It Looks Like You're Writing a Letter
Chapter 8

David Wilkinson awoke and opened his eyes. Staring into the murky darkness of the room he gradually became aware of his surroundings. The ceiling above his head was rough brick, illuminated dimly by the cold flicker of monitor screens a few metres away.

He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the military-style bunk. Rubbing his eyes he was depressed to note he was still in the bunker under the church in Fort Smith. Across the room he saw that Thorner and Kruke were already awake, dressed and deep in conversation. He dressed himself in his smart trousers, grudgingly tucked in his shirt and slipped on his shoes before slouching over to the older men.

"Any chance of some coffee Kruke?" his tone was defeated, meek. The cockney accent was muted, almost imperceptible.

"Ah! Good morning David. Did you sleep well?"

"I had weird dreams."

"To be expected. Here, you'll need this," said Kruke as he passed an arm piece to David. David looked at it. Beige, with comfort straps, and heavy - this was no high-end alloy device with a sapphire screen. It had the air of medical equipment about it, and the large easy to read buttons cemented his opinion that this was the kind of device favoured by the old and infirm.

"Fucking really?"

"Ah ah ah!" admonished Kruke, as Thorner looked amused. "I don't think that kind of language is fitting, do you, David?" The emphasis he put on the last word of the sentence made David pause.

"Uh. Yeah. Yes. Sorry. Thank you."

Thorner turned to Kruke. "I think I'm going to quite like young David here."

David looked unimpressed but stayed silent.

Kruke grinned. "Coffee's in the pot. Help yourself."

Suddenly one of the computer operators cleared his throat and stammered nervously. "Mr Kruke? I think you'd better take a look at the news."

Kruke's cheery demeanour vanished, immediately replaced with his usual militaristic frown. He pushed the tech worker out of the way and drew up the news channel on one of the large monitors.

"Turn the sound up. Turn it up!" he demanded.

"... Gridwide manhunt continues for the fugitive Tanner Griffen - currently located in the region of Shawnee, Oklahoma and heading east. Citizens are advised not to approach him as he is known to be armed and extremely dangerous. Security forces have been despatched to apprehend Griffen, a notorious criminal, racketeer and hacker, after his brutal murder of Senator Joseph Rigsby and his aide this morning in Oklahoma City."

The screen showed the same mugshot of Griffen, mohawked, pierced and tattooed, in full leathers and giving the finger to the camera. David suffered a pang of loss and nostalgia, quickly overtaken by indignation.

"What?" he blurted out, "I never done it! How could I? I was with you lot, wasn't I?" his tone started out defiantly but turned more questioning - as if he wasn't one hundred percent sure he hadn't actually done what he was accused of.

"OK, stay calm," mollified Kruke. "There's something going on here. We all know you can't have killed the Senator. As far as the authorities are concerned, however, Tanner Griffen did - and Tanner Griffen is currently on the run. The question is, what do we do about it?"

Thorner stepped in. "Wait a minute - can we find out exactly what time the murder was committed?"

"Sure" Kruke motioned to one of the computer operators.

"1:35am this morning Mr Kruke."

"And what time did you complete the reprofiling?" Thorner asked Kruke.

"Well, let me see - about an hour before that, just before the techs and I retired for the night."

Thorner scratched his chin. "We all know Ora won't allow duplicate idents. Kruke, is it possible for someone to have grabbed Griffen's ident once it wasn't being used anymore, as in, after he became David?"

"Eminently possible, Thorner. Perhaps Tanner had been fuzzed out long enough for the system to think he had expired - physically died. Once someone is flagged as expired, their profile ident can be recycled, but that takes some high level access."

"So, I didn't do it, can we all agree on that?" David's expression was panicked. He'd never felt this anxious on the occasions when he actually had killed someone.

"Please calm down David," said Kruke in a low tone, "someone out there has your old ident, we know this. We know they killed Senator Rigsby and now they're on the run. Question is - if Sec get to Griffen, it won't be long before they realise it's not you. Well, not who you were, you know what I mean. The manhunt for you will be back on, and all our good work here will have been for nothing."

"Kruke, has this happened before - old idents getting hijacked?" asked Thorner with a suspicious tone.

"No, not to my knowledge. This is most unusual."

Kruke moved briskly to a filing cabinet at the edge of the room. Opening a drawer he pulled out a flat file and from that a bunch of keys.

"Thorner, I guess you'd be best to make use of these." He threw the old-style car keys to him. "No point in you trying to travel by auto-car. It would give away your position as soon as you started it up. That old girl may be thirty years old, but she still runs just fine. There's enough energy in the cell to take you most of the way but you'll need to find somewhere to recharge. Be careful with it, I don't have another."

"Wait," said Thorner, his brow furrowed. "Are you expecting me to go on this hunt for Griffen?"

"Oh yes, you all are. David can't stay here a moment longer - he's a risk to me, and the sooner he's out of my facility the better. You weren't supposed to be here in the first place. Jeopardy has a job to protect David until he reaches his new profile location. This is an unexpected wrinkle in that plan, but I'm confident she'll clear this up. Stay with her until it's done."

Jeopardy emerged from the shadows in the corner of the room. "Unbelievable Griffen," she spat, "even when you're dead, you're a pain in the ass."

Kruke turned to Thorner. "Oh, and Thorner - if you bring the authorities back here, I will be gone long before they reach this building."

"Let's go," urged Jeopardy.

They gathered their belongings, each packed into a rucksack, and made their way out of the bunker, through the church and out of the rear exit. Parked in the alleyway behind the church was an old Volvo family saloon. It was bright red, rusting and there were numerous pools of fluid congealing beneath the engine bay.

"What a delight," muttered Thorner, pressing the remote opening button on the key fob. Absolutely nothing happened. He opened the driver's door with a twist of the key and motioned Jeopardy and David to get inside.

Inserting the old-fashioned metal key into the ignition, he turned it without much hope, but to his surprise the car started first time with an asthmatic hum. The small colour screen in the dashboard flickered into life, speckled with dead pixels.

"Where's Griffen now?" he asked Jeopardy, who had taken the passenger seat. She checked her left arm piece - Thorner noticed she had two, one on each arm.

"He's just left Shawnee, still heading east. We should be able to cut him off if we head west on Route 40."

Thorner manually typed their heading into the car's vintage satellite navigation computer and pulled away as inconspicuously as possible, joining the thin traffic towards the interstate highway.

The car was noisy and hot, the air conditioning having expired many years ago. The gas required to refill it had long since been outlawed for its damage to the environment. Nothing electrical worked.

Thorner called to the back seat: "How you doing back there, David?"

David was looking pensively out of the window at the sparse, dry wilderness. "I'm OK," he lied, his eyes moist.

Thorner softened. "Look kid, I know this must be tough but you're going to be OK."

"Maybe. What are we going to do when - if - we catch up with Griffen? I mean, this guy is a murderer, right? Are we going to ask him nicely to give up my profile and disappear?"

"I don't really know right now. I'm thinking."

"We kill him," said Jeopardy, matter of factly.

Thorner looked at her, somewhat aghast. "Kill him? That's your plan?"

"Yes - it's the only plan. We can't take the risk that Sec get to him first in case he knows where David is or who's helped him. It's simple. There's no reason for Tanner Griffen to be alive at all, and I'd be happier knowing I pulled the trigger."

David ground his teeth, but didn't say anything. Not even the things he desperately wanted to say, like how it really pissed him off to have people talk so nonchalantly about killing him when he'd only been someone else for less than 12 hours. This Jeopardy chick obviously thought she was a badass, but just one day ago, he would have slit her throat and laughed as she bled out. It was strange how completely he felt that was no longer an option. It was something Griffen would do, but David wouldn't.

How did he end up here, dressed like a suburban dweeb, travelling across the country in a prehistoric car with an old off-Gridder and some psycho girl? A large part of him would have preferred going out in a messy showdown with the Sec meatheads, exchanging hot electric fire until a good shot burst his head like a ripe peach. The Sec officer who pulled the trigger could have gone back to base and bragged about how he took out the great Tanner Griffen when nobody else could. That was the kind of legacy he was always planning to leave. An unstoppable force of chaos right up until his own bloody-mindedness caught up with him. Instead he was suffering some kind of living death, trapped in crisp white cotton, catching every profanity before it left his lips.

He sighed and pushed up his left sleeve. Cringing once again at the ugliness of his arm piece, he woke it from sleep and scrolled through his profile, still trying to get to grips with some of the minutiae. It was important he become comfortable as soon as possible, Kruke had said. What David said, where he went and what he did would have to fit perfectly into this new template so as not to arouse digital suspicion.

Political views: mildly left of centre but not enough to offend anyone. He was pro-choice, anti-animal testing, with strong views about nature conservation borne out by multiple online memberships to animal sanctuaries and video-streaming zoos. His profile proudly boasted his vegetarian status. His physical body had already started to mourn the loss of bacon, burgers and kebabs.

Musically, David wasn't really interested. His choice of musical groups and bands were strictly from the radio-friendly selection pumped incessantly into licensed public spaces and subscriber's homes and vehicles. Not really a choice at all, the act of choosing without choosing, enjoying what was there by default without having to make any decisions or formulate any opinions. David would never utilise comparative analysis on whether Shovel Bastard's second album was as brutal as their debut. Not listening to music at all would have been a bolder standpoint.

David scrolled dejectedly through his contact list. A sea of happy, white-toothed Americans grinned back. Peace signs, pictures with elephants on holiday, fat shapeless babies, examples of Western excess paraded as a means to validate existences. He contemplated garrotting Thorner to death with his belt while he drove, hoping the ensuing crash would take out all three of them, but he couldn't guarantee that post-mortem, he would be identified. The accident might be ignored by the media as three nobodies cluttering up the embankment with their unruly corpses. David Wilkinson's death would always be as unremarkable as his life.

He shut off his arm piece and pulled his sleeve down again.

"So, Jeopardy - how long have you worked for Kruke?" Thorner was asking.

Jeopardy didn't look at the consultant, continuing to scan the horizon for some unknown threat. "About three years, on and off."

"How many of these do you do a year?"

"Varies. Most I've done is about three, that's about right. Can get messy and drawn out, hard to plan anything much with this kind of job."

Thorner nodded. "So, what's with the extra doohickey?" he motioned towards her right arm.

"I've got one arm piece that's connected to the Grid, and one that isn't. The one that isn't is connected to Kruke's bunker. Means I can get messages to and from him via the sub-Grid and not be detected."

"Ah. Clever." Thorner didn't mean this to sound patronising, but it did.

"I've gotta piss," announced David from the back seat.

"Noted," stated Thorner, matter of factly.

Fifty miles or so down the same road, a jagged shape loomed in the distance. Jeopardy squinted a particular way and an almost imperceptible servo whine emitted from her eye sockets as her implants zoomed in.

"Refuelling station. We should stop."

They pulled into the station forecourt in a plume of dust and grit. At first glance it was hard to see if this was even an operational business, but the ragged 'open' sign in the door looked promising. They got out of the car and each stretched painfully.

"Why is it so tiny inside? Who designed this thing?" complained David, rubbing his cramped legs.

"Come on. Thorner, fill her up, we'll go inside." Jeopardy had taken control, habitually.

Jeopardy and David approached the shop building. It sagged at the seams and no two surfaces appeared to join properly. Brown stains of rust ran down between the cracks like the sides of a long-scuttled trawler. For the first time David saw that Jeopardy was subtly but powerfully armed with energy weapons. Her belt bristled with small, black, knurled alloy handles and microswitches - all belonging to some form of high-end crowd suppressor or personal aggression management system. David had only seen this kind of gear on Sec Special Ops forces. If this chick was tough enough to take them from SSO, she might just be a force to be reckoned with. These toys weren't available on the black market. If you wanted them, you usually had to win them in a fight.

They pushed open the door, which rang a bell somewhere behind the counter, and went inside. Dust hung unmoving in the sword-like shafts of sunlight streaming across the room, like a still from an old movie. Everything was covered in a thin layer of grime. If the shelves weren't so well-stocked, David would have assumed this place had been abandoned about twenty years ago.

They walked slowly between the aisles of junk food. Apart from the buzzing sound of the decrepit recharging station outside, it was utterly silent. The whole place was like a mausoleum, an unattended wake for capitalism.

"Good afternoon." The voice made them both jump. Jeopardy's right hand instinctively flew to her belt but remained there as they swung around and saw the tiny old man who had appeared, as if by teleportation, behind the counter. "Can I help you young'uns?"

Jeopardy started breathing again. David was embarrassed to realise he had hidden behind her when the old man had startled them. He straightened himself.

Mary Bilton approached the counter. "Well hello there, you gave us quite a shock sir! My name is Mary and this is David, we're just passing through on our way to Shawnee." Her voice was a sweet Tennessee drawl all of a sudden, her body language had changed entirely as she giggled and wiggled. David was nonplussed but kept silent. He glanced at his arm piece's geolocator function. In the plan view of the building, where Jeopardy was standing, was Mary Bilton, 23 from Forest Hills, Tennessee. Loves dogs, engaged to be married to Brad Scott, a builder by trade.

The old man behind the counter brightened visibly. He was like a gnome in flannel, as much a part of the shop fittings as his old wooden counter. "Is that a Tennessee accent I detect, Miss?"

"It surely is!"

"Well, you're a long way from home if I may say so - what brings you to this part of the country?"

"Oh, you know - just hunting down old friends!" She tittered, nauseatingly.

"Well, you just need to be careful, right now. Word is there's a maniac on the loose. Killed a senator, he did, up in Oklahoma City! Security put a warning out - look." The garage owner twisted his torso so that Mary could see Griffen's mugshot on his arm piece, which span loosely on his withered arm. "Every business within a few hundred miles has been warned not to tangle with this lunatic."

David's face began to itch. He stood behind Mary and shuffled his feet. Every second was physically painful - luckily the old man was too enamoured with Mary to even cast a glance towards him.

"Oh we will be careful, he looks like a terrible person. Looks like my poppa is done with the recharge - unit number two, oh and we'll take this bag of chips also." Without looking away, she grabbed a nearby sack of potato chips and placed it on the counter. The old man grinned toothlessly, waved over his till, and the total appeared on Mary's arm piece. She waved back and the transaction was complete. For David, the penny dropped. Somewhere in Tennessee a young bride-to-be was about to get an unusual item on her credit card bill.

David's panic was not subsiding. He'd seen the door to the toilet at the back of the shop, along with the sign reading 'FOR KEY SEE MANAGEMENT'. Mary turned from the counter, gave David a sweet smile and went back out into the white sunlight. The old man sat back down behind the counter and became instantly transfixed with a sports game on his arm piece.

David approached the counter as nonchalantly as possible and cleared his throat. "Say, sir - could I use your bathroom over there?"

The old man was barely responsive, but reached under the counter and pulled out a brick with a key tied to it. He placed it in front of David without looking up. "If you block it, 300 credit surcharge."

David grabbed the brick and scuttled to the back of the shop.

Jeopardy was Jeopardy again and was waiting in the car with Thorner when David came scuttling out of the shop building. He climbed into the back seat again before leaning forward between the front seats and talking in hushed tones.

"What the hell was that? Is this how you operate?"

"What's he talking about?" asked Thorner, with a concerned expression on his face.

"Jeopardy had a full personality transplant in there, sweet talked the old goat and got us a free recharge!"

"I guess we'd better get moving then," said Thorner, his concern evaporating. He started the car and they peeled out of the garage, and back onto the blacktop.

"Calm down, David," said Jeopardy in a mocking tone. "You know as well as I do that the credit companies absorb any losses. I can't be seen to be spending across the country, leaving a nice glowing trail for Sec to follow. I can't check in to any buildings as myself either for the same reasons. I don't have much choice but to... borrow people."

"It's creepy. And what was with the voice?"

"You never know who's got audio recording equipment on them. Some people do it just because they're paranoid. I could get traced on my voice patterns. At least if my voice matches the profile it's still congruent and won't throw up any alerts."

David did his best to look unimpressed. His blood had started to cool in his veins again and he could hear himself think over the roar of it.

"I suppose you would have gone in there, smoke bombed the old guy and emptied his till with a root exploit, before stealing all his candy bars and torching the joint?" goaded Jeopardy.

"Yeah, maybe. Seems a bit more honest to me."

Jeopardy rolled her eyes. "Maybe this is why you're on the run and I have a successful career."

David pulled a face and went back to looking out of the window. He unclipped the ear buds from each corner of the arm piece and put them in his ears. Scrolling through the personal playlist, he saw nothing but AOR, R&B and classical music. Instinctively he went to perform a search for something more offensive.

Jeopardy looked over her shoulder just in time to bark a warning. "Don't even think about listening to anything other than what's on that profile, David. It will be broadcast immediately to every single connection you've got. Think about it."

They drove in silence for another half an hour, before Thorner said apropos of nothing: "It's all such bullshit."

Jeopardy shifted in her seat to look at him as he drove, amusement on her face. "Expand?"

Thorner gesticulated at the windscreen. "This world, how it's ended up. How did we get to this, every place we go to we're automatically checked in, when did we all agree that this continual scrutiny was OK? Everything we spend, tracked and added to an algorithm, every personal connection is public, there's no privacy."

"What are you complaining about? None of this affects you, off-Gridder," Jeopardy countered, with a wry smile.

"Sure it does. Do you know how hard it is to live without an Ora profile these days? Virtually no public services are available to me because they don't know who I am. That goes all the way from libraries to hospitals to state welfare. I don't qualify for any of it, because essentially I'm not a citizen unless I've signed up and paid my dues to OraCorp." S~ᴇaʀᴄh the (ꜰind)ɴʘvel.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

Jeopardy shrugged her shiny, leather-clad shoulders. "Sounds like it's a choice you have to make, Thorner. I expect people thought the world was coming to an end around the time the Guttenberg press was invented too."

Thorner's knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. "Come on, don't paint me as some kind of Luddite. I've not opted out - I just never opted in. The world kept on spinning crazily out of control around me while I stayed as I was. It's not fair. I know that sounds naive, but I can't understand how civilisation as we know it got OK with selling its soul to a corporation within such a short space of time."

"Lazy," David piped up from the back seat.

"What?"

"People are lazy. Bottom line is, people don't want to think or spend any effort they don't absolutely have to. The more Big Momma told them what to buy, where to eat, who to speak to, what to watch, the happier they were. The more information they surrendered to the algorithm the more accurate the results, so of course everyone ploughed in their shoe size, birth weight, first pet's name and so on. A lot of the time people don't even know why the information is required by the network, but they give it anyway."

Thorner shrugged. "But people have always been lazy, or at least had the propensity to be. I guess cheap consumer electronics started that ball rolling."

"Yeah, but that's not all," continued David dryly, "you've gotta remember people are easily scared, and if you're the powers that be, keeping the populace as scared as possible is great for profits. OraCorp spent decades telling people terrorists and paedos were lurking around every corner, both physical and digital. Citizens were told that the only way to guarantee safety was to flush these people out - if everyone was free and easy with their data, those who were not, were obviously hiding something."

"Sounds like a witch hunt," said Thorner, his mouth thin.

"Yeah, yeah - just like that but without the finger pointing. It wasn't up to the general public to find these paedo rings and terrorist cells, it was enough for them to just keep quiet about the extra few hundred CCTV cameras that appeared around their town, or click 'OK' to the updated privacy policy without reading it. Just submit."

Thorner ran his hand around his growing stubble. "Who's really running the show?"

David smirked, Jeopardy laughed out loud. "There's no mystery here, Thorner," he continued. "OraCorp is a company like any other. Its board of directors is public. It's not some kind of secret, underground Illuminati kind of deal. It makes profits, huge profits, but it's all legal and above board. What we're actually experiencing is a kind of loop - a kind of, I don't know, circle of implicit acceptance. The users of the services are as guilty as the company that provides them. It's a bit like when we used to have newspapers, and everyone complained about how low-brow they were and how they were never accurate, just exploitative and scaremongering. When it came down to it, they printed that trash because it's what sold. At the end of the day, the public sold themselves to OraCorp and were happy to do it."

Jeopardy chipped in. "He's right, Thorner. There's no evil mastermind trying to control society and make it inconvenient for you to rent a library book. Just a company that got inconceivably large through giving people what they wanted. The free market economy writ large. The American Dream."

Thorner drove in silence for a little while, digesting this.

The sun was starting to reach the apex of its arc across the day. Shadows recoiled under the car, the rocks and the trees as if trying to hide from it.

"You guys are young. Do you think it's OK, how things are? Am I just past it, a relic?"

David cocked his head and thought before answering. "Yesterday, I would have told you I loved it. It gave me opportunities I wouldn't have had otherwise. I was a junkie from a broken home who taught himself how to speak to machines. I hacked, I stole, I made connections in the criminal world that a puke nothing kid should never have had, and that's how I got the big paydays. The Grid is like a huge playground, and if you've got the keys after dark, you can ride for free and do what you like."

"And today?"

"Today," David sighed deeply, "I'm not going to tell you I'm a reformed character and I regret my evil past or any of that sh- stuff. But having who I was taken away from me so easily, it's made me wonder what it means to be someone in the world today, how much of me is actually left you know? That other guy, the one who's on the run right now? He had a history, everything he'd ever done was available somewhere on a server. Every social update about what gig I'd been to that night, or which girl I'd banged, I mean it's not exactly important I guess, but it was my legacy I suppose. Not much to speak of, but having all that taken away, it's not a good feeling. Maybe that's why I freaked out when Jeopardy pulled her Tennessee hick impersonation. If it really is that easy to be someone else, then who you really are can't have much value, can it?"

Thorner looked at Jeopardy. From what he could see in her porcelain features, she wasn't fazed by David's words. "What about you?"

She folded her arms and pouted. "It's pretty easy to give up your identity when you didn't want it in the first place. You see this?" she pulled a two-inch bladed knife from a small holster on her belt and waved it under Thorner's nose, "The first time I used this was to kill my old man. My mom had slipped it under my pillow, and when he came in drunk that night and tried to fuck me again, I stuck it in his liver."

"How old were you?"

"Thirteen."

"Jesus." Thorner wasn't used to this level of empathy and it washed over his nervous system like a new tide. It was a good feeling, to feel this bad for someone. It was bittersweet. It felt like an old program being launched, one that was in dire need of updates.

"It's fine. After eight years, he had it coming you know what I mean? Anyway, my point is - after that I went on the run. My mom took the rap, did six years inside for it, I never saw her again. I went off the Grid and started running with various biker gangs up the west coast. This one night, we came across a little house way out in the middle of nowhere and needed food and alcohol so decided to see what they had. All the lights were on, but someone had gotten there before us and killed the entire family, probably only an hour before. Anyway, I took the daughter's arm piece off her while she was still warm and used her profile, that did me long enough to learn how to work the sub-Grid and grift between profiles as and when I needed to."

"So you've not been you for so long, it doesn't matter who you are, that's what you're saying?" asked Thorner.

"Yes."

"So how did you end up working for Bill Kruke?"

"He showed up on the sub-Grid one day looking for people with profile hacking expertise, so I replied. Things were getting shitty with the bikers I was with, so I just got up in the middle of the night, stole the bike with the most energy in the cell and went to work for Kruke."

"And never looked back."

"What's the point of looking back? What's there?" she spat - her eyes flashed like a blade in a nighttime alley fight. "It's like our newborn in the back seat was saying, it's just zeroes and ones on a server somewhere, who gives a shit."

"No, I can't accept that," said Thorner, firmly. "I can't just accept that everything you've felt, experienced, only exists because you checked in to the location, or updated your profile status, or whatever. How can it? What about your feelings?"

"Feelings change, Thorner. Memories are selective and unreliable. These things fade if they're not documented in images, text, connections. It's that permanent record that OraCorp own. They own the only tangible evidence that any of us ever existed, or meant anything to anyone else."

"So when I die, I will never have been alive?"

"Of course - once everyone who has met you and shared experiences with you over your lifetime have also died, there's nobody to feel anything for you, or remember you. The only chance you have to remain after physical death is to leave some remnants that can be audited, searched for, connected to others. Write a book, or a symphony, paint a fucking picture! If you can't do those things - and let's face it most people can't - this digital tapestry is all they can hope for."

Thorner knew she was right, and was too tired to argue anyway. It depressed him deeply but he couldn't argue with the logic of it, he'd known it for five years already - he'd died the day Martha had died.

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