Datanarchy

So when the shadow arrived, I didn’t even look up. “Whoever you are, there is no reason for you to be here,” I said. “So don’t.”

“I really don’t want to bother you, Mr. Bronzepiece. But it’s about a job.”

The shadow was attached to a pale sweaty guy, thin red hair, could have benefited from a gym program, melanin therapy. A face transplant. I preferred the shadow. “I retired.”

“My boss says you still have a relevant skillset.”

“I didn’t retire that long ago.”

His sunburn was coming up already. “He won’t let me come back with a no.”

I scratched at the data socket in the back of my hand. “Oh. I feel sorry for you.” I so had this under control. “But only because you’re ugly.” He got blotchier, so I relented. “Alright, but you’d better think hard about your pitch. You’ve got... one word.”

I hadn’t got things under control at all. A smile crossed his lumpy, freckly damn face. “Quantitract.” He watched me for a moment and then sat down. “My name’s Brad,” he said.

***

I was an IP jockey. Got in young, retired young. Used to call us patent attorneys, in the days when we had to persuade people about stuff, but when the IP mandate got subcontracted to the Artificial Intelligence sector, the name went out of fashion. Funny times—AI could decide if an invention deserved a patent, but turned out it was no good at actually inventing. It was just a big robot. And Big Robot made a pretty weird space up in the cloud where they put the system: you’d plug your wristsocket in and then you were roaming the dataplane, gliding through giant shimmering blocks of code, avoiding the majestic icebergs of military grade encryption in the impossible distance. You know. But we still needed inventors to invent. And IP jockeys to work the cloud.

***

Brad’s boss was ugly too. Tired looking and saggy faced, like his skin was trying to escape. “Well done, Brad.” He waved my escort away. “I’m Louie. May I call you Jake?”

“No.” I picked some papers off a chair, brushed away some crumbs. Then grabbed a tissue from his desk and scrubbed. I sat down. “Are you sure you can afford me, Louie?”

He sighed. “You look great. All that sun. So peaceful.”

“You can’t tell a man how to relax.”

He nodded wisely. “They said you were the best.”

“Were?”

“And to burn out so young. Then again, the competition nowadays. That scary new nerd-wave kid out east—Navigator—who’d want to come back and deal with that?”

“I can still outwork some spotty no-lifer. Navigator? Really?” I released my grip on the chair arms and slowly smiled. “Who says I’m coming back?”

“You hired yourself the moment we mentioned Quantitract. And how would you define ‘no-lifer’?”

That was the second time I realized I hadn’t got things under control.

Louie rooted round in a drawer. “We have some background for you. Still got a socket?” I offered him my wrist, and he did a double take. “You used this recently?”

“Not for data. Don’t tell me they’ve changed the interface again.”

“No.” He pulled out some solid state. “But they’ve changed how it is in the cloud.” He gestured, “May I?”

***

Once, if you wanted information, you’d ask someone. Or read it in a book, or other old ways like that. Then the web came, and suddenly you could know everything. But it was datanarchy: information actually got more dissolute, and you couldn’t trust the source, and the search engines always sent you where they got their money from. Then Big Robot redesigned it until no one could even use the web properly, and we jockeys got rich. But the killer was when governments realized that they were losing control, around the time when a movement called the DisenFranchisers started doing politics through social media and getting a global voter base. So datanarchy ends, the web locks down, the DFs get cut off, and people start talking to each other again. And you plug lumps of solid state into your arm to learn complex stuff.

I miss books.

***

Louie jams the memory block into my socket, the world turns inside out, and I’m back in the cloud. Kind of looking forward to soaring around, ruling the roost like the old days. And some solitude. No one can get in your head, when you are in your head.

But instead I’m in some kind of high school movie classroom. “It really changed,” I murmur.

And this voice yells out, “Silence!” It really, really has changed. I sit there like in a real schoolroom, teacher talking infinitely fast. Mind you, it makes more sense than all that Big Robot crypto-iceberg stuff. I listen infinitely fast. This stuff Quantium—everyone knows about that. Awesome material, found in Asia by Quantitract. Its energy density makes fusion look like a vegetarian snack, and it’s as easy to squeeze power out of as pips from a pomegranate. At least, if you have the techniques for dragging Quantium out from halfway down to the Earth’s core. And then you patent them.

Trouble is, you also need the most advanced processing methods on the planet, and someone else owns them: Uberchem. Doesn’t get on so well with Quantitract, but like drugs and addicts, they can’t survive without each other.

I loathe the learning a little longer, then summon up the sick feeling you need to get out of a good dream, and log back into the world.

I miss books.

***

Louie smiled. “Like the new intuitive feel?”

“No. So there’s a giant load of Quantium that needs mining, under Hong Kong. Been there, nice harbor. Quantitract had the IP, so they got the contract. Tough luck to Uberchem. Now tell me why you want to give me all this money.”

“Quantitract’s monopoly is a threat.”

“And I knock out their IP?” I shrugged. “Easy.”

“Perhaps. But if you can’t, we want you to extract the technology … some other way.”

I looked round the rundown office. “So who’s feeling threatened?”

“You will be working on behalf of a third party.” He stood up. “Our local jockey will meet you when you get to Hong Kong.”

I didn’t stand up. “I can access the IP sector from anywhere.”

“You’ll need physical access to certain aspects.”

“Who are you, Louie?”

He didn’t tell me. He just said how much they were going to pay. I coughed a bit. “Who are you, Louie?”

“You’ll need to get up to date.” He handed me another memory block. “For the flight. It’ll help you relax.”

***

I landed in Hong Kong dazed with data. But when Louie’s contact found me, I focussed fast. “You’re an IP jockey?”

She was called Georgia. She said she had heard of me and hoped to learn a lot. All in a sort of flat voice. “Have you been to Hong Kong before?”

I nodded knowledgeably. “Nice harbor.”

Georgia looked at me oddly. “Yeah. I heard you’d retired.”

We kept the talk to business on the way in. Quantitract had done their legals beautifully. They’d worked out the only way of mining the Quantium, patented it everywhere, and then won the mining concession because no-one else could mine it. Not even the people who lived there. You had to admire them.

“Mine all mine,” I said, cleverly. She didn’t laugh. “Well, they’ve done a good job.”

“We Hong Kongers,” observed Georgia, “thought our colonial days were over.”

She pointed out of the window eventually. “Coming up to your favorite bit.” “Damn,” I said, staring at the harbor. “Where’s the water?”

“It was getting in the way of mining Quantium.”

***

The problem—with everything—is that the moment Armageddon abates, trivia kicks in. The cold war ended, and a prosperity war began: like, who’s got the most? Everyone started inventing new things to possess, intellectual property became more important than real property, and power shifted to the datarchy. Not long after that, people realized that new warfare needs new armies, and lawyers became the militia of the knowledge economy. And we jockeys got rich.

The DisenFranchisers understood. They put out a statement on social media: “1/3 of the power of the datarchy is knowledge,” they declared. “And 1/3 is law.”

The people who followed social media all asked: “What’s the other 1/3?”

Then in the best use of social media in history, DF waited two whole days to multicast again. “The other 1/3?” By now the entire world was listening. “Nuclear capability.”

That was pretty much when things got shut down, and we got on with draining harbors to enhance our quality of life. It would be pleasant to spike Quantitract’s IP.

I wanted to run this past Georgia, to show I’m not scum. But she broke the silence first. “Are we paying you enough?” she said.

We transferred to a cab, and she spoke again only as we jumped out. “Thank you.”

“What for?”

“For stopping speaking.”

***

She worked out of one of those login collectives, people plugged into approved access points everywhere. We took a hotdesk, she nodded at me, and I slipped my hand into a gauntlet and connected to the IP cloud. At least it was a world I could enjoy on my own.

They’ve upgraded the experience here, too. The Quantitract patents are mapped out in wireframe light these days, but my old tricks still work—I crawl over their tech, test it, look for the weak points. It’s pretty rugged, so I slip through the luminescent skeleton, to probe the hard shelled claimconstruct inside.

That’s when I notice the shadow. What the hell is someone else doing in my headspace? Not possible. I try a couple of moves to lose it—but it knows the same moves. So I go through the construct shell. That is my speciality. What I get paid the most of anyone for. My little virtual grin fades when the shadow joins me there.

I ignore it, poke and stroke the construct for flaws, give up, glare at the shadow. “You the Navigator?” I gather myself up. “Hate that name.” Then up through the nausea, back to the hotdesk.

Georgia was touching up her lipstick. “Fixed everything for us?”

“I think I met the Navigator.”

“I heard the Navigator and Quantitract don’t get on.”

“Quantitract shouldn’t know the Navigator even exists. Amateur.”

“So you failed.” She put the lipstick lid back on, carefully. “Then we’ll need to get into Quantitracts’s own dataspace.”

“How? You can’t just prance all over the web anymore.”

“How retired are you? Do you think they’re crammed in here just to go to approved locations?” She gestured around the hollow-eyed data denizens, vacant in their booths. “This is the nerd-wave. Let’s go.”

***

That damn shadowpest is there again. Weird, but…

“Georgia. Is that you?”

“In here, I’m the Navigator.”

“It makes you sound like a bad pub.”

She gestures round. “Welcome to the shadow web.”

Like the datarchy or not, at least Big Robot made the approved locations sanitary. Here in the shadow web they can’t afford cleaners. We’re in a murky back alley, leading to a dank street, in a decrepit, forgotten burger franchise of a web. We skulk along, and the passages gradually grow wider, making room for more dirt. But at least there’s a glisten to the grime as we approach the glow of a barricaded Quantitract entry point.

“Allow me,” I say; I probe it, then try my walk-through trick, but end up outside again. She slips through between cracks, and it spreads open. Show off.

Inside, the dataspace is more like the old days: towers stretching in n-dimensional databases, shimmering firewalls. I get through a couple, but the crypto gets tougher as we head for the core, and soon I’m just trailing the Navigator. OK. She’s not bad.

Then we hit something really bright and important looking, and even she struggles, swarming over the diamond surface, looking for a way in. I point out a high, dark smudge, and she wafts up, forces an opening, and prises it wider until I can squeeze through in her wake.

There is no further to go. “Nice work, Navigator.” Still hate that name.

“Really?” She’s scanning the core. Helplessly—because there’s nothing there. Right at the heart of their security, instead of some sparkly heap of prime Quantitract IP, is just a dull grid of empty memory registers.

Then I get it. I laugh, make myself sick, and plug back out to the collective.

***

Georgia was already there. “What’s so funny? There’s no data!”

“There is. All that crypto is just for their physical security. That smudge you went through? Probably the security camera system. There’s no data in memory.”

“Where else can you put data?”

“Somewhere in Quantitract they’ve got a vault. And inside, they’ve stored all their information. In a book.”

She rubbed her face and I finally noticed what was missing from her hand. “Hey. How do you log in without a socket?”

“It’s a nerd-wave thing.” She put her hand down again. “We need a conference with Louie.”

***

Big Robot put the three of us in a virtual conference space which was literally the inside of my head.

“No luck?” Louie had his feet dangling out of my nostril.

“We need physical access to Quantitract,” said Georgia.

I peered out of a pupil. It had a weird lensing effect but I could see RealGeorgia across the hotdesk, doing her mascara absently. “Because I’ve worked out where the information is,” I added.

“Yeah,” she said. “He’s great. But we can’t get in.”

“Jake can,” said Louie.

She straightened. “What?”

“I said I was retired.” I told her. “Not resigned. Why do you think Louie hired me?”

“You’re from Quantitract?”

“I consult.”

She pondered. “Can you get me in?”

“Why?”

“You can get past the people. I can get past the machines.”

“Fine. If we can rewrite your profile. You can be my assistant. No. Trainee.”

She started going all Georgia but Louie interrupted her. “Navigate it.”

She went blurry and then flicked back into focus.

It made me feel old. “Did you just go online somewhere else when you were already online here?”

“That’s what we kids do. My backhistory’s rewritten.” She paused. “Now how can I trust you, Jake?”

Oooh. My name. “I stopped liking Quantitract.”

“Business not good?”

“Business not yours. Actually I’m not sure I dislike them enough to do this.” I scratched my nose. The one on my virtual face, not the one on my conference suite. “Louie. Do you work for Uberchem?”

He stepped closer. “Let me talk you through what happens if we don’t extract Quantitract’s IP. One: Uberchem doesn’t know how to do what Quantitract does. Two: Uberchem can’t go legal. You couldn’t break their IP. Not even the Navigator could.”

I let that go.

“So that leaves option three.”

Three options. Knowledge. Law. Then I got it. “Nuclear capability?”

“Nuclear measures would be… short-termist. But in the datarchy, people go to war over far less. We can’t let that happen.”

“Datarchy?” I stared at him. “You’re DF?”

“Extract the IP, Jake.”

***

Quantitract HQ was in one of those big old glass buildings that made the Hong Kong skyline look like bad high tech teeth. Front desk was easy. “Rick, Head of Legal, please,” I said. “I know the way.” But we had some cow-sized guy called Joel escort us up anyway

Rick was a 30 litre man in a 45 litre hat. “Jake! Great to see you buddy!” The cold eyes under the high capacity headwear flicked across a screen. “And... Georgia?”

“Colleague of mine.”

He lifted his hat. “Ma’am.” He had always worked the oil cowboy thing. He was actually from Crewe. Look it up. He checked her profile again. “Mighty young to be your boss, Jake.”

“My boss?” Damn, she was good. “Rick, we need to get into your dataspace.”

“You are a favored consultant, Jake,” replied Rick. “But why would I let anybody into our dataspace?”

“Because I can do you a big favor.”

“And why would you do that?”

“For a lot of money.”

“What’s the favor?”

“I can set you a trap. Solve a big problem for you.”

“Go on.”

“I can bring you the Navigator.” I smiled at Georgia. “Right, boss?”

He had a gauntlet on his desk. “Wait.” He blanked as he logged in and then blipped awake again. “You’ve got permission.”

I glanced at Georgia’s face and plugged in to the dataspace quickly. From inside the firewalls, cruising the Quantitract IT was as easy as snoozing in a Jacuzzi, but I hung around longer than I needed to, and logged out again with my best confused look. “There’s nothing there. Just ... empty memory.”

Georgia winced, Rick grinned. “That’s why we don’t get hacked.”

I ran my impressed expression. “Clever. But give me some data to put there, I’ll bring the Navigator.”

“You can only load that memory up physically. From inside the vault.”

Now my blank face. He sighed. “Joel. Make sure they can’t hack in.” Our escort superglued my wrist socket, scanned Georgia, found nothing. Rick handed me some solid state. “Web says you’re clean. Joel says you’re clean. Show us you still got it, Jake.” And we followed the cow and the cowboy to the vault.

Georgia hissed at me. “What are you doing?”

“Just go Navigator when I say. Distract them while I copy the papers.”

“How will you copy them?”

I paused. “You’re the one who can log in without a socket—you’re a bag of tricks. I don’t know… have you got a camera in your eyes?”

“Of course I bloody haven’t.”

“You said you’d do the machines!”

Rick turned. “Technical discussion?” We shut up till we got inside the vault.

You couldn’t miss the databanks there. Rack on rack of the biggest, boringest blocks of 3D memory stack ever. I stared at them, and not at the thin folder of papers lying on a small table. Rick wasn’t staring at the folder too.

I loaded Rick’s solid state into the machine and gave Georgia a nod. I hadn’t watched her log in before. She went absent—still moving, breathing, functioning, but not much brain activity. Cow and Boy didn’t notice though—both had logged in to watch the datachase. So I thought I’d surprise Georgia. I’d been reading up. I went absent too.

***

There are eyes in the Navigator shadow, and they stare at me. “How did you...”

“It’s a nerd-wave thing.” I look up at the smudge in the core firewall. “Navigator. Georgia. They’re really good...”

She puts a finger to her shadow lips, I stop speaking, and she slips through. This time Quantitract is ready; immediately other shadows stream past me as the anti-virus routines follow her in. I’d help, but I have my own job to do. And it isn’t real Georgia, just a little virtual version Louie’s employers built for her. I work fast, but it is difficult to concentrate. In dataspace you can hear everyone scream.

***

I jacked back out, same time Rick did.

“Rick, we don’t want to hang around—if Navigator’s employers trace this I want to be a long way away.”

“We have what we want.” He was very happy. “And don’t worry, we have your account details. Joel, show them down.”

Joel didn’t notice how vacant Georgia was as we left. Well, he was pretty vacant too. Still nothing from her when we were out of the building—I started worrying then. We’d jumped in a cab back to the collective before she clicked back in again. I’d kept quiet.

“Thank you,” she said.

“How’s Navigator?”

She turned to the window. “She was just virtual.”

***

This time it was only me and Louie hanging out in my conference cranium.

“Job done,” I said.

“Then where are the papers?”

“You didn’t see Joel.”

“But you made copies.”

“Copies? What do you think—Georgia has cameras in her eyes?” I was getting under his skin. Then again, he was literally inside my head. “Who do you work for, Louie?”

“Someone who wants to share the IP.”

“Well, suppose I do have it. And suppose you are DF. So I just open-source it and everybody can extract Quantium. Bingo.”

He was leaning against a mucous membrane. “Honestly, Jake. We can handle all that.”

I laughed. “Honestly? Come on, Louie. You’re Uberchem!”

“Do you care who’s paying you?”

“It matters intensely.”

“It doesn’t matter at all.” He waved away my interruption. “In the sense that you’ll give me the data whomever I work for.”

“What are you going to do?” I had had enough of this conference, and this ridiculous conference space. “Persuade me? This is my world, Louie.”

He didn’t look concerned. “Remember that solid state you popped on the plane? We threw in a couple of algorithms we didn’t tell you about. Now tell.”

And then he made me start downloading. Just made it happen, one of my virtual eyeballs projecting inwards onto the back of my skull like an old movie. We both watched the vault scene relive itself. Me and Georgia, half Zombie, laying out papers from the folder, page by page. Rick and Joel plugged in, oblivious, watching the Navigator being decoded. And me, in dataspace, logged in through the security camera, capturing every moment. Every sheet of Quantium data.

“Thanks Jake.” Louie gathered himself to log back into the world, but a shadow stopped him.

“It’s not your data, Louie.”

“Navigator?” Louie was trying to look cool. “I thought they decoded you.”

“She recoded,” I said. “Nerd-wave thing.”

He just couldn’t do cool. “May I remind you, you’re Uberchem property.”

She ignored him. “Jake, I’m going to release the data.” I was going to speak, but she put a finger to my lips. My virtual ones, not my conference space... You get the idea. She blurred, went somewhere else in the cloud, and then refocused, holding a sheaf of delicate densely typed sheets. “Datanarchy.”

***

Georgia throws her arms wide, we evaporate out of the conference dataspace, and suddenly we’re floating high above the shadow web. Weak sunlight glistens off the streets for once, but when the cascade of data leaves her hands, it throws no shadow.

Can you slump and float at the same time? Louie does. “Georgia!”

“It’s over, Louie,” she says.

He whispers. “Navigator, please.”

The last of the Quantium data scrolls down from her fingers, rides through the sky, then falls and hides the grime like snow. She shakes her hands as though she’s drying nail polish.

“Hate that name.”

***

So now I’m relaxing again. Horizontal. Wrist socket plugged straight into a piña colada, like nature intended. Not a byte to be seen. OK, I broke my rules a bit. I’m not completely alone. But it turns out that’s alright. You just have to be with the right kind of shadow.