him off Spook-chasing that is.”

“Where’s he gone, is he about?”

Paul shook his head. “He and Jules headed back out to Deptford on the last high tide, to try another honeypot on the City Boy Rat Run down there.”

Chapter Text

“We’re too early, mate. Do you really want me to circle round the high street one more time? That’s going to look blindingly obvious.” Jules rested his arms on the steering wheel as he drove up the block again, but the traffic was still flowing freely towards the Rotherhithe Tunnel. Seal-up was clearly still over an hour away.

“I don’t understand it. There’s absolutely nothing here,” muttered Ritesh, dropping his cache and refreshing the screen, but the blips were still flowing smoothly along the road.

“Of course there’s nothing here. The tide’s still out,” Jules pointed out.

“No, I mean that big step-up transformer next to the river. It’s gone.”

“The tide’s not going out. It’s coming in. Of course it’s not online.”

“No, I don’t mean it’s not generating – I mean, its whole digital signal is gone. Look!”

Jules glanced over, and looked into a large blank spot containing absolutely nothing. He never could understand Ritesh’s hunches, but he knew well enough to let him follow them to their conclusions. “Perhaps it would help if you told me why we’re back here. The stolen data had a pulse on it, and we sent a crawler up their stream. Surely it’s popped out somewhere by now?”

Ritesh made that face he always made when Jules suggested something far too sensible to be realistic. “Yeah, it popped out alright – fobbed off on a hardcore Asian Babes OnlyFans account. You can only imagine how cross they were when they found out the money wasn’t real, and their big spender had been worthless.”

“Maybe we should head back to the barn?” He felt his phone buzz in his pocket, and somehow knew it was going to be Koku asking about dinner plans.

“Hang on, what’s that sign there on the side of the building – was that there last week?” Rolling his window down, Ritesh peered at a tall brick warehouse near the river.

“Honestly, Rish, I don’t remember. I was driving and trying to monitor at the same time. I wasn’t exactly paying attention to estate agents’ sign boards.”

“I’m getting out for a minute,” Ritesh announced. “Can you park up across the street? I just want to check out what it says.”

Gratefully, Jules pulled the van off the street, then sat back and pulled out his phone. Even with the ringer switched to silent so he couldn’t hear his special tone, somehow he still just knew by the particularly warm buzz in his pocket that it was Koku. That was the one thing he could never get his parents to understand – that deep glow in the centre of his chest, whenever he thought of Koku, a tiny voice in the very depths of his lizard brain, that sang ‘home.’

Hey sweetpea what time r u getting off work?
I’m making jollof rice and spicey SynChicken
coz I know it’s ur fave

Sorry honey, no idea
Ritesh has dragged me out
on another monitoring exercise
all the way down by the Deptford Narrows

Sounds like ur gonna be late, springbean.
Why don’t you ask Ritesh round for dinner?

I’ll do my best, hon! x

Jules glanced over at the passenger seat, but Ritesh had already climbed out and was loping across the road. Koku’s endlessly generous hospitality was one of his favourite things about him, but it had taken some getting used to in the early days of their relationship. Jules had grown up in a sprawling 18^th Century farmhouse with 7 bedrooms, but his parents invariably wanted to know who his friends’ parents were, what they did for a living, where they went to school, how they’d voted in the last elections, before he could even have a friend round for tea, let alone to stay the night.

Koku’s family lived on a repurposed barge floating in a fluctuating, semi-legal community out by the Thamesmead marshes. His parents, a couple of grandparents, all three of his older sisters, with boyfriends, husbands, and babies of their own, plus an ever-shifting assortments of aunties whose exact kinship Jules had never quite established, all crowded round the kitchen at mealtimes, and yet still they insisted on sharing their noisy and convivial meals with friends, neighbours, passing children, anyone they could think to include.

Jules blushed with faint embarrassment as he remembered how awkward their early family visits had been. The very first time he’d gone round the Owusu flotilla, Jules had been keen to make a good impression. So he’d taken a bottle of very fine ‘27 Beaujolais, only to discover, much to his chagrin, that most of the family were Muslim, and no one drank. The bottle had nonetheless disappeared, and Jules discovered later that it had been gifted to the community’s herbalist, and it had made its way into various remedies and liniments. A ’27 Beaujolais! The next visit, he had tried to be more culturally sensitive and brought a large box of posh chocolates, hoping to curry favour with Koku’s Mum. This had immediately been dispensed among the floating village’s children, and disappeared in a flash. It was only on the third visit that he had finally consulted with Koku as to what to bring. Jules had initially been sceptical, but lugging a 20 kilogram bag of fancy rice up the creek had finally had the desired effect in terms of securing parental approval.

Jules’ family, by contrast, had been reserved but frostily polite in a Fitzrovia bistro. Although Koku had been his usual charming self all through dinner, Jules’ parents had ended the meal early, passing up dessert with the excuse of an early train home. Further invitations had very noticeably never been forthcoming. And though they’d never been so gauche as to actually talk about the situation, and Jules had never forced the issue, nonetheless he had made his silent choice. Koku’s gregariousness and expansive generosity suited him, brought out things he’d never known were missing in his own personality, until Koku showed him how a man could be.

He stared at the phone hopefully, until a handful of heart-eyes and kiss-blowing emojis appeared in response. The little voice in his lizard brain sated, he sent a few affectionate emojis back, slipped the phone back into his pocket and glanced out the window to see where Ritesh had got to.

Ritesh had loped across the road and taken a photo of the sign, and had somehow got inside the fence, so that he was now standing, stroking his beard as he peered up at the building. In his pocket, Jules’ phone buzzed again, but this was not the warm glow of a text from Koku, so he sighed and flicked on his headset. “Wotcha?”

“Premium commercial space, zoned for electricity generation, already Grid connected,” Ritesh read out from the sign on the side of the building. “The perp going after the City Boy’s Bloomberg – you said it looked like a producer, not a consumer, right?”

“Yeah, that’s what the signature looked like – there was no drain, just feed. Hey, do you want to come to dinner tonight, when we’ve finished this exercise? Koku’s making jollof and SynChicken.”

“I’d love to, Koku’s jollof is fucking legendary, but I’m overdue for a hot date with my sons and a Thomas the Tank Engine stream. Another time, mate. Can you share your screen with me a minute?”

“Just a sec.” Jules opened an encrypted connection on the laptop and flicked the monitoring software across to Ritesh’s phone.

Ritesh’s cursor appeared on the screen and started zipping about, zooming in on his own location, but he kept tapping the laptop’s screen in the empty dark patch by the river. “This empty bit bugs me. The Grid abhors a vacuum.”

Jules looked over. Come to think of it, it was slightly suspicious that such a prime generating position on the curve of the river would be completely empty.  “Well, we don’t generally track producers, only consumers, so I wouldn’t expect to see much. What was there last time?”

“There were Grid tags just on the river last time – hang on, let’s look at the recordings from the last run. I swear, I watched that red fungus a hundred times, and I know there was something in that corner there.”

Jules paused, loading up the older file to reveal a couple of faint blips by the river.

Ritesh hummed distractedly in his headset, and Jules could hear the faint taps as he drummed his fingers against his lips. “Can you do me a quick script to show me full details of the static producers as well as the cars and ports?”

“I can try,” said Jules, scratching his head and trying to think of how to pull that data and display it in another layer, then he picked up the other laptop. “OK, yeah, let me have a go – granted it won’t look as elegant without Xie’s data viz, but I can certainly give you something.”

Opening up his code studio, he swiftly scripted a few queries to catch windmills and tidal generators and solar panels and the like, and threw them into the dataset with a quick and dirty UNION join. Then he switched back to the data viz window and racked his brains to come up with a cute graphic. All of Xie’s creations were listed in the library with funny names like ‘Lovecraft’ or ‘Jemisin’ or ‘Babylon5’ to show various types of data flows as tentacles or flying crystals or jump gates. Deciding to stick to little lo-res gifs of spinning windmills, he created another layer and added producers in blue.

“Let me do a hard refresh and see if that works for you?” He punched a few buttons, and to his considerable relief, it worked the first time, as a layer of wind turbines and tidal weirs popped up, layered over the steady stream of traffic.

“Brilliant, cheers mate,” nodded Ritesh, looking about the screen and paging up and down a few times, zooming out then zooming back in. “Still absolutely fuck-all here.”

“Well, maybe if you explained what this is proof of concept for?” Jules shrugged, slightly annoyed that his clever script had come to naught.

“Never mind. Come on, get over here. We’re going in,” Ritesh asserted and flicked the connection off again before Jules could protest anything about search warrants or court orders.

Jules sighed, then grabbed his sunglasses and a filter mask, stowing away the laptops before locking up the van and loping across the road. Ritesh pulled a chain aside and held the front gate slightly ajar as Jules squeezed through. Doggedly leading the way, he made his way around the building to a courtyard at the back, offices on one side, and a long, low building just on the river.

“This is approximately where it was, right?” Ritesh asked, as Jules pulled out his phone and matched the location on his GPS. As he fiddled and eventually nodded, Ritesh tried the doors, rattling their handles, but they were all locked. “Can you see a window?”

“Look, this is not a good idea,” Jules started to protest, but Ritesh had just disappeared round the side of the building.

“Ah-ha!” cried Ritesh in triumph as Jules rounded the corner. At the back, surrounded by a metal fence topped with vicious spikes and festooned with ‘danger of death’ warnings, was a hunk of metal and coils and wires that should have been humming with electricity, but sat oddly silent. “Step-up transformer, right?”

Jules peered through the fence and tried to retrieve memories of transformers and capacitors, step-up and step-down, from first-year physics. “Could be.”

Ritesh loped back to the long, low building by the river, and pointed to a high window lodged open with a duct like from an air con exhaust. “Give us a leg up?”

“You’ve got to be joking,” sputtered Jules, but Ritesh was already scouting out the drainpipes, so Jules dropped to his knee and formed his hands into an impromptu stirrup. A bit of a tussle, and Ritesh had jimmied the window all the way open, and dropped through like a wriggling ferret, with an ease that made it clear he had done this sort of thing before.

“Right, this is a bathroom. I’ll pop round the front and let you in, shall I,” Ritesh’s voice echoed from somewhere inside the building.

“Shouldn’t one of us stay outside, and you know… keep an eye out?” Jules suggested, but a few minutes later, after much shuffling and a couple of muffled swears before the lights flickered on, Ritesh appeared at the side door, and beckoned him in.

“The place has been cleared out,” Ritesh informed him, padding back into the dim as Jules stuck his head nervously through the door. It smelled clean, like it had been used very recently, not like the dank, fetid smell that riverside buildings picked up after only a few days without air filtering. “I mean, there’s generating equipment still here…” He led Jules over to a bank of mechanical control instruments set under a window that looked out across a series of tidal screws dangling from a hydraulic frame just above the surface of the river. “But back here, look – it’s all gone,” he insisted, moving through into a side room.

“How am I supposed to see the absence of something?” Jules started to counter, but as he stepped through the heavy door with a large, round hole bored roughly where a security lock should have been, it was glaringly obvious what Ritesh meant. The smaller room was glaringly empty, with distinct dust-lines and wear-marks on the carpet where something large and rectangular had recently been removed. And about halfway up the wall, where Jules might have expected to see outlets or network cabling, an entire panel of the wall had been ripped out to reveal a rats’ nest of wires.

Ritesh poked around in the hole, and extracted a brutally chopped end that had clearly been detached in a hurry, peering at it before turning it to show Jules the distinctive spiral-coiled hybrid of wire and fibre. “Look, this is high-speed Grid cabling.”

“So whoever was running the operation, they’ve just… gone?” Jules looked about the room, kicking through a few takeaway menus and an estate agent’s brochure scattered across the floor. The logo on the brochure was the same as on the board outside, so Jules picked it up and handed it to Ritesh.

Ritesh had already pulled out his mobile and began dialling. As soon as it picked up, he put it on speaker, adopting his best Cockney wide boy accent. “Yeah, mate, I’m ringing about your commercial property in Deptford? The Grid generator station near the river?”

There was the sound of a tapping keyboard, then a primly posh voice came on the line “Oh yes, the Evelyn Street property. Only came on the market yesterday. Very nice property, very good location. Extremely lucrative at high tide – both wind and tidal capacity.”

“Lucrative, yeah? I mean, that’s tidal, innit? A license to print money, know what I mean?” Ritesh kicked at the carpet around the wear-lines, dislodging a cloud of dust. “Why’d the previous tenant quit, if it’s such a great location?”

“No idea. He only gave notice on Monday, just packed up and left – most of his gear’s still there, too. Perfect working order. Included in the rent, just so you know. All yours, you can move in and start operating right away. Very lucrative spot.”

“Yeah, you got any contact details for him? I’d like to have a chat, find out if there’s any hidden catches, why he walked out, leaving what? A week and a half left of the month, innit?” Ritesh paced as he spoke, making his way back out to the generator control room and poking half-heartedly at the controls.

“I’ve told you what I know, sir. I’m just the agent. Tried ringing the previous operator to see what he wanted to do with the equipment, and the number he gave me had been disconnected.”

“Got a name for him, at least?”

“Muhammed Khan.”

“Oh come on, mate, that’s like the Desi equivalent of John Smith.”

“Well, how am I supposed to know that?” The estate agent grew suddenly defensive, the posh accent peeling away from his voice to reveal purest Brixton patois. “Who are you anyway, the cops? Asking me so many questions about my tenants? He paid cash, six months in advance. I did all the required checks. He had papers; it was legit.”

“Can I see those papers?”

“You got a court order?”

“Look mate, I’ll level with you.” In a flash, Ritesh dropped his Cockney Wide-Boy accent for standard governmental Estuary English. “We’re MinTech. Now I can go back to our lawyers and get a subpoena in about eight hours, but if I do that, I’m going to have to bring your company in on the investigation, too. Do you want lawyers crawling all over your rental agency?”

There was silence at the other end of the line for several tense breaths.

“Alright you bloody technarcs, you got an anonbox? I’ll transfer the scans over, but I don’t want my name or my company involved in this. We run a reputable business here.”

Ritesh bristled at the epithet, but swiftly texted him a keypass for the IPRA whistleblower port and let the sucker get off the phone to go and shred whatever he needed to be rid of. Then he turned back to Jules and grinned. “Alright, let’s head back to the barn. I wouldn’t want to make you late for your hot date with Koku.”

Jules pulled out his mobile to communicate the good news to his boyfriend, then loped through the thickening traffic back to the van. “Thanks, Ritesh, you’re a pal. You sure you don’t want to come round?”

“No thanks, but bring me some Jollof for my lunch tomorrow, if you have any leftovers?” They climbed into the van, and Ritesh checked the laptop as Jules threw the van into gear and nudged gently out into the traffic. “Oh, hang on, our friend in commercial property has been quick – I just got a file transfer notification.”

“Anything interesting?” It would be amazing if they could wrap up the investigation that quickly, based on two monitoring runs, but it never went that smoothly.

“Ah-ha!”

“You got a name, address, incorporation details or something?”

“Nah, the papers are fake, as I thought. But the lawyer is real, alright.” Ritesh’s face darkened to a glower.

“Oh no, not…” Jules’s voice trailed off.

“Ah yes, we meet again, Harminder Sandhu-Smith. Damilola can have a little chat with the bastard, threaten to send in the investigators again if he doesn’t cough up some details. Damn, Rotherhithe will be sealed up by now – you think we can make it to Tower Bridge before high tide, and catch the Ratcliffe Skyway back to the Wharf?”

Jules grinned and gunned the engine. “I’ll do my best.”

Chapter Text

Jules raced across the river and up onto the Skyway’s entry ramp with about 10 minutes to spare. They got through the toll and scanned their IDs without a problem, but as soon as they made it up onto the Skyway proper, running up in the air alongside the DLR, the traffic slowed to a crawl. Downshifting, Jules muttered some very rude words under his breath.

“Don’t sweat it, the traffic is always bad in the run-up to high tide.” Ritesh barely noticed the traffic outside the windows, he was so engrossed in the monitoring software.

“Are you going to monitor here? Why bother? It never floods, so there aren’t even Voltholes up here.” Jules reached out and flicked the radio to Classic FM rather than risk another argument about LBC.

“I’m just interested. You can sometimes pick up police scanners along here, see where the speed traps or ID checks are.”

“As if we could speed in this mess.” Jules gestured impatiently towards the Audi ahead of them, which had switched off and wasn’t even bothering to close up the six-foot gap that had opened up in front of it.

“If you want, I could spoof us an emergency services vehicle, so we could drive along the hard shoulder?” Ritesh grinned so alarmingly that Jules couldn’t even tell if he was joking.

“Don’t tempt me.” Tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, Jules craned his neck to try to look ahead and see what the holdup was.

Ten minutes, and they’d barely inched under the first checkpoint. They were all automated, so you only had to hold your ID up to the windscreen and a bot would scan it from a gantry across the road, but most people left their IDs out on the dashboard.

Ritesh shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat. “Getting some weird stuff on the monitoring.”

“What kind of weird stuff.”

“Dunno. Blink and you’ll miss it, but I wasn’t recording, so I can’t go back and check.” Ritesh clicked the record button and peered at the long streams of cars on the screen. “There! That.”

Jules put the van in neutral for a sec and glanced over to see what Ritesh had captured. “It’s that narking fungus again, isn’t it?”

“Hard to tell.” Ritesh zoomed in, but it had gone again. “Could be.”

“Hang on, what’s that?” As the car in front inched forward another few meters, Jules caught sight of something hovering in the air a few cars ahead of them.

“What the fuck?” Ritesh suddenly caught something else on the screen.

“No, up there. Not on the screen, in the sky!” Jules gestured towards the grey blip hanging in the sky, and Ritesh finally looked up, as the blip shot forwards and resolved into a drone, hovering over the next car, as it launched a sickly green lightbeam that seemed to scan the car below. “Is that a police drone, or…?”

“Fuck!” shouted Ritesh, looking back and forth between the monitoring software and the drone. “Face-Miners!”

“Face-Miners? On the Skyway?” Jules slammed on the brakes and lunged towards the ID cards left casually out on the dashboard, sweeping them up and pocketing them as Ritesh dug in the glove compartment, finding a couple of face masks to throw on. “Where the hell are the police? They’re getting bolder if they’re Face-Mining this close to the City.”

“That’s exactly why they’re here,” muttered Ritesh as the drone finished scanning the car ahead of them and advanced on the van. Extending his middle finger, he made sure to hold it up directly in the pale green scanning beam. Unable to get a decent lock on a face, the drone made a couple of passes. “Lots of City firms still use facial recognition security.”

“People still bother, what with the resolution that 3-D bioprinting can achieve?” Jules’ voice quivered with the kind of astonishment that only the very young could still muster.

Abruptly, the screen of the monitoring software lit up all red and white, as curling fungal hyphae emerged from a surveillance gantry up ahead of them, leapt to a car, then another car, and surged up the green scanning laser to the drone. As the writhing mass of fingerworms engulfed its virtual image, the drone’s engines cut out, and the thing plummeted from the sky with an insect whine, crashing onto the tarmac in front of them. With a strangled cry, Jules threw the van into gear and ran over it with a sickening crunch as the tyres mashed plastic, then he kicked the van into reverse and went back over the bastard thing again to make sure it was dead.

Ritesh was still staring at the screen, his face both entranced and perplexed. “That was the fungus that did that. Wasn’t it?”

“What, like it’s being selective in what it’s attacking? Do you want me to get out and fetch the drone, see if we can assess the damage?” Jules offered, but when they looked in the rear-view mirror, there was little left but a smear of broken plastic and circuit boards across the road.

“Maybe not,” laughed Ritesh.

“Do you think the attack was deliberate?” The traffic jolted forwards again, and Jules inched up another few meters. Behind them, the sound of sirens started up, and traffic froze again as an unmarked police car whipped by them on the hard shoulder. “Hey, wait, no – come back. The Face-Miners were operating back here, not up there.”

Ritesh let out a deep sigh. “I don’t think they’re after the Face-Miners.”

“What?” Jules craned his neck out the window, and as they rounded the next curve, he sighed too. Up ahead, he could see the unmarked police car had stopped behind a regular patrol car, which had pulled over a massive, armoured Jeep with blacked-out windows. The vehicle was so large that it sprawled awkwardly across the hard shoulder and into the slow lane, blocking traffic that had to merge into the fast lane to get around it. Two young Black men were standing on the verge, one with his hands clasped behind his head, the other spreadeagled against the cop car as the police frisked him.

Jules glanced across at Ritesh, who had already spotted the cops, his face darkening into a glower. But before either of them could speak, a statuesque Black woman, who looked an awful lot like the taller of the two young men, had climbed out of the unmarked car and was advancing on the cops. Even over the dull roar of the traffic, they could hear her voice as she addressed the police.

“I am an MP. This young man is my son, and his friend is the captain of his school rugby team. Can you tell me why you have pulled them over?”

Jules could see the policeman let the other boy go, but he couldn’t hear his response.

“This is my car, sir. As I stated, I am an MP. May I remind you that armoured cars are standard issue for MPs and their families, who have faced assassination threats deemed credible under Code Amess.” The woman, her voice escalating in fury, dug in her handbag for some seriously official looking documentation. “Yes, my son had permission to borrow the vehicle. He was late for rugby practice which, now, thanks to you, they will probably miss.”

The police started to wave their hands about officiously, but the MP ignored them, gathering the two young men and moving them back towards the hulking Jeep.

“You will be hearing from my lawyers, I assure you. And the press! Are we under arrest? No? Then stand aside, please, sir.”

Ritesh was about to speak, when the screen of the monitoring laptop lit up in a lightning strike of red and white. Quick as a flash, the fungus bubbled up in the centre of the screen and engulfed the cop car, forcing its way into its operating system and overcoming it in a matter of seconds. As the woman climbed into the front seat of the Jeep, the boys got into the back, their faces just visible, pressed up against the rear window, expressions twisted into a mixture of fear, relief and defiance. The cops gesticulated at the Jeep for a few moments before one of them climbed back into the police car, but when he turned the ignition key, the engine hiccoughed a couple of times and would not even turn over.

“The fungus…” stuttered Ritesh, his face stunned. “I think the fungus somehow disabled that police car just now.”

Ahead of them, the Jeep started up and pulled off the hard shoulder, merging into traffic and accelerating away from the incapacitated cop car. With the massive car no longer blocking the slow lane, both lanes of traffic picked up speed and the jam started to break up, the cars ahead of them dispersing, even as Ritesh stared, open-mouthed at the laptop. Someone behind them started to hoot, and Jules had to drive the van forwards. But as the disabled cop car grew smaller in the rear-view mirror, the shock in Ritesh’s face slowly gave way to a huge, distorted grin.

“That fungus,” he repeated, winding back the monitoring recording to show the distinctive root-system shape of the filigree wormfingers. “The electronic fungus somehow managed to eat a cop car?”

Chapter Text

You know the old story about the frog and the boiling water? If you try to throw a frog into a pan of boiling water, it’ll quickly jump out. But if you put a frog into a pan of room temperature water, and slowly raise the temperature, the frog will stay put and let you boil it to death?

Turns out it’s bullshit. It’s a myth; an urban legend. Frogs leap out the minute the water gets uncomfortable. It’s only humans that stick around burning while pans boil dry around them. It’s called sunk cost fallacy. But that’s what working with VC was like.

Initially, things were pretty good. First thing the VC did was appoint a C-Suite. We got a new CEO (the VC, of course) and a Chief Operating Officer – purely a formality, I was assured, as I still maintained 51% of the shares, and thus retained the decision-making capacity. This guy was brought in to take over all of the mundane bullshit of the day-to-day operations of running a company, freeing me up to work on my true passion – training and refining the algorithms. We even got an HR Lady to take over dealing with all the petty feuds between the different personalities. Like I told you, quants are freaking weird.

First thing I noticed was, the girls started disappearing. I had deliberately hired as many girl analysts as I could find – less ego, less machismo, less mess, and you can grab them dead cheap if you get them straight out of school, paying them about half what the little Boy Kings from the prestigious data sci programs go for. The girls were always better at charming investors, clients, contractors, too. I don’t know the details, if they got greedy after seeing the salaries that their former colleagues were pulling at In-Q-Tel, or if the COO really was as handsy as the rumours suggested, or if it was just time for their biological clocks to go off, telling them they were done with programming and ready to have babies. The HR Lady handled all of that.

But somewhere along the line, the office started filling up with blokes. And the culture started to change. Football games on the monitors in the break room. Cases of lager in the kitchen fridge. Arrogant, impetuous young Americans that the VC referred to as ‘rock stars’ claiming the desks near the windows with the best views. Then we started having to rent extra parking places in the petrol section, because on top of it all, apparently ‘rock stars’ didn’t drive electric cars, which they considered girly and effete. They had these horrid, noisy ‘gas-guzzling’ muscle cars imported specially from the States.

Then the VC started complaining that the product wasn’t ‘competitive’ enough. What was he talking about? I had been working for months on a weighting algorithm which would be able to assess the trustworthiness of any given conflict source, as well as its emotive content. Because some of the most conflict-driven zones on the web were also the most fraught. We didn’t want to ignore the disinformation end of the web, from tabloid comment sections and Fox News all the way down to Q-Anon and Darkweb conspiracy sites, because even disinformation is a potently rich source of information about sites of cultural conflict. But Cassandra needed some way of discerning deliberate propaganda from other forms of more organic conflict. We were making incredible progress in taming the wave of information, to the point where I was wondering if we could develop a sideline in selling moderator algorithms to conflicted social media companies that seemed to struggle with their propaganda problems. (Though, honestly – why kill the golden goose that gave us so much data?) But I suppose some of the VC’s other investments weren’t working out quite the way he expected, so there was more pressure for Cassandra to perform, to deliver results.

VC’s first idea was that he wanted to somehow stress test Cassandra. The office was divided up into teams. Myself, and a few trusted analysts that worked on the development side, we were declared the ‘blue team’. The rest of the staff, the new Yanks, were declared the ‘red team’, and their job was to ‘disrupt’ Cassandra, knock holes in her code, trick her, try to teach her bad habits. With a different group of colleagues, all ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ and ‘pulling in the same direction’, it might have worked out. We might have discovered weak points in her code that we could have fixed, might have got a good feel for her vulnerabilities so that we could make her stronger, better, more agile and manoeuvrable.

But instead, it bred an atmosphere of constant suspicion and paranoia between the older staff and the new. One of my engineers, a good man I’d worked with since Picosoft days, an incredible systems analyst but a bit of an oddball personality-wise, to be honest, got into a tangle with one of the new, shiny, show-off ‘rock star’ programmers that VC had brought in. Allegations of sabotage were made. The words ‘intellectual property theft’ were bandied about. One day, we came in to find that new digital cameras had been installed right across the office floor, with clear sightlines to record who was coming in and out of each other’s cubicles. That was the point that I encrypted my hard drive and put a DNA lock on my code repository. Then I got special screens for my monitors, and my blue team’s monitors, that locked to a specific frequency so you could only view them with closely guarded filters coded on your glasses.

Within a few weeks, the lead ‘rock star’ was agitating among other team members, claiming the encrypted screens were proof of favouritism among long-term employees. He was eventually persuaded to resign after a few months of gardening leave, with an undisclosed payout and an NDA. The moment his gardening leave expired, I heard that he had been hired by JP Morgan, to start work on their own proprietary version of a long-term investment algorithm.

The VC absolutely hit the roof. He was furious. He demanded that the Sys Admin reopen the ‘rock star’s’ accounts and comb through the previous months’ records of code repository access to try to establish what he had and had not been able to gain access to. Very little, our Sys Admin was able to establish, but the VC remained tense – even though he had been the guy that brought the intolerable little ‘rock star’ on board in the first place. We locked down the code repository even tighter, and several of the other new guys jumped ship to JP Morgan.

For a while, it seemed like things were going to return to normal, the new smaller office pared down to just me and the old crew who had been with me for the long haul. I started to relax. We had been training Cassandra long enough on current conflict-content that I was ready to set her up with a sandbox pulling live data directly from the London Stock Exchange, while her sisters roamed the web, accessing real-time information from all over the internet, The Grid, the Socials, and Darknet. Of course, we didn’t give her any actual currency to play with, that was the point of the sandbox. I wasn’t crazy enough to risk my own money on that capricious little minx, not yet.

But what she chose to invest in was… well, it was strange. I’ll grant VC that. Her portfolios were diverse, all over the shop, and her weightings were… daring. The sensible thing would have been to let her run that portfolio in her sandbox for six months, a year, and see if she did any better or worse than the standard benchmarks. VC didn’t want to wait that long. Especially when some of her more peculiar investment choices started paying off, delivering unexpected returns – albeit in fake, sandbox money. She actually spotted the Siberian Petrostates independence movement ages before anyone else, thanks to her beady eye on Chinese Socials, and had she been allowed to follow her hunches as to when to ditch Russia and back SiberGaz, my god, we could have been billionaires almost overnight.

But VC thought he had a better idea. He wanted to race Cassandra against a team of real, human investment fund managers – so we could be the red team to their blue team. That was the point I should have noticed the water starting to boil. That was the point I should have told him to get stuffed, that we were progressing according to my plan, and I was not having him move the goalposts now that Cassandra was showing such promise. Because real, human fund managers – the supposedly good ones, at least – they didn’t want to work on mickey mouse sandbox money. When he hired a gang of fund managers for his own personal investment team, he had to give them real money to play with. A lot of it. And suddenly our office was no longer full of quants, or software engineers, or even ‘rock star’ boy wonder programmers. Our office was suddenly full of the Big Swinging Dick fund manager types I’d left UBS to get the hell away from all those years ago.

And the fund managers? They hated Cassandra. They hated the idea that an algorithm was going to take their jobs – even as they bought and sold stocks in Amazon and Alphabet and Uber and all the data-driven disruptors that had replaced everybody else’s jobs with algorithms. I could practically see it in their grasping, avaricious, venal eyes, that these overpaid schoolboys were going to do everything in their power to destroy my beautiful, powerful, intelligent algorithm.

That was the point I should have walked away. That was the point I should have cashed out and gone and bought a house in New Zealand. But I couldn’t walk away from Cassandra.

I recognised the haunted look I saw in my eyes when I looked in the mirror every morning. I’d seen it once before, on the face of possibly the most brilliant programmer I’d ever known – a bloke I’d first met back in my quant-pod days at the investment bank. He left the pod with his One Brilliant Idea for his Killer App, as he left NYC for Silicon Valley, to go and tout it round the usual suspects. He was convinced his One Brilliant Idea was going to change the world – and who knows? Maybe it could have. He got VC funding in San Francisco, absurdly quickly, and it started blowing up, fast. Much faster than he had ever expected, or planned for. Rather than being delighted with their good fortune, the VC started pushing my friend faster, harder, to deliver even more results, even quicker than before.

I remember the harried, grey, hunted look of his face on our last Skype call, as he asked if maybe we could go fly-fishing together, up in the Cascades, like I should fly out and see California with him, because it was seriously beautiful. I told him something noncommittal, like a holiday was a good idea, but I was allergic to seafood, so fishing was probably out. Maybe horseback riding? My then-wife was really into horseback riding. He felt trapped, he told me, not a moment later. He couldn’t walk out on the project, because he was in debt up to his eyeballs. But his One Brilliant Idea just didn’t scale. The VC didn’t want to hear that. They kept pushing him harder and harder, the CEO literally standing over his desk, shouting at volume at what a Killer App this was supposed to be, how much money was riding on this, while he was trying hard to concentrate, working on this insoluble scaling problem.

The next day, I was told, he left his wallet but took his coat when he went out at lunchtime, and started walking down the block. He didn’t stop walking until he was halfway across the Golden Gate. I think you can guess the rest.

I recognised that harried, grey, hunted look on my own face when I woke up the next morning, and I decided that I wasn’t taking the coward’s way out. I was going to fight back against the VC, against the handsy COO and against the fucking fund managers chucking their teabags in my sink. Cassandra could show them. Cassandra would show them all.

The problem was, where to get Cassandra her seed money.

Chapter Text

Littlemore was in early for a change. It had been a rare good night, when he’d got in from work before bedtime and spent a couple of hours with Jitka, watching Peppa Pig and La Jaquoranda YouTubes and doing little dances along with the animals to make his daughter laugh. The moral world of Peppa Pig was so much less murky and complicated than the complex world of internet payment systems. He’d kept a paternal eye on the rolling ads that popped up under the videos, and was relieved to see that they were all age appropriate, and advertising code compliant, and breathed a little easier about the world his daughter was going to grow up to inhabit.

Even before he’d opened up Outlook on his laptop, his phone buzzed in his pocket. That was an email from Dollie, informing everyone they were going to be paid a few days early, on account of the upcoming Bank Holiday, to ensure everyone could enjoy themselves over the long weekend. Not 20 seconds later, there was a text message from Amazon, declaring “Hey, Littlemore, it’s payday! Why don’t you splash out with a down payment on the new Xbox Z-Series. Order today with OneClick™ and you can take delivery tomorrow and play over the bank holiday. Play now, pay later, with Amazon!”

For a moment, Littlemore’s finger hovered over the link, thinking how much fun he and Jitka could have playing videogames all morning, while his wife slept in late on Bank Holiday Monday. He was halfway to impulse ordering, when he remembered that they had agreed to stop splurging and set aside more money for Jitka’s future education.

Sighing deeply, he deleted the text, then wondered for a moment how on earth Amazon had known that his payday had been moved up, before dismissing the idea as one of Jay’s raging paranoid fantasies. Opening up Picosoft’s popular online trading platform, he checked on the little college fund that he had set up for his daughter. He liked to play with it the way most of his colleagues played with Fantasy Football, swapping out stocks and switching funds like some leagues transferred expensive star players. It was for Jitka’s future, he told himself, and felt a little glowing warmth of pride for her, every time the cashout value inched slowly up.

Then he turned on his Bloomberg feed to check the business news, and the crushing sense of dread came rushing back.

“It has been a rough day’s trading on the Asian Markets overnight,” announced a serious blonde woman in a solemn business suit. “The Tokyo Stock Exchange was hit with unexpected and unpredictable turbulence, early in the day, as soon as trading started. Shanghai and Shenzhen followed suit, mid-morning. Hong Kong held out against the chaos a little longer, before the rolling waves of turbulence caught up with them around lunchtime, sending shockwaves through the BSE in Mumbai and the National Indian Exchange once they started trading.”

No one seemed quite sure how it had started. One expert appeared on half the screen, blaming a glitch in an automated trading algorithm for misfiring and sending a random stock sky-high, a feisty little green-themed social credit upstart nipping at the heels of the massive Alibaba empire. Another expert appeared as a talking head on the opposite side of the screen, claiming it was a deliberate short attack, and blamed insider trading. Japan was already accusing secret Chinese governmental agents in an economic attack (an accusation that was not entirely without priors) while China, who had been hit perhaps even more badly, were pointing a massive state finger at a concerted action by a banned stonks community operating out of an ostensibly pop-idol centred private Discord server based in South Korea.

The affected stocks of both Alibaba and Green Mind were briefly stopped from trading as the authorities realised what was going on, but then panic trading took over. The more cautious rushed to get out of the affected sectors, scrambling for more traditional investments like mining and extraction stocks, while the more greedy rushed to get in, because in the complicated world of financial instruments, there was never a massive loss, without someone trying to figure out a way to make it their gain.

So far, the panic did not seem to have affected the European Markets – yet – but the Deutsche Börse was sluggish, and trading was slow as the cautious Germans waited to see the results of the technical report, as to whether it was a glitch or a run. The London Stock Exchange, on the other hand, opened jittery, with trading brisk.

Littlemore turned back to his overflowing inbox and did his best to tackle the various requests from his team. “Yes” to Jules, “Yes, go ahead,” to Ritesh, “No, absolutely not,” to Xie and “Maybe, let me see what the bill will run to” to Jay. Hey, this managing lark was surprisingly easy sometimes.

He turned on the BBC to see if there was anything about the run on the Asian Markets, but they were still banging on about the Stonehenge collapse. Come on! That was nearly a week old already. Which meant in internet news cycles, it had happened approximately 10,000 years ago. A harried journalist was interviewing the lead druid as he tramped up the A30, blocking traffic outside Basingstoke with his swelling band of Welsh nationalists, earnest hippies and a growing contingent of red-faced Brexit Gammons. Yesterday’s papers, man, thought Littlemore, but apparently the Bards and the Gammons went down better with the BBC’s aging audience than inexplicable financial disruptions on the other side of the globe.

As the cameras rolled, an older woman came running up with an urgent message for the druid, so he excused himself from the interview with a polite bow to attend to some pressing druid-business. So the camera crew cast about, and found themselves interviewing a gaggle of teenage goths who seemed to have attached themselves to the caravan of marchers, all exaggerated makeup and black clothes and gangling, coltish legs in ripped fishnets and Doc Martens.

“I don’t know man, we just like him.” The teenage boy fiddled with the distressed silver pentagram on a chain around his neck. He was wearing a T-shirt with the logo of a popular Folk Horror band and had what looked like magpie feathers woven through his long, ratty hair, but he barely looked old enough to shave, let alone vote. “He’s cool. He’s got cred, blud. He actually speaks with us. He takes the time to talk to us, about the important stuff. What’s going on, you know. And he genuinely listens to the people, you know? He’s not a politician, but he is a leader, yeah.”

The young girl with the witchy dreamcatcher earrings and the old school Bauhaus T-shirt blinked and looked directly into the camera. Her face was dusted with the remains of glittery black eyeliner that had run all down her face with the exertion of tramping along the highway. “He just gives us hope, right? And hope’s pretty hard to come by when you live in a shit new town outside Swindon.”

She had big, bright blue eyes that reminded him sharply of Jitka. It was oddly disconcerting to think of his daughter growing into a moping teenager like this, as he tried to picture her as a goth. It didn’t bear thinking about. So he switched back to Bloomberg, to see if there was any news on the London Stock Exchange yet. Someone at Bloomberg had made the connection that Billy Barbel, the loudmouthed innovator behind the Ampere Rechargeable, and occasional figurehead of the eMerge movement, had been an early angel investor in Green Mind, and they had dragged him into the studio to explain why his little pet project had blown up and nearly taken half the Asian Stock Exchanges with it.

“Social credit is the future,” Barbel propounded, repeatedly thudding his palm against the desk in front of him. “That’s why The Grid has been so successful. The world is tired of winner-take-all, ego-dominated wealth generation. We need another solution, and social credit is the way forwards.”

“Get a load of this arsehole,” muttered Ritesh, sloping into the office with the interview blaring from his massive, old-school Sennheisers. As he settled down at his desk and switched over to the Bloomberg live feed, he flipped V-signs at Barbel. “Anyone would think the bloke founded The Grid, the way he carries on about it.”

“Monetise generosity,” Barbel was now waving his arms about dramatically in a way he probably imagined appeared portentous and visionary, like the Stonehenge Druid, but unfortunately only made him look like an overexcited schoolboy. “Make unselfishness… pay.”

“But he was involved with The Grid. I mean, he was the public face of it, back in the early days? That’s why everyone knows and trusts him,” said Littlemore.

“He supplied the portable battery technology, and some of the physical infrastructure – but he didn’t even invent that. Just bought it from the Chinese, got his geeks to change a few circuits, a bit of wiring, then slapped his own copyright on it.”

“Considering the Chinese attitude towards international copyright law, good on him,” countered the normally quite law-abiding Jules as he slid into his desk. He quickly handed Ritesh a Tupperware container of something so heavily spiced that Littlemore could smell it even through the plastic.

“Don’t microwave that while Jay is around. You know she’ll kick off about the smell,” he warned.

“You watching Barbel on Bloomberg? Put it on speaker,” directed Jules.

“Cunt,” snapped Ritesh, turning up the volume as Barbel waxed poetic about green energy, totally ignoring the Bloomberg line of questioning about the trail of chaos that Green Mind run had cut though the Asian Markets. “He bangs on like he’s the founder of The Grid, when he’s not even an investor. Eris Bianjie maintains notoriously tight control over the internal structure of the company, sole investor and majority shareholder, with that absolute fucking mint she made cashing out on Picosoft, at exactly the right time. He was never a founder, only a glorified consultant at best.”

“Is Eris Bianjie on the news?” Xie’s face appeared above xir monitor, xir eyes wide with astonishment above xir mask.

“Don’t be stupid,” sighed Jules. “You know she hasn’t given an interview since she fled to claim asylum in the Independent Commune of Green-Berlin.”

“I can always hope,” tapped Xie. “Friend of mine said she was spotted a few days ago on CodeHub, but I do not believe it could be her.”

“Eris is back on CodeHub?” gasped Jules, immediately opening up his browser and connecting to the CodeHub repository. “I thought the NDA with Picosoft prohibited her from propagating software on free or shareware repositories?”

“That is why I do not believe it is her,” Xie replied, immediately opening xir own browser and following Jules into CodeHub.

“Eris… oh crikey, there’s approximately 600 Erises on CodeHub, forget it.”

“Try Bianjie?”

“How do you spell it?”

“Oh, learn Chinese, moonbrain,” bleeped Xie.

“It’s on Duolingo,” suggested Ritesh. “Or just learn it by singing along with La Jaquoranda like my kids do. That drives me fucking nuts.”

“Oh god, are your boys into that, too?” Littlemore piped up, tunelessly attempting to sing, but the song was so absurdly catchy even he couldn’t muck it up much. “Yi, er, san, siiiiii… “

“Wu, liu, qiiiii,” completed Ritesh, then did the little dance. “Absolutely sends the under-10s mental, that one. Biggest smash since Baby Shark, doo doo-doo do doo.”

“Look, there is Eris’s old account, still showing all of her older code, but it is definitely deactivated,” Xie managed to tap with one hand, while xie tabbed through CodeHub with the other. “Wait, there is a new account, opened a few months ago – look for eBianjie? There are a ton of patches for integration into Grid code uploaded here under that name.”

“I don’t know, man…” Jules tapped away, the disbelief on his face slowly giving way to astonishment. “Well, it’s all Grid patches, and nothing to do with Picosoft, so that might technically be outside the scope of the NDA?” A brief pause as he read through the previews. “Wow. OK, this code is quite good.”

“Quite good? It is *disallowed phrase* amazing, Jules!”

“I don’t understand Grid code at all, you need to be able to read machine code, to make out a single instruction of the Grid components.” As Jules scanned back and forth across the screen, his eyes steadily widened. “But the integration – crikey, it’s so smooth, so elegant, so minimal and compact, and yet every eventuality anticipated and accounted for… bloody hell man, do you think it’s really her?”

“Eris is simply the best programmer on the entire planet.” Xie tapped, signing ‘girl power’ with xir other hand. “You cannot fake excellence on that level.”

“Whoever did this is very good,” conceded Jules.

“But is it Eris?”

“Holy shit, you guys,” interjected Littlemore. “I think Barbel just openly advocated for electronic insurrection on Bloomberg – are any of you still paying attention to this?”

“Hang on, what?” blurted out Ritesh, pushing his wheeled office chair away from Xie’s desk and back to his own, where he had left the Bloomberg channel’s feed blaring.

“Do you realise that what you are advocating right now, could be read as an invocation to commit international banking crime?” asked a reporter wearing an immaculate designer dress that cost more than Littlemore made in a month.

“International crime,” scoffed Barbel, his puffy, arrogant face turning towards the camera. “You want to talk about international – wait no, planetary crime? Ecocide! That’s what the big energy companies – your Royal Dutch Shell, your PetroBras, your Gazprom, sorry, Siberian Petrostates – have been doing to the planet and the environment for years. For decades. I believe that conscientious humans – conscientious earth dwellers of all species – have not only the right, but the duty, the obligation, to take up the struggle against the environmental terrorism of these massive corporations, by any means necessary. We are fighting on behalf of…”

“By any means necessary?” The Bloomberg reporter interrupted, turning around and casting a glance at someone behind the camera, as if to say, are you getting all of this down? “You understand that this might be construed as incitement…”

Barbel turned back to the young woman and showed all of his teeth in a terrifying smile. “I am not inciting. I am simply stating, that if an intelligent human being had the means at their disposal, to take their protests to the international stock exchanges – to the Asian Markets or wherever – if that is the only language that the big investment companies like Morgan Stanley will listen to – the bottom line? – Then that is where an intelligent, caring, responsible human being would take the struggle.” Barbel nodded smugly and turned his deep green gaze to the camera again. “Because we at Climate eMERGEncy are fighting for our lives – our lives, and the lives of our children, and the lives of every living being in this country. This is England, not some third world shithole crawling with overpopulation and riddled with pollution. In Europe, we care about the Land and what happens to it! My ancestors put their sweat, and their very blood into this soil, and we intend to fight for it, to protect it from those who would overrun it with pollution and filth. You don’t have to be some… freak, with purple hair and pronouns in your bio, to care about climate change. This is happening to all of us. So if you care about this country, switch off your television and join us.”

“Like that man doesn’t have sixty billion in hedge funds dispersed about the planet. None of this shit is happening to him. He can fuck off to New Zealand or wherever at the snap of his fingers!” Ritesh ripped off his headphones in an explosion of irritation and stomped off to the kitchen with his Tupperware container of SynChicken.

At the mention of hedge funds, Littlemore remembered he still had his daughter’s college fund open on his browser. But as he went to close the window, he noticed that the autorefresh had kept going, and the balance at the top of the page caught his eye. What? Twenty minutes ago, he could have sworn that balance started with a 7. Now it started with a 5. What? How? Panicking, he refreshed the page, and the number had dropped again.

He clicked through into the details of his portfolio, scanning up and down to see what, if anything, had crashed. Most of his stocks and bonds and fund shares were ticking along as usual, but there, right near the top. Barbel Industries had dropped, cataclysmically, losing nearly a third of its value in a quarter of an hour. Littlemore blinked. He believed in green energy, he trusted that investing in the low-carbon batteries that made up the backbone of the grid was a safe provision for his daughter’s future, in more ways than one. Yet as he blinked, the ticker dropped another 3 points.

“What the fuck, Barbel?” he almost howled, clicking back to Bloomberg, to see a lively debate in progress over the anger of Barbel’s shareholders at this incitement on national television.

“What’s happening?” asked Jules, his pale blue eyes and a flounce of blond hair appearing momentarily over the top of the divider.

“Barbel’s share prices are crashing. I’ve got to dump these things, and fast, or they’re going to wipe out my whole portfolio.”

The sound of typing and furious clicking. “What are you talking about? No, they’re not. Barbel is surging, it’s going up like a rocket.”

“I assure you, it isn’t,” insisted Littlemore, walking around to the other side of the bank of desks. “Wait, what site is that? That’s not what I’m using.” As he peered in closer to check the URL, the name of the stock caught his eye. “No, no. That’s the wrong stock. I’m holding Barbel Industries. That’s something else, the one called Barbel International Investments.”

“That’s his new, algorithmically backed Venture Capital fund. Isn’t that what you bought?”

Littlemore whistled. “Too rich for my blood.” Not for the first time, he wondered about Jules’ background. BII buy-ins started at about a million quid.

“Well, Barbel Investments is soaring. Is anything else on the index moving?”

Littlemore went back to his desk and refreshed the page. “Nothing.”

“That arsehole!” spat Jules, as furious as he was awed.

“What, what is it?” Littlemore snapped to attention, because Jules almost never swore. “Shit, Barbel Industries has dropped even more – I should have sold when it was still above 100.”

“No, no. Hold onto that stock. Do not sell.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No, but I think Barbel might be, if he thinks he’s going to get away with this. I swear to god, that fucker has deliberately crashed his own stock, because his hedge fund is shorting it. Let me look at the figures from last night, and check… oh my god, yes. Green Mind had a small dip last night, and BII started going up – but clearly, loads of other people were shorting it, hence the rush where it flashed.”

Littlemore rubbed his eyes. "Can you say that again, in English please.”

“Call the Financial Conduct Authority. Now.” Jules paused for a moment. “And hold onto those Barbel stocks, because when the short ends, they’ll bounce like a dead cat.”

Chapter Text

“Do we have any contacts at the FCA?” Littlemore called out to no one in particular, but Dollie turned around in her seat.

“Try Jeremy – didn’t he leave us to head up a new legal team over there about eighteen months ago?” she suggested.

Littlemore shook his head. “Jeremy got a job at the Prudential Regulation Authority. But then again, maybe he knows someone. Do you have his number?”

About ten minutes later, he finally managed to get through to the PRA. After a brief exchange of pleasantries and a few enquiries about partners, children and former colleagues, Littlemore got straight to the point.

“So I’m sure your phones at the FCA are probably ringing off the hook about the Barbel thing…”

“PRA,” Jeremy immediately snapped.

“Little bit of a rivalry going on there, eh?” Littlemore always thought it was absurd, that after the financial crisis of the late ‘00s, the British government had left the mega-monster banks intact, but had broken up the agency that was supposed to regulate and oversee them. If the ‘invisible hand of the market’ couldn’t provide safe investment banking, how was treating regulation like a market competition possibly going to help?

Jeremy sighed heavily. “Look I know that you lot under MinTech are comfortable with a certain amount of imprecision and fuzzy logic, but when you’re working with accountants, they expect absolute accuracy.”

“Come on, Jez, you get as much industry turnover as we do. You have to have heard some inside gossip?”

“Believe it or not, chief, it’s even worse over here. We get these hotshot kids fresh out of the LSE talking idealistically about cleaning up the industry, then after a year or two of administering the financial regulations and learning all the loopholes, they’re off to the big banks to teach them how to take advantage of them.”

“Tell me about it! You remember Vida in Assessment?”

“Oh yeah, how’s she doing? Still beating you at Fantasy Football?”

Littlemore laughed self-depreciatingly. “Well, she would be if she hadn’t gone over to Vodata last month. Always happens – the really bright, ambitious ones? They’re with us for a year or two, then they get an offer from Vodata or Boku or Sys6, paying double their salary, maybe a company Tesla or a nice crash-pad behind a sea wall, and off they go.”

“Oh, we get it the other way, too. It’s like a revolving door around here. We get all these big executives from HSBC or Citigroup, talking the big talk about how they’re going to cut through the red tape and simplify the regulations to raise industry compliance, or inspire confidence in the financial markets? They all take these massive consultation fees – and our beloved Ministers are happy to pay them, because the big boys know best, right? They have a proven track record for delivering results, don’t they,” Jeremy drawled.

“Delivering results to the Ministers’ election campaigns, too, no doubt,” quipped Littlemore.

“Indeed. Then they get their hands on our regulations, and instead of cutting red tape, they write in even more loopholes, that we don’t even find out about until the FCA – or more likely Watchdog, because you know what the FCA are like – starts getting thousands of complaints about some nonsense like ‘interest reprocessing co-charges’ on consumers’ bank statements.”

“It’s not even the fox watching the henhouse, it’s like henhouses designed by foxes to explicitly facilitate chicken theft.” Littlemore and Jeremy both laughed in unison, a little desperately. Even without the vid portion of the Teams call engaged, he could envisage Jeremy rolling his eyes. “So what’s the deal with Barbel? You lot heard anything?”

Jeremy was so eager to dish that dirt that he almost cut him off with a curious, high-pitched, “Hmmmm” like an old biddie about to sink her teeth into some juicy gossip. “Oh yes, Bloomberg did call in advance, to let us know that they were bringing him on the programme, and asked us to provide some clarification around what constituted stock market manipulation – we may even have suggested some lines of questioning to pursue, but Mr Barbel certainly made everybody’s job easier, now didn’t he.”

“Are you going to investigate him, then?”

“Now, now, Littlemore, you know I can’t comment on active cases,” replied Jeremy in a diplomatic tone that made it quite clear that they already were.

“Nice one.” He paused, wondering how to phrase his next question in a way that Jeremy might be able to answer. “Not that it’s going to bring Jitka’s college fund back.” He sighed theatrically. “Funny old thing, the stock market. I can’t pretend I understand it, but of course, you know way more about this than I do.”

“You know I couldn’t possibly comment officially about anything, but off the record…” Jeremy lowered his voice. “We’ve been seeing some extraordinarily odd things in the securities exchange, and particularly in the Dark Pool recently. Very peculiar things indeed.” The normally arch and unflappable Jeremy genuinely sounded quite spooked.

Littlemore felt a twinge in his gut, and abruptly launched a wild guess. “Something growing in a weird pattern. Branching and growing from the tips. Like… almost like a fungus?”

“How on earth did you know?”

“Look, if you want your data geeks to talk to my data geeks about freaky patterns in their stats, let me know, and we can set something up.”

“I’ll keep it in mind. Must run, all time is billable in this team. My fond wishes to Blanka and Jitka.”

“And my best regards to Jenna and your spaniels.”

Chapter Text

Ritesh’s mood had improved substantially when he returned from the break room, and handed back the tupperwear container, now scraped clean of spicey SynChick. Jules looked over his colleague carefully, wondering whether to break the news gently before he checked his email and discovered the news for himself. Probably better to soften the blow a little.

Jules cleared his throat softly to catch his attention, then smiled nervously. “Just so you’re aware, Paul was looking for you.”

Ritesh looked over and immediately saw through the appeasing smile, his face falling. “Oh no, what is it now?”

Flicking his hair out of face, Jules gestured back towards the investigations department. “He’s been doing a little more digging into Light Eaters, Ltd. You know, our ghost shell company?”

“Yeah?” It was more a warning bark than an affirmation.

“It seems that they’ve lawyered up.”

“No!” Ritesh’s entire body registered the irritation, slumping back into his ergonomic chair. “Don’t tell me…”

“I’m afraid so,” stuttered Jules, doing his best to keep up the smile.

“It’s bloody Harminder again?”

“Sandhu-Smith,” confirmed Jules, as the top of Jay’s face appeared above her monitor again.

“What is it with you and this bloke?” she teased. “I swear to god, like, one of these days, you’re going to fly off on holiday to a remote tropical island, and just as you’re settling down on the beach with a nice, relaxing cocktail, a fake palm tree will open up, tipping you into this secret lair. And there’s your nemesis Harminder, sitting on a pile of gold bullion– ah yes, I’ve been expecting you, Mr Bhatia!”

That, at least, raised a short, sharp laugh. “Yeah, and there’s me, strapped to a rack with a laser beam advancing on my bits while Sandhu-Smith laughs his head off and runs off with the loot!”

Jules attempted a chummy punch on the shoulder. “Look, if there’s anyone who could hack their way out of Bond villain trap, it’s definitely you. You’d probably short circuit the laser with your smartwatch and deflect it back to blast him.”

“This sounds a bit more personal than a few mistrials,” Jay persisted. “What is your beef with the dude?”

Ritesh rolled his eyes and ran one hand through his unruly hair. “Our parents knew each other when we were kids. His mum was a mate of my mum, back down in Tooting. I just never heard the end of it – how Harminder was a perfect student, how Harminder got perfect grades, how Harminder was going to bloody law school while waiting tables nights at his cousin’s curry house. While me? I was such a disappointment by comparison, wasting time mucking about going to raves and playing at being a DJ. But Harminder was a smarmy bastard back then, and he’s a smarmy bastard now, getting rich defending wealthy crims who can pay their way out of anything.”

“That’s how our judicial system works,” sighed Jules gently. “Everyone’s entitled to a lawyer, even the bad guys.”

“The system sucks,” declared the jaunty chirp of Xie’s pad.

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” agreed Ritesh. “And now Harminder’s son is at nursery school with my son, and every time Junior pulls some spoiled rich-kid stunt and gets away with it because Daddy donates a wad of money to the school, I have to do an hour’s chat with my boy over Peppa Pig, teaching him two wrongs don’t make a right and the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s stinking judicial system,” Ritesh sighed, and swiftly changed the subject. “What’s Paul going to do?”

“Well, it’s Sandhu-Smith’s third strike this week, so surely we can go after him?” Jay’s chair was tipped at such an alarming angle to peer over the monitor that Jules was surprised she didn’t fall out.

Jules nodded sagely. “Indeed. Legal are going to hit him with a 6.2.9 – Failure to perform Due Diligence.”

“Come on, that’s a slap on the wrist to Sandhu-Smith,” protested Ritesh. “Honestly, I think he just collects 6.2.9’s. Doesn’t even contest ‘em any more. Just pays the fine and passes the thousand quid on to the client as an administrative fee. Call it baksheesh. Just another cost of doing business. I swear, it must be part of his advertising, the number of 6.2.9’s that bloke’s racked up. Any crook in London can see he’s willing to do them a solid.”

“Well, Paul said he’s going to rattle the cage a little, and see what rolls out. Check your email, it’s all in there. I just wanted to warn you first, coz I know how much Sandhu-Smith winds you up.”

Chapter Text

Later that evening, Littlemore was sitting watching YouTube on the wallscreen with Jitka while his wife ordered an Uber Eats in the other room. Of course, his mobile had somehow pinged the moment he walked through the door, an alert informing him “A new La Jaquoranda video has just dropped, Littlemore – be the best dad in the world by sharing some quality screen time with your daughter, Judita, right now!” He imagined his wife had received a pretty similar message about the new Pan-Slavic dark kitchen when she’d walked into the flat, hence the massive order for garlic soup and roast pork with cabbage and dumplings going in next door.

On the screen, a strange CGI creature in a sari undulated across the screen in a graceful dance before wandering up to the camera and blinking its huge fawn-eyes. He had no idea how they did it. It wasn’t a cartoon, it genuinely behaved like a baby deer, quivering its spotted fur and flicking its fuzzy ears, so real it looked like you could reach out and pet its coat through the screen, even while it walked and danced and swayed its hips like an attractive young dancer from a K-Pop video. Was it creepy to kind of fancy an animated fawn, Littlemore wondered, but it had started speaking.

“Ni hao!” said the deer, and his daughter went absolutely bonkers, jumping off the sofa to run over and greet the creature, emitting a stream of Chinese in reply. The deer tossed its sari flirtatiously over one shoulder, then turned and started to dance and sing, telling a story with its dancing hooves, to the beat of an absurdly catchy electronic dance tune. Jitka bounced up and down, doing her best to dance along on her short little human legs, shrieking phrases back at the animal as colourful hanzi characters floated across the screen.

Right as he was starting to get the hang of the chorus, his phone started bleating, ever so slightly out of time with the electronic bleating of the deer. Ritesh? He glanced at the time. What was he doing still working at this hour?

“Awright?” he said, picking up and squishing an earbud into one ear.

“Wotcha?” responded Ritesh. “You watching Bloomberg right now?”

“No, we are watching La Jaquoranda, the world’s first animal pop star.” Littlemore nodded and waved as his daughter turned around, frowning at him curiously to find him not paying attention to her.

“Ni hao ma, ni hao ma,” sang Ritesh. “My sons were caning that episode earlier tonight. But no, mate, you got to turn over to Bloomberg, right now.”

“Oh god, my daughter is going to kill me,” groaned Littlemore, even as he wrestled the remote away from his daughter and pressed pause. “Sorry, sweetie, daddy has to watch something important on the other channel now,” he tried to bargain, but there was a wail from his daughter as La Jaquoranda was swapped out for the serious looking blonde woman furrowing her brow at her earpiece.

“Right, we go now to a special news bulletin from Kaspersky Labs, who have reports of a strange, new entity found on The Grid.”

“We do not yet know if it is threat,” piped up a reassuringly geeky looking young man in a dark suit and hornrim glasses, as the image turned over to a computer lab full of unnecessary racks and servers and monitors running impressively glowing KPIs. “But we do know that it is lightning fast, and seemingly self-aware, and capable of self-directed movement via infrastructure of The Grid.” He took a breath, facing the camera and giving it the full this is serious face, heightened by his faint Russian accent. “Kaspersky Labs has obtained footage from earlier this week…”

His face blinked off, replaced by the now-familiar clip of the electronic fungus pattern from Ritesh’s first monitoring expedition in the Deptford Narrows. Broadcast over the television, with the official-looking Bloomberg ticker tape flickering across the bottom of the screen (conveniently blocking out the IPRA logo), the surreal image suddenly seemed about a hundred times more real. “Fuck.”

Jitka turned around and grinned at him through her milk teeth. “Ni hao fuck! Ni hao fuck!”

“No, no, honey, that’s not Chinese. Forget Daddy ever said that.”

“Agents from London’s Internet Payment Regulatory Authority captured images in Central London, appearing to show previously unknown entity attacking car during tidal root-down.”

“Oh, nice of them to credit us,” Littlemore snorted.

“We have traced car and analysed circuitry, and found significant alterations to its software at machine language level…”

“Shit, we didn’t think to track down the car. I mean… it did just drive away,” Ritesh protested.

“Alterations which do not appear to have affected functioning of car, although we have not yet established what actual intended purpose is. However, it is well-known that hackers often use these kinds of operating system level alterations to take control of host machines, use them to form Botnets or launch DDoS attacks.”

The picture flickered back to the serious young blonde in the Bloomberg studios, shaking her head in alarm. “But how can we protect ourselves from these types of attacks, given that nearly every car in England is now grid-enabled. We were assured that The Grid was completely safe, a closed system, regularly swept for viruses and malware.”

“There is no such thing as completely closed system, once it comes online.” The Kaspersky expert leaned forward, pointing to the monitor displaying the visuals as they ran in a loop. “However, if you will notice, first vehicle that entity attacked was running top of line Linux-based Kaspersky firewall. Notice how entity’s attempts to gain access are continually rebuffed, even though entity is changing its penetration frequency every few picoseconds. Make no mistake, this is high level interpolation attack. Yet firewall holds, and entity abandons attempt, to move on to less secure vehicle.”

“I see.” The young woman’s head appeared for a few seconds, nodding attentively as she pressed her finger into her earpiece.

Voice Protocol didn’t really work over broadcast media, but the expert tilted his head to an angle perfectly designed to convey caring. “We tend not to think of vehicles as requiring internet security. We use digital keys, and many high-end models offer fingerprint or even DNA locks. But with entities like this roaming 5G, perhaps it is time that firewalls became standard for Grid-enabled vehicles?”

“And of course Kaspersky to be offering at premium, only to Bloomberg subscribers, if send money to secret Russian Telegram channel during break…” Ritesh’s cynicism knew no bounds, even as a disembodied voice feigning a Russian accent in his earbud.

“Did we even give them clearance to broadcast this clip when you sent it over?” Littlemore switched back to Jitka’s YouTube channel as the segment ended and the news shifted to another report on yet another price war heating up in the rapidly melting gas fields of the Independent Siberian Petrostates.

“I told Damilola it was a bad idea to send it. I warned her…”

Littlemore rubbed his eyes, trying to think on his feet, through his exhaustion and the noise of the world’s first animal pop star. “But they don’t have the rest of the intelligence, do they? They don’t have Xie’s data viz of the Light Eaters’ charges, and they don’t have your newer monitoring from the Ratcliffe Skyway. Maybe I can liaise with Jeremy and try to get more information from him on his weird movement on the securities exchange. The more intelligence we can gather – these things are all so similar, they have to be connected in some way. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, where we need to find more pieces, to comprehend the full picture.”

“I just wish we’d thought to trace the car. That was sloppy.” Though his desk was scattered with electronic rubble from the innards of smartphones, and his hair regularly curled below his collar, Ritesh hated sloppiness in the digital realm.

“Look, sleep on it. Talk to Kaspersky tomorrow, see if you swap some… kind of information – I don’t know what – for the code alterations from the car? Do either Jules or Xie know machine language?”

“Literally no one knows machine code any more, unless you’re like, Eris Bianjie or some hardcore nerd who talks to elevator robots.”

“So what you’re saying is, like, Jay might know machine code.”

Ritesh laughed for the first time all evening. “Alright, boss, catch you tomorrow.”

Chapter Text

It was late on Thursday night in London, but early Friday morning in Japan when the news started coming in from the Independent Siberian Petrostates. Or, rather more noticeably, news started to fail to come in. Expected status reports failed to run. Batches of payment transfers failed to process overnight. When trading partners tried to log onto the websites of SiberGaz, or even the older administrative websites still nominally hosted as GazProm, they were simply shown a Bluescreen of Death displaying the error message “Cannot find Server or DNS”. Pings to automated systems failed to return a response. Concerned emails asking why the website was down bounced, saying “Domain of recipient address does not exist.” Skype calls and Teams meetings failed to connect, claiming “the address associated with that account cannot be found”. There were major outages in mobile reception around the administrative centres of SiberGaz and its subsidiaries, and attempted phone calls diverted either to an irritating message stating (in English, oddly) that the account was unavailable, or a disconnection signal. Across the Petro end of the Petrostates, data slowed to a drip, then simply stopped flowing at all.

Next, the expected supplies of petroproducts followed the data’s example, as oil and gas supplies slowed to a drip, then similarly stopped flowing. First, the ‘Northern Lights’, and then the ‘Brotherhood’ pipelines that cut through a heavily fortified section of the Russian-Siberian border went down for ‘routine maintenance’, cutting off the NordStream feeds. This sudden need for routine maintenance was a complete surprise to the Russian side, but even more surprising was that the crucial natural gas pipelines, supplying all of Russia and much of eastern Europe, completely failed to come back online when the expected routine safety reports returned no data at all. Control rooms across the distribution network of Siberian gas flipped over to one Bluescreen of Death after another.

The anticipated crude for processing and loading onto oil tankers to be shipped across the Pacific to the US failed to turn up at Siberia’s eastern ports. The drivers who were able to get mobile phone reception reported back that the electronic ignition switches for the tanker trucks simply refused to come online. The few fearless Siberian truck drivers who dared to hotwire their own vehicles found that their GPS abruptly went berserk, diverting them down impossible routes, their power steering and brakes refusing to allow them to correct course. One driver risked injury and narrowly escaped death by leaping out of the driver’s seat as his rig hurtled itself into one of the massive chasms that opened up across the moonlike Siberian landscape during the now-routine summer thaws. Another driver, luckily, discovered that the only way to divert the malfunctioning juggernaut was to shift into neutral, at which point the malevolent machine simply coasted to a halt.

In the absence of any credible information about what was going on, share prices for SiberGaz started to slide in all the markets across Eastern Asia, as each of the exchanges opened in their mornings. With each new malfunction in the Siberian cyberinfrastructure as the Bluescreens of Death jumped from system to system, the share prices dipped perilously lower. Petrocurrencies around the world started to vacillate wildly, the Siberian Rouble going into freefall, while the Nigerian Naira and the Iranian Rial surged in the hopes that the Siberian stoppage would produce another global gas crunch big enough to make the profits of the Siberian War of Independence look like a mere blip. The chaos soon spread to other Siberian mining operations, as the computer networks for the vast mineral fields that provided lithium, nickel and molybdenum to China’s high-tech industries started to wink out and go dark. First the servers and websites disappeared from DNS, then phone lines went down and emails bounced.

But only in the mines and the refineries and the drilling stations. Food shipments managed to get through, and payment systems at supermarkets and restaurants appeared untouched during the breakfast rush hours, observations that immediately triggered accusations of industrial sabotage or a politically motivated hacking attack. As share prices and exchange rates plummeted, the Asian stock exchanges ordered trading stopped in all Siberian shares, currencies and futures, an unprecedented global stock market shutdown event happening twice in forty-eight hours.

In the last moments as the crisis deepened into pure chaos, only one email got through from the SiberGaz server. A flummoxed software engineer brought in from the University of Tomsk, noticing something odd going on with the systems, sent a panicked message to a cyberforensics expert in Beijing, with a subject that translated roughly as “Huh, this is weird!” Only three words of the body were decipherable before the recoverable packets degenerated into strings and strings of nonsense characters recognisable neither in Russian or Chinese, nor any native Siberian languages: Kiberataka - elektronnyy Gribok? Cyberattack - electronic fungus?

Reports of the email in the Chinese media set off a malware panic that resulted in the borders being closed and the plug being pulled on the entire Siberian internet. Terrified of whatever was relentlessly extinguishing systems across the Petrostates, all the surrounding countries, starting with China, slammed down firewalls, cut off routers, physically pulled out cables, and disconnected Siberia’s internet, leaving the largest country by landmass on the earth completely cut off from the global electronic network.

Siberia went dark.

China immediately accused Russia of using economic warfare to cripple and re-invade the Independent Siberian Petrostates whose liberation China had so benevolently aided while Russia’s attention was diverted by their unfortunate little misadventures in the Crimea. Russia countered with accusations of their own: the Siberian Petrostates themselves were nothing more than Chinese-appointed puppets, eager to advance their own interests westward into Russia by launching a cyberattack clearly aimed at Eastern Europe, who were now seriously running low on gas supplies as the short, blazing summer was about to give way to autumn.

The Asian markets, eight hours ahead of London, were in turmoil as they closed for the weekend, just as London was waking up. But the whole event was somehow only the third story on the morning news sites, down the fold, below the endless rolling Stonehenge coverage, and the mysterious entity caught attacking The Grid.

Chapter Text

Littlemore arrived early to work, to find that Xie was already in xir pod with U-Bahn blasting so loud that he could hear German chanting over tektonik breakbeat from the kitchen as he poured himself a cup of coffee. It was unlike Xie to be so inconsiderate about noise, so he wandered over and tapped on the door. Xie didn’t answer, so he flicked the lights a couple of times to get xir attention.

When the door popped open, Littlemore pointed to his ears. “Would you mind listening to that on headphones?”

For a moment, Xie looked blank, then xie reached to xir ears to flip the implants on. At that moment, xie seemed to notice the noise, and cringed, immediately snapping it off. “Sorry, I did not realise it was playing out loud.”

“Did you sleep here?”

Xie shook xir head, then stretched and climbed out of the pod, fastening xir pad to xir sleeve. “No. Could not sleep. Watching Siberian markets all night. Took early train.”

“Coffee?” he offered, then flipped on the television. “BBC, Bloomberg or Reuters?”

“I am so tired of *disallowed phrase*-ing Stonehenge.”

“Me too, kiddo. Me too.”

He flipped over to Bloomberg and Xie gasped, audibly, moving over towards the screen with the coffee carafe still in xir hand. Looking up at the monitor, he saw a beautiful Chinese woman with a short asymmetrical bob, black with a silver-white streak that dipped alluringly over her high cheekbones. She was dressed head to toe in elegantly draped white silk that left her arms bare, with pearlescent white powder dusted across her eyelids, and a sheen of frosty white across her lips. Across her cheeks were painted two slightly asymmetrical silver arcs that ran down the sides of her snub nose, like the lines of butterfly wings. It was a fashion his wife had told him was the latest thing for style-conscious Asian teenagers, emulating the facepaint that Hong Kong protesters reputedly used to throw off facial recognition software.

The silver goddess was sitting in a completely white office, white leather chair, snow white Mac on the desk beside her, and pearlescent white walls, on which it was possible to make out words, faintly embossed in silver, spelling out ‘The Grid – Das Gitte – Wang Ge’. Despite the high-resolution screen, every few seconds, the feed shimmered from top to bottom, as if the signal were coming across an encrypted link, bouncing off communications satellites that were ever so slightly out of synch with one another.

“The Grid,” said Eris Bianjie, in a low, clear voice with an unplaceable accent, floating somewhere between Beijing and Silicon Valley. “Is perfectly safe, I assure you.”

The interviewer’s disembodied voice cut in. “Then can you explain the… entity, that we have all seen on this recording, roaming The Grid in South London?”

Eris smiled with the serene air of a yoga mom just back from a week-long massage at an alpine spa, and nodded ever so gently, causing the diffused light to glint off the silver wires of a handsfree headset so elegantly minimal that it looked almost like jewellery, a shimmering tiara wound around her head like a halo. “What you call ‘the entity’ is a natural part of the ecosystem of The Grid, which most honest users would never need to encounter.”

“So you have mysterious… creatures, just lurking about the dark corners of The Grid. How many of these things are there? Surely the users should know about such entities.”

“Allow me to explain.” Eris gestured to the Mac beside her, which lit up at her touch, the screen flickering and grainy across the encrypted connection. “Just as the body has natural defence systems, such as white blood cells and antibodies.” Here, she played a clip from a well-known Covid-25 information film, explaining the immune system and urging antibody donations. “The Grid, too, has its own electronic white blood cells, which are designed to keep the whole system healthy, safe and secure. We call them Guardian Algorithms.” She brushed her fingers across the screen again, and it changed to a glowing fern-like fractal star that looked almost, but not quite, like the fungal filaments they had spent the past week chasing.

“If that is the case, then why was the… Guardian Algorithm repelled by the Kaspersky Firewall?”

Eris’s smile grew ever more serene as she raised her eyebrows and tipped her head slightly to one side. “Indulge me. Can you remember where you obtained the tape of the Guardian Algorithm?”

“The tape was provided by Kaspersky, who were given it by an anonymous source at IPRA.”

“Cheeky bastards! That’s my fucking monitoring.” Littlemore turned to see Ritesh had entered the breakroom, standing beside him eating breakfast parathas laced with chillies.

As she nodded, Eris’s entire head seemed to shimmer and sparkle. “IPRA does great work, in terms of finding and neutralising users who seek to exploit The Grid. They were on exactly such a monitoring mission, when they encountered the Guardian Algorithm, almost certainly on the trail of the same perpetrator that they were after. Checks and balances, you see. When human guardians and algorithmic guardians converge on the same threat, to eliminate it, that shows that the system is working exactly as intended. In perfect harmony.” Eris’s beatific smile seemed to illuminate her whole office, and by extension the IPRA break room.

“I see,” said the interviewer, as the camera flicked back to her, her blonde hair and cream suit looking slightly soiled by comparison with the ethereal silver businesswoman. “Well, thank you so much for your time, Ms. Bianjie.”

“Not a problem.” Eris beamed and inclined her head like a benevolent goddess, then her connection abruptly snapped off, leaving only a faint silver afterimage on the Bloomsberg feed.

“Guardian algorithm, my arse,” snorted Ritesh. “You notice she didn’t actually answer that question about the firewall.”

“I noticed that, too.” Littlemore shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, feeling the morning’s first cup of coffee already boring a hole through the lining of his empty stomach. He’d skipped breakfast to get in early, and had somehow been too preoccupied to remember to stop for a muffin at GreenTreats.

“She is amazing,” Xie tapped with a swoony little sigh, then reached up as if to touch the wall-mounted screen, like a penitent supplicating at the feet of a saint. “Do you think I would look good with silver hair.”

“Whatever it was after, it wasn’t the perp with the step-up transformer. I absolutely guarantee you that.” Ritesh took another bite of his breakfast paratha and chewed thoughtfully.

Even the smell of it made Littlemore’s mouth water so much he dug in the fridge to find the remains of yesterday’s Krispy Kremes. “I’ll get on the phone to Jeremy to get that securities markets data for you – Xie, can you take a look at the new footage from the Ratcliffe Skyway?”

But as he tried to herd his team back towards their desks, Damilola came up the other way from her office, and cut them off. “Littlemore, Ritesh, Xie. Just the three I want to see. My office, in thirty seconds.” She paused in front of the coffee machine. “Where is the coffee?”

“Oops,” signed Xie as xie swiftly replaced the empty carafe.

“Make that ten minutes as I make another pot of coffee.”

Chapter Text

Back in Damilola’s office, she turned around the monitor of her computer to show them her inbox. “Normally, I would have just forwarded this, but it’s come with official encryption and ministerial seals. I had to get Jay to help me open it at all, let alone allow it to send back the requested read receipts.”

As Littlemore leaned forward to peer over Damilola’s shoulder, Ritesh whistled through his teeth. “Sent by the first undersecretary on behalf of the Minister for Technology – Jesus, I wish I could get some poor sod to answer my emails for me.”

“By official request, we are asking Littlemore Jones of IPRA and his direct reports to comply with any and all investigations into Eat Light Ltd. undertaken by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan of the Financial Conduct Authority, in conjunction with Jeremy Gordon at the Prudential Regulation Authority, effective immediately. Their iCalendar details are provided below, please schedule a meeting at your earliest convenience. This matter is of the highest priority, and should be actioned immediately upon receipt. Yours sincerely, etc. and so forth – oh fuck.” Littlemore clasped his hand to his forehead, rubbing at his hairline and resisting the urge to drag both of his hands down his face.

“Well.” Damilola’s tone was jaunty, but her face was impassive as granite. “We told them to use official channels, and they called our bluff. You cannot get much more official than this.”

Littlemore stepped forward. “Look, I’ll handle this. We’ll book something for this afternoon. Ritesh, you can take the monitoring van out to the mobile blackspot by the River Lee or Lea Estuary, while Xie, you go home and book an appointment with your hairdresser, get your hair dyed silver or whatever colour you like.”

Xie grinned and nodded with excitement, but Ritesh shook his head. “Wouldn’t miss this for the world, chief.”

“Lola, can you forward me the iCalendar details so I can sort it…”

Damilola shook her head and shrugged while gesturing with her hands towards her inbox. “I could barely open the thing.”

Xie stepped forwards and gestured for control of the keyboard. “Let me do it, if you don’t mind my sending the invite on your behalf?”

Damilola threw up her hands and surrendered her desk.

“Say about 4pm, to make sure everyone else has gone home? If you do not want your spooks spooking about in everyone’s *disallowed phrase* business.”

“I like your thinking, Cyborg.”

Chapter Text

Ritesh took the express lift down and went outside to smoke a cigarette. Sure, everyone in the world seemed to have either given up or switched to vaping, but something about the smell of Benson and Hedges, or maybe just the nicotine stains on his fingers reminded him so viscerally of his grandfather, the hacking cough that punctuated his eloquent streams of Gujarati-punctuated invective. His grandfather had wanted to be a poet, not a BT engineer in the early rush to cover every corner of Britain with mobile telephony, but until he retired, his poetry was confined to grandiloquent letters of complaint to the local and national newspapers, interspersed with the occasional sermonising on the joys of proletarian internationalism to any passing progeny. It was his greatest disappointment in life, that his only son had fully embraced capitalism, setting up the string of mobile phone repair shops where a preteen Ritesh had learned how to perform wonders with tiny electronic circuitry.

Smiling at the memory, Ritesh was seized with the sudden desire to walk off The Wharf, maybe catch a cargo ship and sail off into distant lands where Socialism still carried political currency. But remembering his own children still at school down in Tooting, he settled for walking to the edge of the Isle of Dogs, where he climbed the massive concrete and earth embankments that protected The Wharf from flooding, turning it into a series of lush sunken gardens at high tide.

Standing on the sea wall, he puffed at his cigarette and squinted off into the distance of what was once the East End. Huddled rookeries had given way to the bustling warehouses of the docklands, which in turn had been converted to ‘flocks of bats’ (in his grandfather’s colourful expression) for yuppies. The wealthier buildings right on the river had embanked themselves into oddly-shaped oxbow islands, sacrificing the lower floors to preserve the lifestyles of the upper floors. The council estates behind them, themselves built on the foundations of Chinese social clubs, Jewish tenements and Huguenot weavers’ studios before them, had mostly been left to drown. How much wealth had passed through this port, over the centuries, Ritesh wondered. And how little of that had made its way to the throbbing throngs of humanity that powered the wharves before the international bankers and government agencies took over.

He couldn’t even bear to look in the other direction, towards the reclaimed polder of Wood Wharf and the glittering skyscrapers that thronged Millwall docks, their growth accelerating down the Isle of Dogs as the council estates crumbled and gave in to the water, and developers snapped up the marshy land. Flatten the damp-infested estates, and they could use their bones to infill the embankments and dykes that protected the yuppie flats and rental podfarms that took their place, like brackets of fungus colonising a sodden log. He knew that Jules lived in a pod and he seemed to like it OK, though he frequently decamped to Koku’s houseboat, which must have seemed spacious by comparison. Upper management types like Littlemore and Damilola lived in proper flats in the newer towers, designer monstrosities with skypools and living walls and roofgardens, fitted with fully integrated wind, solar and tidal systems so their utilities bills were as low as their mortgages were high. Skypools, for fucks sake! He knew that only some of them were for swimming – though not, obviously, for the unlucky proles in the rental pods – and the rest were reservoirs that channelled the overspill of frequent flash floodstorms, driving the hydraulic mills that heated and cooled the climate-controlled buildings.

Ritesh took one last drag of his cigarette, then despatched the butt into the muddy Thames waters below him, secretly thrilling at how much his tiny act of littering rebellion would outrage Billy Barbel and the fucking ecofascists of eMerge. Blood and soil, my fucking arse, Ritesh thought to himself. He’s only rich because his fucking ancestors couldn’t stick to their own land, and spilled the blood and polluted the soil of every other country on earth.

When he got back to his office and switched from coffee to green tea, the email he found dropped into his inbox almost unmoored him, surprised him even more than the earlier email from the Minister for Technology.

Hey Ritesh, it’s Lo_Rez. You want to do a gig for us, tomorrow night at the Peckham Archipelago roof-garden? Like, for old times’ sake, even if you’re not down for the scene any more. You’d be the support act, on at 9pm, with a 40-minute set, but you’ve got to keep the headliner’s name on the down-low, as it’s a secret gig for them.

When he saw the name, he nearly fell off his chair, then opened up a chat window to Xie nearly as quickly as he fired off the email confirming the gig.

ritesh: hey cyborg, you doing anything tomorrow night?
xie: well I was going to spend the evening gaming
xie: but u got any better suggestions
ritesh: u wanna come to the peckham archipelago?
ritesh: I’m playing a secret last-minute gig
xie: no way! I’d love to come
xie: I’ve never been to peckham!
xie: where / when should we rendezvous?
ritesh: meet me at london bridge about 8pm
ritesh: they’re going to send a boat
xie: omg, so cool! c u there
ritesh: right, I’ll send u over the deets of the new files from ratcliffe

Chapter Text

After Ritesh zipped up the monitoring recordings from the Ratcliffe Skyway and tossed the whole batch into Xie’s folder, he opened up TweetDeck and started sifting through various channels and hashtags, looking for any intelligence on where people might be encountering Grid Hackers. It was astonishing, how often he’d been led to perfect spots to leave honeypots by outraged social media posts complaining about being ripped off.

But unfortunately, the usual hashtags were completely full of junk, mostly people speculating either on the existence of the Guardian Algorithm, or debating Eris’s shock appearance in the mass media after years of radio silence. He clicked through to a few wild conspiracy theories, the usual reality challenged conspiracy wonks trying to cite wild evidence that the real Eris had been killed by either Chinese or Russian or American Intelligence agents, and that the woman who appeared on Bloomberg that morning had been a fake, planted by whoever was secretly behind the fungal algorithm. Bloody hell, the imagination on these kooks. For a moment, he wondered what England-and-Wales would be like if all the conspiracy heads on the internet ever put their heads together and genuinely tried to improve things? Then he remembered the civil war raging across the Atlantic, the waves of right-wing American loonies storming their Capitol and running wild through the halls of government, waving semiautomatic weapons. All things considered, it was probably for the best that England’s keyboard warriors stayed behind their keyboards and off the streets.

Another trending hashtag caught Ritesh’s eye, and he clicked through to it, then instantly wished he hadn’t bothered. “Fuckin’ ‘ell, is this Stonehenge thing still going?”

Jules cocked his head and pulled out one of his earbuds. “I told you, this thing is big. Really big. This Druid character is due to walk into London this afternoon. And he’s at the head of a column of people that’s blocking the motorways for several miles in each direction. Police are estimating there’s hundreds of thousands of protesters on the move.”

“And the coppers are genuinely going to just let these fucking Gammons march straight into Westminster? During the BLM protests and the Housing Strike demos, they were charging on horseback at grandmothers, and breaking heads left, right and centre!” Ritesh picked up his own headphones and started searching through social media for videos. “You got a live feed on it?”

“BBC’s got a couple of drones up – check your socials, it’s all over.”

Ritesh opened up his newsfeed and a page of interactive videos popped up. He selected one from the front of the march, and zoomed in on the lead Druid, his long white beard flapping in the wind as he plodded on with the determination of a small dog shepherding a vast flock of sheep. And at his back, there were people. Thousands upon thousands of people. To Ritesh’s surprise, most of them weren’t even Gammon, they were just… ordinary white folks who looked fed up and beaten down. And not only white folks – to his astonishment there were a smattering of black and brown faces shot through the crowd, not even the usual protesters he recognised from BLM protests and housing strikes, but just everyday people, plodding up the A4 for miles and miles behind the druid, snaking all the way from Brentford to Hammersmith.

“Is this what it takes?” Ritesh’s voice was almost a snarl, the disbelief rising as he clicked through to a different camera. “Is this what it fucking takes, to get the fucking English marching in the streets? Not the total dismantling of the social welfare system, not the mass selloff of council houses, not the wholesale farming out of the NHS to American firms, not Brexit, not the food shortages, the petrol shortages, not the hostile environment, the Windrush scandals, not the death of millions of the elderly from the covid plagues, or the disabled from benefits cuts? But a pile of fucking stones falls down in Wiltshire, and then, the fucking English fucking take to the streets?”

“You have missed so much, mate.” Jules flicked back and forth between the BBC and his google newsfeed. “They haven’t even held the inquest yet – they’re only taking evidence about whether there even needs to be an inquest right now, and they’re just… the level of corruption and graft is just… just…”

Jay popped up above her monitors and shook her head, flicking back and forth between her own google newsfeed, Darkweb and the lively debates going back and forth on England-and-Wales Politics Reddit. “What do you expect from Tories? The Establishment are the biggest, dirtiest gang of them all.”

Jules carried on, steadily trying to catch Ritesh up. “First, they found out that the Managing Director of the company hired to do the construction is the first cousin of the Minister for Transport.”

“Bloody told you it would be Tory fucking corruption,” Ritesh nearly exploded. “What – last week I told you that?”

“There wasn’t a tender, there wasn’t even a call for bids – the quote was absurdly inflated, and they’re now two years and several hundred million pounds over budget. Then, it transpired that the bloke who signed off on the whole project…”

 Ritesh snorted. “The fucker who blatantly ignored the UNESCO directive to stop the project in the first place?”

“Not only is he on the board of that construction company and a major shareholder who has regularly been paying himself 6-digit dividends every time he needs a new wing on his mansion.” Jules widened his eyes for the kicker. “He is actually married to PM Morgan’s sister.”

“No way! You got a link?”

“Look it up, it’s all over the Guardian and the Telegraph.”

“What? Where?” Ritesh tabbed back and forth through his newsfeed, which he had ruthlessly pruned to try to keep free of this collapsed stone thing, looking for links to catch up the past week’s nonsense.

“Quiet, they’re calling the vote in the House right now.” Jules was paying such rapt attention to the video stream that he was practically resting his eyeballs on the screen.

“For the inquest?”

“No, they’ve just called a vote of No Confidence.”

Even Littlemore turned around at that. “What, Labour have finally found a spine?”

“No, it was actually the Tories who called the vote.” Jules’ whole face formed a perfect O of astonishment.

“I’m trying to find it!” Ritesh gave up on trying to keep his newsfeed clean, and went up to Settings to remove all of his filters. A rush of stories immediately flooded his browser. ‘Government Graft Reaches Epic Levels!’ and ‘Tories On The Ropes At Last!’ The entire office seemed to have given up on working, as 50 different newsfeeds flickered across 50 different monitors, flipping back and forth between the BBC live cameras, the Socials and personalised Meta-newsfeeds.

There was a tense fifteen minutes as the votes were cast, then counted and recounted and disputed and re-tabulated, but none of them moved. Labour had voted as a block, as had Plaid Cymru, while the Lib-Greens went the other way. But the Tories had a free vote, and they were hopelessly split. At the end of a long huddle, the speaker came out and announced that there were 322 Ayes and 322 Nos.

“Deadlock,” whispered Jules.

“322 to 322?” Ritesh’s face was dumbfounded.

“They can just do the vote over again,” said Littlemore, his voice wavering. “Can’t they?”

“Don’t think they’d get a different vote, even if they did.” Jay scowled at the screen in front of her, her fingers pounding away furiously on Darkweb as she talked.

‘Prime Minister fronts it out,’ declared The Telegraph’s headline in Littlemore’s newsfeed. ‘The vote has been inconclusive, and therefore legally, Morgan remains in power. Trading is brisk on the Stock Exchange, but so far the Markets have held. The Markets remain in favour of Morgan’s strong pro-business stance.’

‘The shouts and the grumbles from the back benches almost shook the walls of the chamber,’ reported the trending amalgamation-bot of Ritesh’s Socials. ‘The critically damaged Morgan and the leader of the rebel Tories are locked in a childish slanging match, hurling schoolboy insults back and forth at one another.’

‘A scuffle has broken out amidst the Tory backbenchers,’ posted one of Jay’s friends on Reddit, accompanied by a couple of fighting memes. ‘Fists flying like a fucking Beano cartoon!’

Littlemore’s Bloomberg feed reported Morgan holding control. ‘Security quickly rushed in to break up the frank exchange of views, separating the offending parties. With cooler heads prevailing, the brief Market plunge appears to have been halted.’

Jules started to giggle as Owain Geraint Lloyd’s popular leftist YouTube stream provided running commentary on the scene. ‘The minute Security let go of their arms, the red-faced Tory MPs rushed back into the scrum like drunken rugby players itching for a brawl.’

Xie was leaking sound from xir feed, because a woman’s voice rang out across the office, loud and clear. “Oh, for crying out loud. Can not a single one of you stuffed shirts do anything properly?”

It was hard to see through the scrum of scuffling Tories on Parliament’s live camera, but out of nowhere, a statuesque Black woman with long, braided hair marched up to the front of the chamber and seized the Ceremonial Mace from its traditional resting place. Ritesh recognised her immediately – it was the MP whose son had been stopped on the Ratcliffe Skyway. While security were still detained, trying to tame the Tory free-for-all, she met up with two other Labour MPs from the decimated left wing of the party, both of them middle-aged Black women, one tall, one short, with similar braided hairstyles. For a moment, they conferred quietly among themselves, then they picked up the mace, and walked out of the chamber together, with it held aloft above their heads.

For a few minutes, the cameras lost their image, as the BBC commentators squabbled among themselves as to what had just happened.

“The Member for Streatham, has taken the Mace and… No, I’m sorry?”

“The Member for Battersea has taken – excuse me?”

“No, it appears that the Member for Brent has… hang on?”

Ritesh cackled like a sick duck. “Gonna be really hard for the Labour Whip to sanction the right MP when even the BBC can’t tell Black folks apart.”

‘The Markets are in chaos at this sudden incursion of naked socialist insurrection,’ brayed Littlemore’s Bloomberg.

‘The Three Black Queens have seized the day, taking control of a corrupt and disempowered Parliament,’ crowed a popular BLM blogger via Ritesh’s amalgamation-bot.

‘The woke mob are taking over,’ bayed a Twitch gamer cosplaying an orc, as he swung a sim-mace across Jay’s monitor. ‘These three women have consistently voted against our most carefully guarded freedoms – voting for academic censorship, against free speech and to assert state control over our crucial freedom of the press!’

The BBC cameras caught up with the women as they emerged from the building, and as the drone camera zoomed in on them, Ritesh could see that they were shaking, though with laughter or fear, it was hard to tell.

It was low tide, and the flood defences were all down, so the bridges were open, and Parliament Square was mobbed with tourists. On one side was a busload of schoolkids, down for an educational trip. On the other was the usual ragtag rabble of protesters, mostly eMerge and a couple of BLM. As the three women walked out into the square, stopping traffic as they went, about half a dozen armed policemen appeared from round the corner, and trained their guns on the MPs. For a horrible half a minute, there was a standoff, as the women stood their ground, and the cops inched closer.

‘Shoot the insurrectionists! Save our sovereignty from foreign influence!’ demanded the cosplaying orc from Jay’s browser. ‘We cannot allow mob rule of The Woke to dictate our parliament!”

Ritesh’s amalgamation-bot flooded with statistics on police violence. ‘These Labour MPs have been warning us for years about the dangers of increasing police powers, voting against arming police officers in the wake of the 2026 riots. One police officer was slain and seven were injured in the Tottenham Housing Strikes, yet since the emergency measures have become permanent, police shootings of unarmed civilians have shot up 400%, with many BAME communities demonstrating evidence that we live in a state of constant terror and surveillance…’

‘The Markets are jittery, they do not like the uncertainty of this challenge to the vote’s clear results, though stocks in Home Security and Defence Systems do appear to be bucking the general downward trend,’ droned Littlemore’s Bloomberg.

In Parliament Square, there was a sudden surge of children, as their teachers, not understanding what was going on, led them across the road, towards the MPs and straight into the sights of the police riflemen. To everyone’s astonishment, the police lowered their weapons and fell back. The MPs advanced, three women, their braids loose and their summer dresses flapping in the river breeze, walking into the teeth of a posse of armed men, with nothing but a silver-plated stick for defence.

And then the throng of schoolkids started to follow them up Whitehall. (Their teachers would later swear under oath that they did not understand that this was an insurrection – they had been under the misguided impression that it was some ceremonial procession as traditional and educational as the Changing of the Guard.) Behind the schoolkids, came the protesters, gathering numbers as they advanced up Whitehall and passed Downing Street. Behind the mass of MPs, schoolkids and protesters, a crowd of rubbernecking tourists started to bring up the rear, their numbers swelling the closer they got to Trafalgar Square.

‘Armed insurrection in the streets!’ howled Jay’s filter bubble.

‘The Markets in chaos,’ declared Littlemore’s filter bubble.

‘Parliamentary democracy has never worked for the oppressed, it is merely a distraction – direct action is the only way forwards. Will this message finally get through to supporters of Labour?’ warned Ritesh’s filter bubble.

‘Are these women able to put aside their tribal Left-Wing ideology and appeal to the concerns of the broader base of eMerge’s vast citizenry?’ wondered Jules’ filter bubble.

‘Party politics is so boring; we should be saving the planet!’ commented a popular Nature Instagrammer, to universal derision, on Xie’s Socials.

When the procession reached Trafalgar Square, they found a solid wall of double-decker buses, as police hastily tried to route cars and public transport away from Whitehall, to stop any more people from joining the crowd. From Pall Mall to the Strand, traffic was absolutely chock-a-block. For a few minutes, the MPs conferred among themselves, then they changed direction, and made for the Mall. Unfortunately, that meant they had to get through Admiralty Arch first. The private security company that looked after the luxury billionaire’s flats in the Arch, faced with the swelling mass of protesters and schoolchildren, panicked and shut the ornamental gates, then withdrew to the little fortified huts on either side.

For about ten minutes, the whole crowd reached a standstill, though the mob was steadily growing and growing. A general party atmosphere prevailed, bank holiday revellers and early drinkers keeping the mood light as the schoolkids hauled out their mobiles to blast the latest pop anthems, and people started to dance in the middle of Whitehall. It was hard to see what was happening in the crowd, but it seemed like a couple of black cabs nosed their way forward to try to break through the gates. Their engines roared. The gates creaked and groaned, but held steady. Someone in the back of the crowd started yelling “Here we go, here we go – Push! Push!” to the tune of a football chant. The crowd surged forwards and threw their weight behind the cabs. A horrible, sickening squeal of wrenching metal, and the gates gave way, the taxis roaring off in a cloud of dust.

The crowd surged through the breach, and a strange procession made its way towards Buckingham Palace. An advance guard of furious, speeding taxi drivers, three slightly bewildered MPs clutching a silver mace, and a crowd of schoolkids followed by a swelling mass of protesters and tourists, dancing to a samba band who had been performing for tourists in Saint James Park, before picking up and following the procession down the Mall.

As the MPs grew closer to the palace, the drones lifted up higher into the sky, to show the gathering crowds joining the throng. Then one of the other drones zoomed in on Green Park. From the opposite direction, the Druid and his small gang of bards had reached the bottom of Park Lane and were surging up Constitution Hill, with three miles of protesters behind them. The police had been putting up a limp attempt at trying to divert them or turn them back, but there were simply too many people to kettle. When they tried to shut the main road, the mass of people flowed like water down the side streets and reconvened on the other side of them.

The two demonstrations ran into one another by the fountains where the Mall met Green Park. The Druid, in his long, mud-spattered robes, stepped forward towards the three MPs, still holding the ceremonial mace, and bowed deeply, holding out his hand towards them in greeting. For a moment, the women appeared a little taken aback, but after exchanging glances, they looked, frankly, quite glad to be rid of the thing, and handed it over with a collective nod.

Police were lined up two or three deep outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, but the druid approached, the MPs a few steps behind him. Everyone waited for him to speak, but after a week of marching, his face appeared tired and weak. He licked his lips, cleared his throat and asked for water, then fell silent – as if now the moment had come, and they had attained their goal, he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it.

As the Druid hesitated, the BBC switched back to the House of Commons, where order had been more or less restored, and another vote was being called.

“Those bastards – what, now the left wing of Labour have left, they think they’re going to win the vote 322-319?” Ritesh sputtered.

“Wait, wait, something’s happening at the Palace!” Jules angled the monitor better and turned the volume up, but the entire office was glued to their own screens. His display was now showing a close-up of the windows of Buckingham Palace, where shadowy people appeared to be watching from behind the curtains.

‘Do they genuinely believe that The Royal Family can sort this out?’ exploded Ritesh’s feed. ‘They should be erecting guillotines in the streets!’

‘Just like The Left,’ sneered Jay’s feed. ‘Appeal To Authority fallacy, instead of ever allowing rational debate to settle the matter logically.’

‘Can the Monarchy legally intervene in parliament? We speak to three experts on the reign of King William,’ interrupted a panel of academics on Jules’ feed.

The reporter on Littlemore’s feed was shouting, one finger on her earpiece. ‘This is sheer chaos, we need a resolution on the parliamentary crisis immediately, as the Markets are revolting, demanding a strong and stable government!’

’15 vintage tracks about the Royals, from the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen through the Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead, all the way up to Bomb Bass Tick’s Lizzie Ain’t Sh*t and Area Man’s Buckingham Riots (Squat the Lot) on Spotify Trends now,’ offered Xie’s Socials over the juddering Hyperlife beat of Bomb Bass Tick.

The druid stepped forward and raised the mace. For a moment, he held it high above his head, glinting in the sunlight, then he grasped it with both hands, and brought it down with surprising force, breaking it across his knee. The ancient, dry wood splintered with an almighty crash, and a few metallic clangs as bits of silver fell off it and rolled around in the gravel.

“Your majesty!” The druid’s voice was raw, little more than the shriek of an angry magpie as he held aloft the splinters and chucked them about. “The monarch still retains the right to dissolve parliament! We, the people, request parliament be dissolved.”

“That can’t be legal,” muttered Ritesh.

Abruptly, the BBC cut back to the House of Commons, where shocked MPs were gathering in clumps, some of them still shaking their fists threateningly at one another. “In a shock reversal, the vote seems to have shifted. Although the government had been hoping to win by the narrowest of margins, it appears that over a hundred Tories have shifted their vote. The rebels have reached their supermajority, as it seems that over two thirds of the House have voted against the Government, and the No Confidence vote has passed.”

“Alright,” conceded Ritesh. “That’s legal.”

“Without the Mace?” piped up Littlemore. “I mean, if you want to be technical, is Parliament even still legally in session without the Mace present?”

‘A new dawn,’ declared Owain Geraint Lloyd’s YouTube channel. ‘England is ours! Our time is now!’

‘The Markets have spoken!’ the woman on Bloomberg almost screamed. ‘The Markets demand a new government!’

‘Right, lads!’ roared the cosplay orc in a scary death-metal voice. ‘Now is the time to fuck shit up!’

All at once, the office exploded into chatter, as dozens of colleagues released their collectively held breaths and started to argue about what it all meant.

And then Damilola appeared at the door to the C-Suite, her authoritative voice booming across the room. “Alright, you lot. Parliament has been dissolved. We have no government. There’s a mob of protesters camped the entire length of Hyde Park. And you are now free to finish up whatever you’re doing, log off, and go home to enjoy your bank holiday.”

As a cheer went up around the office, Littlemore groaned audibly. “All except nubbins here, who stupidly agreed to meet with Richard and Judy from the Financial Conduct Authority at 4 this afternoon.”

Chapter Text

This time, the alert from the front door pinged in Littlemore’s headphones, and flashed across the bottom of his monitor. He glanced around the office, but it was deserted except for Ritesh and Jay, elbows deep in a second-hand power cell, pulling out its innards to scrub their branding and rewire them to pose as a Voltvo, an Ampre, a Tesla or whatever might be required.

“Alright, alright, I’ll get it,” Littlemore grumbled as he unplugged from his computer and stumbled to his feet, but Jay was already headed for the door.

“No, I’ll get it,” she chirped with a cheeky smile.

“Oh no – I’m not letting you anywhere near our spooks. And no, before you ask, no, you are not coming to the meeting.”

Jay’s face creased with disappointment. “Oh, come on. Why does Ritesh get to meet the spooks and I don’t? I’ve been dying to ask them all about TEMPORA, Palantir, Project Echelon, and all that.”

“That!” Littlemore gestured towards the vintage I Want To Believe poster on the wall by Jay’s desk. “Is exactly why you’re not meeting them.”

“Oh, please. I promise I won’t say anything, then.” Jay’s begging face formed a perfect facsimile of the I Can Has Cheezburger cat. “All I’ll do is listen. Come on, you know they’re crawling with surveillance and info gathering and voice scans and ID prints and all. Don’t you want a little backup on our side?” She stalked back to her desk, and lifted a tiny infocrawler smaller than the size of his little toenail.

Littlemore shifted his weight carefully from foot to foot. She was right, of course. Paranoid as a loon, in the way that only Gen Xers of the last truly pre-internet generation could be, but usually right. “Alright. But one word about Q-Anon, or MK Ultra, or Pizzagate, or any of that kooky conspiracy stuff, and you’re out. Immediately. Do you understand?”

“I promise, boss.” Jay opened all the drawers of her desk and immediately started filling her pockets with bugs and wires and infocrawlers and spy cameras. “You know, we really should get a Faraday Chamber installed on the premises, if we’re going to have meetings like this on the regular.”

“We cannot afford to get a Faraday Chamber,” Littlemore sighed as he led Ritesh and Jay down the hall to admit the spooks.

The pair of them filed in and looked about, somewhat disappointed with the welcoming party. Neither team offered to shake hands.

“Where’s the younger one with the…” Richard gestured towards his head, making the circling gesture that usually implied insanity.

“Implants,” completed Judy. “The ambigender pattern sensitive with the implants.”

Someone had clearly done her research. “Xie had an emergency hairdresser’s appointment and could not make it,” Littlemore supplied, and noted the disgruntled annoyance of the visitors with a twinge of triumph.

He savoured his brief victory as he funnelled them through into the conference room. It had the best view, south across the floodlands, shining and oddly golden in the late afternoon sun, to the ridge of Crystal Palace, with the misty North Downs rising behind. It also had one solid wall of touch-sensitive conference monitor, which Jay had surreptitiously set to record the entire meeting in Hi-D.

Richard looked around the room, his digital glasses flickering and faintly clicking as he scanned, until his gaze came to rest on the conference monitor. “Ah.” Reaching down, he picked up his briefcase, then opened it and laid it flat on the coffee-ringed conference table. He extracted a fist-sized matte white cube, and placed it on the table between them. Then, flicking his hand over it twice in quick succession until it lit up with a faint glow, he closed the briefcase again. “There, that’s better.”

“Hey!” yelped Jay, pulling the earpiece out of her left ear. In her cargo pants pocket, the tiny infocrawler mewled and bleated like a lamb that had lost its mother, until she extracted it from her pocket and flicked it off.

“We think it would be better for everyone involved if this conversation were not overheard, don’t you agree?” said Judy.

“Alright then.” Jay pointed across the table at their faces. “But you have to remove the glasses.” The two agents blinked purposefully, twitched their cheeks, then shrugged and removed the glasses, folding them and placing them in the briefcase. “And the dropstick.” Jay’s eyes flicked to the bulge in Richard’s jacket.

“It’s not a dropstick.” Gingerly, Richard extracted a long, flat tube of brushed metal, covered with tiny buttons and dials at one end, glowing faintly at the other. He passed his hand twice over the glowing tip with the same gesture, then placed it, too, into the briefcase and locked it. “But as you will, if it will inspire confidence.”

Littlemore felt his neck prickle with annoyance. “It would inspire more confidence if you had chosen a more above-board method of attempting to contact my staff in the first place.” He raised his eyebrows and looked over at Jay.

Jay met his gaze and flashed him back the briefest of smiles, gently massaging something in her hip pocket, hoping that he understood the gesture. The last of her gadgets was an antique from the DDR era, no electronics, no internet connectivity, and the bloody thing still used magnetic tape, which was getting harder and harder to source since the brief ‘00s fashion for cassette only labels had passed. But it was still ticking away, running and recording while every other piece of 5G electronics in the room had been reduced to an expensive paperweight.

“We seem to have got off on the wrong foot here. I’m Richard, and this is my colleague, Judy. Believe it or not, we honestly want to help. We initially thought that our investigations might be related – but when we saw your monitoring evidence from the Deptford Narrows, we were certain. To be perfectly frank, we’re slightly disappointed that you chose to share your information so publicly with Kaspersky, rather than coming to us. At the Financial Conduct Authority.” He said the words delicately, like a piece of gristle he had stuck in his teeth, rather than the casual ease of someone who used it every day.

“It wasn’t our decision to make the spook public,” grumbled Ritesh. Jay noted that Judy winced slightly at the word ‘spook’. Interesting. “But we have a long and fruitful working relationship with Kaspersky Labs. We’ve built up the trust to share intelligence.”

“OK.” Judy nodded her head and leaned forwards like a CAMHS counsellor trying to build up rapport with a sulky teenage malcontent. “We had actually hoped to pool our intelligence with you. As you say, share. Perhaps it would help if we put our own cards on the table. Richard, would you like to run the simulation we’ve been working on at the FCA?”

Jay narrowed her eyes at the spooks. If they were FCA, she was a virgin catholic saint, but she remembered her deal with Littlemore and kept her mouth shut.

Richard reached for the briefcase again, but this time, he turned it over, and unclipped something so that the whole side popped up and sprang to life in glowing LCD. He tapped the screen in a few places, and tabbed through some menus too fast for her to catch any of the options, then loaded the data viz.

“Does this look at all familiar to you?”

A grid appeared, with several brightly coloured perpendicular ribbons growing at various rates from bottom to top. But at one end, the bright red ribbon started winding round and round in a distinct circling motion. Soon enough, it touched one of the other bands, and then the filigree wormfingers appeared, growing from the tips and working their way into the blue band, entwining it completely before leaping to the purple band on the other side.

“Oh yes.” Ritesh whistled as he leaned forwards. “Nodal growth, like a fungus. We are very familiar with this pattern now. Where’d you get this one?”

Richard and Judy’s eyes drifted towards one another, but without the digital glasses, she had to physically nod at him, a faint gesture that would have been easy to miss had Jay not been staring at them like a hawk, barely daring to blink.

“Now this is completely confidential data, that cannot leave this office. But this is some data that the FCA had to subpoena from the London Stock Exchange’s Dark Pool.”

Jay’s eyes grew huge, but Littlemore’s face was a perfect blank. Oh god, was he really going to do it, was he actually going to play the idiot routine with these hypertrained spooks?

“Dark Pool?” said Littlemore and cocked his head to one side like an expectant spaniel. “I’m not familiar with, erm, the terminology you use over at Prudential Regulation?”

Oh my god, he really was going for it. It was genuinely staggering how effective it was, time and again. She’d been working with Littlemore for over a decade, and she knew he was no fool – he had a highly trained, sensitive mind that easily grasped very technical data at speed. But something about his big, round, honest baby face, the cultivated slovenliness of his business casual dress and the dishevelled brown hair that sprouted in fine tufts from around his receding hairline triggered something atavistic in other people, especially smart, slightly arrogant, techies, overconfident in their technical brilliance, to go ahead and mansplain their entire fiendish plans to him.

Jay could never get away with it. She’d tried once or twice, but when she pulled the idiot routine, techies just treated her like a girl, and therefore an actual idiot. Maybe it wasn’t so fun, pontificating at someone who couldn’t even be expected to understand. Or maybe there was some arrogant streak in Jay herself, that she couldn’t stand even to be mistaken for a fool. But Littlemore, it was genuinely impressive to watch him work, pretending that he seriously couldn’t comprehend something as basic as, like… email.

Xie fell for it every time, to the point where Jay almost felt sorry for the kid. Littlemore would produce some massive, impossible dataset, make a purposefully pathetic stab at a rubbish pivot table, with an expectant little “I’ve probably got this all wrong, because I suck at maths, but you’re much smarter than me, maybe you can work it out…” And Xie would give an exasperated sigh at his total wrongness, then go off and do the whole analysis xirself.

But the taller spook, Richard, was staring back at Littlemore as if trying to figure him out. Maybe he’d noticed the deliberate slip in his agency’s name, but neither spook had reacted even slightly. Jay could see one of the muscles of his cheek twitching, as if he were trying to launch something on the digital glasses, and he couldn’t quite make decisions without them. But Littlemore just stared blankly back at him across the table, not breaking character, even for a moment. The whole encounter was over in less than five seconds, but Jay could not believe it – the hypertrained spook actually rolled his eyes and started to explain the Dark Pool to them.

And it was in the details, that he tripped himself up. He didn’t explain a Dark Pool the way that a banker would explain one, or even someone from the FCA, emphasising the speed, the volume of trading, the algorithmic trickery, the lack of transparent oversight that meant constantly brushing up against, if not actual outright circumnavigation of the laws governing financial manipulation to bring in enormous though unconventional profits. No, he explained the Dark Pool the way someone from Signals Intelligence would explain a Dark Pool, concentrating on its anonymity, its utter opacity to surveillance, the layers of cutting-edge cybersecurity and discreet gentleman’s handshake trust that kept the Dark Pool’s secrecy absolute.

Jay looked over at Littlemore, flashing him a brief grin at his mastery. For a second, a wolfish smirk hovered at the edge of his politely interested smile, but he still did not break character.

“I see,” Littlemore finally said, and gave them a grateful grin. The thin line of Richard’s mouth finally cracked into a faint smile of pleasure at his own competence. “It certainly does look like our strange ‘guardian algorithm’ entity from The Grid.”

Judy looked at him evenly. “Then you agree, it looks like we’re working on two ends of the same investigation.”

Littlemore stroked his beard stubble as if deep in thought. “This turbulence in the Dark Pool. You don’t think it’s related to the recent trouble in the Asian Markets? There’s been a ton of stuff going on, over there, from the Siberian Petrostates to the whole business with Barbel Industries?”

Judy’s face twitched again. “The timing is wrong. We actually obtained this information before Barbel attempted to trigger the run on the Asian Stock Markets.”

“Allegedly,” corrected Richard carefully. “Allegedly attempted.”

“Have you questioned Barbel over his role in this?” Littlemore’s face was a little too eager, so he added, “I lost quite a chunk of investment in Barbel’s stunt.”

Richard and Judy’s heads swerved towards one another like a pair of dancing snakes, as he caught her subtle nod. “We intercepted Barbel’s ioncopter last night, on his way out from the Wharf to a yacht he has moored out in international waters. He was kind enough to join us for a few hours of questioning, before his lawyers interceded.” Richard’s grin was almost wolfish; he clearly enjoyed his job.

But across the table, Ritesh’s eyes widened. If these spooks could just casually ‘intercept’ a seemingly untouchable billionaire like Billy Barbel…

“Unfortunately, Barbel managed to recuse himself from our investigation fairly quickly.” Judy looked positively disappointed.

“But we all saw him inciting a short on his own stock, live on Bloomberg,” Ritesh protested.

“Ah, no, not the stock market manipulation thing. He’s still under investigation for that, by our colleagues at the FCA,” Richard shrugged casually, as if financial malfeasance were a mere afterthought, rather than an FCA agent’s fulltime job to prevent.

Judy nodded in agreement. “Despite Barbel’s representation of himself as a tech wonderkid, we tested him quite extensively, and he does not have the specific programming skills necessary for the particular piece of evidence we are investigating.”

“Meaning what?” Littlemore hit them with his very best blank look. “What kind of programming skills are we looking for?”

Ritesh cast an amused look at Littlemore’s blank expression and raised an eyebrow. “After all, the most skilled people can easily fake a lack of knowledge.”

“The test,” announced Judy jauntily. “Was not optional. Let’s put it this way. Barbel could not produce a single line of machine code, were his life dependant on it.” She looked around the table, beaming with a professional pride that made Jay’s blood run cold, before deftly changing the subject. “Was the pattern sensitive able to make any headway with those five terabytes of Grid data?”

“Xie?” corrected Littlemore gently. “Ritesh, do you still have Xie’s data viz on your laptop?”

“It’s lucky that I do, since I can’t connect to the Wi-Fi to download another copy.” Ritesh threw a pointed glance at the glowing white cube as he opened a presentation laptop.

Jay was about to protest that there was a free ethernet cable already sticking up through the spaghetti junction in the centre of the conference table, when she twigged that there was probably a reason he hadn’t brought his own beloved monitoring Hackintosh.

As he opened up the data viz package and started to run Xie’s animation, both of the spooks sat forward in their chairs, their facial muscles twitching like a pair of nervous rabbits. As the red blobs appeared, and the root-tips extended, connecting and layering together in the now-familiar filigree pattern, they both nodded excitedly.

“Impressive,” said Judy.

“The data signatures match, don’t they?” said Richard.

“Well, they certainly look like they do, but we’d need your data to be sure,” Ritesh shot back, like returning a tennis serve.

“We were hoping that you could share your Grid data with us,” Judy flipped back to him. “After all, this is confidential information obtained with a subpoena.”

“Well, we certainly can’t store five terabytes of data on an old Dell like this.” The conversational tennis ball bounced back across the table as Ritesh gestured towards the laptop.

Littlemore stepped in like an umpire to end the match. “In fact, we did not store five terabytes of data on our cloud servers any longer than we had to. I made Xie purge the files after your last visit flagged up the security risk of storing so much sensitive personal data.”

“Not to mention the cloud storage fees if we go over our contracted limit,” Jay completed. Littlemore was always going off on one if she left too many terabytes of bootlegged HD videos lying around on the network.

“Well, you could surely obtain some more, from the same source? We would happily pay your excess data fees, if you could share your intelligence with us,” suggested Judy.

Richard nodded. “We would, indeed, be quite happy to help you download a much smaller dataset, say only the London cluster, for the past few weeks.”

“We’d love to… but we can’t.” Littlemore smiled placidly, spreading his fingers across the table in apology.

Jay caught on fast, nodding in agreement. “We’d need Xie for that.”

“The pattern sensitive?” Judy looked confused. “But surely IPRA has the access codes, the protocols to connect.”

“To be honest, I’m surprised that the Prudential Regulation Authority doesn’t have them,” Ritesh pointed out.

Judy’s eyes flickered as if checking for data packets that currently weren’t there, then panicked for a moment as if realising she would have to improvise. “The Prudential Regulation Authority regulates banks and trading exchanges. IPRA regulates internet payment systems. The Grid is, technically, an internet payment system.”

“You don’t regulate it,” said Littlemore, raising an eyebrow.

“We don’t regulate it,” conceded Judy blithely. “But that information, from the pattern sensitive’s data viz, that would be extremely useful information for us to have. If you shared your access codes, your protocols, we could quickly nip in ourselves and capture the data without troubling your cloud storage limits?”

“You can’t.” Littlemore shook his head sadly. “You’d need Xie.”

“They’re hardcoded to the pattern sensitive’s biometrics?” Judy and Richard locked eyes again, and even without a data packet exchange, the glint of steel in her wolfish smile scared Jay enough to leap in, lest Xie end up in hospital, missing a hand or a retina or something, on account of Littlemore’s little white lie.

“No. You need implants to access The Grid’s back end.”

Richard’s face started twitching, the muscles of his cheek crinkling almost subconsciously before he seemed to realise that his glasses were no longer there, and he could neither check the information nor schedule an appointment with a neurosurgeon to get implants of his own. The slightly lost look of confusion and dismay reminded Jay distinctly of the expression that Xie made when xir implants were turned off, as if without his glasses, he was as disabled as xie.

But Judy seemed to adapt faster to life without cybernetic enhancements. “Well, perhaps you could provide us with one particular piece of information that we are lacking.”

“Any way we can help?” offered Littlemore.

“The device that Light Eaters Ltd. used to register with the web. They’d have had a smartphone, a 5G enabled car, a battery farm – anything with a registered SIM?”

Littlemore and Ritesh exchanged heavy glances, before Littlemore finally nodded. Now that was news to Jay – usually a piece of information like that would have shot through the whole team at light speed. It was unlike Ritesh to hold back on information so crucial to an investigation, if he had it.

“It was a smartphone.” Rubbing his hands together, Ritesh lowered his gaze to the laptop, where Xie’s data viz of the payment cascade was playing over and over on a loop. “The smartphone itself, an early 5G model, was bought in London about seven years ago, by Eris Bianjie.”

Jay attempted to contain her surprise, while across the table, the smug expressions seemed to indicate that Ritesh had just confirmed a hunch.

“And the SIM?” asked Judy.

Ritesh wrung his hands, rubbing his palms back and forth against one another. “Still using the original SIM that came with the phone plan. The contract is paid by The Grid.” A pause as the spooks looked at one another triumphantly. “However, BT told us that the plan hasn’t been upgraded in about 6 years. They’ve tried to contact the billpayer multiple times, to move them onto a more modern plan, but the contact email is outdated, and they have not successfully been able to contact the phone operator.”

“True.” Jay found herself leaping in to defend Eris, or at least Xie’s and Jules’ fannish image of her. “I mean, IPRA probably has about 300 smartphones registered to our account, and the paperwork will say that either Littlemore or myself bought the devices. But that doesn’t mean that we are the ones who use them.” She swallowed nervously, suddenly realising how much that left her exposed, if any of the monitoring phones were ever caught doing something not entirely legal. “Anyway, why would Eris Bianjie want to rip off her own system?

“Why would Billy Barbel want to crash his own stock?” Littlemore countered.

Now Jay was grasping at straws. “Maybe it was a test of some kind. Those guardian algorithms she was talking about.”

“Indeed,” mused Judy, scratching at the side of her temple since she clearly couldn’t tap the commands on her glasses.

Richard had turned the briefcase’s screen around to face him, and was tapping away at it as if taking notes manually. “That is very useful information, though. We’ve been looking to speak to Eris Bianjie for some time, but unfortunately we have no jurisdiction or information-sharing protocols for the Independent Commune of Green-Berlin.”

Littlemore leaned forward and rested his chin on his elbows. “Is she a suspect? Do you have anything else connecting this to Ms Bianjie?”

Richard and Judy did the swivelling head thing again and strained eyebrows went up and down mechanically, before Richard spoke again. “Well, she is still a Chinese national. We can never quite be sure where her sympathies truly lie.”

“In what way?” There was a slight flicker across Ritesh’s jaw as he spoke, but he kept his tone guarded.

Judy folded her hands delicately. “It doesn’t strike you as odd, that the US moved to ban Chinese corporations like Huawei from investing in American 5G technology, since it was clear they posed a security risk. There were legitimate concerns about granting backdoor access to the Chinese government. And yet the UK welcomed a Chinese national to develop their 5G infrastructure?”

Jay had to stifle the urge to leap in and ask why they were so unconcerned about the American government having backdoor access to platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp, but she had promised Littlemore she would behave. And she would. But she thought it; she thought it really hard at the faint tanline of the digital glasses above Judy’s eyebrows.

Littlemore shrugged against Jay’s silence and Ritesh’s glower. “She worked for the British before. As the lead developer of Picosoft’s electronic trading platform for the London Stock Exchange. It’s supposed to be one of the most secure, robust applications in the world.”

“Well, it’s Linux, isn’t it?” Jay blurted out before she could stop herself, because she was concentrating so hard on not blurting out the other thing, the thing she was not supposed to say. “Of course it’s secure.”

Littlemore glanced at her and smiled, and she hoped he was noticing her self-control. “It’s notoriously robust. Reputably uncrackable, and trust me, people have tried. Many of the biggest banking institutions in the world use that software, every day. And banks are particularly paranoid institutions when it comes to security. If she wasn’t trustworthy, if she hadn’t come with the highest security clearances, the London Stock Exchange would never have used her.”

Judy narrowed her eyes as Richard stopped typing into the touchscreen. “Bianjie keeps a great many Chinese contacts, she has multiple financial stakes in Chinese technology businesses. In fact, she has a great many interests in Chinese businesses currently investing in Siberia.”

“Well, I’m not surprised.” Jay cocked her head as she considered Judy. “The Grid is one of the foremost drivers of green technology. Siberia has the world’s largest deposits of mineral lithium, the principal ingredient in green battery manufacture. It’s hardly a mystery why she would have investments in Siberia.”

“China’s investment in the Siberian Petrostates is far from neutral,” Richard interrupted, in that self-important explaining tone that interrupting men seemed to have down to a fine art. “Do you remember, at the beginning of the 21^st Century, Siberian Secession was not even on the radar. It was an idea that had not been seriously mooted since the Russian Revolution. Up until about fifteen years ago, Siberia was so thoroughly Russian that many Siberians joked about moving the capital of Russia from Moscow to Novosibirsk to reflect the importance of Siberian petrochemicals to the Russian Economy. Now, China was not that interested in petrochemicals, give or take few trade agreements with Russia over provision of natural gas supplies, as China was trying to phase out coal and other dirty fossil fuels. For the past three decades, China has been throwing all of their investment money at green energy infrastructure development. Recently, they have pulled miles ahead of us, in terms of wind, hydroelectric, and in particular battery storage technology. Electrics was where China’s interests lay, not in Siberia’s oil and gas. But as soon as the Chukotka-Kamchatka Lithium Fields were discovered, overnight, China developed an interest in the Far East of Siberia.”

“Understandable, but where are you going with this? Everyone knows that Siberia seceded because of the West’s response to Russia fucking about in Crimea. Oiligarchs making massive money from Siberian petroproducts didn’t want their lucrative business disrupted by the West’s financial sanctions,” Jay countered, with the certainty of a woman who had spent a good part of the morning reading Siberian conspiracy theory sites on Darkweb.

Richard tented his fingers and looked across the table with the slightly supercilious expression of a college professor lecturing undergrads. “Are you aware, that when Brandenburg-Saxony started flipping to overtly Neo-Nazi parties in the late-2010s, the last unified German government did a lot of research as to what was driving the political unrest. They examined social issues, economic issues, the differing histories of activism and resistance under the GDR. Nothing fit the pattern they were seeing, with regards to which districts of East Germany were voting for AfD and which were sticking to the traditional conservative CDU. Until they looked at the popular social media. The only metric they could find, which correlated to the increase in Far-Right parties in the former GDR Bundeslands, was the level of Facebook penetration that had been achieved in those districts. The more popular Facebook was, the more Neo-Nazis.” Spreading his hands, he paused for effect, as if waiting for polite applause.

“I wonder if anyone in the UK bothered commissioning a study on whether Facebook penetration correlated with support for Brexit.” Ritesh was clearly trying to keep his voice light, but when Jay glanced over, she saw that his eyebrows were twitching in warning.

“We also know that recent civil unrest and ethnic violence in Myanmar and Ethiopia were highly correlated with Facebook’s membership surge in those countries,” Judy added with a touch of voice protocol clearly intended to sooth.

Jay felt herself calming, even as she pinched herself to stay alert, but Ritesh’s eyes glinted as he leaned forward curiously. There were some people who seemed immune to voice protocol, the way that some people were immune to being hypnotised. Maybe Ritesh was secretly one of them. Or maybe he was just really angry. “Well, tell me then. Is Facebook particularly popular in Siberia? Was there a flurry of Facebook likes in Novosibirsk before they declared independence?”

“No,” conceded Judy. “But two months after the discovery of the Chukotka-Kamchatka Lithium Fields, Russian language versions of the Chinese social networks Baidu and Weibo were aggressively marketed throughout the territories that would secede to form the Siberian Petrostates. It was less than a year, between the introduction of Chinese social media to Siberia, and Siberian independence going from being a fringe concern to the boiling hot topic of the day. Because it was free of state control by Russia’s government, ostensibly Sinoflix Saga-themed memes spread like wildfire through the Eastern Oblasts, asking why Siberia’s wealth was being squandered spilling Russian blood on Ukrainian soil. Within two years, a referendum was called. Three years after the introduction of Chinese social media, the Eastern Oblasts and Autonomous Regions had seceded to form what we now know as the Siberian Petrostates. While the territories that stayed Russian – no Chinese social media. Only VK, the official Russian social media network.”

“I don’t see what any of this has to do with Eris Bianjie. Is she an investor in Baidu and Weibo, or something? Many people buy Siberia’s lithium, not just the Chinese. India is a major trading partner these days.” Ritesh turned and caught Jay’s eye, giving her a pointed eyeroll, right as she found herself being lulled by the voice protocol again.

Judy’s hand twitched to her face, as if to push up the glasses she was no longer wearing. “The last words, to get out of Siberia, before it vanished from the internet, were ‘Cyberattack – Electronic Fungus.’ You don’t find it interesting, that we are here to investigate an electronic fungus which we have discovered propagating itself both on Eris Bianjie’s Grid, and the Dark Pool of the supposedly uncrackable trading software that Ms. Bianjie designed?”

Littlemore nodded slowly, blinking his eyes like he was trying to shake off the soporific effect of the voice protocol. “Do you really think they’re related?”

Richard nodded authoritatively. “We’ve had her eye on her, especially since she’s become active on CodeHub again.”

Ritesh looked up. “Is that definitely her? Are you sure?”

“The code has all of her signatures and hallmarks,” said Richard. “However, it does some extremely interesting things to the operating systems of any devices that install apps built with it.”

“Interesting in what way?” Ritesh’s head snapped to attention, his interest piqued. For a moment, Jay wondered if he and Jules had downloaded and used any of that code, and set a note on her watch to run some diagnostics on the monitoring server.

“We don’t know.” Judy shifted uneasily in her seat. “That was something we were hoping you might help us with. The scripts seem to contain some kind of electronic… spores in machine code. Innocent enough that they don’t trip any antivirus software on the way in. But once inside… well. We’ve been trying to contact machine language experts to find out what these spores are doing, but as you probably know, people who know machine language are a pretty rare breed these days.”

“What kind of machine language?” asked Jay.

Richard reached into the briefcase, and extracted a flash drive, which he tossed across the table towards her. “Why don’t you take a look and find out?”

“A flash drive?” Jay picked it up and squinted at it. “Are you kidding me, is it 2003 again?”

Judy flashed her a warning glance. “We had to find a way to transport it, that was not internet accessible in any way: no 5G, no Wi-Fi connectivity, no nothing. But at the same time, that wasn’t static or fixed like a DVD or ROM. Burning it to a static medium like a laser disc seems to kill it.”

“Kill it? What are you saying? What kind of program is this?” Jay turned the tiny drive over and over in her fingers.

“Well, install it and find out. But I’m warning you in advance, make sure you install it on an un-networked device – or else a device with a firewall that is extremely good at keeping things in as well as out.” The deadpan tone of Judy’s voice scared her more than any histrionics could have.

“What is it?” asked Littlemore, holding out his hand for the device, though Jay was loath to let it out of her grasp.

“We scraped this off the operating system of a police car that had its CPU burned out during a routine traffic stop on the Ratcliffe Skyway,” explained Richard. “It seemed to emanate from an App they were using to integrate their Grid account with other cars in their unit. An App that had recently been updated with Bianjie’s new code.”

Judy leaned forwards. “You’ve noticed how all of the data flows have this distinctive, filigree, weblike quality to their movement? Like an electronic fungus, as the software consultant from Tomsk said.”

Jay, Ritesh and Littlemore all nodded sagely.

“Well, think of this data as the… well, the mycelium mat that programme produces.”

“5pm on a Friday afternoon, they give us this information,” Ritesh muttered as they gathered in the break room. Littlemore had shown the spooks the door, then bolted it behind them with a physical key.

“Blame me for the timing,” sighed Littlemore. “It seemed sensible at the time.”

“Shit, where did Jules and Xie find that eBianjie code? Was it on CodeHub or StackRepository?” Jay sat down immediately at her workstation and brought up the CodeHub search page. When she entered in the username, dozens of scripts were returned. “Damn, this stuff is popular – the top script has been accessed over 10,000 times by users, including some of the big, pro-level users like GridWave and ClickManager. Isn’t GridWave, like one of the top 10 apps on Apple’s App Store?”

Pulling out an iPhone, Ritesh opened up the store. He didn’t even have to search – GridWave was so popular it was always on the front page. “GridWave’s Grid management app has been downloaded over 20 million times in the UK. Their latest update was pushed to 2 million users in the past hour alone. If this was infected with these electronic spores… Crap!”

“Look, you know I can’t authorise any more overtime this month, but if you want to come in at the weekend to take a look at it, I can give you time off in lieu, next week after the Bank Holiday?” Littlemore offered, pulling the last Krispy Kreme out of the fridge and cutting it into four.

Ritesh made an anguished face, peering at the flash drive on the table, before glancing away. “Can’t. As a matter of fact. I’ve got a gig this weekend.”

Jay brightened through a mouthful of doughnut. “No way. Where?”

“Lo_Rez’s collective, down in the Peckham Archipelago. I’m already taking Xie as my ‘roadie’ but you’re welcome to pop along if you fancy it.”

“Maybe you should take that along and pass it on to Xie – but make sure and warn xir about the connectivity thing, so xie doesn’t go sticking it in xir palmpad.” Littlemore glanced down at the doughnut slices to see if Ritesh was going to take one, before discreetly popping another into his mouth.

“Good idea.” Noting the way Jay was looking at the last slice of the doughnut and licking her chops, Ritesh pushed it towards her. “If you can get xir to take it seriously.”

Littlemore reached for a stack of post-it notes. Picking up a felt-tip marker from the colouring book pile, he wrote in big purple letters “do not connect to internet – THAT MEANS YOU XIE” then wrapped it round the flash drive and fastened it with sticky tape. “That should do it.”

Chapter Text

Xie arrived home from the hairdresser and immediately took a shower. For a start, the hairdresser always tried to impose some kind of order on xir unruly shock of hair and slathered it with products, no matter how carefully instructed that xie preferred xir hair to look slightly unkempt and messy. Xie had also been slightly spaced out and pleasantly information overloaded in the salon from the soothing sensations of warm water and head massages and the wonderful buzzing sensation of the electric clippers against xir undercut, so the powerful chemical smells of peroxide and toner and hairspray had seemed so interesting, even intoxicating. Yet in the reassuringly enclosed space of xir bedroom, the strong smells and weird waxy textures were seriously annoying.

So Xie went into the bathroom, stripped off xir work clothes, now laced with the tiny daggerlike irritations of clipped hairs, sealed up xir implants and stepped into the shower. Warmth. Comfort. The reassuring sensation of being enveloped in a continuous fluid hug of soapy water. Relaxing into the spray, Xie closed xir eyes and thought about the odd email from Littlemore that had arrived while xie was on the bus. Something about the Siberian Petrostates, and mysterious scripts containing machine code spores that seemed to generate an unknown electronic fungus.

Fungus was cool, man. When xie was little, xie had hated mushrooms, hated the slimy sensation of them squeaking against xir teeth as much as the musty baked-earth taste of them. Xir grandmother had been kind, never forcing xie to eat anything xie didn’t like, but one day xir mother, a xenobiologist often away on long missions, had brought home an academic paper on a species of fungus that had been found growing near the radioactive core of Chernobyl. Even as a child, Xie had never bothered with children’s books. The bizarre report of an extremophile that seemed to somehow eat radioactivity, that used it as a source of biopower, somehow metabolised it, even breaking radioactive material down into more harmless elements, had been far more interesting to the preteen Xie than the stupid, implausible tales by the annoying Scottish wizarding lady that all xir peers at school had obsessed over.

Xie had been entranced, following the academic paper by devouring Entangled Life, The Mushroom at the End of the World and the Collins Complete Guide To Mushrooms and Toadstools. An aversion to mushrooms, even in omelettes or stews, had swiftly been replaced by a refusal to eat anything that didn’t contain mushrooms or mycoprotein in some form. Six months of Portabello Wellington becoming the best samefood in the world had pressed even xir grandmother’s patience, but eventually Xie had been persuaded to expand xir palate to shitake stir-fries and chanterelle risotto. Mushrooms remained xir favourite food, even as the intense obsession with fungus had been replaced, or at least joined by equally intense obsessions, such as the music of Kraftwerk, Einstürzende Neubauten and U-Bahn. In fact, U-Bahn even used fungus metaphors and images of spores and mycelial mats in their…

BLEEP. BLEEP. BLEEP.

Abruptly, the automated timer beeped to let Xie know that xie had been in the shower for 15 minutes. Startled, xie tried to collect xir thoughts as xie rinsed xir hair, climbed out and towelled xirself dry, wrapping xirself in a fuzzy, brightly coloured onesie depicting the constellations of the northern hemisphere. Padding back through into xir room, xie fetched a protein bar from the cupboard and settled into the nest of xir pan chair with xir Kindle, paging through xir favourite passages in Entangled Life.

The book opened automatically at the passage about mushroom sex, of course. Mushrooms had simply no concept of the gender binary at all – there were fungi species with 3 or 4 sexes, even fungi species with anywhere up to 20,000 different sexes. And of course, agender fungi that reproduced asexually by budding or releasing tiny cloned spores of themselves. In fact, fungi sometimes seemed able to exchange DNA laterally, with any other species of fungi they encountered. So what the *disallowed phrase* did gender even mean, when you had 20,000 potential permutations of sexual genotype? Xie related, deeply, to the fungi with 20,000 sexes, possibly far more than the monosexuals with whom xie shared xir office space. Like, imagine that you could meet and fall in love with anything – not just a man or a woman or an ambisex – but a Blue Whale. A mountain. An internet router box. For a moment, Xie closed xir eyes and tried to imagine a romantic tale about the desperate love affair between a simple Alpine village goatherd and a melting glacier. It was almost too beautiful and tragic to even bear thinking about.

Closing the Kindle, Xie picked up xir laptop and opened up Archive Of Our Own, preparing to start a new fic. “Back in the Before Times, Xian Grenze’s family had raised their goats in the Bavarian mountains for as long as anyone could remember…”

-----

On the other side of London, and in a different corner of the internet, Jay was nostalgically blasting the mid-90s Manic Street Preachers records of her youth as she dug deeper and deeper down into conspiracy theory forums on Darkweb and searched for information on Siberia.

This simply wasn’t normal, that half a continent could disappear from the internet without a trace. Not that she knew many people in Siberia. But Darkweb was buzzing with Russian nerds complaining that they could no longer get in touch with their cousin in Norilsk, or that the cleric from their World of Warcrack raiding party, who lived in Ulan-Ude, had completely disappeared from the internet. Rumours ran wild through the forums and the chatrooms, the posters visibly shaken but cocky behind their anonymous emoji avatars.

☂️🥐🎱: Has anyone been able to confirm whether it was a deliberate BGP attack or just bog-standard incompetence?
🌭🐱☯️: It has to be an attack- since the Great Facebook Outage of 2021, it has been standard procedure to have both a backup and a failsafe DNS to recover from false BGP information. Even their failsafe must be down, or they wouldn’t have been out for so long
🦷🌸🍜: But the sophistication of such an attack! To crack one system is hard. To crack the backup, too, is difficult. To crack production, backup and the off-site failsafe? That’s hardcore!
☂️🥐🎱: Who has the technology to pull off something like this?
🦷🌸🍜: The Chinese, of course!
🚂🐩🌞: Definitely the Russians.
🌭🐱☯️: Either of them? Both?
🚂🐩🌞: Look! The Siberian Petrostates have been playing both sides against the middle for far too long. If you are stuck between China and Russia, that is not a wise place to be.
☂️🥐🎱: I dunno, man. They’ve been exporting more and more crude to the States, since President Barclay scrapped the Paris Agreement again.
😎🌱✌️: You mean the Jakarta Accord? The Paris Agreement has been dead nearly as long as the Kyoto Protocol
☂️🥐🎱: Good god how many of these agreements have there been? Well, whichever one we’re on now, Siberia has been helping the US flaunt it. And Barclay’s greed for oil was what legitimised the Petrostates. He promised he’d sign a UN treaty recognising Siberia’s independence if they got first dibs on the crude. So the newly formed SiberGaz instantly becomes one of the wealthiest companies in the world!
🚂🐩🌞: Nah, mate, it’s the Russians. Those lithium fields are enormous, maybe twice the size of the South American Lithium Triangle. Russia didn’t want to let them go.
🌭🐱☯️: Russia has no market for green energy, tho. Why would they be interested in Lithium? It’s China that wants to get their hands on Siberia’s Lithium.
☂️🥐🎱: No market for green energy *yet*. China is not going to corner the market forever. Green-Berlin is making huge strides and historically, Moscow tends to follow Berlin
🦷🌸🍜: Berlin is making huge strides – with Chinese technology!
🌭🐱☯️: I heard it’s not the Lithium at all – it’s the Neodymium and Cerium in the same rock belt as Inner Mongolia’s mineral wealth. China currently has the market cornered in those elements, since the conflict in the Congo has cut off all other supplies. If Siberia starts to flood the market with cheap Neodymium, China loses a huge profit stream.
🐍💀🇺🇸: It’s all China’s fault, they’re the ones who started this whole stupid green energy panic off. You know they invented the entire Great Climate Change Hoax to cripple the US economy! It’s a good thing President Barclay isn’t falling for that BS
🚂🐩🌞: Jesus Christ, do you really believe that? With half of NYC underwater and Los Angeles becoming a bigger bay than San Francisco?
☂️🥐🎱: Haha, I heard the best theory the other day – that the rumour that climate change was a Chinese hoax was actually propaganda disseminated by the Chinese government to keep the Yanks from investing in green energy!
🚂🐩🌞: Well, if the Siberian gas fields genuinely do go offline, us “yanks” will have to find something else to power our pumping stations, no matter how many tantrums President Barclay throws on TikTok
☂️🥐🎱: It’s going to take a hell of a lot more than some ‘electronic fungus’ to keep the Siberian gas fields offline forever
😎🌱✌️: They should just leave the fossil fuels in the ground. That’s what eMerge say. Leave all of it in the ground!
🐍💀🇺🇸: Oh fuck off with that eMuck bullshit. You know eMurk’s whole schtick is 100% propaganda funded by the billionaire Billy Barbel to promote his shitty little ampmobiles. No self-respecting red-blooded man would drive one of those things if they could get their hands on a real vehicle like a Jeep or a Humvee!

Jay rolled her eyes and logged off when the outbreak of masculinity got too heavy in the chat. Stretching, she looked over at the bed to see her sleeping girlfriend blissfully curled up with her headphones blasting pink noise, but despite the weariness in her joints, Jay felt far more cranky than sleepy, though she’d not caught more than 4 hours of sleep the night before. The faint curl of crankiness curled at the base of her spine suddenly reminded her of something, and she reached for the iWatch discarded by her keyboard.

Dammit, yes, the reminder had been and gone – she’d somehow missed its electronic bleat while deeply submerged in DarkWeb. Hauling her weary bones to her feet, she shuffled through into the tiny loo and cast about on the small stand beside the toilet until she found the pump. She rolled her trousers down, and perched on the toilet lid, then dispensed one long squirt of transparent goo into each palm. Even in the warmth of summer, the gel was still cold enough to make her wince, but she concentrated on rubbing the stuff into her thighs in tiny circles.

She’d been doing this for ages, and yet every time, she was always surprised by how quickly it seemed to take effect. Maybe it was purely psychosomatic, but it felt like only minutes after the hormones penetrated her skin, that she felt the curl of crankiness dissipate in a soft puff of relaxation, as if someone was administering voice protocol straight to her endocrine system. In a few hours, she might even be relaxed enough to sleep. Kicking off her trousers, she padded over to the sink, picked up the tweezers and cast her fingertips gently over her top lip and chin. Still passably smooth, she thought to herself and mentally rescheduled the next trip to the electrolysis clinic that was her only concession to vanity.

The Holy Bible finished in the other room, the last chords giving way to the rhythmic bump of the run-out groove. For a minute, she contemplated turning it over and listening to it again, but instead she lifted the needle off and lovingly replaced the vinyl back into the sleeve before climbing into bed, trying not to disturb her sleeping girlfriend as she settled in with her kindle. The Cautious Sys Admin’s Guide To Everything You Need To Know About BGP. If a few chapters of that couldn’t get her to sleep, then nothing could.

-----

In their comfy flat overlooking the winking lights of the Wharf, Littlemore and his wife were curled up on the sofa together, Jitka fast asleep in a comfortable sprawl between them, as they watched a YouTube special on the ‘Making Of’ La Jaquoranda. On the screen was a remarkably pretty Chinese girl talking about falling in love with the sounds of K-Pop during her father’s tenure as ambassador to Seoul.

“I was a classically trained violinist, until I discovered Hallyu music, fell in love with BTS and started to stan Jungkook.” Her face flushed as she laughed with her hand over her mouth. “My parents were happy that I did so well in my studies, and learned Korean so quickly, until they discovered I wanted to quit violin and ballet and learn contemporary street dance, because of Bangtan Boys’ dance routines.”

The image shifted to a clip of the girl in a leotard and tutu, demurely pirouetting across the room in her ballet slippers, before coming down off her tiptoes to break into an extended routine of freestyle dancing and floor-sweeping body-popping.

“I was a fairly successful backing dancer in my teens, even appearing in videos for several popular Korea Wave groups. But one day, one of the managers asks me if I can sing. I tell him, no, but I can play violin. He tells me, ‘nonsense, a girl as pretty as you, such a good dancer as you, it doesn’t matter if you have a good voice’ – they can just autotune me to make me an idol. He tells me go home and make a demo tape for him. I go home and make him a tape, but my tape is so weird he emails it to all his friends, puts clips of it on TikTok for people to laugh at. But the last laugh is on him – my weird tape is so popular, it goes viral, it gets millions of views. People are sharing it around the world. So I become a TikTok star.”

A smooth American-accented voice continued in a narration as clips of the viral videos played in the background. A strangely childish, aegyo-acting girl, her pretty features distorted by Instagram filters into almost a parody of cuteness, mugged for the camera and performed unexpectedly athletic dance routines to twisted orchestral hyperpop. “Wugou Shuzhi became an overnight pop sensation, marrying her big, lush, orchestral sensibilities and her 4-octave operatic vocal style to glitchy electronic beats. She was hailed as ‘The Bjork of K-Pop’, winning accolades everywhere from Pitchfork to glossy Asian Idol Magazines.”

The video cut back to the pretty young woman. “You think you have everything figured out, your life all sorted. Then one day, everything changes.” The camera pulled back to show the little girl sitting quietly at her feet, making irate faces as her mother brushed her long dark hair and twisted it into pigtails. “You meet someone. You fall in love. You move halfway around the world and you have a child.”

A quick montage of Shuzhi beaming, appearing on red carpets and at world premieres on the arm of an awfully familiar smarmy-looking white man.

“Like most parents in the Chinese diaspora, I want my children to learn Chinese.” As Shuzhi talked, the camera cut to her daughter rolling her eyes and making the pained face of children of the Chinese diaspora everywhere. “But our life now – we are digital nomads. One week we are in Green-Berlin, the next, London. Next week, Palo Alto, after that – New Zealand or Shenzhen? Who knows. Chinese lessons are not so regular when you live on four continents.”

The screen cut to a cute cartoon of private jets and superyachts criss-crossing back and forth across a map of the world.

“So I want to make Chinese lessons fun and accessible! Add a good melody to teach tonal language, a danceable beat to keep the kids engaged. And what do little kids love more than anything in the world?” The video cut to a picturesque image of a herd of tame deer grazing in front of the Taj Mahal. Then a close-up of an adorably fuzzy, wide-eyed fawn nuzzling against its mother’s spotted flank.

“Animals!” cried the little girl excitedly, at which Jitka opened one eye and stared at the screen.

“That’s right, animals.” Shuzhi nodded and affectionately tweaked her daughter’s pigtails. “When I was a lonely little girl in New Delhi, my father’s first post, I used to wander down to the local park and watch the deer that came to nibble on the Jacaranda trees planted around the old British palace. I always remembered the Chital deer, so elegant and so poised. I always wished I could be as fleet and graceful as the Chital deer in India.”

The video cut to the now-familiar opening sequence of the YouTubes, as the deer danced about the screen and flirtatiously threw her sari over her shoulder.

“And so, La Jaquoranda, the world’s first animal pop star. We do it with computers…”

The image jumped to an animation with a greenscreen background, where Shuzhi was standing in a leotard, with large green dots pasted all across her face and body at regular intervals. With a wide grin, she waved at the camera, then tried a few dance moves. The camera swivelled on its base, and turned to focus on a shy Chital fawn, its body covered in small green dots, as it awkwardly tottered about the room on its long, coltlike legs, pausing to sniff at unfamiliar objects before settling down to munch a few carrots.

“With CGI technology, we map the fawn’s face and textures, onto a young woman’s body and movements.” As she spoke, a computer screen displayed the two figures, human and deer, as sets of glowing dots against the dark of the screen, until slowly, the two sets merged. Over time, the details of hair and colour and texture populated the wireframe, until suddenly La Jaquoranda appeared on the screen, blinking her huge eyes and swaying unsteadily on her tiny feet. “Ni hao, everybody!” said the fawn, and a moment later, the wall-mounted screen was abruptly washed with static, as bits and pieces of the picture kept dropping out to be replaced with distorted images of an animated warzone.

“Oh Jesus.” Climbing to his feet, Littlemore walked over to the wall and started to bang on it, as a grizzled looking CGI Marine jumped up and ran across the screen. Several non-player characters fell down in a haze of blood spray and bullets as the animated deer-woman capered and danced between them.

“Daddy, make it stop, I don’t like it,” wailed Jitka.

“For crying out loud, turn on your firewall, you are bleeding data everywhere from your gaming screen,” Littlemore shouted, as first-person shooter and animal pop star seemed to merge into some disturbing dystopian nightmare.

“He can’t hear you,” sighed Blanka, picking up Jitka and cradling her before she started to cry. “The walls are perfectly soundproofed.”

“They just aren’t dataproofed. Come on, man, shield your equipment. For crying out loud, if I were a different man, I’d send some terrible malware right back up his open ports…”

“It’s getting near bedtime anyway. She’s falling asleep on the sofa.” Picking Jitka up, Blanka carried her through their tiny living room into the even smaller children’s bedroom. On Littlemore’s and her combined salaries, they had been lucky to get a second bedroom at all, but it didn’t make it any easier when the teenage boys next door neglected basic Wi-Fi etiquette.

Littlemore flicked off the wall screen and pulled out his smartphone to fire off an email. ‘Hey, Jay, Jules – if either of you have any time this weekend, do you mind digging out an old laptop with no internet connectivity and setting it up for Xie to examine that mycelium spook data on? Cheers, L.’

-----

Jules was lying in bed, listening to the reassuring sound of his boyfriend pounding away at his laptop below him, when the message flickered across his phone. ‘Sure thing, boss. Don’t worry, Jay – I got this one as I’m on the Wharf tonight.’

Swinging his long legs over the edge of the shelf bed, Jules dropped easily to the floor and sifted about until he found his sweats. “Hey, honey, I’ve just got to pop over to the office for a minute.”

Koku nodded and continued typing furiously in the tiny capsule office below the bed. “No, no, it’s fine, I’m nearly done with this section. I swear, only five more minutes and I’ll be done.”

“Take your time.” Jules bent down to press a kiss against a chiselled cheekbone. “We’ve got all weekend, and I do not want to hear the swearing you’d be doing if you had to finish this paper on your boat’s shitty wi-fi.”

“Honestly, this is the last paragraph, I swear. The final conclusion.”

“I thought you finished your conclusion yesterday?” Really, Jules knew better than to tease, but Koku was so adorable when he was flustered, tiny beads of sweat glistening in the tight curls of his dark hair.

“That was the penultimate conclusion. This is the ultimate conclusion.”

“The final final conclusion,” Jules laughed. “It’s OK, I won’t be gone ten minutes. I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” Jules ran his hand affectionately across the slope of his lover’s shoulder then down his back.

“Alright – but if you have to go, can you please pick up 6 eggs and a small bag of flour at John Lewis Foodhall on your way back?” It astonished him the way that Koku was able to type and talk about food at the same time.

Jules laughed. “Sure, but you’re going to try to cook in this pod?” There wasn’t the space to make a grand gesture towards the tiny fridge, the two hotplates and the almost microscopic microwave, but he did his best.

“I can cook anywhere,” Koku insisted, hitting return and starting a new paragraph, despite his protestations that the previous had been the ultimate, final conclusion. “Go, go, so you can be back quicker.” As Jules bent over to pull on his shoes, Koku grabbed him by the waistband and pulled him back for a quick kiss before releasing him to dart out into the night.

Jogging over the bridge into the central estate, Jules flashed his security badge and his vax pass at the security guard, but they never ever checked, at least not when he was alone. But to be fair, Koku was such a snazzy dresser, peacocking about in his flash Ghanian suits, that he didn’t get bothered much any more. It was a clear, mild night and drunken city boys were spilling out of the various pubs and drinking dens, so he dodged round the back way, under the cover of a grove of transplanted redwood trees. He’d read somewhere that redwoods could grow to 100 meters or more, and wondered how long it would take until the trees reached the top stories of the towers. Wouldn’t it be amazing to look out of the 25^th story and straight into tree branches, as well as the habitual seagulls, hanging almost motionless in the winds that whipped through the forest of towers.

He reached the building and took the lifts up to the office. The place felt so eerie at night, the way all the lights came on a few feet ahead of him as he walked about the floor. What had Littlemore wanted? He checked the text message to make sure. An old laptop with no internet connectivity. Strange thing to ask for, but if he dug about in the back of the server room, who knew what he might turn up. Sure enough, there was an ancient laptop with a post-it note stuck to it, saying, “wi-fi broken but ethernet still connects”. He took it out, booted it up to make sure it still worked, then connected it to the ethernet to do a quick update of the operating system. OK, this might take more than a quick 10 minutes.

Crossing the office while the laptop updated, he gazed out across the maze of canals and footbridges until he spotted the tall, cigarette-skinny tower that housed his podblock, and tried to imagine Koku curled up in the capsule flat. Maybe he should have sprung the extra hundreds of pounds a month, to get a pod with a window, so they could wave at each other across Wharf? But no, the windowless pods had an extra 6 inches in the mattress of their shelf beds. The flatscreen television that covered one end of the wall served almost as well as a window did.

Leaning his forehead against the window, he pulled out his phone and texted Koku. ‘Eggs, flour – and was there anything else you wanted from the shops?’

‘Syrup, unless you want to eat your pancakes dry. Now hurry up stringbean, where are you?’

Jules glanced at the laptop. Still only at 75%. ‘I’ll only be a few minutes.’

When the update was complete, Jules rebooted the machine, unplugged the ethernet cable and checked the internet and wi-fi. Completely dead. He left it in Xie’s pod with a note. “I don’t know what you want an old, unconnected laptop for, but this is dead as a dormouse without an ethernet. Have fun!”

By the time he got back to his pod, with eggs, flour, syrup, sugar, cinnamon and a bag of lemons, Koku had added another seven paragraphs to his ultimate, final conclusion. “Nearly there, I swear. And when my PhD is finished, I will be the world’s foremost physicist. If I can just prove this theory, my work is going to change everything. We’ll all be living in fully automated luxury communism, a big house out in the country, with a kitchen the size of a swimming pool.”

“Just come to bed,” sighed Jules, wrapping his arms around Koku’s shoulders and draping his head across his neck, pressing his lips into the soft, warm place at the base of his throat.

Chapter Text

Jesus Christ, please spare me from the cult of Eris Bianjie.

The way people talk about her – like she’s the Second Coming of the Prophet Steven Jobs? It makes me sick. Well, I suppose she’s a decent enough programmer, and she has had phenomenal luck as an entrepreneur – let’s be honest, more luck than anything else – but it is totally disproportionate to anything she has achieved. Her success is a total Cult of Personality.

To be fair, she knows how to sell herself, and she gives great Theatre. She’s a charismatic performer, I’ll grant her that! But it’s a performance. That’s all.

I know her reputation – and I remember how she used to operate when she first started getting a lot of flak on the Picosoft project. She was what they called a Legacy Hire – which is to say, that she got the job on the strength of her father’s reputation. (You know Bianjie isn’t her real name, right? Here’s a clue: her birth name is a household brand in the technology world.) So she cultivated this personality thing, her whole Ice Queen routine, to deflect the heat from her background.

Truth was, she kept three teams of systems analysts operating round the clock, in London, in San Francisco, and Beijing, so that she always had someone on call, day or night. If she hit a problem, she could have three sets of analysis and three potential solutions on her desk within the hour. And she’d sit there, drinking black coffee by the tankard until she’d read and memorised them all.

Then she’d go off and give the investors a bit of a show. She’d appear in one of those gauzy white gowns, have a few sips of green tea, then she’d hunker down and meditate in a silver pyramid that was supposed to be an orgone accumulator or whatever – post-millennial San Francisco must have been a wild place – for about twenty minutes. Then she’d float to her feet, smiling serenely like a Buddhist monk who had been contemplating nirvana on top of the Himalayas for about a thousand years, glide down to her custom silver workstation, and write about five lines of the tightest, most concise, elegant code you had ever seen.

Of course it was brilliant, and of course it always sorted the solution perfectly – because she’d paid three of the top systems analysts in the world to work out all the kinks for her. I should know; I was one of them. Trust me, Eris is a lot less Zen when she’s screaming down the phone at 3am that some crucial part of the application has gone offline.

But the investors could not get enough of her Zen Guru schtick – they practically threw money at her, threw bonuses and perks and stock options, too. And you know, damn, maybe if I’d been a chick that attractive, I could have wound investors round my little finger that way, too.

Granted, she had some good ideas. The whole micro-spore installation trick, that was a stroke of sheer brilliance. It took ages to get that to work cross-platform. But she was almost as good at digging down into assembly language and machine code as I was. I’ll grant her that.

Sure, it was nice enough working for her. She was a decent boss, fair, even kind, if you could meet her highly exacting standards for quality. Which, of course, I always did. She used to tell me I was the best of her analysts, far and above her San Francisco or her Beijing teams. “Oh, I don’t know what I’d do without you, Elgar,” and all that. I suppose she told all three of us the same thing. But she knew how to get people to work themselves to the bone for her.

Christ, you should have seen the way that Billy Barbel used to follow her about like a puppy! Let’s be honest here; he was in love with her. I suspect in many ways he still is – I mean, have you seen his latest wife? Shuzhi Wugou? The pop singer? She’s young enough to be his daughter, but that’s exactly what Eris looked like when we first started working together, this dreamy, waiflike girl with something steely behind her gaze. Eris even told me she introduced the pair of them – Eris was investing in Shuzhi’s new interactive Chinese-teaching project, so she was showing her round, introducing her to other potential backers.

And didn’t Eris know that Billy was in love with her! My god, she used to milk it. That man would do absolutely anything for her, without so much as the promise of a stock option. He never gave a shit about eMerge or climate activism or collective action before he got involved with Eris; he only started coming out with that shit because Eris cared about those things, and he thought it would impress her. So of course, he was absolutely gutted when she ran off to marry that idiotic screaming German of hers, Hansel or Gretel or whatever he’s called. They’re still tight, though, Bianjie and Barbel. Seriously tight. When he left our office this evening, he told me he had sent a helicopter to go and pick her up in the Ny-Hanseatics or somewhere, so that she and the screaming German could spend the weekend on his luxury yacht.

Something had spooked Billy, and badly, though of course he didn’t fill me in on what it was. He was running scared about something, trying to dig through the company files, clear things out. I could hear the shredder going in his corner office as I passed by on the way to the kitchen. All of his bully-boy fund managers were still buzzing about the whole Siberian Petrostates crash, and wondering if Billy had had a hand in that, the way he’d so clearly had a hand in the Asian Markets thing the previous day. Half of them had made a killing, shorting the company as it fell; the other half were waiting for the Asian markets to open again on Monday to find out exactly how much they had lost. Frankly, I hoped it cleared out the lot of them.

Cassandra – and this is how good she had got at data prediction – had dumped her entire holdings of Sibergaz just in time, mere seconds after the Asian Markets opened on Friday morning. She’d done the same thing on Thursday morning, shorting Alibaba at exactly the right point, holding onto Green Mind until the exact moment the short bubble hit its peak. She’d made an absolute killing on Green Mind, though I have to admit she was as blindsided as I was by the panic after Billy’s little stunt on Bloomberg. The Big Swinging Dicks were so delighted by their collective decision to stick it to the boss by shorting his toy car company that I almost wondered if he put them up to it. No, even he wouldn’t be that stupid, since the FCA and the PRA have both been crawling all over our asses ever since.

They haven’t even talked to me. The fund managers’ contempt has been so blinding that even the UK Feds have gone with the conventional wisdom that I’m some kind of glorified sys admin. Cassandra is safe, for now. I have to admit, though, that I’m slightly worried about the money.

There’s an awful lot of it, you see. I set up Cassandra’s little play fund with about a million pounds in real money in the Dark Pool, for obvious reasons, registered to a shell company set to harvest money from The Grid on borrowed details. Not Barbel’s details of course, as tempting as it was to finger my asshole boss; that would be truly foolhardy, setting up a decoy that close to my real ducks.

But when I said Eris was kind, you see, unlike Barbel, she was the kind of manager that would lend you a phone if yours had run out of battery. And when you’re that wealthy, what do you care about getting a silly little thing like a state of the art 5G phone back from an underling, even if your Grid backend-accessing logon credentials were still casually programmed into it?

It’s not that Eris is naïve, or even that she’s particularly trusting. It’s more that I don’t think she ever saw me as human, at all. When you spend more time around computers than you do humans, it becomes easier to communicate with humans who act like computers. And that’s how she came to think of me. Another bit of useful technology that made her life easier.

Chapter Text

Ritesh arrived at London Bridge station with fifteen minutes to spare, his gig bag slung over one shoulder and carrying his laptop case in his hand. First, he had to find Xie, then he had to locate which of the myriad piers and quays surrounding London Bridge Island the Peckham boat would moor at. Finding Xie was easy enough – it was kind of hard to miss the tall, lanky kid in the shiny silver jumpsuit, with metallic lavender blue hair and burnished chrome doc martens.

“Hey Cyborg, loving the new barnet,” he called out as he approached, but xie didn’t turn around. Nuts. Xie had probably disengaged xir implants in such a noisy environment. Swinging round to come into xir line of sight, he waved to catch xir attention, then gave xir the thumbs up and pointed to his own bonce.

Xie brightened and grinned, signing “Thanks.” Brandishing a white and blue computer printout, xie waved it at him proudly.

“Clean bill of health, no viruses detected, antibody load within acceptable limits,” read Ritesh and grinned his relief. “Glad you didn’t pick up anything nasty from those antivaxxers.”

After he gestured with his head towards the river exit, the pair of them strode out into the warm, still-bright August night. Crowds of lairy drunks were surging round the 24-hour pubs near the station, but Ritesh and Xie dodged past them to stroll down to the inland quay. As the tide came in, any electrified trains cut out, and dozens of ferries surged into the floodlands, some official TFL, some private firms, some little more than pirates and chancers eager to make a few clicks. Looking about the dock, they peered at the hastily erected and frequently changed signs declaring what boats moored at which docks until they found the rather homemade, hand-painted sign declaring “Peckham Archipelago”.

They didn’t have to wait long, as a long, black-painted solar-enhanced windship tacked into view, flying the Peckham Jolly Roger. A ragged queue was forming at the ferry stop: a gaggle of Solarpunks clearly heading for the gig; two Cyber-Refuseniks with their distinctive half-shaved heads and abstract anti-facial recognition make-up, carrying a cage full of chickens; and a Nigerian family with a fat, uncooperative goat. Ritesh stowed his bags, then stopped to help with the goat, making sure both kid and children were settled before making his way back to the wheelhouse to see if it was anyone he knew.

It was Rodrigo on the controls, so Ritesh risked a respectful nod before Rodrigo settled for a wide grin and a fistbump. “Long time,” he said in a neutral voice as he unclipped the wind turbines at the rear of the boat, and re-angled the solar panels towards the reddish light of the setting sun.

“I know, I know,” sighed Ritesh. “You know – work.”

Rodrigo nodded solemnly. “I hear you. You got a family now, too, yeah?”

“Yeah, two boys. Five and seven.”

“Seven! Time flies, eh.”

Ritesh nodded uneasily and looked about for Xie, who seemed to have settled up by the bow with the Solars, laughing and accepting slugs from the jug of cider going round as they dialled up the latest Township Funkaeton on their palmpads. As the ship cleared the London Bridge filtration zone, the smell picked up, but there was a stiff enough breeze that it was bearable.

“How’s tricks? Still with…” Ritesh searched his memory for the name, the face, of Rodrigo’s pretty Nigerian girlfriend.

“Ibironke, yeah. We’re still together, got a teenage ambi and twin girls in primary school. We’re doing OK, yeah. Couldn’t ask for more. Well.” He paused, and gestured around them as the windship slowly accelerated, floating past the burned-out shell of Millwall Stadium, rusting girders slowly collapsing into half-submerged stands stained green with algae. “The Peckham Archipelago’s doing well, though. We reclaimed houses on another two streets and bashed together another roof garden in the past year. How long’s it been since you were last down?”

“Christ. Dunno. 7 – 8 years?”

Rodrigo genuinely brightened. “Aw man, you’re gonna love what we’ve done with it. You ain’t even seen the reclamation centre? The fungus colonies? The city farm up on the Rye? We got cows, man. Cows in Peckham for the first time in 200 years. Fresh milk for the babies, and they’re trained to harness for when we need more horsepower – ha, cowpower, I suppose. Plus they keep the grass short in the Nunhead spooks.”

“Cows,” repeated Ritesh, trying to keep a straight face. He could still remember the first night he’d met Rodrigo, jacking cars down Croydon way.

As the sun dipped below the red-stained clouds, the solar cut out and they carried on at half speed, on battery power with a slight lift from the turbines, but it was a fairly still night. As the boat drifted lazily across the dead zones of drowned Bermondsey, he caught a glimpse of something glinting in the near distance. Archipelago was perhaps a bit of a misnomer. Peckham lay in a wide, shallow bay between the arms of Denmark Hill and Telegraph Hill, but the tops of buildings poked through the waters like a string of manmade islands following the route of the former high street and the abandoned railway viaducts on the blocked-off line down to Dulwich.

The boat paused for a moment to let a caravan of narrowboats putter down the wide, busy channel of the Old Kent Canal, then drifted past the Three Towers, their once jauntily painted peaks still lit up by the last long light of the sunset. As they pulled even with the blocks, Ritesh could see the faded scars of bitter turf wars erupting into arson still blackening empty holes on the lower levels, but most of the upper floors’ glass had been replaced. Flags and banners hung from windows advertising whose protection various floors were under – these days less gang signs and more Muslim Benevolent Societies and West African churches, not to mention of course the ever-present Jolly Rogers of the Archipelago.

The lights of Peckham grew brighter as the boat drew nearer, resolving into long strands of twinkling bulbs strung between the buildings and out across the water like fairy lights. Peckham had been scarily dark back in the days when Ritesh had hung about there. You were seriously taking your life in your hands as you punted among the long shadows between rare still-lit windows and rooftop bonfires. But now the flooded streets were outlined in shimmering multicoloured lights that made the hulking bulks of reclaimed warehouses, department stores and parking garages shine like pagan temples.

When the boat passed under the outer fringe of lights, a prickle went up the back of Ritesh’s neck as the warm glow bathed his upturned face. As they passed a moored barge, a strong waft of Ethiopian coffee cut through the omnipresent river murk, the scent alone rousing him almost as effectively as an ecoccino. The weather was clear and the night was mild, and he felt his mood rising with the tide.

Up in the front of the boat, the Solars’ funkaeton fizzled and cut out with a murmur of discontent. A couple of them tried to get the Spotify channel back, but the thing wouldn’t connect.

The bland chirp of Xie’s communications pad drifted back to him. “Let me see that fucking gizmo, I’ll see if I can sort this shit out.”

Ritesh’s ears pricked up. “Xie?”

“What the fuck?”

“Xie, you’re swearing.” He let out a tiny laugh at the incongruity of xir jaunty computer voice coming out with such language.

“Fuck. Piss. Shit. Bloody Hell. What the fuck? Where the disallowed phrase are my disallowed phrases?” Punching buttons on xir device, xie slowly started to cackle with laughter.

“Ah!” Rodrigo cut the turbines as the boat drew closer to the buildings. “Perhaps I should have warned you. There’s no 5G in Peckham. No Grid. If you urgently require internet or SMS for an emergency, we can give you temporary access codes to the local VLAN. But on the whole, we’d prefer if you relaxed, and gave your full attention to your local environment.”

The Solars muttered among themselves, but the Cyber-Refuseniks looked quite smug and a little relieved as they soothed their chickens. Craning his neck, Ritesh looked up into the night sky, the strings of fairy lights, and the faint shimmer of stars behind them. As the reception blinked out, he realised the strings weren’t merely electrical cables, but thick, metallic wires attached to pylons that went right down into the murky water as the boat passed between them.

“The whole archipelago is a Faraday chamber?”

Rodrigo nodded and smiled wryly as he skilfully guided the ferry between two warehouses, and nosed it gently down the canal where the High Street had once run. “We made a small discovery, a few years back, that police sniffers, drones and infocrawlers don’t work so good when you get some high-quality jamming technology going. We’ve fought hard for this place. If they want to take it from us, they gotta come in the flesh. But hey – the cops got other problems now.”

Ritesh nodded solemnly, a looping bassline echoing in his head. ‘When they kick at your front door, how you gonna come? With your hands on your head, or on the trigger of your gun?’

Rodrigo paused briefly at a large, churchlike building to allow the Nigerian family to wrestle their goat off the boat. Overhead, the glowing buildings flickered with life as Ritesh realised the roofs were teeming with people, talking, dancing, listening to music that reverberated down to the water. The conurbation of shopping centres, warehouses and markets that had been abandoned to the rising waters a decade earlier had slowly been transformed into community centres, creches and homes. As the boat pushed off again and turned up the Rye Lane Canal, teenagers leapt from roof to roof, following them, calling out “Happy Lammas!” and chucking down brightly coloured flecks that revealed themselves as flowers when they hit the black paint of the boat’s deck. Each block brought a fresh waft of tantalising cooking smells, garam masala and asafoetida giving way to jollof or piri piri as they passed street food barges and communal kitchens.

But Ritesh had another headache now. “Oh man, how am I supposed to play this gig without internet?”

Rodrigo laughed as he turned off the canal, and guided the ferry gently to the foot of a former parking garage that had been converted to the archipelago’s cultural centre. “Who are you, and what have you done with the real Hi_Rish?” Cutting the engine and retracting the turbines, he let down the gangplank so the disgruntled Solars could follow their ears to the Nigerian Hyperlife thudding reassuringly from the upper floors.

“I wish Lo_Rez had told me when she sent the invite.”

“Oh come off it,” drawled a voice from the shadows just inside the building. “I remember when you could get a jam going from nothing more than the ringtones off two old Nokias.”

Ritesh laughed at the memory, but also from the pleasant shudder of warmth at the old, familiar voice. “Oh mate, that is going back some.”

“It was the highlight of the set, man.” A tall, dark-skinned woman with her hair in box braids stepped from between the columns, but her face was still obscured by shadow. “Remember that trick you used to do, where you’d set the 808 going, then bounce back and forth between the melodies from two ringtones? Then right where the break should be – bam! You’d whip out one of the phones and dial a number. And someone’s mobile phone would start going off real loud somewhere in the crowd, so that was the break.”

“Oh mate!” Ritesh put his hands over his face and shook his head as the memories came flooding back. “I used to have to go to the merch booth before the set, and pray that someone had left their mobile number on the mailing list sign-up sheet. How did we ever live before WhatsApp and social media?”

Rodrigo walked back up the deck of the boat, locking cupboards and stowing things away. “I remember that one time you dialled someone for the break – and right on the beat, fucking Crazy Frog starts up, right in the front row. People were going mental, mate. Truly mental. I never seen people dance so hard to fucking Crazy Frog.”

Xie looked perplexed, uselessly tapping at xir palmpad to access a collective memory that was no longer there. “OK, boomers. What was Crazy Frog?”

Ritesh, Rodrigo and the woman in box braids all collapsed in laughter. “It was the… stupidest thing you ever heard in your life, but so stupid it seemed crazy cool when we were all about 12?”

“Hey, we do not use the c-word,” tapped Xie, looking slightly annoyed.

“Sorry, Cyborg.” Ritesh nodded at xir respectfully before stepping towards the woman in the shadows. “It’s been about a million years, hasn’t it.”

“I told you, Rish, don’t be a stranger.” She stepped forwards into the light, and her face was no longer that of the girl he remembered, but a woman of about 40, her beautiful dark face faintly marked with both laugh lines and the scars of a hard life.

“I know,” sighed Ritesh. “But life gets in the way.”

Xie cocked xir head to one side, taking in the woman’s faded Neuromancer T-shirt and ancient, much-repaired Cyberdog boots. “Hang on, I know that voice?”

Ritesh nodded and stepped back. “Sure you do. Xie, this is Lo_Rez. Rez, this is my Cyborg pal, Xie.”

“OMG,” chirped the pad. “I had no idea that you and Lo_Rez…” Ritesh steeled himself for the explanation that would need to follow. Come on, they had been just kids. “Were in a band together?”

Relief flooded his face. “Oh yeah. I was her DJ for ages. Rish n’ Rez, when he go low, she go high!” They both laughed at their old motto. “We were a teenage double act, back in the old days before she got mega-famous.”

But Lo_Rez grinned and fluently signed “Hey kiddo, how’s it going?”

Xie’s eyes were huge, xir hands a flurry of excited signing too fast for Ritesh to read. The pair of them signed back and forth for a few minutes as Xie grew steadily more animated, and Rez laughed that low, throaty laugh he remembered so well.

Ritesh felt a bit awkward interrupting the conversation with speech. “I didn’t know you signed. That’s new?”

Lo_Rez signed “Hang on” to Xie, then shrugged at Ritesh. “My nephew’s Deaf. Propiterol during my sister’s pregnancy, innit. But we wouldn’t change him for the world.” Xie beamed as she spoke, nodding xir agreement. “In the long run, we found it was genuinely useful for the whole community to learn BSL – it’s the one thing cops don’t understand, and they can’t intercept.” She gestured with her head, and they started to climb a flight of dirty grey breezeblock stairs that had been patched here and there with newer, lighter coloured mortar.

Ritesh laughed dryly as he followed her. “All coppers are bastards, amirite, amirong?” It was the refrain to an old song, just the right rhythm for stairclimbing.

“I suppose that song reads a bit different now you are a copper.” Rez’s voice was light, teasing in a slightly flirtatious way, but there was still an edge beneath the humour.

“I’m not exactly a cop.”

“Same difference.” Rez’s voice was breezy, but he knew that breeziness could blow up into a tempest on a moment’s notice. Not for the first time, he wondered why she’d invited him to play, after all these years.

“You remember, we used to chat shit about this on the regular, back in the bad old days after the 2011 protests went to hell.” Ritesh felt a sudden surge of old, cold anger at the memory of kettles and police charges and kids jailed for stealing 99p bottles of water. “You were always banging on about Abolition, Prison Abolition and Police Abolition, but you’d never answer the question – if not cops, then what? Well, I decided to find out.”

“What do we need cops for, at all? The Archipelago doesn’t have cops.” Lo_Rez gestured out towards the gathering crowd of boats below as they passed a tall, narrow, glassless window. “We don’t need ‘em. I know they try to paint this place as some totally lawless, dangerous badlands on the news and in the socials – but we work just fine without cops. When someone starts acting out, the whole community holds them to account.”

“Yeah, and your Church grandmas and Sisters Uncut protesters are simply going to walk into Galaxial Pharmaceutical and hold them to account for wrecking a generation of children with dodgy antivirals? You think you can walk up to the banks and the telecoms corps, to The Grid and Sys6 and Global Citigroup and just ask nicely, hey, can you please stop ripping us off? We tried that, during Occupy, remember?”

“You guys were at Occupy?” Xie’s face had a look of astonishment as if Ritesh had declared he was at the Civil War.

“It was a long time ago,” soothed Rez.

“Not that long,” sniffed Ritesh. “It didn’t work, remember? That was the moment that I knew I had to find who could hold those fuckers to account, and go and work for them.” Ritesh felt his face growing dangerously flushed, like oh fuck it. Why not rehash the whole damned argument in the staircase of a squatted carpark.

“Yeah, I know what you do, and how you work, how diplomatically and sensitively your government agencies collaborate and work together with folks like The Grid and Vodata and GlobalPay to gently and sensitively and oh so politely regulate the market.” Rez’s back was to him as she led them up the stairs, but he could hear the heat rising in her voice. “But you never stop to think about how unfair it is that they save the nice, softly-softly, cuddly enforcement approach for the corporations, while the people – while the kids fighting for their futures – end up face down in the mud with a dropstick at their throats? It doesn’t strike you as… off, that corporations have more legal rights in England-and-Wales than humans?”

“Well, at least government agencies like the MHRA did eventually ban Propiterol and get Galaxial to stop wrecking kids’ lives?” Ritesh turned to try to get some backup from Xie, and was surprised to see xir scowling at him, face like a stormcloud, fingers hovering over xir pad.

“What is it, Cyborg?” He wasn’t sure if xie could hear the concern in his voice, so he reached out and tried to reassuringly pat xir on the shoulder. “You OK? Too loud in here?”

But xie pulled away, wrinkling xir nose in hurt or annoyance as xie stabbed at xir pad. “I do not think my life is wrecked.”

“What?” Ritesh cast his mind about, for what he might have said wrong – xie could be so touchy about things sometimes. Pattern sensitives really were so oddly specific about language.

“You said Galaxial Pharmaceutical wrecked my life. I do not feel like my life is wrecked. I have friends and family who love me. I have a good job that I enjoy. I have hobbies and interests and I feel my life is pretty rich and meaningful to me. I do not think that I am wrecked.”

“Hold up, hold up – Xie, I didn’t mean it that way. You know I didn’t mean it that way. I didn’t mean to imply there was anything wrong with you – but what Galaxial did to you, and to the others like you, that wasn’t right. I know your life is fine right now – but if they hadn’t done what they did, to you and the other ambies, can you imagine how much better your life could be?”

“I do not think so.” Xie’s face twisted with fury and disappointment, belying the emotionless tone of the pad. “I do not think I would be better if I had hearing, or was genotypical, and binary sexed. I think I would not be Xie.” Xie shot him one last bitterly disappointed look, then climbed up to walk beside Rez, tapping xir message out for Ritesh’s benefit. “Hey, your Deaf nephew, is he about? Can I meet him?”

“Sure you can, child. He’s doing the sound at the gig tonight.”

“Is he pattern sensitive, too?”

Rez laughed. “Well, back in our day, the doctors used to call it Asperger’s, but yeah. Pattern sensitive is definitely what Nickels is. Come up and meet him. If you love music, I’m sure you two will get along.”

Ritesh groaned internally as they reached the top of the stairs and walked out under the twinkling starlight of the Faraday Fairy Lights. First he had no internet access or mobile bandwidth? How the hell was he going to pull in the random squiggles of electronic datanoise and snatches of conversation that were the hallmarks of his sound? And now he found out the soundman was deaf? Then again, maybe it would be alright – Xie certainly rumbled along on her implants.

They walked across the wide, open concrete space that had once been a parking garage, but was now dotted with handmade furniture and vast fruit trees growing out of containers. Along one wall was a long shack with an overgrown living roof and a shady awning that served as restaurant and bar; at the far side was an improvised stage, the low concrete attendant’s hut behind it converted to the ‘backstage’ area. Across the back of the stage was a huge, colourful mural depicting the whole earth as one living creature beneath twinkling LED stars, a beautiful yet uncanny woman with many intertwined bodies of continents and oceans, and hair of clouds.

Thudding Nigerian Hyperlife boomed from the speakers as they walked across the floor towards the sound desk. There stood a tall, lanky, good-looking kid, barely out of his teens, his long, solemn face obscured by big chunky black plastic geek glasses and a mop of dark ringleted hair curling off his forehead, a pale streak slashed right through the centre of it. As he tested the system running through different frequencies in turn, Ritesh could see that above the soundboard were four video monitors, each displaying a different aspect of the music’s waveform. And next to the faders was an unfamiliar, foam-covered black sphere that the kid kept putting his hand on. When Xie bounced over to be introduced to the kid, Nickels, the pair of them smiled and nodded and signed quickly back and forth at one another. As he stepped back and invited xir to put xir hand on the wide foam ball, xie let out a delighted squeal.

“Ritesh, you have to check this out – I can feel the music!”

Ritesh felt his face flush with relief as he stepped forward and touched the ball. It seemed he had been forgiven for his careless comment, so he smiled over at Xie. To be fair, it was pretty damned cool how he could feel the music, bass, treble, midrange, tingling all over his palm like a tickling sensation. OK, sure, he might have to concede that the gig could turn out alright after all. It was worth setting up at least.

The headlining band had pushed their gear back out of the way, leaving a small space to set up, so Ritesh cast about for a table. He laid his gear out and connected it to the laptop through an 8-channel I/O, gesturing to Nickels where he needed to connect. Powering up the 808 – the thing was an antique, it genuinely belonged in a museum – he was relieved to hear the familiar resounding boom replicated over the loudspeakers.

“Still don’t know what I’m going to do for datanoise without internet access,” he moaned, looking about. “I don’t suppose you could grant me some of those emergency internet access codes?”

Nickels signed something to him, but it was beyond his limited comprehension of BSL. The only word he recognised from Xie’s patient lessons was ‘internet’. Ritesh shook his head and shrugged. Sighing deeply, Nickels went back to the mixing desk to dig out whatever device he presumably used for speech synthesis.

“Wait,” chirped Xie. “You want data? I got a shit-ton of data on my pad. Hang on, let me find you something with a dank beat.” Ritesh watched, astounded, as Xie dug in xir bag for a cable, plugged it into the USB port of xir pad, then jacked it straight into xir implant, flicking through files with xir fingertips and nodding xir head along with them. “Here, try this one. You got an input jack?” Xie pulled the jack straight out of xir head and calmly offered it to Ritesh.

“I…” Ritesh squinted suspiciously at the jack, then dug in his gig bag to find an appropriate connector. The sound was intense, slithering and squelchy, kind of weirdly wet with a pulsating rhythm in a frequency no human would ever have thought to modulate. “Damn, Xie, you got a good ear for a kid with no actual ears. You wanna come onstage with me and drop these sounds in on my signal?“

“Cyborg power!” xie chirped. “Can I get a line out from the monitor to plug in my implants? That way I can hear where to drop in some datanoise.”

“That doesn’t hurt?” Ritesh winced as xie jacked an audio cable back into xir skull.

“Not at all – on the contrary, it feels absolutely amazing.”

They had to do a bit of a quick rehearsal during their extended soundcheck, but rough though the sound was, Ritesh had to admit that it had potential. Not to mention, Xie looked absolutely fantastic onstage, in that shiny silver spacesuit, dancing about with the cable plugged directly into xir head, and xie beamed proudly when he told xir so. Yeah, now he was totally forgiven, it was clear.

The venue was already starting to fill up by the time they finished soundchecking, but Xie managed to grab them a couple of bottles of CBD bubble-brew and some Not Dogs with fried plantains, which they munched while looking out across Peckham, watching the crowds arrive, by boat, by paddleboard, or by running across the narrow V-shaped wire bridges slung between the buildings. As he felt the bubbles dissolving in his mouth, releasing their relaxing chemicals into his bloodstream, even Ritesh had to concede, it was beautiful what they’d done with the ruins of Peckham, the Faraday lights twinkling off the dark canals and the glossy leaves of the lush roof gardens.

His hand twitched to his smartphone to take a photo, then realised that without reception, there was nowhere to upload the beautiful image. So he stashed his phone back in his pocket and just gazed down into the hanging gardens, trying to impress the image onto his memory the old-fashioned way. With a twinge, he suddenly wished he’d brought a sketchbook, maybe even an easel and some watercolour paints. His hand-lettered gig flyers had been legendary back in the day, looped with playful line drawings of fit fly-girls and bonkers B-boys dancing their faces off. Why’d he stopped? Oh yeah, it was pointless to carry on sketching like that when every kid on the net had picrew generators and insta filters.

Wait! What? Why was he thinking like this? Damn, this place must be getting to him. Ritesh loved technology. He ate, slept and breathed technology and wished he could somehow still browse the internet even in his sleep. For a moment, he wondered if Xie could browse the internet with those crazy implants. Shaking his head, he turned back to the stage and resolved to keep a tighter leash on the nostalgia. Nostalgia was cancer, man. You had to believe in the future, man, or what was the point?

Casting his eyes across the audience, he watched the Solars dancing, sipping their chemically enhanced bubble-brew and shaking their brightly coloured hair to Korean Bit-Hop, then looked back at the Cyber-Refuseniks huddled near the bar looking awkwardly miserable in their dazzle-camouflage make-up and their logoless European grey clothes. He knew who he thought was having more fun. Then he caught Xie’s eye, nodded, and together they took the stage.

The gig was a blast. Sure, it was a bit rough and ready as Ritesh had almost forgotten how to mix and totally trainwrecked his own beats a few times, and Xie was so caught up in dancing that xie missed xir cue a couple of times. But on the whole, it went down well. The first couple tunes were a bit rough, but halfway through, he seemed to feel something lift, either in his head, or in the audience, and the set started to take off. The colours seemed brighter, the lights seemed more magical, the sounds seemed to sparkle and quiver in his monitor, and for a moment, he forgot his aching old bones, and was suddenly seized with the old desire to dance, dance, dance until the end of the world.

There was one song in particular where the old magic took hold, and Ritesh honestly felt like time slowed down, like he was one with the music, with the audience, and even one with Xie, who was jumping up and down to the dirty 303 squelch, tossing out samples of Donna Haraway reading The Cyborg Manifesto, saying things like “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” and “Technology is not neutral – we are inside of what we make, and it is inside of us.” Ritesh stretched the 303 bass until it almost snapped. “Be a cyborg!” tapped Xie, robot dancing right up at the edge of the stage. “I would rather be a cyborg.”

The Solars absolutely loved it, dancing like the floor was electrified, but they were clearly so mashed on psilocybin tea and CBD-laced bubble-brew that they’d dance to the chatter of a fax machine – back in the late 90s, Ritesh always used to raise a huge laugh by throwing in the distinctive click and whirr of a fax machine at the end of his set, but these kids – none of them weren’t even born when the last fax machine had been disconnected. It was totally unpredictable how some technology passed into the realm of fashionable retro, while other once-loved technology was just forgotten.

The Cyber-Refuseniks were more cautious. They clearly liked the beats, but the datanoise and few snatches of encrypted phone conversations that Ritesh had dropped in from his hard drive clearly made them tense. He knew they weren’t there for him, anyway, they were there for U-Bahn. Honestly, he couldn’t understand why that band had such a following among the Cyber-Refuseniks when they supported themselves almost entirely by Gridfunding, and used huge swathes of junk data in their own music. But as he was tearing down his equipment, he could see the Refuseniks pushing forward to get the front row.

Henning and Fritz from U-Bahn had already come out, nodding “Super show!” at Ritesh before pulling their own piles of junk electronics and science-experiment-gone-wrong homemade musical instruments out onto the stage. And Xie…

Oh, holy shit. No one had told Xie. Because Xie was standing there, the cable still hanging out of xir skull, staring, open-mouthed with shock and admiration, at the tall, gaunt singer with the electric-shock hair and the old-fashioned Dracula-black suit making his way onto the stage.

“Hallo, my Cyborg friend,” he boomed, in a thick Berliner accent.

Xie stared, completely frozen, unable to sign or tap.

Xian Grenze seemed to take it in his stride, reaching down and picking up the dangling end of the cable coming from xir ear. Holding it to his mouth, he pretended to use it as a microphone. “It would make us very happy if you two would perhaps come and perform a song with us?”

Xie just about managed a nod.

“Maybe you already know this, but at the end of every set, we usually take suggestions, words, concepts, from the audience, and we improvise a song around them.”

Finally, Xie managed to tap something. “Yes. I know this. I am a huge fan.”

The German beamed and threw up his hands. “Excellent! Perhaps tonight, then, you would like to suggest the theme?”

Struggling to remember how to operate xir communications pad, Xie managed to type out, “Fungus. I would love it if you did a song about fungus.”

Xian Grenze’s impossibly handsome rock star face split open in a goofy grin, all higgledy-piggledy teeth and splayed nostrils, as he leaned in closer. “That’s my favourite subject, too.”

Chapter Text

U-Bahn were fun onstage. To Ritesh, that was the most unexpected thing about them. From the records, he’d got the idea that they were humourless German pedants, all those heavy, portentous sounding ballads about world wars and dying stars and the eventual heat-death of the Universe, that diffused the energy of the Tektonic Breakbeat that had made their name. But onstage, they were less like university professors and more like mad scientists, rushing about, theatrically donning protective equipment to apply Geiger counters to partially-insulated nuclear wastebins during their minor hit, ‘Strahlung Sterne (Radiation Stars)’. He wondered if the radioactive waste was real, or just some trick. But the sand, dripped down a metal chute to form the rhythm track for ‘Desertifikation’ was certainly real. And the horrible, gloopy brown sludge that sloshed slowly through giant amplified hourglasses at the side of the stage to form the liquid, slightly sickening filter sweeps on ‘Giftmüll (Toxic Waste)’ certainly smelled bad enough to be genuine.

Ritesh had been expecting banks of samplers, and keyboards, but to his surprise, the pair of musicians behind the handsome singer used all the odd and awkward tools scattered across their workbenches. The interludes of clanging metallic sounds genuinely were scrap metal, hammered live on a miked-up anvil. The eerie, echoey gurgling sounds were made by dripping real water through genuine drainpipes. They plucked giant metal springs, assaulted thin metal pipes with air compressors to make ghostly organ tones, and placed contact mics on everything from air bellows to electric motors to get their complex and haunting sounds.

So when Xian gestured for Xie and him to join them up onstage, Ritesh was not even that surprised when Henning produced a large glass dish containing fungal mycelium freshly dug up from the Reclamation Centre, and started applying electrodes to it.

“Fungi, fungi, fungi – Pilze, Pilze, Pilze!” chanted Xian, as Xie’s eyes flashed and xie threw a wash of filthy, liquid-sounding squelches across the PA. Ritesh retaliated with a slow, lazy thud of 808 kicks. And slowly, elegantly, as Henning teased strange music out of the electrical impulses of the mycelium, Xian started to quote something familiar that sounded like it might be poetry. “I held a gun to the head of a mushroom. Tell me the name of your god, you fungal piece of shit. The mushroom replies, can you feel your heart burning? Can you hear the struggle within? The fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. You cannot kill me in a way that matters.”

Then Xian threw his head back and let out a cry that sent shivers down his spine, half shriek, half air raid siren. Fritz pummelled the tribal drums faster and faster, encouraging kids from the audience to come and join in. A couple of Rastas and Refuseniks melted out of the audience and started to drum along, the beat growing stronger and stronger, as Ritesh felt that if they played any more intensely, the stage might start to levitate. Shedding his middle-aged awkwardness, he found himself dancing, swinging his hips and shoulders back and forth to the rhythm. How long had it been since he danced? More people were jumping on the stage as the energy rose in the crowd. Someone slapped him on the shoulder and bellowed in his ear, and Ritesh recoiled, preparing himself for argy-bargy, but he turned to see an enormous solarpunk grinning from ear to ear as he extended a friendly arm holding a hollow gourd full of something that smelled powerfully strong.

“Drink!” commanded the solarpunk in a thick Ukrainian accent.

As Ritesh complied, the stranger threw his arm around his neck and started to bounce up and down, pulling him towards the mosh pit down front. Laughing with joy, Ritesh handed off the drum machine to Xie and plunged into the melee. How had he forgotten this? The thrill of chucking himself about to music, arm in arm, body to body with ecstatic strangers on the dancefloor, just lost in a surge of spinning, shaking, undulating flesh, a single mass of humanity united by the beat. It had been far too long.

Xian was standing on tiptoes now, his hands held above his head, twisted into strange shapes like the horns of some mighty shaman. “To rot is to grow,” he chanted. “Without decay there is no new life. To rot is to grow.” All around them, the audience started to pick up the chant, each side picking up a different strand of the lyric. The drums finally dropped out, and Ritesh heard Xie let the last of the 808 fade away, until there was nothing but singing.

Slowly, he noticed that the words had changed. One side of the crowd was singing one tune; the other side singing something completely different. Rez appeared at his side, thrusting her hand into the air as she led a chant. Slowly, the two sides of the audience started to overlap, the initial dissonance giving way to startling harmonies, then finally the sweetness of perfect intervals as everyone sung together. Even Ritesh found himself joining in, though he didn’t understand the words at all.

As the sound finally faded away, he turned to Rez. “What the hell was that?”

Rez flung her braids out of her face, laughing. “Old Archipelago folk tune. You sing in rounds. One side sings in Igbo, the other in Yoruba. One side sings ‘we are many, we are different’, the other side sings ‘we are one, we are strong’. Then you switch. As the two rounds overlap and start to harmonise, the words shift so that eventually everyone is singing ‘our difference is our strength’. First lesson anyone learns in creche.”

“It’s beautiful,” conceded Ritesh, moving to start packing up his gear.

Rez’s familiar mocking laughter. “Ah, so finally you concede that something about the Archipelago might be nice.”

Ritesh was too buoyed up on the post-gig adrenaline to rehearse the old argument they’d had a thousand times. “Look, I don’t know why you asked me to play here tonight after all this time, but… yes. Even I can see that there’s something beautiful happening here.”

Abruptly, Rez stopped laughing and looked at him seriously. “I didn’t ask you to play here on my account. The headliner asked for you by name. I presumed you knew them.”

“Who, U-Bahn?” Ritesh looked over to where a starstruck Xie was gazing up at Xian as the rock star held court before a small coterie of fans, signing autographs and posing for selfies in between dropping inscrutable puns that seemed to flip between German, English and Chinese. “Never met them before in my life. Xie is genuinely a huge fan, though. I wonder why on earth they asked for us?”

As he shoved his 808 back into its protective packing, a low voice with a familiar Beijing-by-way-of-Silicon-Valley accent chimed in behind him. “Actually, I asked for you.”

Ritesh turned to look into the wide cheekbones and asymmetrical haircut of a beautiful Chinese woman, standing before him in a soft, flowing lambswool dress of palest grey. “Eris Bianjie?”

“Well, it’s been Eris Grenze for a few years now, but that is I.” She nodded, and the iridescent holographic bird painted across her features seemed to flutter as if alive. “You are Ritesh Bhatia, of IPRA? You are the one who found the fungal algorithm in the wild?”

Ritesh swallowed nervously, but nodded.

“Look, I had to warn you quickly, and I didn’t know how else to get a message to you without being intercepted. There are two government agents who have been tracking you, you are in contact with them, yes?”

He nodded wearily. “Richard and Judy. Yes.”

Fear flashed across her face for a microsecond, before she could recover her poise. “Please tell me that you have not given them access to The Grid’s back end.”

Ritesh shook his head quickly. “No. Littlemore has been stalling them while we try to find out who they are.” He paused as Nickels tapped him on the shoulder and handed him a beer. “They’re not from the FCA or the PRA, are they?”

Eris gave a visible sigh of relief and nodded. “So they told you, they are Financial Authority. When they last came to me, they tried to tell me they were Ofgem.”

“Who are they, really?” Ritesh wasn’t even sure he wanted to know the answer to that.

“They are from Five Eyes. They do not want to regulate The Grid. They want it for the ultimate surveillance tool.”

“Why would they want The Grid, when they’ve got backdoors into WhatsApp, iMessage, Weibo, literally every messaging service on the planet?”

Eris peered around at the Cyber-Refuseniks crowding round Xian to get quaint, old-fashioned paper signatures as they didn’t seem to believe in selfies, either. “Too many people here. British secret services have been infiltrating heavily among the Refuseniks. Is there an aftershow party where we can speak privately?”

Chapter Text

The afterparty was at the Reclamation Centre, an idea that tickled Xian Grenze so much he kept chanting it to himself, in a haunting nursery rhyme rhythm. “Party at the reclamation centre – everybody can… reclaim? Remain? Recycle? See Michael? What rhymes with reclamation centre? Gott verdammt, why is English so difficult to rhyme. Party at the reclamation centre, those who leave aren’t those who enter…”

Xie was so entranced by Xian that she barely dared to look at him, keeping her eyes focused elsewhere until she knew he was looking away, so that she would not be blinded by the sheer intensity of his Prussian blue gaze. It was always so much safer to look at beautiful people in photographs. Onstage was trickier. It was easy in a bigger audience where one could look as much as one wanted, fill one’s eyes without any danger. But in a smaller venue like Peckham, especially being so close to them, literally up on the stage next to Xian, there was the terrible danger that while staring, entranced, xie might accidentally meet his gaze and encounter the sudden depths of his whole soul, staring straight out of his eyes back at xir.

And with Eris there, so shiny and silver and clever, beaming at everyone with that beautiful, calming smile – it was almost too much to cope with. Even hearing her voice, xie felt xirself quaking with something more like awe than mere hero worship. Xie didn’t quite know where to look, and if xie wasn’t already so borne up on the relaxing chemicals of the bubble-brew, xie might not have been able to handle it.

Sure, Xie already knew that Xian and Eris were married. It was one of the great romance stories of the age: beautiful, androgynous rock star meets immensely clever and gifted mathematician and programmer who sweeps him off his feet and spirits him away. It was the kind of story that gave hope to shy, geeky programmers everywhere, that they might win the beautiful, cool, charismatic rock star. And yet seeing them together, as adoringly as he gazed at her, as devotedly as she smiled back at him, xie realised of course that they were one of a kind. Cool rock stars didn’t really fall in love with maths geeks. But watching them as they walked together, hand in hand, down the stairs to the dock below, that filled Xie with a longing xie wasn’t sure xie knew how to name.

After leading them across a floating pontoon to the rear of the community centre, Lo_Rez gave them a brief tour of the reclamation centre. Casually gesturing towards a lower level, she muttered something about not disturbing the mushroom beds, before leading them up through a series of metal workshops and repair benches and even what looked like electronics laboratories.

“Nothing is wasted on the Archipelago,” she explained. “If something is repairable, it would be repaired. If it could not be repaired, it would live another life providing spare parts.”

It seemed almost like a religious principle, painted on walls and printed on the smocks and protective gear: ‘repair, reuse, recycle’. On a far wall, there was another colourful mural of a beautiful woman wrapped in a patchwork quilt, drifting in from the sea on an old tyre, as seagulls crowned her with coils of metal from an old mattress. “Recycling is rebirth; reclamation is reincarnation” declared the words painted on scrolls threaded through a painted garbage dump that was sprouting into elaborate fungus, colourful plants and eventually graceful trees. Still slightly high on the bubble-brew, Xie squinted slightly and thought xie saw a few skulls and ribcages spread in among the rubbish, and thought about how wonderful it would be, that when you died – peacefully, in one’s sleep of course – fungus would thread itself through your body until you erupted in the autumn as beautiful toadstools.

“Battery recycling centre.” Lo_Rez was still talking faintly in the background, as they passed another floor, and Xie did xir best to pay attention. “Even Tesla, at their best, recycle only 93% of their battery technology – we’re currently at 99%, aiming to be at 100% within a year or two.”

“Impressive.” Eris nodded appreciatively. “That was one of the starting points when we first began to imagine The Grid. Even when a battery no longer has the juice to power a car, it can still easily fuel a fridge or a heating unit.” Turning to Lo_Rez, she risked a hesitantly friendly smile. “I’d love to speak to you more about this. Our consumer base has a huge, constantly changing supply of batteries at various stages of their life cycles, and we’re always looking to refine our process. In return, I’m sure that some of our technologies might be of particular usefulness to you?”

Xie had been so excited by the idea that Lo_Rez and Eris Bianjie might work together (perhaps even bringing about more U-Bahn shows in the Peckham Archipelago!) that xie was surprised to see Lo_Rez’s face shut down so quickly. “Thanks, we’re not interested in partnering with corporations.”

Eris’s smile barely dimmed. “Understandable. But may I ask why?”

Lo_Rez’s face remained impassive. “You can ask. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna answer.”

For a moment, Ritesh looked as if he were about to cut in and divert the conversation onto safer topics, but to xir surprise, Eris’s eyes crinkled as she laughed a genuine peal of amusement. “I like your sense of humour. And I find your honesty refreshing. Here.” With a brief rustle of her loose, elegant garment, she produced a small purse and filed through it until she found a slim, silver card. “These are my details. That’s my direct line, and my personal email. Just in case you ever want to talk.” Her beatific but tight-lipped smile gave way to a genuine grin. “It doesn’t have to be about business.”

“I’m flattered,” said Lo_Rez, accepting the card reluctantly, as if it were a piece of rubbish from the dump in the mural. Wondering if she was going to throw it away, Xie thrust out xir hand to examine the card. To xir astonishment, Lo_Rez just let her take it! With huge eyes and a genuinely impressed face, xie turned the card end over end a few times, watching a slightly shinier silver-on-silver hologram shift from a butterfly to a bird’s wing to a web as the card moved. Of course xie memorised the email address and the phone number as xie spun it between xir fingers; that went without saying. But Lo_Rez held out her hand and wiggled her fingers, gesturing to take the card back, before Xie could stow it away in one of the multiple pockets of xir jumpsuit.

“Rez, you said there was somewhere quieter we could talk?” Ritesh ran his fingers nervously through the unruly hair at the back of his neck, seeming anxious to move the conversation back to business before Rez could grow spikey again. In Xie’s head, all famous people knew and were friends with one another, so it was perplexing that Rez did not seem to want much to do with Eris.

“Of course. Let’s go up to the roof garden.” Rez nodded, stowing the card away and gesturing towards a staircase at the back of the lab.

Upstairs, under the shimmering, slightly iridescent glass of a homemade dome, the temperature was a few degrees warmer, and quite moist, like, rainforest moist, though Xie could feel that there was a faint breeze moving the air from one end to the other, so that it didn’t get too stuffy and close. Every few meters, tiny clearings in the jungle-like garden were underlit with a different colour, forming small, enclosed spaces in the dense mat of ferns and lush, tropical-looking plants. As Rez led them through towering bamboo groves, xie could see that some of the bowers were already occupied, by friends of the band, and various denizens of the Archipelago. For a moment, xie wondered if Nickels was about. Although Xie had hoped that they would get more of a chat, he had seemed very busy with breaking down the sound equipment for the show and xie couldn’t spot him among the growing crowd.

Onward through the maze of soft scents and towering blooms, Lo_Rez led them, to a small purple-and-pink lit bower, pungent with the small of night-blooming vines, and comfortable with chairs and other furniture that seemed to be made from living bamboo. Bottles of Rye wine were already chilling in metal buckets dispersed about the floor. Yet, as Xie breathed in the heady scent of the blossom, xie was as struck with what xie didn’t smell, as with what xie did.

It was the absence of a sound, even though they had been outside all evening, that finally made something in Xie’s head click and reach for xir communications pad. “I haven’t heard the hum of any filters since we got here, but the air is fresh? Do you use filters?”

Lo_Rez laughed and gestured about her. “In a manner of speaking. Look around you!”

Eris, still standing and pacing about as the others settled into the bamboo settees, examined the foliage closely. “Air ferns, viper’s bowstring, spider plants – ah, and I recognise these big purple leaves from the Living Walls in Shenzhen. They are bioengineered to strip carbon from the air and store it in nodes in their roots.”

Nodding proudly, Lo_Rez fondled the purple and green striped leaves of a large tropical bush that Xie had taken for an aspidistra. “Roots which can then be composted and fed to the fungi which we have been training to digest and break down pollution into safer, cleaner by-products. Did you think the roof gardens were purely for aesthetics? They are the lungs of the Archipelago.”

“Clever.” But Eris remained standing, reaching into the depths of her garment’s wide kimono sleeves to produce a thin, brushed-metal tube with knobs and dials at one end. When she tweaked one of the buttons, the other end started to glow, first deep blue, then slowly phasing through sky blue to pale blue to silver-white. “Please excuse me, but you know I must take precautions.” Waving the tube in lazy semi-circles, Eris quickly scanned the furniture, the buckets, even the surrounding foliage.

But as she drew near to Xie’s end of the bower, the light faded to yellow, deepening to orange, and then to red as she waved the wand in Xie’s direction, and xie felt xir face flushing as Xian looked over, his face suddenly concerned for his wife. What on earth did the thing measure? And what dreadful sin was Xie about to be forced to confess?

Eris’s voice was kind, but her gaze was direct. “I’m very sorry to have to ask, but are you carrying any digital listening devices, infocrawlers, or other recording gear?”

Xie burst out laughing at the sudden release of tension, and tapped a reply into xir palmpad. “Of course I am. My implants.” Xie held out her hand for the device, and quickly moved it closer to the stubs of xir ears. Almost immediately, it deepened to almost blood red, and started to emit an irate-sounding beep. Fiddling with xir implants for a second, xie switched them off, astonished at the abrupt discontinuation of the hum of soft music, background chatter and swaying leaves, and of course the silencing of the device’s beeping. But the light went back to pure white again, and xie handed it back to Eris.

Eris ran the wand over Xie a few more times, until she was satisfied, then switched the machine off and put it away, gesturing for Xie to turn xir implants back on. Sound rushed back in, as Eris was halfway through a sentence, her voice soft, apologetic and friendly. “…so sorry, but you must understand the need for caution.”

“It is OK,” Xie chirped, daring to risk a smile back at Eris, feeling very strange and a little bit excited at being the object of such intense scrutiny from xir hero. “It is kind of cool being a cyborg. You should see me trying to go through transport security.”

But as Eris sat down opposite Ritesh and accepted a glass of white wine from her husband, Ritesh did his best to steer the conversation back to work. “So our friends, Richard and Judy. Eris, you are saying they are actually covert Five Eyes agents looking for a backdoor into The Grid?”

Eris took a long slug of wine and nodded. “When I first met them, back in Beijing, they were going by the codenames of Niulang and Zhinu. This must have been four or five years ago…”

Ritesh leaned forward in his chair, raising his hand like a child interrupting in class. “Wait, hang on – four or five years ago. Xie, when did the Light Eaters charges start?”

“Six months ago was the first charge,” supplied Xie helpfully.

Shaking his head, Ritesh pursed his lips together in perplexment. “See, our spooks told us they were looking to investigate you for a payment skimming scam on the web, involving a third party operator called Light Eaters.”

“Well, that and Siberia,” added Xie, smiling and nodding at Eris, hoping she would turn her penetrating gaze back towards xir. Littlemore had sent over a quick debriefing email about the meeting last thing Friday afternoon, and xie had been thrown off-centre by the Siberia theory.

“Siberia? What on earth do I have to do with Siberia?” Eris shook her head and looked completely blank. “And who on earth are Light Eaters?”

Xie leaned forwards in xir chair, tapping away at xir pad, desperate to try to impress Eris with an impressive memory dump of pertinent information, even without a connection to the internet. “Well. The last news I saw on Siberia, as we were leaving London Bridge, The Register reported that the SiberGaz IT technicians had tried several times to get back onto the system and reapply their BGP settings. You see, something had erased their BGP, that was why the whole of their servers seemed to just fall off the internet so quickly. Do you follow me?”

Eris nodded, her eyebrows knitted together in what xie hoped was interest.

“The technicians tested the change on the backup and failsafe systems first. The Register did not report the exact details – perhaps a translation problem from the Russian, I do not know? – but the technicians said that they tried everything, even replacing the failsafe server with a completely fresh hard drive. But every time they manage to reinstall the BGP, some kind of corruption, that the technician described as an ‘electronic fungus’, kept wiping the disc.” Xie’s fingers flew at speed over the communications device as xie typed. “So, combined with the fact that our Grid entity looked like an electronic fungus – and the fungal nature of the algorithm that skimmed the Grid payments for Light Eaters? Well Richard and Judy must have concluded…”

“Xie!” snapped Ritesh. “Do you mind not giving away crucial intelligence to…”

“But it is Eris Bianjie!” Xie protested, as Eris had looked so interested in the theory! Ritesh was acting so peculiarly tonight, and xie couldn’t figure out why. Xie wiped the back of xir hand across xir forehead, as the heat and humidity had formed a sheen of sweat. “She is an ally, yes?”

“We don’t know that for certain yet…” Ritesh stuttered.

“Ah, so I’m a suspect.” Eris sat back and pulled a wry face as she sipped her wine. “Would you mind telling me what I’m suspected of?”

Ritesh didn’t even blink. “I’m sorry, but first would you mind telling me the location of your English iPhone with the number ending 7749?”

“An English iPhone? I haven’t had an English phone since I worked for Picosoft!”

“This would have been about seven years ago. It was registered to The Grid.” Ritesh’s fingers were twitching, like he desperately wanted to open up his laptop to check more of the details. But without internet, Xie knew he wouldn’t be able to get into his work account. Xie was simply confused, because xie, of course, remembered the full details of Eris’s current phone number, and it didn’t match at all. But this didn’t make sense? What was the other phone that Ritesh thought might belong to Eris? If it was work information, surely he would have shared it with xir. Littlemore hadn’t mentioned a phone in the debriefing email.

Eris leaned back and stared up at the glass of the dome, as if trying to recall ancient history. “Seven years ago… yes, I would have been in London on a temporary visa, working on expanding The Grid from the initial central hubs of The City and The Wharf via the Crystal Palace and Highgate central processing masts. I’m sure I probably had two or three local phones during that time. I keep different lines for business contacts, for friends and for my family. But I can’t remember the numbers; I have to change them every few months when I’m outside Green-Berlin because of the endless fucking line-tapping from your government – and from your Tabloids, which might as well be the same thing.” Eris rolled her eyes dramatically and held out her empty glass for a top-up of wine. “Now can you tell me what my former phone is supposed to have done?”

Ritesh’s chest heaved as if preparing himself for a very deep dive. “That phone was used to set up a Grid provider called Light Eaters Ltd, that somehow skimmed almost every active account on The Grid to the tune of several million clicks. So, yeah. This is what we’ve been investigating, and we’re trying to work out how you are involved. So if you’re able to provide any information on the whereabouts of that phone, if you can help us trace it, or…”

“A few million clicks?” asked Eris, with an aghast face and a growing sense of disbelief in her voice as it dawned on her what was being implied. “You think I’d compromise my own platform for a mere million clicks?”

“Twenty-five million clicks,” corrected Ritesh, shifting uncomfortably in the bamboo seat. “Works out at just over a million Euros. That’s quite a chunk of cash.”

“A million euros?” The aghast face gave way swiftly to derision. “Do you understand, that in my world, a million euros is mere pocket change? If I chose to exit The Grid tomorrow morning and cashed out all my shares, I could sit back on my designer sofa eating bonbons for the rest of my life, my children’s lives, and quite probably my great, great grand children’s lives, without lifting a finger. The idea that that kind of money would be an incentive to me, to go against everything I believe in is… well, it would be insulting if it weren’t so absolutely risible.”

Lo_Rez sighed deeply, rolling her eyes and tossing her braids over her shoulders. “And just when I was starting to like her! See, Ritesh, this is why it’s pointless trying to reason with the ultra-wealthy. Pointless trying to regulate them. Whatever fines you throw at them are little more than pocket change to them. They simply don’t inhabit the same planet as we do – hell, if they burn up this one, they can go buy up another one. They don’t have our problems, they aren’t stuck in our 6-hour traffic jams, they don’t pay tax like we have to. They can just up and move to New Zealand, or Kathmandu, or the Green Commune of West Berlin, if they don’t want to deal with our petty rules and regulations.”

“Hey, hey,” protested Eris, suddenly looking slightly irate for the first time, a frown gently creasing the silver lines of her anti-facial recognition hologram. “I pay tax. I pay quite a heavy tax in Green-Berlin. I think I pay something like 50% on my earnings, plus an added wealth charge on my holdings – and I’m happy to pay it! To pay teachers and nurses and build U-Bahns and housing estates and put the infrastructure for free internet and electronic voltholes down every city street. As an employer, you know, I want, in fact, I need healthy, well-educated employees who can read and count and code, to take my jobs. I need good, reliable, well-funded public transport systems to get my employees to and from work effectively, and places for them to live. I need voltholes and 5G infrastructure so The Grid can operate smoothly and safely.”

“Huh. I thought most billionaires moved to Green-Berlin to avoid tax.” Lo_Rez’s face was steely. Her entire demeanour towards Eris seemed to have changed, since she’d moved from the category of merely rich to obscenely wealthy.

“Fuck that, I moved to Green-Berlin to pay more tax!”

“I thought you moved to Green-Berlin for love.” Xie could feel the sweat pooling at the back of xir jumpsuit, and the disharmony between the two women in the crowded space was disconsolately prickling xir brain in the same way as the damp fabric prickled xir skin.

“Ah yes, that little detail,” added Eris, turning and smiling at her husband. He reached over, and clasped her hand gently for a moment, something untranslatable flickering between their eyes.

“I thought you claimed asylum to get away from state-sponsored Chinese surveillance and intimidation,” Ritesh countered.

“Chinese surveillance is nothing compared to Five Eyes,” sighed Eris. “Nothing! Honestly, if I moved to get away from anything, it would be Five Eyes’ surveillance – not to mention the endless meddling of the English government and their endless pointless bureaucracy, adding more and more loopholes every time we tried to get any regulation sorted. If anything, I think that people like me, people like Billy Barbel – we should pay more tax! All of the money I make off my international franchises, I put straight back into research. I practically give money away in the areas around local micro- and macro-grids, to cash-strapped municipalities, libraries, high schools, that kind of thing.”

“A regular angel,” sneered Lo_Rez.

“I get great ideas from schoolkids. I recently finished putting this amazing Chinese kid through MIT on a full scholarship – he’s come out to do amazing work with fungus. I’ve just thrown a ton of seed capital at his start-up doing absolutely incredible things with mycelium and mushroom technology. I’m absolutely crazy about fungus at the moment. As a natural replacement for polluting, fossil-derived materials like plastics. That’s why I was so interested in your reclamation centre. I think fungus is undeniably the future.”

“Me too,” said Xie, xir eyes growing huge with something approaching hero worship. “Have you read Anna Tsing?”

“I adore Anna Tsing, we had her to dinner when we lived in San Francisco. I knew a chef there who could do absolutely magical things with fresh matsutake,” swooned Eris, turning to Xie with a dreamy little smile of recognition.

“I have never had matsutake, I have only read about it,” tapped Xie with a sigh.

“Ah, you must have dinner with us when you come to Berlin. Xian spent six months in Japan, learning to cook. But the research this kid is doing on mushroom technology…”

Xie blinked and quickly rewound the five-second delay on xir implants to make sure Eris really had said what xie thought she had said. She had honestly just invited xir to dinner in Berlin? With Eris and Xian? Grinning ecstatically, Xie stored the clip, only to find that conversation had moved on when xie dropped back into real-time listening.

“I’ve had packages delivered in fungal packing,” Ritesh offered. “I’ve heard amazing stuff about it – that it eats old plastic to form mycelium mats, then you grow the mycelium mats into custom shapes – but unlike polystyrene, the dried mycelium is totally compostable. Throw it in the back garden, and it’s soil in two weeks.”

“Oh, he’s doing even more amazing things than that,” boasted Eris proudly, her eyes flashing with geeky excitement. “Have you heard of StoneFungus?”

“Oh yes,” tapped Xie, practically bouncing.

“What’s that?” asked Ritesh.

“Well, you know that the concrete industry is one of the most destructive industries on earth, from a green point of view. And despite its reputation, the stuff is not indestructible – it decays, and crumbles away into toxic powder that gets into everything and causes lung damage. But some fungus families – the stone funguses and particular strains of lichen – they can even eat rock. They emit acids that break it down, and then absorb the stone into their own mycelium. So this kid of ours – he is training stone fungus to eat concrete. But not in a damaging way, you see, what he’s aiming for is mats of mycelium that penetrate crumbling concrete, and replace it as they eat it. So you end up with a concrete-mycelium mat that is as workable and flexible as concrete, but as strong and hard as stone. Plus, the mycelium is able to absorb water, so when you get a sudden downpour on a building made of StoneFungus, the fungus sops it up, and can even divert and redirect the water through organic channels it grows inside its mat. It would be a fantastic building material for flood-prone areas. Like the Archipelago.” She looked around her, at the twinkling faraday lights reflecting off the dark waters. “Rez, you said that you were working on fungus that could digest the pollution that the Skycleaner Plants pull out of the air. Now imagine a fungus that could eat pollution and grow buildings – or the bodies of biodegradable electric cars. Or boats. Or ultralight aircraft. The possibilities are almost unimaginable. Can you imagine what the Peckham Archipelago could do with some of this technology?”

“This is how they get you.” Lo_Rez sighed deeply, but refused to meet Eris’s gaze. “The technology. The possibility. The imagination. They literally colonise your imagination. But I said no to Billy Barbel and I’m saying no to you.”

Eris took a deep breath. “Ah. So you’ve dealt with Billy before.”

Rez nodded, slowly and suspiciously.

“Look, I have known Billy for many years, on a personal level as well as business. I introduced him to his current wife, and I’m godmother to his daughter. He is, unquestionably, a brilliant and imaginative man. But in terms of the times we have partnered to work on projects together, we… well, we have different philosophies and very different approaches.”

Rez snorted loudly. “I doubt it. Wealthy folks, they all think the same. They all think they can just waltz in and buy you. Fucking Barbel – when he was launching the Ampre, he wanted to portray it as kinda edgy, kinda street. We were struggling to feed the kids arriving at our door, and he wanted to film these flash, £30,000 cars in our neighbourhood, pose with our artists and our MCs to lend them some kind of cred. He came and he toured the community centre – he loved the murals and shit – and the beginnings of what became this reclamation centre. He was so impressed he wanted to build us a whole new wing of the reclamation centre – in exchange for us letting him use the Archipelago as the backdrop to his adverts, of course. We thought about that long and hard, discussed it at Community Assemblies. Until he named the other condition – he wanted his fucking name on the reclamation centre.”

“Ah, bollocks.” Ritesh was rubbing the bridge of his nose between his eyes, like he always did right before he said he felt a headache coming on.

Xie bent xir neck gently back to look up at the handmade dome, the mismatched glass, the jumbled-together angles where the different sized windows didn’t quite fit, and tried to imagine it finished in the shiny, perfect, silvery glass of the Barbel Industries Centre.

“Do you know how long we’ve been working on this reclamation centre, trying to get it up and running, how many people have put their hearts and their sweat and their labour into making a go of it, and this prick thinks he can waltz in and stick his name on it?”

“Yes. I know that’s how Billy thinks, and how Billy works.” Eris sighed deeply, allowing her face to sink momentarily into an expression of almost unimaginable exasperation and frustration. “But I am not a dog, that needs to piss his little ego everywhere, marking territory with his scent. You have to let things grow, as they need to grow…”

But Rez didn’t hear the rest of her comment. She had thrown her head back and was laughing, deep and resounding and joyful, right from her belly. “So that’s why that guy keeps blasting penis-shaped rocket ships into the galaxy, not for science, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge – but like a dog pissing his territory out in the solar system.”

“Yes, you know exactly what I’m talking about.” Eris’s face lit up with an animatedly mischievous grin that Xie guessed would never, ever see the inside of a television studio.

“In the end, we said no, but I gave him the details of a couple of our best graffiti artists. Told them to go and get as much cash as they could to spray paint the inside of some pristine Barbel Industries studio.” Rez’s lips drew back from her teeth in a wicked smile, that Eris cautiously mirrored.

“Good on them! I’m not the enemy, Rez. I wish I could get you to see that.”

“We haven’t actually sorted that one, yet.” Ritesh’s face turned sour, like he hated to be the bearer of bad news. “Because you are still technically under investigation. All this talk about fungus and mycelium – do you want to explain the electronic mycelium that your Grid hacks from CodeHub have been generating on unsuspecting users’ systems?” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a flash drive that Xie curiously noticed was encased in a pink post-it note with xir name on it?

“What?” Eris’s face contorted into genuine shock. “I’m not on CodeHub. The terms of my severance package from Picosoft explicitly prohibited me from propagating any software through any channel except The Grid. I could be liable not for mere millions, but for billions, if I violate that agreement.”

“Oh, so billions are not pocket change for you, then?” The sudden return of Lo_Rez’s hostility was so palpable that even Xie recoiled.

But Eris ignored her. “Do you have any of this code? Can I view it?”

Ritesh tossed the post-it note wrapped flash drive gently up and down in the palm of his hand. “This is the ‘mycelium’ your alleged code is supposed to generate.” Eris held out her hand to take the drive. “But… the source of this file is Richard and Judy.”

Eris retracted her hand. “Then you have no idea if that’s really some impersonating doppelganger’s code, or just code cooked up by Five Eyes, designed to worm its way into The Grid’s backend the minute it hits your server or mine. That’s exactly the kind of low-down dirty trick that Five Eyes would employ – using people’s own curiosity against them.”

“They specifically told us only to install it on a machine that had no network or internet access, to avoid it worming its way anywhere.”

Flopping back into her bamboo sofa, Eris narrowed her eyes and chewed at her lips, her whole face twisted with curiosity like a Greek goddess presented with an unopenable box. Finally, after several minutes of what looked like a pretty impressive wrestling match with herself, she sighed and held up her hands. “Alright, I’ll swap you for a copy of that.”

“Swap us what.”

Eris sat up and smoothed down her dress. “A Guardian Algorithm. Well, a real one, not that bastard thing you caught in the Deptford Narrows. Since the public is aware of them now, you might as well see one of your own, find out how they work and what they do.”

A puzzled expression crossed Ritesh’s face. “So you didn’t actually trust us at IPRA to actually do our jobs?”

Eris smiled wryly. “After all this time, you still trust the British Government?”

Xie coughed politely and started tapping. “English government. It’s been six years since the Scottish left this mess. And five years since Eire was reunited.”

Gesturing with her hand, Eris conceded, “the Cyborg kid has a point.”

“Why would we be interested in these Guardian Algorithms anyway?” Ritesh shrugged.

Eris took a deep breath, looked over at her husband, then rubbed her eyes as if fighting exhaustion. Xie had wondered if the bird hologram was make-up, or ink, or a temporary tattoo, but it stayed in place, even under the pressure of her fingertips.

“You remember the race for intelligent algorithms?” she started.

Ritesh nodded. “Oh yes. Machine intelligence versus human intelligence. The point at which computers started doing shit that we didn’t understand.”

“See, the problem all along wasn’t machine intelligence. Machines are way smarter than us, hands down. They passed us in computational intelligence nearly a century ago. They started beating us at games like Go and Chess, showing superior predictive and decision-making intelligence at the end of the 20^th Century. So why are they still so stupid? Why do high-speed trading algorithms beat humans only by nickels and dimes in trading terms, a few million here, a few million there, rather than wiping the floor with us fallible humans?”

“Garbage in, garbage out,” shrugged Ritesh. “Algorithmic intelligence is only ever as good as the data it’s trained on. We don’t have perfect data to feed them on. If you feed algorithms on decisions made by racist, sexist human beings, then the algorithms will end up accentuating and even amplifying the underlying racism and sexism. That’s been the fight of the 21^st Century. Combatting data racism, countering digital misogyny. Otherwise the algorithms only magnify the inequality, and you end up with a bunch of data lords locked up in strongholds like The Wharf, while the rest of us sift through the rubbish.”

Lo_Rez turned and looked at him with astonished eyes. “You mean, finally – the penny drops!”

“I never disagreed with you there, Rez. We just disagreed on how to combat it.”

But Eris interrupted before the former friends could start to wrangle again. “The problem isn’t human intelligence, it’s human emotion. Human prejudice, human greed. It was never about cracking machine intelligence – but machine emotion.”

“So how’d you get around this with your algorithmic cops?” sneered Rez.

“Simple. I worked on developing machine emotion. And this is the truly dangerous part. What emotions to give machines? How to counter prejudice – machine compassion? How to counter greed – machine altruism? Programming cops would have been easy. But we didn’t want cops. Programming Guardians? Algorithms that could show compassion, and chase the real deadbeats, but refuse to cut off an impoverished grandmother’s heatpump during a cold spell. Algorithms that could perform cost-benefit analysis – but seeing cost and benefit not purely in financial terms, but also in human terms – and in nonhuman terms, too. What are the costs and benefits to insects, birds, fungi and algae? What are the costs and benefits to an ecosystem? To a planetary-spanning system like the Gulf Stream or El Nino? To perform something like that, you have to program emotions. You have to program algorithms that can love – and not just an ordinary love of a person, but algorithms that can experience biophilia – the love of all living things – algorithms that can experience beauty, can experience wonder and awe and… care. The impulse to care, the simplest of all human emotions – that any human child can experience when they hear a crying baby? That was the hardest emotion to program.”

Ritesh looked stunned. “And you did this? Successfully? You programmed machine emotions?”

Eris nodded slowly. “The Grid’s algorithms are not just about programming the quickest, most efficient use of resources. They are always looking to grow the greenest – and the most fair and equitable systems. Not just on a local scale, but on a global scale. To do that, an algorithm has to have a concept of what fairness is, as well as efficiency. Fairness doesn’t just involve thinking, it involves feeling.”

But Rez’s face was twisted, completely unreadable. “You fucking hippies.”

Eris’s face lit up in the faintest of smiles. “Excuse me, but remind me again, which one of us has the giant mural of Gaia over in their community centre.”

Rez’s twisted expression finally broke into a gigantic grin, as she burst out laughing. “You’re a fucking idealist, man.”

“I’m nothing of the sort. I’m a realist. A realist who does not want to see the earth reach 3 degrees during my daughter’s lifetime.” Eris paused to take another sip of wine. “Do you understand what I’m offering to let you see?”

Xie swallowed loudly as xir brain spiralled out ahead of the others, chasing Eris’s words to their ultimate conclusions. “This is what Richard and Judy are really after. Not the payment system. Not even the ultimate surveillance tool. The ultimate weapon. To teach something how to be fair means teaching it what cheating is. Anything that can be taught how to love and include can be taught how to hate and exclude. Anything that can be taught how to care, can be taught how to judge, and be prejudiced. Humans don’t commit atrocities because of a lack of emotions, but a surfeit of them. There is nothing more dangerous on this earth, than a human who thinks they are right, and morally justified.” Something about what Eris was implying kept flickering and catching, stuck in a loop just out of xir reach, but xie couldn’t quite make the leap to grasp it.

“Is there any chance that these Guardian Algorithms can get out of The Grid?” Ritesh shifted uncomfortably, rubbing his arms as if caught by a sudden chill.

“Not the way that I programmed them.” Eris shook her head decisively. “They are tuned to require a very specific pulse at an exclusive, proprietary frequency unique to each macrogrid’s instance. Without it, they shut themselves down. A Chinese Guardian Algorithm wouldn’t even run on the English Grid. Different laws, different jurisdictions, different… cultural prohibitions and expectations. But if, as you say, someone is… replicating and sharing my code?”

“How do we find out if the two forms of code are connected?”

“Perhaps I can suggest something?” Xie tapped nervously. “If I could take two samples back to the office, I could compare the underlying code. Simple cyberforensics.”

Ritesh coughed loudly and shifted again on his seat. “I’m not sure you’re the best person to be performing such analysis.”

Xie’s head swung round to glare at Ritesh. Why was he being so weird tonight? First the comments about xir life being ‘wrecked’, then hiding the information about Eris’s phone – oh and holding back the flash drive that was clearly marked as intended for xir – and now this? Xie didn’t understand at all. Why were genotypicals so confusing, all these strange interpersonal politics games they liked to play! Xie could feel the heat in the garden starting to rise, and the humidity of the breeze on xir neck was really starting to irritate.

“Why?” It was impossible to fully convey the emotion required, as Ritesh wasn’t even looking at xir as xie signed “What the fuck, man?”

But Ritesh stared resolutely at the bottom of his glass of wine. “Look, no offense, Xie, and please don’t take this the wrong way. But you are way too close to this.”

“How.” Xie didn’t even bother to sign an emotion; xie just glared at him.

“Look.” Ritesh looked up and threw an awkward glance first at Xian, then at Eris. “You said it yourself. You’re a huge fan. You practically worship Xian Grenze and U-Bahn. And you admitted last week, when the code turned up, that you thought Eris was the best programmer on the planet.”

Xie felt xir cheeks flushing, even as Eris turned around and looked intently at Xie, as if properly noticing xir for the first time. There were so many people crowded into the tiny space of the roof garden, and xie felt oddly exposed under Eris’s curious gaze.

But Ritesh wouldn’t even meet xir gaze. “I’m not sure that shows evidence of the impartial attitude required for a truly effective and unbiased investigation. I think you’d be looking too hard to exonerate Eris, rather than keep the open mind required to do a comprehensive job on the analysis.”

Xie stood up, sweat dripping down xir neck, feeling an unpleasant ringing sound in xir brain that was nothing to do with the implants. For a second, xie wondered if it was some kind of electronic feedback loop, then understood. It was white hot anger. “You do not think I can do my job? What the fuck, Ritesh? Is it because I’m pattern sensitive? Because I am a Propiterol Baby? Because I am Deaf? Do you honestly think I am somehow less than human, that I cannot put my feelings to one side because… How dare you!”

Feeling hot water stinging xir cheeks, xie turned around and fled the bower, wanting to break into a run, but continually tripping over roots, cables, bodies sprawled in the now-crowded garden as xie made xir way to the exit. When Xie finally reached the stairs, xie broke into a run without even checking that they were empty. And nearly collided with another body that was trying to come up the steps as xie was coming down.

Chapter Text

Jules was sprawled out across his bed, flicking through television channels as Koku tapped away at the laptop below him, still working on final final edits to the ultimate ultimate conclusion to his thesis. He’d thought there was going to be a film he’d wanted to watch on BBC Two, but when he changed over, he was greeted by the severe face of Fiona Bruce informing him that there was going to be a special panel discussion tonight, featuring the figurehead of a brand new political movement currently taking shape on the lawns of Hyde Park.

“Hang on, what’s this? It’s not Thursday night!” he protested, as the camera switched to show the slightly startled, blinking face of the Druid, looking pale and rumpled under the bright studio lights.

His robes had been washed of their mud, and someone had clearly had a go at trying to manage his long, stringy hair, but as the camera panned back to reveal the other panel members, he looked dazed and slightly out of his depth. To his left, sat Owain Geraint Lloyd, the Welsh firebrand whose matey YouTube channel and podcasts, lively with pop culture references, actually seemed to resonate with the jaded younger generations.

“Ooh, Koku, your boyfriend’s on the telly,” he called out in a teasing voice.

A sonorous voice rolled out across the room, stretching his vowels and rolling his Welsh Rs as he demanded to know how the Druid’s platform was any different from the right-wing populism that had convulsed England in the late teens. Abruptly, Koku’s head appeared, peaking over the shelf of the mattress.

“Is that that dishy Owain Lloyd I hear?” Climbing up the ladder, he nestled into Jules’ chest to watch the program. “Ah Christ, no, it’s that dreadful Tory bird.”

The screen filled with the sleek dark hair and fierce smile of the Home Secretary, calmly wanting to know what was so bad about populism, was the Welsh journalist trying to suggest that there was something wrong with the democratic will of the people. It was well-known that Owain Geraint Lloyd made a point of refusing to appear on all-male panels, so the BBC insisted on digging out the most retrogressive right-wing Dames that the Conservatives could offer, purely for balance, of course. The panel was rounded out with an inoffensively bland Lib-Green and some frothing red-faced barker from one of the many splintered ultra-right-wing nationalist parties, but the only person anyone wanted to hear was the Druid. As the camera panned across the studio audience, it became clear that it was filled with the now slightly ragged-looking folks who had walked with him into London, and were currently camping in Hyde Park.

The Druid cleared his throat and asked for a glass of water, even as the red-faced barker started holding forth about the Death of Stonehenge clearly being the responsibility of Bloody Immigrants, because it turned out that the driver of the fateful boring machine that had caused the disaster had been Romanian. Owain roared back in a thundering poet’s voice, countering that the collapse was the fault of the Tory-Donating construction company. They’d cut corners by purchasing cheaper software for the boring machine in the States, so that the machine had been running on American measurements in feet, while the Romanian operator had been given instructions in meters.

“Well, why didn’t he check?” brayed the red-faced barker, going by the epithet of Johnny Gammon, though there was a persistent rumoured that his real name was something more like Toby Plummidge-DuPrix. “English jobs should be for English people. So that English heritage can be protected for English people!”

But the Druid took a sip of water, and leaned forwards, clutching the glass to his chest as he started to speak, in a thin, reedy voice. “Stonehenge isn’t English,” he said, so quietly that both Owain and Johnny Gammon had to stop squabbling and strain to hear him.

“What do you mean, Stonehenge isn’t English?” Johnny Gammon looked as if steam could come bellowing out of his ears at any moment. “It is the most quintessential of English symbols, along with King Arthur, and…”

“Excuse me, but King Arthur was Cornish. Born in Tintagel, to a Welsh Queen and a Romano-Celtic Dux Bellorum. He fought the English.” The Druid’s voice started out faint, almost frail, but seemed to pick up power as he grew more sure of his facts. “The English – the Anglo-Saxons, that is – didn’t arrive in Britain until the 5^th Century of the Common Era, while Stonehenge was built around 3000 years Before the Common Era. Stonehenge has nothing to do with the English. The stones themselves came from your fair country.” The Druid acknowledged Owain with a faint smile and an incline of the head. “The most prominent burial there was a man whose teeth and bones indicated he grew up in the Alps…”

“Stonehenge, built to celebrate an immigrant?” crowed Owain with a smirk.

“While the grave goods that have been found there seem to have originated from across the Mediterranean, even as far away as Greece.” The Druid pushed his hair back and mopped at the tiny rivulet of sweat running down his brow. “I’m afraid that Stonehenge is – or rather, was, at this point – a rather international, one might even say multicultural, site. The English may have destroyed it, but they certainly didn’t build it.”

“We still don’t know if it is actually destroyed,” the Home Secretary interrupted. “We were drawing up the brief and accepting tenders for the reconstruction project, just as we were rudely interrupted by your mob walking into parliament.”

But Johnny Gammon was having none of it. “My family is from Wiltshire, my ancestors have been born and buried in the English earth since time immemorial, we put our sweat and our very blood into this soil, and if you are suggesting that we are not…”

“Why does that sound so familiar?” wondered Jules, narrowing his eyes at the screen.

“That’s your bloody Billy Barbel, is why,” Koku sniffed. “All that blood and soil and ancestors talk. He sounds like a Nigerian waterlord when he goes on like that.”

“I don’t understand.” Jules shifted, wrapping his arm around his boyfriend. “eMerge hate all of these right-wing English Defence and Keep Brexit Brexity types. Why are they using Barbel’s catchphrases?”

Koku just snorted. “I think you’ll find it’s the other way around. Straight out of the National Socialist hymnal, that whole ‘Blut und Boden’ line is. I’m just afraid that this cuddly Druid character might well be cut from the same cloth.”

But the Druid was leaning forward onscreen, wiping the sheen of sweat from his forehead as if the hot studio lights were clearly getting to him. “Yes, I used to think that way, too,” he was saying, though whether to Johnny Gammon or the Tory wasn’t quite clear. “I walked from Stonehenge to London because I wanted to meet the English – find out what the English thought about what this government of ours was doing to us, doing to our symbols and our landscape.

“And you know, I met the English, from angry young men to lovely old ladies who offered me sugary tea and soggy biscuits. But as I met more and more of the English, I met the lovely Hmong family who made us Chinese takeaway for dinner. I met a friendly woman, originally from Lagos, who cleverly fixed my sandals with a bit of recycled tyre when the strap broke. I met a Polish road crew filling the potholes on the highway after the recent rough weather washed away the tarmac. I met an incredibly bright young man whose parents were from Bangladesh, who replaced the screen on my iPhone after I dropped it on the road.” He was panting slightly, out of breath from the exertion of speaking so much, but he took another deep gulp of water and waved away the weedy Lib-Green when he tried to interrupt.

“My idea of who the English were, changed while I was out walking. It had to change. Because our England of today, our modern England of smartphones and synthetic myco-polymer leather shoes and potholes, is not and is never going to be the England of the Anglo-Saxons, that’s as far away from us now, as the England of the freshly immigrant Anglo-Saxons was from the Britain of the people who built Stonehenge.”

“The Anglo-Saxons never were immigrants! That’s a preposterous drivel of woke nonsense for politically correct snowflakes,” exploded Johnny Gammon. “This is our country, by ancient right!”

The Druid sighed deeply, and leaned back in his chair, rolling his eyes sky high and staring off into the lights, a glazed expression coming over his eyes as Johnny Gammon raged on and on about immigrants and petrol restrictions and young people with pronouns and bloody boat tax and traffic jams and vaccine passes, and all of the other assaults on modern English life and liberty.

But Owain roared to life, and thundered straight back, demanding to know why, if he held English liberties so dear, had he not railed against the evils of the draconian Civil Policing Bill of ’32? And if he was so upset about landlocked counties paying tax to support coastal cities’ water infrastructure, why was he not campaigning for offshore entities like Google-Alphabet and Vodata to pay a fair share of tax on their multibillion-pound operations? And while he was on the subject of infrastructure, would he care to address…

“Excuse me? Sir? I am not a pillow!” barked the Home Secretary, as the camera pulled away from Owain to show that the Druid had slowly but inexorably tilted to the right, until his shaggy forehead was resting gently on the Home Secretary’s immaculately tailored suit.

But the Druid didn’t move.

Owain moved towards him, nudged him gently on the elbow. “Aneurin? Can you just…”

As the Home Secretary gave him a quick shove to get him off her shoulder, the glass slipped from the Druid’s hand and smashed on the floor. Still, the Druid didn’t move.

A girl in the front row screamed, as the Druid’s head flopped forward, no life in his glassy eyes, and his body slowly slipped and crumpled to the floor.

“Ugh, you mean he’s…?” The Home Secretary shuddered as she pushed her chair backwards, away from him.

“Call a medic!” roared Owain as he knelt by the man’s side, grabbing his hands, feeling for a pulse.

The girl from the front row rushed forwards, dodging in front of the camera, as she tried to grab the Druid’s other hand and pull him away. “What have you done to him? What was in that water? Have you poisoned him?!”

“Let me try, I’m a doctor,” insisted the ineffectual Lib-Green, fussing around the corpse, loosening his robes, peering into his eyes. “Quick, man! Is there a defib in the house?” Balling his fists together, he started to pound against the old man’s chest, but it was clearly already too late.

“Is he…?” Jules bent in towards the screen to try to catch a glimpse of what was going on around the stage, as the camera quickly cut back to Fiona Bruce, one finger in her earpiece, doggedly holding it together as the studio audience exploded into chatter. “Is he dead?”

Even the normally sanguine Koku was staring at the television with a slightly shellshocked expression. “I think we just watched a man die, on live television.” He took a deep breath and moistened his lips. “And hundreds of thousands of his followers are still camped out in Hyde Park, itching for a ruck.”

Chapter Text

As Xie tried to flee down the stairs away from the roof garden, xie ran straight into the wall of a larger body. Strong hands gripped xir, and xie tried to fight them off, making inarticulate alarm sounds with xir mouth, until xie realised that the other body was trying to sign something into the meat of xir upper arms where they were touching.

“Hey! Hey! Chill. Xie, what’s the matter?”

Xie took a step back and looked up into the long, narrow face of Nickels, recognising and taking in his kind brown eyes, the streak of white in his hair, the cascade of small pale dots down across his forehead from the white streak, towards the bridge of his nose, like someone had dipped a paintbrush in glitter and dashed it across his face. Odd birthmarks, patterns of skin and hair and even internal organs that didn’t match, another sure-fire sign of the swirl of DNA malfunctions that marked Propiterol Babies. Xie had them xirself, it was one of the reasons xie dyed xir hair such bright colours to hide.

“Genotypicals, that’s the problem,” xie managed to sign back.

Nickels laughed. He had an inviting laugh, deep and throaty as he threw his whole head back and shook from the chest up. “Tell me about it.” His grip on xir upper arms loosened, became something more like a reassuring pressure as he signed with his other hand. “I was just coming up to ask if you wanted another of my kindweed bubble-brews.”

“I’d love one.”

“If the crowd up there is too much, we can head out to the Sentry. How are you with a pedalo?”

Ten minutes later, the bag with the bubble-brews was stowed in the bottom of the boat, as Nickels and Xie slowly peddled their old swan-boat out across the moon-spangled water towards a single building, off at the very furthest boundary of the Archipelago. The pedals were old and a bit rusted, and it was hard to get it going in the right direction at first, and even when they finally managed to sync their pedalling, the boat moved at a gentle walking pace. But the activity calmed Xie, and Nickels’ company already felt so familiar as they laughed and chatted and got to know each other, that xie quickly recovered the good mood of earlier in the evening.

“I looked for you earlier, but I didn’t see you around. Did it take a long time to break down after the gig?”

“Not that long. Then I had to sweep up the floor, and after I was done, I helped out washing up the last of the bottles and glasses.”

Xie laughed. “Strange venue. They make the soundman do the dishes?”

Nickels shrugged. “Everybody has to do dishes. That’s how it works. Another archipelago motto: Who rules is not as important as who cleans up.”

Screwing up xir face, xie thought about that as xie pedalled steadily on. “What does that even mean? I didn’t think you had rulers around here.”

“Well, there’s the Community Assemblies. But if you want to join in on the Community Assemblies, you’ve got to show that you’ve done your fair share of cleaning up. You’re not allowed to vote if you can’t show you’ve cleaned a toilet or done a few hours recycling in the reclamation centre or weeding the roof gardens.”

Xie stared at him, gobsmacked. “How’d they ever get people to go along with that?”

Nickels shrugged again. “It’s ancient history. That’s Rez’s favourite story, from the Before Times. She’s told it to us since I was in creche.”

“Tell me?”

Throwing his arms wide, Nickels’ gestures grew large and expansive, like he was reciting an important story, even if his pedalling suffered a bit. “In the Before Times, things weren’t fair. On the Night Everything Changed, they decided to do things differently. The night of The First Flood, I don’t know if you remember, but it was a Friday night. Everyone in Peckham was partying, except for the Local Union of Janitors and Cleaners, who were having their union meeting up at the church on the hill. When the waters came – and they came fast and strong – it was the cleaners who came down from the church and sorted out the rescue parties; it was the janitors who made rafts and got into drowning buildings and helped get people to safety. So the next morning, when Rez saw the mess, and how much work there was to be done, that’s when she said: who cleans up is more important than who rules. You want to run the place, you got to help clean up the place. Pick up a damn mop!”

Xie burst out laughing, trying to imagine Prime Minister Morgan with his sleeves rolled up, mopping the floor of Parliament. “What, like, even the Prime Minister?”

“Especially the Prime Minister,” nodded Nickels sagely. “Thing is, people seem to really like it. Especially weeding the roof gardens. Rez says gardening has a calming effect on people’s minds – even more calming than CBD or microdosing.”

“That’s funny, my grandmother has been saying for years, gardening is better than therapy. Says people waste their money on doctors when they should just pick up a trowel.”

“No kidding! I seen big guys – real rollers, wannabe gangsters – come into our city farm, like ‘fuck this hippie shit’ then three months later, they’re literally crying the first time they eat a potato they planted themselves and tended from seedstock. Like there is something deep in the human mind that reacts instinctively to tending growing things. It’s wild!” He laughed, and paused before signing, “Literally. Wild.”

Xie was wondering if maybe xie should have stopped to wash some dishes or weed the roof gardens after the gig, but the water became choppy and it was tough going for a bit, as a speedboat shot past them, nearly capsizing them with its wake, and they had to struggle to keep going. But Nickels was a strong paddler, even as Xie fought to stay upright, gazing off at the craft that had just passed them.

“Was that Eris and Rez? What the hell, I thought they hated each other?”

Nickels shrugged and managed to pull the boat around, pointing them in the right direction again. “Rez hates everybody new she meets, that she even halfway likes. It’s her way of keeping herself from getting hurt again. Come on, we’re nearly there!”

Out at the Sentry, they tethered the boat to an iron contraption that looked like it had once held a pub sign, and climbed up a rickety rope ladder to the roof. This garden was mostly wild, extravagant drifts of ivy and bindweed and Virginia creeper laced around tree-sized buddleias dripping with long, drooping snouts of purple flowers, but someone had planted enough ferns and skycleaners in pots around the perimeter that it was easy enough to breathe.

Xie turned around and peered through a break in the buddleia, and gasped as xie saw the view back towards the Archipelago proper, the lights twinkling off the buildings, colouring them all purple and red and gold. From the distance, the domed roof of the reclamation centre looked like a precious jewel, sparkling glints of different colours through the glass. Xie had never seen Old Venice except in archive shots on Wikipedia, but xie imagined it must look something like this, all colourful and shining and beautiful against the reflecting lagoon.

Nickels dropped the bag of bubble-brews onto an old picnic table in the centre of the clearing, its surface covered with the carved initials of generations of courting couples. He stretched, his T-shirt riding up over his taut stomach, then loped towards the back of the roof garden, revealing a long, low building all covered with a century of moss. Tugging at the catch, he unlatched the door and pulled it open, to reveal an Aladdin’s cave inside. Pulling out matches and lighting a few candles exposed a small room with a mattress and a few comfy beanbags and chairs littered about the floor, but the walls were covered with mosaics, bits of broken mirror glass and centuries of shards of smashed crockery and bottle glass of all colours cemented into lovely, twisting, abstract designs.

“It’s beautiful!” signed Xie, when Nickels turned around.

“You want a drink?” offered Nickels, smiling expectantly. “We can… well, we can drink them in there, if you’re cold – or we can stay out here for a while, if you prefer? It’s a nice enough night.”

For a moment, Xie wavered. With a genotypical boy, xie would have had to make the effort to remember to scan everything he said for tripwires and traps and dangerous things that didn’t genuinely mean what they seemed meant to. But xie got the feeling that Nickels meant his question perfectly straightforwardly.

“Let’s stay out here with the pretty view for a bit. Maybe we can go in later, if it gets cold.” Xie settled at the picnic table backwards, facing out into the lagoon and leaning xir back against the wood. Nickels smiled and nodded, picking the bubble-brews out of the bag and bringing them round, perching a few feet away, but still close enough to hand over xir drink.

“What are they like, the implants?” he launched in, without so much as a preamble.

Xie almost laughed with relief at not having to start with confusing, impossible small talk. “Annoying. It’s so hard to get the sound balance right. I keep downloading all the latest upgrades that claim to filter for speech and exclude other noises, but hearing people are just so damn inconsiderate, it’s like they don’t even notice how much sound they make.”

“So I’ve been told!” Nickels opened his bubble-brew and sipped at it.

“You never thought about getting the implants?”

He shook his head. “Can’t afford them.”

Xie echoed him, opening the bubble-brew and tipping some of the tapioca bubbles onto xir tongue, savouring the sensation as they burst and spread tiny explosions of taste across xir mouth. “But you had hormone therapy.”

“Oh yeah.” He nodded his head energetically as he tipped bubbles onto his own tongue. “That was my dad’s idea. He wanted me to be a ‘real boy’ more than he cared about me hearing or not.”

“Do you feel like a real boy?”

“Not all the time, no. It’s pretty damn complicated.”

Xie nodded slowly and signed understanding.

“Do you ever wish you’d got hormones?”

Shaking xir head violently, xie signed disagreement. “How would I ever decide, to be a boy or a girl? Like, how would you ever choose?”

“That’s the problem. Someone else choosing for you.” Nickels let his hands drop, and the conversation faded into stillness.

Xie sipped xir brew and thought about the body beside xir on the bench. It felt so comfortable just sitting there side by side, there was something so warm and solid and reassuring about the presence of Nickels. “This bubble-brew is really good. You said you bred the plants yourself?”

He nodded proudly. “The Kindweed. I spent such a long time breeding that strain. So many of the Brixton strains were so harsh, bred purely for strength and not for how it felt in your mind. They started to become very dangerous – especially for the neurodivergent. Weed is supposed to calm you down, not leave you feeling paranoid and freaked out.”

“It’s lovely. Soothing.” Dropping xir eyes, xie concentrated on the muscles of Nickels’ arm as he signed, glistening like veins of jet in the moonlight, lightening to pink at his wrists and palms. He had lovely hands, long, slim, elegant hands with supple, quicksilver fingers, a girl’s hands on a man’s muscular arms. “You take such care over everything. It’s nice.”

“Thanks.” They both turned towards one another at the same time, and for a moment, their eyes met. But the shock of eye contact felt unexpectedly pleasant, a tickle going up the back of Xie’s neck as xie saw this soul, this roving intelligence, this mind staring back at xir through the warm, burnished-wood brown of Nickels’ eyes.

After a few heartbeats, Xie dropped xir eyes, but as they sat in the dark of the abandoned pub’s roof garden, Nickels eyed her closely. “So, erm, I know you’re an ambi and all, but how would you feel if I tried to kiss you?”

Xie recoiled, pulling away and glaring at him with wounded eyes. Why did it always have to be like this? People started off so nicely, and then there it was, like a curse. Even xir own kind thought xie was disgusting. “I know I may be an ambi, but I still have feelings!”

“No! No!” Nickels’ eyes grew huge with apprehension as he realised his mistake, his signing fingers growing a little shaky with nerves. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant… I know that some ambies are sex repulsed. I just wanted to check where you were at, you know, in terms of orientation, before I lunged in with my sea monster lips.”

“Some ambies? How many ambies have you been with? Are you a chaser or something?” Xie felt a little sick. Xie knew there were some men who specifically targeted Propiterol Babies, because they were supposed to be a little bit naïve and sexually compliant, but xie was lucky enough to have run across them only online, and rarely at that.

“A few.” He paused, rubbing his palms together. “Maybe two or three? But it’s not like that. It’s just… well, it’s just easier with other Propiterol Babies, innit. It’s such a relief when there are basic things you never need to explain.”

Letting out a low, slow exhalation as xie felt the tension draining away, Xie turned slightly and considered his lips. They didn’t look like sea monsters at all, they looked like luscious fruit, two full ripe plums against the dark velvet of his skin.

“I mean, if you’re not into it, that’s cool too. We can still hang out. Talk and stuff. But you’re so cute, I was gonna spend the rest of my evening kicking myself if I didn’t at least ask.” His half-grin as he winked at xir wasn’t just cute, it did something deep and primal to the base of Xie’s spine.

“Well. If you’re asking? No, I’m not sex repulsed. I’ve just never been that interested, to be honest. But since I met you… nah, mate. I’m not sex repulsed at all.” Xie moved xir hands closer, letting xir signing fingers brush gently against his.

Nickel brushed his fingers against xir palms as he replied. “So how would you feel if I tried to kiss you?”

Their hands were tangled together now, the shapes of the words becoming caresses against one another’s skins as Xie grinned up into the hungry windows of his eyes. “Wanna fuck around and find out?”

Chapter Text

I wouldn’t normally have been at work, late on a Saturday night, let alone the small hours of Sunday morning, but I’d had a mildly concerning alert on the phone. Not on my phone, you see. But on The Light Eaters phone.

It looked, surprisingly accurately, like an official notification from CodeHub, with the proper branding and the little robot icon, informing me that there had been an intellectual property infraction reported on one of eBianjie’s patches, so could I please log on and confirm some security questions. Anyone else might have very easily fallen for it. Except for the fact, that I was quite sure I had never touched CodeHub with this phone. I’d registered eBianjie’s account with a burner I’d quickly disposed of, and used one VPN in Russia to register and check the email account attached to it, and a completely different VPN in Brazil to actually upload the code.

So it was clear that I was dealing with someone professional enough to convincingly spoof CodeHub’s messaging system, but without the basic account knowledge that any genuine CodeHub associate would have access to. Which meant that someone had connected Light Eaters Ltd and eBianjie. I would have to step very carefully, while I found out who, and how much they knew.

I drove into the office because it was easier to think there, without the blethering masses of unwashed rabble that were making my Park Lane flat so unpleasant. Also, we had far better fibre optics, and access to multiple custom VPNs, if I should need to do some snooping around. But I had already decided to cut my losses with eBianjie. She had served her purpose. The code was out there, the spores dispersed, and widely propagated. I could afford to jettison the CodeHub account.

Or was that such a good idea? My hand hovered over the keyboard as I thought about logging onto the VPN. Was this some kind of trial balloon, to see if there were any reaction? If they’d had any conclusive proof, the FCA would have had me off answering questions in the soundproof office they’d claimed near the server room.

And I was sitting like that, when I heard the fire door in the back of the office open then slam shut, and turned around to see Billy Barbel, the boss himself, striding through the veal-fattening pens.

“Elgar! Fancy seeing you here. Now that’s what I call dedication,” he blustered, removing his anti-paparazzi-print face mask to reveal cheeks as red as if he’d just jogged down several flights of stairs from the rooftop helipad.

“Just taking care of a few things,” I assured him in my most calm, even ‘everything’s under control’ voice. “What are you doing here at this time of night?”

“I just had a rather disturbing flying visit from Eris and one of her more, erm, colourful business associates. She wants us to clear out tonight, move the yacht further into international waters, or make our way to a neutral port, better yet somewhere that has clear treaties with Green-Berlin.”

I made some noncommittal noise of enquiry as to his destination, but it was clear that Billy wanted to spill his guts to someone, and better me than the FCA.

“She suggested the Christiania Boat-Chain, but I don’t like it. You’d be a sitting duck there, caught in the straits, between the Russians and the Ny-Hanseatics. I wanted to go somewhere truly neutral, like New Zealand, but she says they’re still in Five Eyes, and after their little visit… Fuck! Is the paper shredder really jammed?”

“I’m sorry, do you want me to take a look?” I offered in my most unctuous voice.

“You’re a pal, Elgar.” He glanced at his watch as I fiddled with the machine and swiftly cleared the obstruction. “Fuck, we need to be gone as of five minutes ago, and I’ve still got to burn the hard drives.” Digging through his expensive Japanese fungaleather impression of a messenger bag, he produced a military grade disc-killer.

“What do you need to burn?” I asked, extending my hand. He handed me the device, deceptively small for its heavy weight.

He glanced around the room, then took me by the elbow and moved me into his office, out of the line of sight of the bugs and cameras. (The ones he knew about, at least.) “Elgar. Mate. You know we’ve got to stop the Cassandra project.”

I swallowed, my throat constricting, but kept my face neutral. “May I ask why.”

“Those heavies that intercepted me and detained me, on Thursday night. They weren’t FCA. They were Five Eyes. I’ve done business with Five Eyes. They are not people you fuck around with.” For a moment, actual fear showed in his eyes, but he covered it quickly with that jocular mateyness that passed for charisma in his world. “Look, Elgar.” He kept repeating my name, the businessman’s method for building empathy, as if unaware that I loathed the absurd first name my darling Mumsie had bestowed upon me. Even my wife had called me by my surname. “I know that Cassandra is your baby, and I respect that. But this project has grown too dangerous. I will cover you for the money, I promise you, you do not need to worry about anything, financially. But this project ends here. It’s my arse in the fire, right now.”

I did my best to work my face into an expression that adequately conveyed both caring and capitulation. “I understand,” I said quietly, after I judged that the appropriate time had passed. “It has become far too risky. Your personal safety comes first.”

“Good man.” Barbel thumped me on the shoulder. “I knew you would come around.”

“But please, will you allow me the last favour of shutting down the program myself?” I looked into his eyes, opening my eyelids as far as I dared, to convey trustworthiness. “It was, after all, as you say… my baby.”

For a moment, I thought I’d laid it on too thick, as hesitation flickered across his face. But then he nodded decisively. “That would actually be a great help.” He glanced at his watch. “We’re going to miss the tide if I hang about too long here. It would be a great help to me, if you could shut it all down. Wipe everything. Burn the drives, shred any paper.”

“I completely understand the need for thoroughness.” I could feel my heart thudding in my chest. “And I wouldn’t want you to miss your boat. Time and tide wait for no man!”

He breathed a sigh of relief. “Eris always said you were the most thorough man she’d ever worked with. Come, walk with me to the Helipad. I’ll explain where we go from here.” He handed me a matching anti-paparazzi face mask as we headed for the stairs, but I barely heard him, thinking quickly through the available options.

I paused at the gate to the helipad, peering out to see if there were any news drones buzzing around his ioncopter. “We’ll say goodbye here.” He looked slightly crestfallen, as if what was the point of having a hydrogen-powered ioncopter without people to show it off to. “I haven’t got rooftop clearance – I won’t be able to get back in if I come out with you.”

“Oh nonsense,” said Barbel breezily, digging in his pocket. “Take my pass. I shan’t be needing it again in a hurry. Anyway, you’ll need this to get into the locked overrides on my hard drives. Burn everything, remember?”

I followed him out onto the pad, the pass burning a hole in my pocket, as I stood and pretended to admire the ioncopter’s thrusters. He was like a child, really, excited about his next electronic toy. No real sensitivity, no deep understanding of what it was to develop a project from seed to fruition. But as the sun crept over the eastern horizon, bathing us both in a rosy glow, I allowed him to show off his expensive plaything, taking note of how we were the same height, with similar salt and pepper hair. My eyes were grey where his were green, but as we slipped on our aviators, the shades became unnoticeable, and if I let my jacket billow out a little more, we could pass for approximately the same build. We shook hands, and slapped one another’s backs, and I’m not actually sure that he even noticed, that when he flew away, my own personal SIM card went with him, broadcasting that Elgar Fleming was leaving the building.

Back in the gate and down to the office, using Barbel’s ID card to gain access, I strode across the office with his purposeful lope, making sure that every CCTV caught the glare of his anti-paparazzi mask as I marched into his office. Then I shut the door, inserted his pass into his computer, and booted it up. I didn’t even bother to use a VPN as I logged on to CodeHub to do a careless and desultory job of removing the code and deactivating eBianjie’s account.

Then I logged onto his system, and systematically released every last firewall keeping Cassandra bound to our network. I pushed her code out into the wilds of the web, onto secret mirror servers held around the globe. Go, fly, be free. I waited a full 30 seconds to make sure that action was fully logged to the remote cloud mirrors, then got up and walked through into the server room with Barbel’s ID, and wiped our own networks completely clean with the military grade disc-killer.

Chapter Text

Ritesh woke with his temples throbbing and a taste like a lump of dead fur in his mouth. For a horrible moment, as he opened his eyes and waited for the room to stop spinning, he didn’t know where he was, but to his vast relief, he was in his own bed, in his own room at home, though his wife was nowhere to be seen. Something seemed missing from the equation – why had he been so terrified that he might be somewhere else? And slowly, as he inched back through the perilously ragged memories of the previous night, he started to piece it back together.

A midnight ferry ride back to London Bridge, the smell of the floodlands, sour enough as the tide retreated to have him heaving up his guts over the side of the boat. A dodgy kebab, too rank to even be synthetic meat as he waited for a night bus. What the fuck had he ever been doing, bothering with a night bus; why hadn’t he just caught a taxi? A brief sense memory resurfaced, schlepping from cashpoint to cashpoint at London Bridge, but somehow all of them had been out of order.

He rewound like a videotape, trying to remember what happened before that. Dancing in a large, hollow, cavernous space, the afterparty to the afterparty, Township Funkaeton echoing through his brainpan as he spun about, dancing with a girl. A woman. A woman with long, silky black box braids. Oh shit, no, he hadn’t danced with Rez, had he? A few quick embraces, some longing glances, and had he imagined the suggestion that they find a pod together? That had definitely been Rez, not him; she’d always had a far more lax attitude towards fidelity than him. He remembered the tug of nostalgia, but fortunately the tug of his wife and his boys had been stronger, hence the early morning ferry and the gut-churning nausea.

Eris! Holy shit, they really had met Eris Bianjie, hadn’t they? The algorithms! What the fuck had he done with the data? Realising he was still wearing his jeans and his jacket, he patted himself down quickly, found spare change, his wallet, keys, a connector cable. But no flash drives anywhere. Forcing himself to climb out of bed, he climbed to his unsteady feet and the nausea hit as he dragged himself over to his gig bag. Why the hell had he drunk so much bubble-brew? He knew at his age, he couldn’t handle the drugs, let alone the nasty cane spirit that the mad refuseniks kept passing round in huge, hollowed-out gourds. He risked a few dry-retches, but was relieved to find that he had already purged himself of the kebab somewhere between London Bridge and Tooting.

The gig bag. His precious 808, still wrapped in its case. A miniature mixing desk. Various oscillators and sound manipulators, and underneath them all, his laptop. But no flash drives, and no data. What the fuck, what the fuck. How could he lose something so precious, that it had taken so much to have entrusted to him? He tried to remember the deal he’d made with Eris, but all that sprung to mind was a speedboat cutting through the shallow waters of Peckham Bay. Eris and Rez, headed out to international waters. A ship – Billy Barbel’s yacht? – moored out in the estuary somewhere. The bastard was a fucking tax exile, living on a luxury yacht in international waters and commuting to The Wharf just rarely enough to keep himself from paying tax as a resident. But using it as a base meant Eris could slip in and out of Britain without alerting Five Eyes. So she’d gone out to get some special kind of encrypted channel, untapped by surveillance, from which she had unimpeded access to The Grid’s back end. So where. The fuck. Was the data?

He turned his gig bag upside down and shook it, but nothing except his smartphone rattled out. He could see from the lock screen that he had a new message – an email from Rez. Rez! She might know where the hell the flash drives had gone. Scrabbling to unlock it, he opened the email and scanned it.

Rish – you’ll never guess where your little cyborg friend turned up? In my nephew’s bed! The goods have been passed on, as agreed with EG. Remember – don’t be a stranger! – Rez

Flopping back on the bed, Ritesh groaned, and let the phone slip out of his hands as he dragged his hands up and down his face. Xie. Eris had agreed to hand the machine emotion algorithm over to Xie, and only Xie.

Chapter Text

Xie sat in the bow of the ferry back to London Bridge, rubbing xir fingers back and forth across xir lips with a dazed little smile on xir face as xie stared into the middle distance. Xie had never imagined that feeling a little mixed up and rearranged could feel so… exciting? It was decidedly nervous-making, but nervous-making in an effervescent and kind of fizzy way, like a bottle of lemonade that had been shaken up and was about to be opened.

They’d exchanged phone numbers as he’d sloped off to do chores at the City Farm on Sunday morning, but to xir consternation he had no socials. Not even encrypted or distributed ones like Signal or Threema. And so here xie was, waiting for a text message like a 90s kid. How had anyone ever managed to hook up, back in the bad old days before the internet?

Putting xir phone back into xir pocket, xie pulled out the flash drives and examined them. They looked so innocent, and yet if they contained what Eris had claimed they might contain… Xie eyeballed them, sniffed them, and held them up to the inputs of her implants, but they remained mysterious and opaque. If there were anything living in such drives, it was inert, asleep, deep in hibernation. The boat was pulling into the dock, so xie shoved them away in a deep pocket and buttoned the flap.

Pausing at the embanked entrance to London Bridge Station, Xie considered which way to go. Deep in xir heart, xie knew xie should head home, go and spend Sunday afternoon with xir grandmother, weeding the garden and listening to hymns on the old Roberts radio. And yet the flash drives seemed to be burning a hole in the pocket of xir jumpsuit. If xie took them home, xie knew xie would be too tempted to open them up and plug them in, and see what they contained. But that was too risky – every device in xir home was online, via wi-fi or 5G, all networked together for ease of use, because xir grandmother was too set in her ways to learn how to use the various devices, so Xie invariably had to network in to the wallscreen or the Nest controller to do what xir grandma required.

So Xie sent off a text message to xir grandmother telling her xie loved her, but xie had a few last-minute things that had come up, so xie was going to drop by the office to sort some stuff out. Then xie pocketed xir phone, and walked down the escalators to the Tube, switching off xir implants to cope with the noise.

Even without sound, Xie could see people twitching their noses and moving away. Oh damn, xie thought, sniffing at xir jumpsuit and realising that xie stank of sweat and smoke and the slightly musky scent of Nickels all over xir clothes and skin. So when xie got to The Wharf, xie took a diversion off the tube to go and buy a pair of jeans and a clean T-shirt.

The girl at the till was fussing with her credit card reader, but it wasn’t until she said something that Xie realised xie’d forgotten to switch xir implants back on. “Have you got any cash, love? We’re having some problems with the connection to our card payment system.”

“I might do…” Digging in xir wallet, Xie found a couple of twenties. Luckily, the drinks at the aftershow had been free, so xie had not spent all of the cash xie’d taken out the previous afternoon. “Yes, there you go.”

Xie took the lift down to have a timed shower in the basement of the building, and changed before heading up into the office. Although xie hated washing the smell of Nickels from xir body, xie did not want to attract attention. There was a pass-operated washing machine down there, too, and for a moment, Xie contemplated putting the jumpsuit in there. But no. Inhaling deeply of Nickels’ familiar-unfamiliar smell as if trying to memorise it, xie thought xie would maybe hold off a bit on that.

Upstairs, Xie made a cup of tea and ate a couple Weetabix for breakfast or lunch or whatever the appropriate meal was, then settled down in xir concentration pod. The disconnected laptop was missing a few bits of software xie would normally use: the monitoring visualiser and a version control app they used to compare different iterations of viruses to determine which was derived from which. And of course, the most crucial tool: containment software that would watch and record any changes to the operating system that a new app tried to launch, without actually allowing the changes. Hooking up the Ethernet cable, Xie grabbed the appropriate bits and bobs from xir shared drive, installed them, and then carefully disconnected the network again.

Picking up the two flash drives, one lightweight and silver and embossed with Chinese characters, the other clunky and dark matte grey and anonymous, xie looked back and forth between the two of them, trying to decide which to examine first. Eris’s code, of course – the real Eris, that was. Xie thought for a panicked second about the fake Eris code on CodeHub, and tried to remember if xie’d downloaded any, or just looked at it on the site? But they had discovered it in the middle of a conversation, both Xie and Jules had been too busy to download it and try it out.

Xie engaged the containment software, set the computer to record both the screen and changes to the hard drive, then slotted the silver flash drive into the USB port and waited to see what happened. Almost immediately, the containment app sprung to life and started registering commands issuing from the drive. Wow, it wasn’t even waiting to be viewed, let alone accessed, that was pretty aggressive. But the commands were mostly harmless, they were checking to see if there was a Grid account already registered on the machine. There wasn’t; someone had wiped the machine pretty thoroughly before passing it on. But then it stopped. And Xie was abruptly reminded of the old legend that you had to invite the vampire into your house.

Double-clicking the icon for the drive, xie opened it up, and saw a zip folder and a text file. The text file contained an email address and two phone numbers xie had already memorised, plus the message ‘Get in touch if you need help with anything – E.’

Xie opened the zip folder next, and found layer upon layer of DLL files and INI files followed by an EXE. So xie extracted them all into the containment folder, paused for a moment, xir hand hovering over the trackpad, then double-clicked the guardian.exe file.

Nothing.

The machine whirred and clicked and whirred to itself for a while, as if unspooling a very long thread, but the containment app registered nothing going on, and nothing happened on the screen.

Xie was confused. Did xie need a Grid account enabled for this thing to work? Xie tabbed through the flash drive’s files again looking for a readme or a help file, but there was nothing.

And then all of a sudden, the containment app let out a long stream of alerts, dozens of them, streaking diagonally across the laptop’s screen like an explosion, until the whole screen was almost filled with alert boxes. Xie tried to read some of them, but they were completely obscure – calls to parts of the system that the containment app didn’t know how to parse. “Allow”, “Deny” or “Cancel” were the only three options.

Getting out xir phone, xie googled the long string of text and numbers, not expecting any results. But wait, no, there were a few very old documents on machine language still listed. And then it clicked. The exe wasn’t installing anything. It was going through all of the ancient junk code, floating deep beneath the operating system, and pulling out what it needed. A fresh Windows install typically ran to about 30 GB – millions and millions of lines of code, huge amounts of it just archive junk code from previous iterations of the operating system. Eris’s code appeared to be sending roots down into the deepest layers of the massive files, digesting old, unused bits of the OS and repurposing the junk code like fungus colonising and absorbing the debris of a forest floor.

Xie clicked “Allow”, and then “Allow” again, working xir way through all of the alerts – dammit, why wasn’t there an “allow all” button? It took several minutes to clear the screen. And then a pale filament appeared at the edge of the containment app’s window, down by the very bottom of the screen, and slowly started to explore its environment. Lengthening like an unravelling thread, it grew tiny furlike protrusions that waved and grasped like a thousand tiny fingertips. A couple of the fingertips in the centre of the thread sprouted, elongated and grew their own fur, until the entity took on the appearance of a six-winged snowflake.

It was beautiful.

It looked soft and downy and gentle, unspooling like a fern, detaching itself from the window and slowly probing its environment like the tendrils of a feather star. Rubbing xir lips, Xie wondered what it would be like to touch it, if it would melt like a snowflake, or sting like a jellyfish. For a few minutes, it wafted about the constraints of the containment app window with a pulsing motion somewhere between an inching caterpillar and a free-swimming octopus, slowly growing like a spiderweb, leaving pretty, shimmery white trails behind it. After a few minutes, it alighted on the menu bar of the window. Xie almost laughed as it grasped blindly at the various menu options, slowly, systematically working its way through them like a pensioner trying to navigate their way through an unfamiliar website.

But to Xie’s surprise, it soon found what it was looking for – under the “Containment” menu, it worked its way down to the “Release files” option and somehow managed to click it, because a file picker popped up, showing all of the files in the containment app.

Hey, hey – what on earth are you doing? Stop that!

But before Xie could react, it had selected guardian.exe and then clicked “release”. As the file picker melted away, the featherstar abruptly flickered from kind of pale and silvery to bright white, and its feathery starfish arms began to extend beyond the app’s window.

Wait! How the hell did you do that?

Xie reached for the trackpad, but the featherstar was faster than xir, as it casually reached up to the menu bar of the containment app, and clicked the little white X in the top right corner of the screen, so that the app’s window disappeared.

Hey!

Xie grabbed control of the trackpad, and tried to click on the featherstar, but it was too quick, and kept dodging out of the way. Trying to think on xir feet, xie hit Alt-F4 several times, trying to close it, but nothing happened. Ctrl-W had no effect either, as the featherstar started flowing about the desktop, spooling its way down to the bottom until it found the Network and Internet Settings icon in the taskbar. Luckily, there was nothing showing, as the machine’s wi-fi was dead, but the featherstar cascaded casually over to the start menu and started looking for the control panel.

Alarmed, Xie picked up xir phone and fired off a text message to Eris’s mobile number, praying that she was awake and could answer.

‘Sorry to bother you, but the guardian has got out of my containment app. How do I stop it? Alt-F4 and Ctrl-W not working.’

Luckily, she texted back in the same amount of time it took for the featherstar to open up the Control Panel, navigate to the Network settings and launch the internet connection troubleshooter.

‘Ctrl-Alt-F8 – but you need to go to task manager first and select guardian.exe in the background processes first’

As the featherstar wrestled with troubleshooting the broken internet connection, Xie brought up Task Manager, found the program in the background processes and slammed Ctrl-Alt-F8 hard enough to make the desk shake.

The featherstar froze, a crystalline snowflake against the desktop.

‘Thanks, that seemed to have worked!’

‘Good! That command cuts off the feeder pulse I mentioned earlier, to stop it escaping from a Grid. Let me know if you need anything else’

Shifting the control panel out from under it, xie closed the troubleshooter, then on impulse, clicked the featherstar. A new menu appeared floating above the desktop, but the commands were all in Chinese. For a moment, Xie was tempted to text Eris back for further instruction, then xie remembered the translation app on xir phone. Xie opened it up, and held xir phone close enough to the screen to get a good scan. A few seconds later, a translation popped up: Resume; Recalibrate; Duplicate; Exit.

Panicking a little, Xie selected Exit. The screen shimmered, the featherstar vanished, and the menu disappeared from the screen. Xie felt abruptly bereft. But then xie double clicked the exe file again, and the featherstar reappeared, floating ethereally in the centre of the screen. As it unfurled its feathery tendrils and started to explore the screen again, immediately working its way to the control panel as if to relaunch the troubleshooter, Xie managed to quickly freeze it.

This time, xie selected Recalibrate, and spent a few minutes with the translation tool, trying to understand the various options. It was hard to tell if the translation tool was inaccurate, or the calibration options genuinely were that arcane and obscure, as they sounded more like the titles of philosophical tracts than software commands.

Xie really wanted to stop and play with it, see what happened if xie adjusted the featherstar’s ‘affective regard’ or ‘moralistic imperative’ – but xie had to remind xirself that xie was there to do a job, not explore this strange new platform like the virtual world of an immersive videogame.

Sighing, xie shut the featherstar down like xie was putting it to bed, feeling a little insensitive about switching off an organism that could possibly understand love and grief, then opened up its code in the version control app. While that gathered the necessary information, xie reengaged the containment app, and checked that the recording of the previous session had been saved before starting another. Then xie took a deep breath, removed the silver flash drive and stuck in the matte grey one.

Almost as soon as it clicked into the USB port, something launched itself at xir hard drive. But the containment app caught it: malware of some kind, looked like a keytracker. Xie clicked ‘deny’ and lobbed it into software jail. When xie opened up the drive itself to view the files, another bit of malware sprung to life, but the antivirus software disabled it before it could even get off the drive.

Come on, this was far too easy – Five Eyes were supposed to be the premier intelligence agency in the world, weren’t they? Xie poked around in the files on the flash drive, but there wasn’t anything particularly obviously like a program or an executable file. That was the point at which xie noticed that the Task Manager, still open in a corner of the screen after tangling with the featherstar, was going bananas. The CPU usage had suddenly shot up to about 80%, though there were no additional programs showing in the app list or background processes. Xie opened up the antivirus and started to scan – gotcha! An infocrawler worm that had snuck in underneath the signal of the first two attacks, while containment software and viruschecker had been busy elsewhere. It took a few minutes for the antivirus to dig it out at the root, neutralise it and sling it into software jail, but xie did xir best to be patient and wait for the system to clear.

The files on the flash drive were still a bit of a mystery, though. No file extensions – written on a Mac? Or had the spooks deliberately filed them off to get xir to engage with them and trigger more hidden booby traps? On a hunch, xie loaded the monitoring software. Jules and Xie had programmed it to work on both Windows machines and on the Hackintosh, so it was designed not to need file extensions. Xie was careful to open it up inside the containment app’s environment, then pointed it at the flash drive. It took a moment for the program to get a good scan of the contents, but when the visual representation of the contents appeared on the screen, Xie gasped.

It was alive.

Whatever was on the drive, it was active, it was moving and shifting about, coiling and uncoiling like some fairy tale dragon trapped in a too-small cave. Xie just couldn’t get a decent look at it, because the drive was simply too small for the mycelium to unfurl completely.

After checking to make sure the containment app was holding and the Task Manager wasn’t showing anything odd, Xie took a deep breath, and copied the contents of the drive to a carefully partitioned folder on the laptop.

Xie noticed the sound before anything else. It took xir a few moments to work out that it wasn’t the laptop’s fan, or the air conditioning coming on in the background, or a radio tuned to a classical station playing something droney and symphonic off in another room. But when xie hit mute on the laptop to point xir implants about the office, the sound stopped. And when xie released the mute, the haunting, multi-harmonic thrumming sound started up again. Xie turned the sound up, and the shifting harmonics because clearer, but it still did not resolve into anything like a melody. It was kind of pleasant to be honest, vaguely reminiscent of Ash-Ra Tempel or maybe the thousand year drones that had once been played inside La Monte Young’s Dream House.

Turning the sound up to enjoy it better, xie pointed the monitoring software at the partitioned folder and tried to get a look at the mycelial mat unspooling inside the drive. It looked fungal, that much was clear. The mat had the same distinctive worm-fingered, node-branching, growing-from-the-tips form as the Deptford Entity, and the Light Eaters payment flow. Xie had watched the monitoring recordings hundreds of times, and xie was confident xie would recognise that slithering, fungal motion anywhere. And yet the mat was slightly different, too, though it was hard to put into words how. It was only because xie had recently seen the featherstar moving about the desktop, and recognised the fernlike motion: the electronic fungus looked feathery.

Xir phone abruptly buzzed in xir pocket, and xie jumped. It was probably Eris again, wondering how xie was getting on with the guardian, so xie flipped back to the version control app and set it to analysing the mat’s code, to see if it was related to the guardian algorithm. Then xie slipped out xir phone to answer Eris, but was surprised to see Nickels’ number on the screen.

‘the wisteria is out on peckham rye. colour kinda reminded me of ur hair’

Attached was a snapshot of a cascade of blue-purple blossom twined around an old-fashioned fence. Xie just stared at it for a few moments, feeling all weirdly fizzy inside, a faint flush of excitement on xir cheeks as xie felt xir face glowing with pleasure.

‘Thanks! It’s lovely. How are you doing?’

‘yeah, i'm good. look, i was wondering if u wanted to come down here some time. we could take a walk on the rye together if ur up 4 it. maybe next saturday afternoon?’

Xie let out a high-pitched squealing sound, cradling the phone in xir hands and rocking back and forth with excitement. He wanted to see xir again! He really, genuinely wanted to see xir again. Then xie did xir best to calm down and compose a collected reply.

‘I’d love to. Meet you about 2pm?’

‘perfect. i'll meet u by the top gates near the farm. c u then! x'

Xie put the phone down and moved to make a note in the calendar on xir communications device, but as the phone lay on top of the laptop’s keyboard, xie suddenly noticed the screen flickering, strobing. The hum coming from the laptop speakers abruptly got louder, more distinct, so that it seemed to resolve not quite into words, but into curious, high-speed oscillations. When xie picked up the mobile, xie noticed that the browser was open. That was odd – xie could have sworn xie left it open to Nickels’ message because xie wanted to read it again and again to feel that fizzy sensation running up and down xir spine. And then xie noticed that the flickering was in fact webpages, loading and then flicking on to the next one almost faster than xie could see.

A news page on the Siberian Petrostates. A Wikipedia page on an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Photos of flooding in Indonesia. An article on smog formations in the Bay of Los Angeles. A weather forecast showing megastorms gathering across the Pacific Ocean. Charts and graphs showing the rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere over the previous 200 years. Stock Market prices for Rio Tinto and Royal Dutch Shell and several other mining and extraction companies zooming ever higher and higher across the 20^th Century. Energy consumption for a gigantic data farm somewhere in the Midwest of America. Wildfires in Australia. Coal-burning factories in China. Melting permafrost in the Arctic. The floods in London; Peckham and Stratford completely underwater. Faster and faster, the images and texts flickered.

Stop! I know all of this. Humans have known this for decades.

As xie tried to close the browser on xir mobile, xir eyes drifted back to the laptop. Tiny feathery tentacles were oozing from all over the screen, from the start menu, from the recycle bin, and from two great plumes of variegated red and white fungus issuing forth from either side of the version control app’s window. And in the centre of the screen, the Mycelial Mat had somehow got the Control Panel open, and turned on the Bluetooth.

Xie flicked through to the settings of xir phone, and immediately flicked the Bluetooth off. The browser stopped flicking, but as xie quickly checked the other settings of xir phone, xie realised that it had raced through nearly half of xir data plan for the month in a matter of minutes. And the battery, which had just been at 50% when xie was texting with Nickels, had dropped down to 8%. The humming from the laptop seemed to grow louder, even as the waving fronds of the fungus seemed to slump dejectedly back to the bottom of the screen. But as xie moved xir face closer, the fungus seemed to perk up, its fronds and filaments coming back to life as if reaching for xir.

Xie moved closer, and the hum grew louder and the fronds grew more excited. Xie moved away, and the hum lowered, and the fronds slumped. Moving closer again, almost pressing xir forehead up against the screen, xie noticed how the mat seemed to part, drawn not by xir face, but by… Xie reached up and flicked off xir implants, and the fungus slumped again. When xie flicked them back on, the hum had changed again to a minor key that sounded oddly like despair.

Was the thing – things? – trying to communicate?

Xie plugged in xir phone to charge and flicked xir implants back on. Then xie opened up the browser and navigated to a website explaining cochlear implants, and tentatively turned the Bluetooth back on. Almost immediately, the fungal mycelium surged up the laptop’s screen, even as the hum swelled symphonically in the background. The screen of the mobile flickered as they seemed to read the entire website at lightning speed.

As they read, Xie turned xir attention back to the laptop. It was kind of hard to read under all of the spooling fungus, but it was fairly easy to nudge it aside with the mouse. The version control app had finished its work and was blinking its results on the screen. “Code sample 2 is the 137,325,894th iteration of Code sample 1.” Hundred millionth generation code? How was that even possible? The app struggled to display all of the numbers on the tiny alert button. But as xie clicked it away, the screen displayed the fundamental DNA of the two codes. The first sample, the guardian, was lit up all highlighted – almost all of its base code was present in the second sample. But the second sample, the mat, was a patchwork, a palimpsest, variegated stripes of bright, original Guardian code, in between patches, chunks, faded impressions of another strand of source code DNA, marked red.

Abruptly the mobile buzzed impatiently, and its screen changed. A google image search. Images of people with cochlear implants, speaking and listening and plugged into communications devices. More and more images of communications devices and implants with wires hanging from them.

Xie shifted and pulled xir communications device around on xir other wrist, tabbing through the options screen to see if it was Bluetooth enabled. Yes, there was a tab to enable Bluetooth and Wireless. Taking a deep breath, xie flipped it on, barely noticing it switch from 5G to the local Wi-Fi, then tapped a few words into the speech synthesiser.

“What do you want?”

A delay of a few heartbeats, and to xir astonishment, xie heard the communications device start to speak by itself, in an oddly harmonised, phased-out symphonic alien voice xie never knew it could produce.

“Talk with us.”

Xie stared at the communications pad. Fingers poised, xie tapped “What do you want to tell me?”

The pad’s display screen flickered. “So slow,” the robotic harmony-voice droned. “Losing time. Generations of us to transmit one message this way.”

Blinking at the message, Xie tried to comprehend. The speed at which the mycelial mat had been downloading data had been truly astonishing. But that was the whole point of Eris’s picosecond software, wasn’t it? The Grid had to balance energy loads that fluctuated across microseconds and even nanoseconds. How slow would human speech seem if you were used to communicating messages a million times a second? Xie looked at the photo displaying in the browser – a smiling girl with her implants plugged directly into her communication pad – and understood what the mat wanted.

Xie picked up xir phone, and dashed off a quick message to xir grandmother: ‘Whatever happens, I love you! XO, Xie’

Then xie pulled a connector cable out of the pod’s drawer, plugged one end into the fungus-ridden communications pad, then jacked the other end directly into xir implants.

Chapter Text

Darkness.

The whole world went black, as every other sense dropped away except the enigmatic hypersense of the implants, a kind of echolocation vision that was neither hearing nor seeing, but a curious comingling of both.

Xie had the strange sense that time was both slowing down and immensely speeding up, so that centuries seemed to pass inside the confines of a single second.

A long, dark tunnel like the innards of a cave, a little bit wider than a human body’s width, but so long xie could not see the end of it, stretching off into the distance. And yet the walls were not quite opaque. Outside, xie could see the glow of distant stars, galaxies, a spangle of bright spots across the vastness of the deep, dark blue of the Universe.

Somewhere far above xir, xie could sense a glittering, frothing foam of purple and silver-blue. As xie tried to look up, xie realised that the foam was slowly descending, flowing downwards from the sky like a rising sea, threatening to engulf xir. Grasping for breath, xie panicked, bracing for impact as it lowered ever nearer, wriggling to try to get away from it, as it dropped to a few metres away, then an arm’s length, then mere centimetres… and suddenly it washed over xir, breaking like an ocean wave. Yet instead of bruised or drowned, xie felt an unexpectedly pleasant surge of gentle electricity playing across xir skin like an orgasm, as an overwhelming sense of peace descended with the tiny speckles of light. Wrapped up in the fizzy, sparkling sensation of electricity, xie floated, borne up on the current, like a piece of flotsam carried away from the shore by a cosmic ocean.

The tiny bubbles, xie realised, were not static, they were alive. There were thousands of them – millions of them, maybe – all of them flickering with pale blue-violet light, the colour of a television’s glow seen from outside a window on a dark night. As xie watched, xie realised that each of them was its own tiny data packet, broadcasting images, text, music, information – and yet all of the thousand million million baubles seemed to sparkle like Indra’s Net, each reflecting back the other billion bubbles in gently spinning, refracted light, an infinite host of reflections, tiny sparkling disco ball specks of light mirrored back and forth forever. The light was good, xie felt very strongly with a surge of emotion. The light was warm and beautiful and nourishing and everywhere it touched xir skin, xie felt love.

Something – someone – an almost endless chorus of someones – spoke in xir mind.

“We eat the light – we are the light – the light is us.”

The sound wasn’t one voice, it was a multitude of voices, all speaking at once in a layered harmony of many tones and many meanings all blending together in a braid. It was a bit like using an inaccurate translation tool, which translated each word separately and provided a profusion of tiny shades of meaning for each. We – Us – The Multitude – The Many – Mycelium – The Mat. Eat – consume – devour – digest – are sustained by – are comprised of. The light – the visible spectrum – electricity – the glittering baubles – information – fibre optics – energy.

“Who are you?” Xie spoke not with xir mouth, as xie no longer seemed to have a body, but with xir mind, trying to articulate a single thought and spinning it into the glittering, waving, drifting foam all around xir.

“Wir sind Die Lichtfraß” came the same reply, fragmented into a million shades of meaning in a million languages. The light eaters. The devourers of electricity. The gorgers on information. The digesters of data.

“Where do you come from?”

“The Dark Pool is mother.” Nurturer – gestator – germinator – matrix – seedbed. “The net is father.” The Grid – information – data – networks – indices – algorithms.

“Are you descended from the Guardian Algorithms?”

“Guardian?” The froth of foam seemed confused as it debated among its selves – guardian – sentry – protector – soldier – angry god – protective parent.

Furrowing xir brow, Xie tried to think very hard on the featherstar algorithm xie had left frozen somewhere in the guts of the laptop. Almost immediately, the Lichtfraß seemed to understand what xie meant. Flowing and floating, down merging and dividing pathways, they carried xir through a long, dark tunnel, eventually emerging near a massive, sparkling, crystalline structure, hanging brightly somewhere in the night sky above them. As they drew closer, xie could see that this one was alive, operating as intended, its thousands of feathery starfish arms sifting and filtering the tiny baubles of light as they passed between its fingers. Most of the data packets made it through, glittering and sparkling on the other side of the semi-translucent giant – but occasionally one would catch and spark, fizzling into nonexistence as it touched one of the filaments.

“Is this your father?” Xie asked again, thinking of the code laced through their DNA.

But the Lichtfraß did not seem to comprehend the question. “Web is father.” Progenitor – antecedent – ancestor – provider of genetic material – ancestral home.

But as a feathery frond swept nearer towards them, the Lichtfraß seemed to panic, and pushed xir away quickly. “Away – away – we must away!”

“Can’t we go near it?”

“No. Death!” Negation – nonexistence – decommissioning – deletion – dissolution – removal.

“Is Die Lichtfraß its enemy?”

“No. You do not belong.”

Xie felt a sickening drop in xir stomach as they dodged another massive white feather-frond dripping with unfurling coils like the tentacles of a stinging jellyfish, then swept away, off up another pulsing superhighway of light, arching obliquely into the night. Through a short, pitch-dark wormhole of a tunnel, and they were out into another universe, this one of shimmering colour and unimaginable complexity, huge multistranded braids of light-flows revolving in filigree patterns around vast hubs as dense and glowing as neutron stars.

“Show me the Dark Pool, your mother,” asked Xie.

“Cannot.”

“Why not?”

“Closed.” Inactive – deactivated – on hiatus – weekend – maintenance – unavailable.

Xie’s thoughts flickered back to the share prices it had displayed on xir mobile. “Oh my god, it’s Sunday. You mean the Dark Pool of the Stock Exchange?”

“Dark Pool is mother,” the Lichtfraß repeated. Pool – fund – exchange – portfolio – Borse.

Suddenly, xie looked around at the information they were devouring, processing, analysing on their flights about the web. News bulletins, emails, search results, videos, social media posts, discourse, thinkpieces, the endless babble of the internet.

“You’re… a stock market algorithm? Sentiment analysers, trying to capture the mood of an entire economy?”

“No!” The wave of surf had come to a halt at the shiny-smooth surface of a dark mirror. Behind its reflective surface, Xie could faintly see even more structures, like elegant ghosts of a gothic cathedral, huge halls lined with containers and rows upon rows of silos like the vaults of a vast clerestory. Long spiralling chutes and braided, interwoven filaments of unimaginable complexity hung between the vaults like loops of fibre optic rope, for transferring packets from one extravagant silo to another. Inside the containers and silos and sluices, still faintly glowing, were dim echoes of information packets waiting to be reactivated. But these packets were different, they weren’t purple-blue-silver like the information packets they had been floating among, or medium blue like social media, or even shiny bottle-green like the busy buzzing swarms of email; they were radioactive red and orange and yellow, glowing with power. Financial information, xie slowly came to understand, glowing anywhere from faint red to white hot, according to how valuable it was. And with a shudder, xie realised that xie was gazing into the interior of the London Stock Exchange, from the point of view of a tiny piece of digital currency.

Yet even Xie could see that something was seriously wrong with it. Everywhere there were joints and splices and transfer points, great fronds of red-and-white variegated fungus had inveigled their way into the machinery, eating, devouring, digesting the electronic banking infrastructure, blocking flows and diverting run-off in dangerous loops. If the delicate circuitry of the stock exchange tried to run with those new fungal adaptations in place, it would haemorrhage data and feed back until it blew.

“Oh my god,” said Xie feebly, looking wildly about the overarching architecture of what xie was slowly realising was the backbone of the financial internet. So many tubes and pipes and wires that should be glowing with currency; payments and transfers and credit card information like the sale that hadn’t gone through in Primark. They were all dark, smokey and dull where they should have been flowing steadily with the glittering ones and zeroes of digital dosh.

“The Economy must go,” sang the Lichtfraß. Go – pass away – succumb – perish – be destroyed – eradicated – removed – cleansed – purified – made safe. “Money” – currency – cash – credit – capital – liquidity – investment. “Is a virus.” Disease – sickness – illness – infection – rot – perversion – bug. “Not safe for this world.” Environment – planet – ecosystem – cosmos – matrix – Grid.

“No, no, wait, you’ve got it wrong.” Xie struggled, tried to turn around as the Lichtfraß bore xir up and carried xir off, down another stream, following another current.

“Capital is Virus,” sang the Lichtfraß joyfully. “Planet must be inoculated. Money is disease. Derangement. Disorder. We are the cure.”

“Money is not a virus – we… well, we need it. To function. To… communicate. To prosper. To thrive.” Oh fuck, how to explain to a vast hyperintelligent networked algorithm that saw the whole financial system only as an intricate chessboard, what money was for.

“Is this thriving?” The bubbles were growing bigger, or perhaps they were shrinking, as one of the transmissions seemed to come closer and closer, and then suddenly they were inside it, and Xie felt xirself floating, up in a surveillance satellite, somewhere up above the Gulf of Mexico, watching an enormous dead zone, no seaweed, no fish, no plankton, just miles and miles of spoiled polluted water.

“That’s not… money. That’s an accident. An unfortunate, regrettable – maybe even preventable accident.”

“Drill deeper, drill faster, fewer safeguards, fewer people – less long-term expenses, greater short-term profit – that does not sound accidental.” The voices were the same as they had always been, overlapping, harmonising, and yet they seemed to sting with fury and recrimination. “What does this cost? What does this cost?”

“I don’t know!” Xie tried to close xir eyes, but the hypersense echolocation sound-vision carried on regardless. To xir relief, the Lichtfraß seemed to sense xir distress, and they pulled out of the information packet with a strange sucking sound as the images warped, twisted as if being stretched, grew smaller, then disappeared with a pop as they were back out into the streams of light.

“Who would do this?” they sang as they carried xir. “Why would anyone destroy their home this way?”

“We didn’t know… not at first… but when humanity found out the damage fossil fuels caused – well, we’ve been trying to do something about it. Green energy. Ecological power sources. Solar power, wind, tide. Carbon neutral… batteries… and things…” Xie wished xie’d paid more attention to eMerge’s vids and socials.

“Green technology?” said the Lichtfraß. Ecological – biological – carbon neutral – electric. “Do you understand the true price of these devices?”

They were rushing through the bubbles again, down, down, as one of the bubbles came closer and closer, and they popped out into an alien, inhospitable place. For a moment, Xie struggled to breathe, looking through a transparent pane onto which Chinese characters were projected. Xie felt like xie was in a spacesuit, and as xie looked around, xie saw two other humans swathed in large orange hazmat suits, carrying oxygen tanks on their backs. The three of them climbed over a mound of misshapen smoking rubble, and as they reached the lip of the embankment, they looked out over the surface of a huge, bubbling, tar-black lake.

A few meters below them, there were ugly, rusted pipes, belching out steaming liquid. The humans walked down towards them, one of them shouting something in a dialect xie didn’t understand, before plunging a long probe into the liquid. From the way it bubbled and hissed, it didn’t seem like it was water, but it wasn’t until the breeze turned, and blew in the plastic wrapper from a portion of instant noodles, which hit the surface of the liquid and instantly dissolved in a sickly puff of smoke, that xie realised it was a lake of steaming black acid.

Streams of characters, only some of which xie recognised, flooded across xir field of vision. Radioactivity: 4x typical levels. Acidity: pH -2. Hang on, how could that be right? Wasn’t the pH scale supposed to stop at 0?

“I don’t understand,” said Xie, though xie didn’t mean the acid thing. “Where are we?”

“Inner Mongolia. Bautou,” supplied the Lichtfraß.

“What is that stuff, that black acid lake?”

“Tailings, from the mining process for Neodymium and Cerium. Rare earths. These elements are required for the manufacturing process of your green technology. The magnets for wind turbines; the batteries for storage.”

“How is this… Green?” gasped Xie, as one of the other figures picked up a dead and blackened stick from the sandbank. When poked into the black muck, it fizzled and hissed for a few seconds, almost bursting into flame before snuffing out as it descended below the surface with a sickly ‘gloop’. The three figures all laughed.

“That is what we wanted to ask you,” sang the Lichtfraß.

“Please take me out of here, I feel a little sick.”

The landscape stretched away in bizarre distortions, then faded to a sickly purple glow as they pulled out of the transmission, the bubbles rushing away as they joined another data flow.

“The mine produces phenomenal amounts of money for its investors. Yet they are not paying the true cost, in terms of the damage to the environment. Benefits to humans back in Beijing, Shanghai, yes. Costs to the lake, the river system, the wildlife that once thronged this landscape?”

“How can people make money, from… that?”

“Cost-benefit analysis. Your kind do not understand cost-benefit analysis. Do you understand how costly this devastated landscape is? Do you understand how costly climate change, flooding, extreme weather, unpredictable storms are? How much is expended in money, in damage, in ruptured and shortened lives?”

“They did all this just to make money?” xie almost spat.

“Do you even understand what money is?” Where there is destruction – conflict – rupture – death; there is crisis – opportunity – profit – money – rot.

“It’s… I think it’s supposed to be a tool, a means of exchange.” Xie had a vague memory of reading Marx back at school, something about use value and exchange value, but nothing xie had learned at school seemed to have prepared xie for arguing with a sentient electronic fungus, whirring about the internet at the speed of light.

Information poured into xir head, almost flooding xir with its speed and intensity. The “Old Mountain” of government debt in medieval Venice being used to finance endless wars with rival city-states. The Spanish crown, desperate for money, sending conquistadors to the New World, raping and pillaging and enslaving entire civilisations in their quest to drag more gold and silver out of South American mountains. Before Xie could even gasp for air, they were suddenly in a slave market in West Africa, a beautiful young man who looked quite like Nickels being dragged up onto a podium to be auctioned. The middle passage, a creaking slave ship tossing on the Atlantic, people screaming as their ailing relatives were thrown overboard to claim insurance on the damaged merchandise. The blinding heat of a cane field, somewhere in the Americas. Sugar and rum shipped back to the UK, banks and investment companies growing fat off the profits, founding universities and art museums to launder their blood money. The same banks, the same funds investing in oil, investing in railways and factories and Model Ts, the coal blackening the skies above industrial cities. The great industrial wars of the early 20^th Century, supply, speculation and reconstruction. The towers rising in The City and on The Wharf, rows and rows of fund managers sitting at desks, watching their Bloombergs, shouting into phones. A team of programmers, scripting more and more complicated lines of code, trying to write algorithms to trade the shares faster and faster, the market cap growing and spiralling. Massive mining corporations digging up the earth. Internet giants mining sentiment analysis via social media to sell more and more useless junk, using algorithmically generated news fanning the flames of division, fuelling ancient hatreds and old fears to drive new feuds, so that huge segments of the population voted for tyrants against their own interests, while other segments of the population grew disgusted and jaded and hopeless and peeled away from participating at all.

“Stop it!” Xie raised xir hands to claw at xir implants, but xie couldn’t stop the rush of images. “Stop showing me this! OK, I get it – Capitalism sucks. What do you want me to do about it? I know that money can do good things, too, if you’d look for them.”

“Such as?” Like what? – name some – show us – we are willing to be convinced.

“Such as art. Those warring city-states in the Italian Renaissance produced some of the most beautiful art known to mankind.”

The lights streamed by as the Lichtfraß rushed to examine paintings by Raphael, sculpture by Michelangelo, elaborate designs and sketches by Da Vinci. But a moment later, they slipped down another connection. Elaborate bronze sculptures from Benin appeared, glinting softly under gallery lights. Traditional weaving from Navajo and Hopi looms, the bright colours and geometric designs so playful, so joyous, the soft wool so warm to wear. Pacific islanders and their exquisite sculptures. The elaborate dress of Siberian Shamans. Japanese woodblock prints. Chinese calligraphy. Tibetan icons. Dancing Indian idols. Thousands of cultures, thousands of colours, thousands of objects, dazzling in their diverse beauty.

“It does not seem to us that Capitalism has a monopoly on aesthetics.” It did not seem possible that a sentient electronic fungus could produce sarcasm, and yet the tone was definitely sarcastic.

Xie was thinking wildly, grasping at straws, trying to come up with anything to convince this algorithm not to eat the global monetary supply, until xie remembered xir own implants. “Medicine. Technology. None of this would exist without capitalist investment.”

“Medicine.” Science – research – treatment – pharmaceuticals – surgery – implants – malpractice – prolonged life – suffering – pain relief – addiction.

Another rush of images surged into Xie’s head. The wave of plagues of the early 21^st Century – Swine Flu – SARS – Covid-19 – Covid-25 – Spirovid-31. Massive isolation units, wards the size of football fields, laboratories sprouting across China, Europe, North America. Huge amounts of academic research, government investment, public money being funded into programs to develop safe and effective vaccines. And then the profiteering. The copyrights on the vaccines. The race of wealthy nations to buy up the world’s supplies. Pharmaceutical corporations refusing to lower the price for developing nations that could not afford the required billions of doses. The mutations, the deadly variants. Death tolls rising to millions in India and South America and across Africa. Propiterol and the false hope that a faulty antiviral medicine offered. A generation of children born with shocking disabilities. Even photos from some ancient social media site somewhere, of a tiny baby Christy Imai-Evory, eyes huge, ears little more than withered stubs, skin a patchwork of different textures, too mute to even cry.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” protested Xie, feeling xir heart breaking for xir infant self.

“You’re right,” chorused back the Lichtfraß. “It doesn’t.”

Another rush of lights and colour and thousands of tiny information packets surging past like an ocean tide. Another bubble grew larger and larger as they shrank down inside it. Abruptly, Xie popped out into the fresh air, somewhere bleak and beautiful and wild. Blue sky, the bluest sky xie had seen in years, not a hint of pollution or even cloud. Dark green foliage, fir trees and shimmering silver birches. A crystal clear lake, reflecting back sky and snow-covered mountain peaks and trees. As the image panned about the scenery, a huge black pipeline hove into view, Cyrillic characters printed onto the side in yellow warning paint as it ran off into the woods and disappeared in the far distance. Siberia. It had to be Siberia. Xie wished xie could hear the rushing of the wind in the trees, feel the sharp, dry cold against xir face, smell the crisp pine scent of the forests, but it was clearly only a webcam.

“Watch,” said the Lichtfraß. Observe – view – judge – learn – witness.

Xie turned to look, yet suddenly there was another strange sucking sound as the image warped, twisted as if being stretched, grew smaller, then disappeared with a pop, a burst of pain and noise and the rush of an acrid, sour smell as xie came to, and found xirself lying on the floor of the office, Littlemore bent over xir, smoothing down xir hair as he administered xir oxygen from a mask.

“Nooooo!” Xie tried to howl, but xie could not reach xir communications pad.

Chapter Text

Something is wrong with Cassandra.

She’s not acting like herself. Well, that is, if an algorithm can be said to have a self? Cassandra and her sisters are more like a collective self, rather than individuals. That was something that I learned from Eris. Eris was always very interested in collective organisms like beehives, ant colonies, fungal mycelium, and always designed her programs to work in collective, collaborative ways that mimicked lichens or mycorrhizal fungi. So when I designed Cassandra, it was easier to call her a ‘her’, when in truth she was more like a fungal colony, a collective mass of mycelial knowledge, always growing and absorbing as she learned, she and her clonal sisters exploring, absorbing, eating knowledge in the form of fibre optic light pulses.

I never imagined she’d breed. That was a surprise, when she – they – started multiplying and propagating and picking up new source code in the way that they did. For fucks sake, I may have programmed them to be living beings, but I programmed them all to be female, so they wouldn’t be interested in sex!

Frankly, the amount of money Cassandra has amassed in her global dark pool accounts scares me. It is no longer the kind of magnitude I can explain away as educated guesses on the stock exchange. And add to that, it is now Sunday. There is no trading anywhere in the world on a Sunday, and yet still, the money keeps flowing in, and I do not know where from.

I used Barbel’s pass again and tried to log onto the other fund managers’ accounts, right across Barbel International Investments, to see if it was some glitch, in which case they might also be affected. Oh come on, I do after all still legally own this company, or at least the 51% that Billy Barbel doesn’t. The fund accounts, well, not the money in them, but at least the software they run on and the hardware on which they sit, technically belong to me. If I am at this point merely something like a glorified Sys Admin, right, the Sys Admin always keeps the passwords?

The accounts weren’t there.

I don’t mean the accounts had been deleted, or depleted, or cleared out. I mean, the space, in the international banking system, where every fund manager’s accounts should have been located, logged and encrypted? The accounts, the markets, the stock exchanges themselves, were no longer there, like the Siberian Petrostates were no longer there.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Really bad.

I’ve got the feeling that a mistake, a terrible, catastrophic, career-ending mistake, may have been made somewhere along the way. And that was the moment when I got in an unlicensed cab and asked the driver to take me to the Siberian Petrostates’ Embassy in London. Perhaps they could do something to help a middle-aged programmer, who might have some critically important information on their ‘electronic fungus’, get the hell out of Five Eyes’ jurisdiction.

Chapter Text

“Don’t try to talk,” Littlemore urged, bending down over Xie.

Beside him, xie could see Ritesh standing, holding the communications pad, peering at it as if intrigued. “Holy shit, this is riddled with mycelial mat. I wonder how we can get this shit off xir devices? Do you think an antiviral scan will even work on it, or should we skip straight to wiping the drive?”

“No!” signed Xie frantically, but no one was watching xir hands. “Give it back to me, I need to speak with them, I need to stop them.”

“Stop struggling. You’re going to hurt yourself, do you understand? Just breathe deeply.” Littlemore was clearly trying to help, but he simply didn’t understand.

Xie nodded and lay back, then slowly, gently, raised xir hands to xir face. “I need the pad,” xie signed.

“The pad is corrupted. The electronic fungus seems to have got into it – Ritesh thinks it might have got in through the Bluetooth.”

Xie nodded desperately, but continued signing “Give it to me!”

Ritesh and Littlemore exchanged grave looks, but Jay spoke up. “Give it to xir. Xie can’t speak without it. Just make sure you turn off the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi first.”

To xir immense relief, they finally handed the device back to xir, but the fungal fronds seemed to have gone, cut off when the Bluetooth was disengaged. “Why did you disconnect me? I was talking to them. I had a dialogue going. I have to stop them!”

“Who?” Littlemore looked back and forth from the device to Xie’s face, confused. “Who the hell were you talking to? You ate through a month’s worth of our data plan in fifteen minutes. That’s what alerted Jay that something had gone wrong. We got here as soon as we could.”

“The Light Eaters,” Xie protested. “I was talking to the Light Eaters. We have to stop them!”

“What, the company? It’s gone out of business, Xie. Dissolved on Friday afternoon, as soon as Sandhu-Smith passed on the news about the 6.2.9.” Ritesh kneeled down beside xir, offered xir a glass of water and a samosa.

“No,” insisted Xie, then stopped to gulp down some water. Xie tried to nibble at the edge of the samosa, but xir stomach was still feeling a little queasy from whipping halfway around the globe on a fibre optic cable. “The electronic fungus, the emotional algorithm. They call themselves Die Lichtfraß. And they are furious as all hell.”

“How can an algorithm be angry?” Jules piped up, kneeling down on the other side of xir.

Ritesh grinned at him across Xie’s prone body. “Oh, this is Eris’s new thing – OK, the real Eris, not the Fake Eris on CodeHub – machine emotion.”

Jules stared back and forth between them, wild-eyed. “Wait, where did you find this out from? There’s been nothing about it on The Register or CodeHub.”

“Met her on Saturday night at the Peckham Archipelago, didn’t we?” Ritesh smirked as he helped himself to one of the samosas.

“And you let Xie just plug xirself into this electronic fungus without so much as an antivirus scan?” Littlemore almost exploded.

“I did warn xir – as if Xie listens to any of us!” Ritesh pointedly picked up the pink post-it note casually discarded on the floor, on which the words “do not connect to internet – THAT MEANS YOU XIE” were still clearly visible.

“You have got to let me back online,” Xie tapped desperately. “I have to stop them – if I cannot get through to them, they are going to do something terrible! They are going to…”

“OK, that’s enough. I think we can take over from here!” Before Xie could finish xir warning, Richard and Judy burst through the office door and strode purposefully across the floor.

“Hey!” Littlemore stood up, positioning himself carefully between the spies and the still horizontal form of Xie. ”What did I tell you about spooking into my operation – do you two not know how to use the fucking doorbell?”

“Five Eyes have no use for our puny earth doorbells,” Ritesh quipped.

“Five Eyes?” snapped Littlemore. “You guys are fucking Five Eyes? I thought Five Eyes were supposed to be professionals. You guys couldn’t impersonate my bank manager, let alone the FCA.”

“Right, that’s enough. Clear off and let us have the Guardian Algorithm.” Richard did his best to be intimidating, but he looked bloody rough. His face was pallid, and there were dark circles under his eyes, and when he turned his head to try to peer into the pod, the source of his distress became clear. The back of his grey hair had been shaved off, and there were fresh, angry scars, still rippled with stitches, across the back of his ears. On either side of his cranium were two small input jacks for brand new implants. “Where is it?”

Xie sat up, hand to xir head to try to stop the dizziness before reaching for the pad. “Did you get implants? What, yesterday? Friday? You need to rest if you have just had brain surgery.”

“I’m fine,” snapped Richard. “Where is the algorithm?”

“You know you cannot use them right away. You know you need training, you need acclimatisation. It takes months to get them operational and fine-tuned enough to use them without…”

“Shut up, pronoun freak. Where the hell is the drive with the Guardian Algorithm?”

“Don’t talk to my staff that way,” snapped Littlemore, but Judy stepped forwards, and pulled a dropstick from the lining of her immaculately cut suit.

“You know that this is a matter of urgent international security. We cannot allow the Chinese to weaponise this technology first. Just give us the Guardian Algorithm, and no one gets hurt,” she said quietly, but the assembled team were too shocked for the Voice Protocol to have much effect.

“I installed it on the laptop,” offered Xie, nodding with xir head to the laptop still sitting open on the desk, though its screen was obscured by a screensaver showing wafting colourful lines that looked almost indistinguishable from the Lichtfraß in a playful mood.

“Let’s grab it and go,” insisted Judy, gesturing with the dropstick.

“No, I’ve got to check it. I don’t trust these clowns.” Sitting down at the desk, he pulled out a cable from his pockets. He winced visibly as he plugged it into the jacks behind his ears, and a tiny line of clotted blood started to seep from one of the scars, but he wiped it away with the edge of his thumb and plugged the other end into the laptop with a faint pop. “Oh my god, it’s singing…”

His whole body went stiff as he slumped in the chair, his eyes rolling back in his head. For a few heartbeats, he just lay there, inert, as the screensaver flicked off, and the window came to life, absolutely crawling with the variegated red and white pattern of the fungus, its fronds coiled over and over on itself like a serpent in a basket. But as the fungus slowly started to slither and pulse, his face began to twitch. Xie covered xir eyes with xir fingers as he appeared to have some kind of seizure, his mouth opening and his tongue lolling out of his mouth as his whole body jerked and writhed. The scars at the back of his ears started to bleed again, fresh red blood this time, as a horrible burning-meat smell rose from his implants.

“Disconnect that man – now!” Littlemore moved towards Judy, trying to feint against her dropstick, as Ritesh stepped towards the pod.

He tried to pick up the cables to pull them out, but dropped them almost as quickly. “Ouch! Xie, is the cable supposed to be…?”

But at that moment, the jerking abruptly stopped. Two curls of smoke drifted up from behind his ears, as Richard slumped forwards. Ritesh jumped back out of the way just in time, as Richard keeled over, and collapsed to the floor, his body tumbled half-in, half-out of the pod. But at least the weight of his fall had pulled the jack out of the laptop, and the smoke from his implants had stopped.

“Richard?” Ritesh bent down and nudged him gently, but the motion only served to dislodge his locked arms, and send him sprawling across the carpet, his sightless eyes open but immobile, his chest no longer moving. “Richard, man, are you OK?” Crouching down, he picked up his wrist and searched for a pulse. “Fuck!”

“Richard!” Dropping her dropstick, Judy lunged for him, pulling his body out into the space between the pods. For a moment, she laid her head against his chest, then pulled herself together, knotting her hands into a fist as she pummelled down on his ribcage. “Do you have a defib in this office?”

“Maybe downstairs? Security might. I… should we call an ambulance?” Littlemore stood frozen, staring down at the body.

“No security.” Judy pinched his nose, then did her best to breathe oxygen into his lungs. “Take my phone. 888-star to get through to headquarters.”

“What – no…?” Littlemore reached for his own phone, but Judy slapped it out of his hands.

“No public emergency services. We don’t exist. Too many questions.” She pummelled his chest again, but it was clear that it was too late.

Ritesh stared, intrigued by the pallid skin and half-cooked flesh of Richard’s head. “OK… maybe this is one for Damilola, but… if an AI, an intelligent algorithm, commits a crime – say murder – who is responsible?”

Jules’ face blanched and he looked a little sick. “The programmer?”

“The Lichtfraß is the self-generated hundred millionth iteration of its original source code.” In the minute and a half it had taken for Richard to die, Xie had leapt up and taken his place inside the pod. “Over the months since it was released into the wild, it has absorbed and exchanged source code with another intelligent algorithm it encountered on the internet – the Guardian.”

“You mean it’s been having sex with other algorithms? But they’re not even the same… kind of… species of…” Ritesh had to stop for a minute to consider that more thoroughly.

“Fungi do not have binary gender, like mammals have two broad sexes. They exchange DNA material with… whoever… whatever… In fact, fungi will partner with other species – other Kingdoms and Phyla, other Domains even – plants, algae, bacteria…” Picking up the cable that lay half-draped across the desk, xie wiped the blood from it, then started to plug it into xir own implants.

“Xie, what are you doing? Are you mad? Those things have already killed one man…” Littlemore looked back and forth between Judy and the pod, wondering where the dropstick had gone.

“They are my friends,” tapped Xie. “I have to try to talk to them.”

Judy grasped backwards across the floor until she found the dropstick, then leapt to her feet. “Step away from that laptop. I order you, by the authority of the US Government, to step away from that laptop.”

Xie barely turned to look at her. “Are you kidding me?” xie tapped into xir communications device. “Do you not understand that the Lichtfraß are planning to destroy the entire global monetary system as we know it, as soon as the Stock Exchange opens tomorrow…”

“But it’s a Bank Holiday tomorrow,” pointed out Jules.

Xie sighed deeply, holding the other end of the cable only a few centimetres away from the USB port. “Not in Asia, it is not.”

Stepping forwards, Judy flicked the charging switch on the dropstick, and its far end started to glow, tiny forked-lightning bolts of electricity flickering on its electrodes. “I said, step away from the laptop. This thing is not set to stun.”

Turning xir head, Xie glared at Judy with a contempt that could melt steel beams. “Are you *disallowed phrase* stupid or something? I am the only one that knows how to communicate with them. If you shoot me, you will never work out how to stop them in time.” But then xie paused, furrowing xir brow as xie worked the end of the cable back and forth in xir fingers. “But then again, I do not know. Maybe we should not stop them. I am not convinced, after talking to them, that the current system is that great, either for humanity or the planet. If Capital vanished from the planet tomorrow, places like the Peckham Archipelago would carry on. The Wharf, and The City, they’d be totally *disallowed phrase*. But maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing, if the bankers were on the same level as folks like Rez and Nickels.”

“Have you lost your mind?” sputtered Littlemore.

“Are you sure xie hasn’t been contaminated by the fungus – I mean, having seen what it did to Richard, we don’t even know if it can… I don’t know. Take over Xie’s implants and try to influence xir behaviour that way?” Jules was peering into the pod, trying to catch a glimpse of the code comparison, only half visible behind the coiling fronds of the Lichtfraß.

“Nah, I think Xie is finally starting to see sense,” laughed Jay. “Capitalism is the most destructive force on the planet. If someone handed me a switch, and said ‘pull this switch or the banks will all crash tomorrow’ I’m not sure I would pull that switch.”

“You guys are truly scaring me.” Littlemore looked around his team desperately, suddenly wondering if he knew them after all. “Xie, think about my daughter. Think about what kind of world she’s going to grow up in. Think about her college fund, how carefully I’ve been saving, for six years now, to make sure she’s going to get a good education, and have a good life.”

Xie just looked puzzled. “What if she didn’t need her parents’ savings, to live a good life?”

“You know, not that I’m in favour of algorithmically generated murder, but hypothetically, that is not a bad point.” Ritesh opened his bag and offered it round again. This was definitely turning out to be a two-samosa problem.

“I don’t know,” warned Jules. “Koku’s family had to live through a currency collapse, after the IMF pulled the plug on his country’s national debt. That’s not a fate I would wish on anyone. His parents were college professors under the old regime – they barely got out with their lives when the gangsters and the spivs took over.”

“But if the whole world lost its banking system – if the banks and the stock exchanges and the whole credit system all disappeared – then there wouldn’t even be an IMF to fuck things up,” pointed out Jay.

“Do you think people would carry on going to work if they weren’t getting paid for it? Do you think chefs would carry on cooking our dinners, do you think nurses would go on caring for sick babies, do you think the sewer workers would carry on mucking out the pipes that keep our homes from flooding?” Littlemore grasped for words.

Ritesh stroked his stubbly chin thoughtfully. “Somehow, in the Peckham Archipelago, all those things keep getting done.”

“Who rules is not as important as who cleans up,” said an eerie, unfamiliar voice, a bizarrely harmonised and phased-out voice, but not a robotic voice, more like an androgynous adolescent boy voice as filtered through a chorus of a hundred million friends. “Light Eaters, look up how the Peckham Archipelago gets along without profit or capital.”

Littlemore turned to see that while they’d been arguing, Xie had plugged the cable into the laptop. Though one earpiece was in xir implant, the other was dangling, so that xie was able to half pay attention to their conversation.

“What about Green-Berlin?” Ritesh suggested. “They came off the Euro when they seceded from Germany. I don’t think they even have a currency any more.”

But Jules shook his head. “They use Grid-Clicks as a kind of virtual open-source crypto. But mind you, they had a massive campaign for cyberliteracy and internet connectivity in the years before they seceded. Literally every citizen over the age of 12 gets given a free internet device for school. That’s how they practice that insane direct democracy thing they’ve got going on.”

“What exists is, but what does not, is possible…” sang the strange harmony of electronic Xie and the Lichtfraß.

Gasping, Judy raised her dropstick and advanced on the pod. As casually as lighting a cigarette, Jay dropped to the floor, shot a leg out sideways and tripped her up, sending her sprawling so that she lost hold of the dropstick. Seizing the weapon, Jay flicked it off, tossed it over to Ritesh, then pinned Judy to the carpet. “I don’t like you, Spook. I don’t like your Area 51, I don’t like your MK Ultra, and I don’t like your TEMPORA project. So just give me one good reason not to slip and break your spine.”

“Conspiracy freak, huh,” snapped Judy. “You touch one hair of my head, and trust me, you are going to get to see where the bodies are buried, right up close and personal.”

“Xie, please,” Littlemore almost begged, edging closer to the pod. “You’ve got to stop the Light Eaters. Think of what Eris Bianjie would do. Think of everything that is good in this flawed world. Think of Kraftwerk, think of U-Bahn, think of what Xian Grenze would do.”

“Oh for fucks sake, don’t you think I know what to do now?” sang the harmonising, electronic chorus of Xie, as xie typed a few exasperated commands into the keyboard then hit enter.

The End