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

dimension and shape. He thought those were fuzzy words for some randomness in Dani’s head. She got mad he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand how present and specific her visions are.
    Images flash – of her and someone chubby who might be Pemberton, both of them tooned into sprites from an ’80s arcade game. Two pixellated Giggly Pigglies. Purple pig and green pig waggle stubby legs to race through corridors, grabbing and discarding balls of light. No idea guides them. Dani must have asked a dozen people to help her today, pulling in data from a hundred sources; but she didn’t know what she was looking for. A random walk with no destination. How do you hunt a Pacman ghost?
    Sometimes you need a software concept to explain the world. Spinning :when a system cycles from task to task so quickly it never finishes one thing before moving onto the next. To the user the machine looks frozen but the system believes it’s working double-time. Dani, spinning up and down the building. Jonquil and Pemberton, spinning round each other in a wary dance. Sam, spinning stories to the hacks and flacks. The whole system spinning and moving exactly nowhere. Pointless.
    Dani’s pig hits a neon carton and spills her balls of light. They scatter and balloon across her field of vision – and right away it comes to her. So obvious. The vision screen-wipes away, quick as it arrived, leaving only screenlight. All she’s done so far is chase the data. That’s the raw material, the dumb unfiltered mass before the spark of life is added by sic_girl’s algorithm. What they need is meaning. She has to talk to sic_girl – and not through Parley; in person. She’ll batch up a semantic dialogue in the morning, soon as she gets in. It’ll be ready to run by the evening.
    She stares at the silent snow-cap mountain screensaver and takes a tug on the Michelob. It’s warm, but that’s OK. She’s wired and numb and isn’t tasting it.
    Out of sight at the back of her machine, an LED flashes crazy. Her network card is active. Someplace inside the metal case, an imp of the wires named Grubly has woken to receive a signal. The signal ends and Grubly starts transmitting in return. The transmission is long and hungry but Grubly is artful. Dani sees nothing and bandwidth is cheap, this time of night. Nobody gets hurt.
    She takes another swig. Would anyone else grok her spinning meme? Gray would. Sam not so much. Is Sam too prim? She tries to imagine kissing him and finds she can, quite easily. Very easily. In her mind he’s silent but his breath races. Today he was tightly shaven but here he grates the skin of her face and neck. His tongue is in the cleft beneath her jaw. It’s sticky and hot.
    She twists in the chair, touching herself with two fingers of her left hand while reaching forward with the right to fire up a browser. She googles Sam and he’s there. Profile. Senior Associate. His face washed white by flash, his eyes tightly perfect. She clicks on the mailto: link. A new message appears, primed to send. She closes it again.
    She wants to build him afresh, package him up. Something strikes her and she digs around in an old project folder on her hard drive until she finds it: an abandoned coding project she called the lovebot. You could email it from anywhere and it’d come straight back with a sex message, tailored to the vocab in your mail. An ancestor that evolved into sic_girl and the other Personas. Nothing too smart or sophisticated, but tonight she doesn’t need either of those things. She starts to hack at the lovebot, chiselling its generic voice into a simplistic scrape of Sam.
    She’ll call it the Sambot. It’ll speak to her, even when he won’t.
     
    Thirty-five minutes later her work is done. The Sambot is up and live on the web server in Dani’s airing cupboard – the one whose constant expelled heat keeps her towels and knickers dry.
    She tabs to her email and types a message to the Sambot.
     
hey sam
i see you inside my