The rain was falling harder while the traffic passed with effortless determination through the torrential downpour. Rising and falling, Doppler shifting, flanging waves of road noise accompanied the slowly moving vehicles as they passed us while storm drains gurgled as they struggled to carry away the flow. Pairs of headlights burned through the colourless transparent plastic of her bubble umbrella through a film of runnels; I felt like I was the only one who felt uncomfortable with the inclement weather.
The call came suddenly, but not unexpectedly. She was quietly happy that we were heading in the direction of Indigo Blue rather than Synapse, but she was still pleased simply to be walking through town in the rain either way. The congestion charges that had been implemented nationwide reduced the volume of traffic but it only served to increase the numbers of buses and pedestrians on the streets in city centres. Walking through the mute, rain-drenched early morning crowds gave me an ironic feeling of isolation.
“D’you ever feel lonelier now you’ve moved to a bigger city?” I asked. Our conversations often started in an out-of-the-blue fashion; I wasn’t always the one to initiate it and neither of us minded.
“Not really. Gives you a sense of security and anonymity, doesn’t it?”
“I s’pose. Doesn’t it feel as though you’re just…passing through or something?”
“I like that,” she answered. “When everyone’s wrapped up in the own trivial problems and doesn’t pay attention to me, it gives a sense of privacy. Does that sound weird?”
“Nope. Makes a lot of sense actually. You seem more…at ease since you moved over here, is all.”
“I guess it’s because I can stop by and catch up with Stu whenever. I can make sure he’s looking after himself and keeping out of trouble, that way.”
I wasn’t sure if she was being serious about that last point or not. Looking at the two of them side-by-side, it was easy to wrongly assume which of them was the driven, outgoing businessperson and which one was the musician who drifted between jobs and seemingly lived on their wits. With his unkempt mop of shoulder-length, dark reddish hair and casual attire, Stu looked more befitting the lifestyle of his sister than the role of the young pro who managed to salvage a small ailing company. I’d seen him in a suit on precisely two occasions: once at his university graduation and again for his Masters award a year later. I joked at the time that if his father looked like a Yakuza boss, Stu looked like one of his henchmen.
When we finally arrived at Indigo Blue, he was sitting at a table near the window with the establishment’s breakfast special on a chipped plate that looked like it had been machine-washed to within an inch of its life. He looked happy and relieved to see me in one piece, but something in his expression hinted there was more he wanted to talk to me about. I could pretty much guess what it was.
“Breakfast?” he asked. She shook her head.
“Made my own. Cooked some for the walking wounded here too.”
I figured I’d need more caffeine before the day was out so leaned over the bar to get the manager’s attention and ordered three.
“The rest of us’ll be here soon,” Stu explained when I sat back down. “I wanted to get business over and done with first. I’ll have to give a full run-down when we’re back at the office but long story short, the shit’s well and truly hit the fan and the client is hounding me for answers.”
“What was it this time?” she asked.
“A next-gen music marketing thing,” Stu replied. “It’s not an A.I. exactly, but it’s based on an evolutionary mathematical model that they wanted our Cloud capabilities for. What with the mainstream celebrity industry being as saturated as it is, some of the big businesses are staking their hopes on literally growing their own pre-packaged and outsourcing the number-crunching to third party companies…which is where we came in. I guess my background made me a first choice for being part of the next fictional electropop star de jour…”
“Hooray for cultural stereotypes,” she interjected.
“Well, yeah. I’m not saying that didn’t help. Trouble is, there’s apparently a major spanner in the works. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault and it might not amount to anything but…they’re getting really jumpy about the security implications and I don’t like that one bit.”
“Hold, on,” I countered. “Don’t forget that this is all because of a simple break-in of my flat. Someone would then have to hack into my terminal, glean something from its cloud link, and make something useful from what they found. All I was doing was nudging the programme you gave me with occasional tweaks to the component parameters.”
“Personality profile, right?” Stu asked.
“Yeah. Really innocuous things like tastes in books and movies, musical influences, even trivial details like family and favourite foods. I don’t think any of that is going to scupper the development process or make a case for industrial espionage, is it?”
Stu gave a short sigh, which was as close to being outwardly stressed as he ever got. “It’s best we get this sorted in the office, really. Mind if we take this upstairs?”
The office occupied a top floor that looked like a traditional garret flat with sloping ceilings and uneven floors. This wasn’t a problem considering how most of our equipment consisted of terminal screens; this way, they were at a comfortable angle when attached directly to the ceiling and didn’t require much space either. Occasionally, eight or nine of us occupied the office, lined along the walls with the screens lit up but today it was just us three. Stu’s other employees often worked from home for reasons of convenience, as I did.
Stu’s terminal was powered up as usual but this time his own server was also humming away under the desk. It was unusual for anyone to have a server, especially of this modest size and spec, in their home or workplace but on a number of occasions Stu found it useful. It wasn’t strictly illegal – tobacco smoking wasn’t strictly speaking illegal either, but that was virtually extinct in everyday situations – but it was rare enough. Not unlike my valve amplifier that, until recently, lived in my flat. In this case, the extra power consumption was deemed socially and financially acceptable on the grounds that it was strictly for business use.
“Long story short,” Stu began, “I’m actually bricking it. I didn’t realise how important this job was, but then I didn’t realise the wider implications either. What I thought was just another small marketing or advertising job is actually part of something really goddamn heavy.”
The other two of us sat in silence, coffee mugs in hand, and let him continue.
“I’ll be straight with you here: if I’d known the crap that this was attached to, I might have walked away at the first meeting. I’m not into that commercial nonsense at the best of times, but that’s not the problem here. The reaction I’ve had from the client just doesn’t fit what it looks like from my end. You’re dead right that taking a private terminal is stupid and pointless; they must know that but started putting the pressure on me all the same. The only way I can explain it is by saying their e-mails – which were encrypted in the same way that seriously confidential info is sent – set my bullshit detector off.”
Stu’s ‘bullshit detector’ might sound like a facetious term, but he didn’t get to where he was by using his academic credentials alone. He had a feel for this sort of thing.
“Didn’t you say that someone would need the clout of a multinational IT firm to get anything out of that?” she asked me. Stu gave a brief wave of his index finger to acknowledge her point.
“Quite. Which is why, in my increasingly-paranoid opinion, I reckon that’s exactly what they’re afraid of. This client of ours seems to have been a bit economical with the details since their reaction has been way out of proportion if I’m to take their brief at face value. Which I’m not doing, by the way. If this reaches up and out as far as I think it does, I’ll be putting myself and my employees at risk to some god-knows-how-big turf war between the big hitters. I didn’t spend all this time building myself a stable career and getting so many good people on board just for it all to be kicked over by faceless corporate arseholes. I won’t let that happen. I can promise you that. Both of you.”
Extending his concern over this to both me and his own sister suggested to me that it wasn’t just risky business: whoever was slugging it out with our client apparently wouldn’t rule out getting personal while they were at it. In our line of business this simply didn’t normally happen; considering their family background though, I could easily see why the two of them were particularly unsettled. Unless we could find out where this was going, I was now part of that, like it or not.
